The BFD | New Zealand Can’t Keep the Lights on with Fairy Dust

New Zealand will be sifting through the rubble of the Ardern government for decades after it is eventually condemned to the dustbin of history. New Zealanders have rushed into a fairytale marriage of almost willfully blind haste. They will have many, many years to repent in increasingly bleak leisure.

From its foreign policy recklessness to its determination to foist racial separatism on New Zealand, to the massive debt burden of its pandemic policies, the Ardern government is piling up a house of cards that will eventually come crashing down like a ton of bricks. Generations of Kiwis will pay a high price for their own blindness — and a prime minister’s overweening ego.

In one of the extraordinarily foolish moves characteristic of her Labour coalition, Jacinda Ardern apparently wants to shine on the world stage by compelling this country to attempt to conform to the UN’s nonsensical Paris Climate Agreement for countries to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

If selfies and self-regard were an energy source, Jacinda Ardern would power the world. Instead, her self-aggrandising policies are unlikely to power even New Zealand. Parading in the Paris limelight might win Ardern the adulation of the glossy magazines, but it is no substitute for competent policy — of which she and her government clearly have not the slightest idea.

Hand in hand with the incompetence is a blatant disregard for facts.

Rather than phasing out fossil fuels, we are importing record amounts of coal. Whereas only 550,000 tonnes were imported in 2017, for example, in the 12 months until last March alone we imported 1.4 million tonnes. Coal imports for the three-quarter year since mid-2020 totalled 973648 tonnes, the highest quarterly since mid-2012, over twice than the year earlier — the highest for any nine-month period going back to 1989. So what has happened that we have had to start importing so much coal, all from Indonesia?

At the same time, it is estimated that the South Island West Coast has 15 billion tonnes of coal we are not allowed to mine.

“Your sole source of truth” insists that this is merely a temporary measure, soon to be replaced by “renewable” energy sources.

Largely apparently, from biofuel, burning woodchips, which helps to partly explain Ardern’s governments now unprecedented attacks on our farming industry, its extraordinary call for productive farmland to be replaced by pine forests, and one of our major sources of food supplies — animal livestock — to now be reduced and limited.

Yet, to actually supply New Zealand’s energy needs, the country would have to be stripped bare of every tree. All to produce power by the most inefficient, polluting means imaginable.

The reality at present? Christchurch hospital’s Acute Services building, to the annoyance of the Greens, decided to put cost imperatives ahead of the ideology, its chief executive at the time pointing out there was a lot of misinformation about coal, with wood also producing sulphur dioxide, and modern coal boilers being very efficient, their filtration plants designed to be environmentally friendly. “Using woodchips would require four truck and trailer loads to be delivered to the busy hospital site daily — compared to one delivering coal every second day for fuel.” And what about the emissions more frequent truck and trader loads produce?

Yet, even if New Zealand magically elimated every single molecule of its greenhouse gases, the effect on the global climate would be… nothing. New Zealand produces just 0.1% of global human CO² emissions. Or, to put it another way, just 0.003% of total atmospheric CO². Even assuming a direct relationship between CO² and temperature, and a highly unlikely “dangerous” 2°C temperature increase by the end of the century, New Zealand eliminating all its CO² production would make precisely 0.00006°C difference.

‘Sheer lunacy “seems to be a reasonable comment now made in relation to the incompetence obvious in so many areas relating to our present far-left government. Given the constraints established by its extraordinary ban on new offshore gas and oil exploration, the risk of unintended consequences is becoming obvious.

New Zealand has an energy crisis, with tight supply, and high electricity and gas prices doing serious economic damage to our industry suppliers[…]it brings into question the viability of conducting business in New Zealand, formerly considered a first world country.

Spectator Australia

Does anyone know if there’s a Te Reo word for “clusterfuck”?