Table of Contents
David Harvey
Retired district court judge
Mainstream media reports that the Green Party will campaign on mass electrification for the election, saying the sun, wind, water and geothermal energy “don’t come through the Strait of Hormuz”.
Chloe Swarbrick with that wild-eyed enthusiasm that only she is capable of offers a simplistic solution. I use the word simplistic advisedly. She herself says the solution is simple.
She says:
The solution is so simple. We must electrify everything we can. We need homegrown, sustainable resilience in our energy system, powering everything we do ...
No one is hoarding, attacking, or starting wars over sun, wind, water and geothermal energy. They don’t come through the Strait of Hormuz.
Swarbrick said the government needed to create a national electrification plan as the “practical response to the fossil fuel crisis”, starting with improving access to “cheap, easy loans for solar panels and batteries” via the Ratepayers’ Assistance Scheme.
Such a plan, Swarbrick said, would electrify homes, transport and industry, “ending New Zealand’s dependence on unpredictable global fossil fuel markets, cutting household power bills, and building real energy security at home”.
She closed by saying:
We don’t have control over what other countries do. But we can, immediately and urgently, take control of our country’s own needs by powering ourselves, with every renewable resource available in abundance around us.
Would that it were so easy.
But what simplistic Chloe overlooks is that there is more to this issue than oil. In fact the real issue is the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry.
I wrote about this in my article Something Must Be Done on 19 November 2025.
The prompt for that piece was a clip from a TV drama Landman, in which the dependency on petrochemicals was made clear. I guess there are some who might prefer that I cite an authoritative source from a peer-reviewed publication, and in some cases I might be inclined to agree.
But in this case art informs life and it does so in a confronting and rather visceral way.
Before I print the dialogue and provide the video clip, as you read and watch what is stated think about a few things:
Is what Swarbrick proposes really a solution?
Does she really know what she is talking about?
Is she aware of the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry in our day-to-day lives and how much we depend upon it?
Have she and the Greens really thought through this policy or is it an easy one to articulate?
Or in fact are Swarbrick and the Greens speaking and policy making from a position of unawareness or ignorance of the nature of the problem?
And if the answer to the preceding question is in the affirmative, do they have any business being near the levers of power?
On the basis of the most recent poll published recently (19 April 2026), the Greens could well be part of the next government.
Do we really want such a superficial and simplistic group in charge?
Think about it and talk to your friends, especially those who may think that the Greens are on to something.
Now here is the dialogue and the video about the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry and how much we depend upon it.
In this scene, Tommy is talking to the lawyer Rebecca. They are at a site where there are a number of wind turbines and the following is the dialogue.
(Warning: some of the language is ‘colourful’.)
Rebecca – God they’re massive.
Tommy – 400 feet tall. The concrete foundation covers a third of an acre and goes down in the ground 12 feet.
Rebecca – Who owns them?
Tommy – Oil companies. We use them to power the wells. No electricity out here. We’re off the grid.
Rebecca: They use clean energy to power the oil wells?
Tommy: They use alternative energy. There’s nothing clean about this.
Rebecca – Please Mr Oilman – tell me how the wind is bad for the environment.
Tommy: Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete?
Or make that steel and haul this sh*t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane?
You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fuck*ng thing? Or winterize it?
In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it.
And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery.
And never mind the fact that, if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow.
And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And, hell, it’s in everything.
That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves. Any kind of clothing that’s not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap, fuck*ng hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats. You name it. Every fuck*ng thing.
And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement.
Rebecca: It’s the thing that’s gonna kill us all... as a species.
Tommy: No, the thing that’s gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative.
And believe me, if Exxon thought them fuck*ng things right there were the future, they’d be putting them all over the goddamn place.
Getting oil out of the ground’s the most dangerous job in the world. We don’t do it ’cause we like it. We do it ’cause we run out of options. And you’re out here trying to find something to blame for the danger besides your boss.
There ain’t nobody to blame but the demand that we keep pumping it.
Think about it.
This article was originally published by A Halfing’s View.
