Today, our thoughts go out to the people of Christchurch who are once again waking up to another natural disaster. As the true extent of the damage becomes apparent, many neighbourhoods will be pulling together to overcome the severe flooding that has been visited upon their city.

Seeing those images of inundated homes and desperate residents beamed in to my living room last night, I couldn’t help but think that there’s now rarely a day that goes by when extreme weather events aren’t making headline news. If I’d pressed the mute button the scenes of the elderly being moved to safety by fire crews or cars half-submerged where the torrents of floodwater had pinned them, it could so easily have been recent scenes from the UK or other parts of Europe.

And the interesting thing is that the lin...

On Monday, we had our court case heard at the High Court in Wellington. Our beef: that the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) – the agency set up by government to safeguard our oceans – had given Anadarko the green light to start drilling without looking at eight key documents. These documents included a report detailing the environmental effects on our coastlines in the event of an oil spill and how Anadarko would deal with this.

The lawyers for the EPA admitted that they hadn’t looked at them before marking their application to drill as ‘complete’, because they argued that they didn’t need to.

Astonishingly, lawyers for Anadarko told the court that they had offered to leave these key documents with the EPA to look at, but were told that it wouldn’t be necessary. The EPA just went ... Read more >

This week, a flotilla of yachts will be leaving our shores and heading out to the deep waters off the coast of Raglan. Their purpose: to protest at Texan oil giant Anadarko’s plans to drill an exploratory well in our backyard.

This is the moment that the dangerous act of drilling in depths of up to 3 kilometers of water and the risks to our coastlines and economy become a reality. The relentless drive by oil companies to go to the deepest, darkest depths, and pristine regions like the Arctic and our seas is simply to allow oil executives to continue to profit from pollution. And they have the blessing of the industry’s spin doctor and climate change Minister Simon Bridges.

Yes, that’s right, our man who’s supposed to be leading our efforts to reduce pollution has been doing secret deals...

This is the second blog in what is now an occasional series, that we’ve decided to call ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand…’. After writing Wednesday’s blog called ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand economics’ it swiftly became uncomfortably obvious that we’d get enough material to turn it into a series.

Today’s is called ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand irony’. We were going to call it ‘Steven Joyce doesn’t understand democracy’ but we’re pretty certain that ‘Big J’ is going to give us plenty of opportunity to come back to that one.

Anyway, back to today’s edition of SJDU. The whole ‘not understanding irony’ thing has been done before. Most notably about how the well-known ditty called Ironic by songstress Alanis Morissette completely misunderstands irony. Which is ironic.

What isn’t ironic... Read more >

Yesterday economic development minster Steven Joyce showed that he doesn’t understand economics. Which must make his job a little difficult. Well, either he doesn’t understand economics, or he’s rather ham-fistedly trying to misrepresent the oil industry’s economic worth.

He trotted out a report yesterday which ignored capital costs, and also ignored the external costs associated with pollution. And, even then, it still showed that exports of oil and coal are on the slide and fossil fuels are no longer profitable.

But still, despite all Joyce’s efforts to misrepresent the figures, the fossil fuel industry still looks like peanuts compared to the clean energy sector that this country could have.

Almost 30,000 jobs could be created in areas such as the geothermal and bioe... Read more >