Just to let you all know I’m still around but a bit busy and still eager to save the world.
There have been exciting developments in climate science, with many new confirmations that human activity is not dangerous but it’s taking politicians a very long time to get it.
The country’s democracy is being torn apart by the government’s constitutional vandalism but people are waking up to it. Some other democracies are being challenged too.
More later. Good luck.
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I regret to inform you that a bereavement has occurred and I’ll be focused on the family until some time next week.
Thank you for your understanding.
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I was recently asked whether, under Labour, New Zealand’s CO2 emissions have increased, and if so, by what percentage? I found some interesting things. Numbers are rounded.
The present Labour Government came to power in 2017 and were re-elected in 2020 with a majority of 49%. Continue Reading →
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Supercell, Texas – May, 2022.
Click to enlarge
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Viv resides in Queensland and, though blessed with wonderfully broad insight on most things, he’s naturally drawn to matters with a strong Australian component. Consequently I decline many of his good articles for the lack of a Kiwi connection. However, on the so-called renewable energy bandwagon, or the Zero Carbon movement, New Zealand are as far up the creek as Australia is, so learning what’s happening over there and how they think and fare can only help.
• Feel free to pass this on •
24th February 2022
No country on Earth relies entirely on wind and solar energy, but Australian politicians aim to achieve this miracle. They are leaders in the Stampede of the Green Lemmings. Continue Reading →
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John Scarry, a structural engineer and member of the Free New Zealand think tank, wrote this today as a contribution to a discussion of the political philosophy through which Labour views the country and its problems. It seemed good enough to me to publish, and John was good enough to let me. It’s being published here because the Free NZ website is under construction.
Collapse of Hard Rock Hotel, New Orleans, in October, 2019 (click to enlarge).
1. I am completely opposed to identity politics, and it is, in large part, National’s wilting before and partial surrender to identity and woke politics that has got them into their current bad polling position and is keeping them there.
2. There may be many factors (including indoctrination at school and through the media) that have so many people in awe of the likes of Ardern and Shaw, but the main factor is that these people have never been properly exposed to sound, rational and consistent counter-arguments.
3. Ardern is pathetic under pressure, but she is never subjected to real pressure. She is given a complete pass on every artificial crisis she creates for her own political benefit and to enable her to implement her dystopian plan or, more correctly, the dystopian plan that she supports. The most disappointing current example of this is Chris Bishop as the National spokesman on COVID-19. If nothing else, masks do not work – that is the undisputed science, from multiple studies over many years. Yet Ardern is allowed to impose them in order to “keep up the scare” and to enforce obedience, unopposed. Continue Reading →
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Chaos. (Click to enlarge)
David Wojick of CFact just posted this essay on a newsgroup I frequent. It’s accessible, compelling and deserves wide distribution. It exposes a fatal flaw in the dangerous anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, namely: weather is chaotic and impossible to predict.
I used to lecture on the role of chaos theory in science. It does not get the attention it deserves in the climate debate. In fact climate change may be nothing more than simple chaos, in which case nothing controls it. Here is a brief explanation. Continue Reading →
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David Seymour released the Māori vaccine priority code on social media along with a message encouraging anyone to use it. Yesterday’s Herald carried an opinion piece from Heather Du Plessis-Allan, who said:
Many won’t care what it takes, as long as we get those jab rates up. In the spirit of pragmatism, many may look past their usual objections to racial favouritism just to get the thing done. (emphasis added)
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Belief, belief is everywhere,
Yet all the proof extinct;
A strong belief fierce binds us, now
Our minds no longer think.
With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Unshakeable belief in global warming is now permanently installed in our important (and many minor) institutions. For evidence of this, browse through recent newspapers and websites: Continue Reading →
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Family First describes our obstinate socialist Government’s ambition to reconstruct our country by allowing changes to birth certificates (from the latest newsletter, paraphrased): Continue Reading →
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I sent this on 5 August, the day before a mere six-week window closed on public comments. Is this a piece of legislation crucial for the nation’s welfare, or another atrocious socialist misreading of Kiwi society that’ll sweep this gutless government out of office?
Hate speech law will shrink and darken the country’s mind and heart for generations. Only our government demands it, we don’t want it. Out with the government! Spread this post far and wide.
Dear Sir/Madam,
The government proposes to introduce so-called “hate speech” legislation but there are fundamental difficulties with this. Continue Reading →
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Should we leap into this without looking? Let’s avoid overseas mistakes when formulating our climate policy.
was: Global Warming Target Of 1.5°C Based On Shaky Scientific Analysis
by Robert Murphy and Ross McKitrick on 27 .
published by Climate Change Dispatch
The Trudeau government’s decision to ban gasoline-powered cars by 2035 in the drive to “net-zero” emissions is part of a global policy agenda kick-started by a 2018 “Special Report” issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Special Report, titled Global Warming of 1.5°C, was commissioned to study the potential benefits of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than the 2.0 °C target stated in the Paris Agreement. Continue Reading →
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Bryan Leyland, engineer and fellow member of the NZ Climate Science Coalition, just sent this punishing critique of Simon Wilson’s piece in the NZ Herald to Simon and kindly allows me to publish it here. Tell me what you think.
Simon Wilson’s Herald article on 25 June contained many false or misleading statements and was seriously one-sided. His misleading statements include (in italics):
Continue Reading →
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The NZ Herald recently published Exxon, shark attacks and America’s climate crisis, an article by senior writer Simon Wilson. He raises numerous alarming aspects of climate but omits to support them with facts. For example, he describes how a group of activist shareholders want ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the Western world, to confront the climate crisis, but there’s no crisis—I show you the facts.
In the same breath as climate change (which means global warming), Wilson mentions shark attacks, recycling human waste, frozen mammoths and other freakish topics. We’ll have a brief look to see whether he’s on track with these facts. Continue Reading →
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The gist of today’s newsletter from F.A.R.M.
We are supporting the Groundswell Protest on Friday 16 July.
Make sure you are part of one of the events. It is an important opportunity to express dissatisfaction with the Government’s handling of rural issues including their approach to Ruminant Methane.
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This is an adopted article.
from the spectator.com.au
For New Zealand’s Prime Minster to be talking such nonsense – in fact, such a complete untruth as ‘bold action on climate change is a matter of life and death’ – is more than ominous. Her obvious preference for calling urgency on endorsing the recent recommendations of the Climate Change Commission is completely unacceptable. Its unbalanced findings verge on the fanatical and it is high time Ardern is called to account for the fear-mongering she is spreading and for promoting policies which would in fact basically destroy our economy. Continue Reading →
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From The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … Continue Reading →
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Hauraki Gulf islands. Looking much the same after more than a hundred years.
Dramatic sea level rise is widely considered among the most evil effects of anthropogenic global warming, since warmsters claim that of all the posited effects, rising seas will cause the most widespread, disruptive and costly damage. We’ve seen that the recent alarming advice from the MfE to local bodies around New Zealand cites figures from RCP8.5, the most extreme of the scenarios the warmsters paint for our future, and although there are enormous differences in both the likelihood and levels of danger between RCP8.5 and observed reality, our news media never seem to hear that part and publish only the anxiety. Continue Reading →
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Viv Forbes reminds us that passports were never compulsory but a sought-after luxury that made travel smoother. Thus he highlights how we’ve become accustomed (oh, how slowly) to their necessity. In this, he reminds us that travel documents were everywhere introduced not by western democratic governments but by dictators. We would do well to be warned that the proposed COVID passports will be prevented only by the pinpricks of thousands of people refusing to use them. Nothing else will persuade the bureaucrats that travel documents are more trouble than they’re worth. Though even after they see the next election won by conservatives they’ll probably still not consider them anti-democratic. — RT
23rd May 2021
A passport was once highly valued by travellers, but it was not compulsory. Signed by the sovereign, it said: “The bearer of this passport has my protection. He is free to travel anywhere. Do not pester him (or her).”
Gradually passports became compulsory bureaucratic tools to control and track international travellers. Continue Reading →
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Real Clear Energy describes how Joe Biden’s hostility toward American energy independence is degrading American energy security. His policies since Day One are running amok in the US energy sector, apparently to save the world from climate change. Or, seeing his craven postures before both Russia and China, is it rather that the world needs socialism? — RT
It took a cyberattack to make clear how integral pipelines are to making the most of abundant natural resources that are available domestically and in a friendly, neighboring country. Unfortunately, Biden’s cancellation of the permit for the Keystone Pipeline is just the beginning as it has set the stage for a broader assault on the oil and gas industry throughout the U.S. that works to the advantage of hostile foreign powers. How do we know? Continue Reading →
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New Zealand’s first government funded space mission has taken a ‘giant leap’ with Auckland University’s Te Pūnaha Ātea-Auckland Space Institute announced as the permanent host of the New Zealand based mission control centre for a global methane tracking satellite.
“MethaneSAT is a really exciting opportunity to showcase New Zealand’s science and research expertise on the world stage, while making a significant contribution to climate change by mapping agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases. It’s great to see Auckland University, with the help of Rocket Lab, playing such a key role” says Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods. Continue Reading →
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As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required could become a major issue in its own right.
Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – the reactive alkali metal that powers our phones, tablets, laptops and electric cars.
In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem. … Continue Reading →
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When people stop trusting you, there’s only one reason: you’ve been letting them down.
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MediaRoom: The latest findings on the public’s trust in NZ news make confronting reading, Plus RNZ rides high in new online audience numbers and Discovery starts cutting staff at Three
Less than half the New Zealand public now professes ‘overall trust’ in news media outlets, despite big rises in audience numbers during the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis. Continue Reading →
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25th April 2021
The World Climate Conference is spreading a Green Virus – they must be gagged for our safety.
The Biden-Boris green virus which infects most of the west has become a danger to Australia. PM Morrison has promised to sink a billion dollars in “hydrogen, CCUS (carbon capture use or storage), batteries and critical minerals” — to achieve “net zero”.
NONE of these green dreams will produce one light-bulb of new energy — they will actually require massive inputs of energy and cash. Continue Reading →
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Bryan Leyland has decades-long experience in electricity generation projects of all kinds. He applied to the NZ Battery Project to join its Technical Reference Group. This week he learned he had been unsuccessful. Their letter offered a summary of why he missed out. Continue Reading →
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Battle of Guadalcanal 1942 – click to enlarge
It’s true that science offers no support to the warmsters, and their narrative has been a dismal failure in the halls of science, but those fraudsters have more or less triumphed in the battle for the corridors of power. However, we can be of good heart, since we will eventually win the war: truth always defeats ignorance. Always. Continue Reading →
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You do know that satellites do not measure the surface temperature? The data is subject to considerable manipulation.
You do know the surface thermometers are reliable and show Earth surface [sic] has warmed around 1.2C — depends on the start date.
You do know Christy and Spencer at UAH made a mess of it and had to be shown what to do?
You do know most of the energy is heating the oceans?
You do know you are wasting your time? It’s not a scientific problem any more, it’s a political problem. Trump has gone.
For 17 years this blog has answered these and related questions, but these new answers are not cut and pasted, they are created afresh. A NASA article last updated on 22 July, 2020, talks about the UAH satellite measurements: Continue Reading →
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It’s about seven years since the anomaly was around zero, but here is the latest data from Dr Roy Spencer at UAH:
It seems there’s been no persistent increase in the global temperature after all. Continue Reading →
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For each year since 2000, Bryan Leyland has assembled a graph of the global temperature against the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), shifted forward by four months. The result is a remarkable correlation that gives an excellent indication of global temperatures up to four months in advance. Continue Reading →
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There’s an unmissable warning for New Zealand in the latest US power blackouts—don’t trust the “renewable” energy policies being pushed by our dishonourable socialist reformers, who shriek at us regularly that our historically dependable power generation is damaging the climate. Even if it is, they endanger our lives!
Alongside the unconvincing wind turbines and solar panels, we need reliable generators that always protect life. That includes nuclear, hydro, coal, gas and geothermal, all of which are called “despatchable” because they don’t turn themselves off. Continue Reading →
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The Draft Advice for Consultation was released yesterday by the Climate Change Commission on their website.
They’re advising the Government to cease fossil-fuelled imports, including petrol and diesel cars, by 2032. They do this without stating the cost of it and, which startled me, without stating how much we would reduce the temperature of the climate or exactly how we would change the weather, though these two things are apparently precisely what we’re aiming to do. This strikes me, initially at least, as moronic. Continue Reading →
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Actually, on average they’re about 300 km apart and visits to a given square of ocean can be months apart. That’s like filming with a stationary GoPro under the water at Mission Bay to count all the swimmers along 500 metres of the beach.
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We’ve been approached by a Christchurch reader, sceptical of the prevailing global warming narrative, who would like to make contact with a climate sceptic. Continue Reading →
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The Green Virus is on a rising curve in the Anglo-Sphere.
Boris, Biden, Kerry, Trudeau, Arden and Australia’s Morrison are all competing to be the first to destroy all industries reliant on coal, cattle, petrol and diesel. Continue Reading →
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After all the endless tables about obscure trace gases and detailed physics, with its decorative, useless graphs and meaningless degrees of relative certainty, the AR5 could only say weakly: Continue Reading →
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The Herald’s false headline, decorated by a bushfire. But the weather does not light fires. Fires are caused by arson and lightning.
The NZ Herald reports on a new paper that claims to see a “growing hand-print of climate change” on the New Zealand climate since 1871, calling it a “150-year climate transformation.”
However, doubts have been raised. The paper claims our “wider region” has warmed by 0.66 °C from 1871 to 2019. But that is wrong, because records from 1850 show they recorded exactly the same temperatures as today: the country has NOT warmed.
The records are in Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand of 1868, held in the National Library in Wellington (image below, right). Today’s temperatures are the same as they were in the 1850s and ’60s.
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6th December 2020
Wandering recently through an arcade popular with the green smoothie set, I saw a sign boasting: “Plant Based Meat”.
Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based. Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne and mulga, plus salt, minerals and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn and grasses plus a few worms, insects and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollard, whey and vegetable scraps. Continue Reading →
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Today, the NZ Herald published a letter from one Hylton Le Grice, of Remuera, revealing a financial arrangement with the United Nations I was not aware of and that I’m fairly sure I would have remembered our government consulting us over.
In case this facsimile arrives illegible, here’s what it says:
New Zealand produces just 0.17 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. China, the worst polluter with an appalling 28.5 per cent emissions is however presently building no less than 583 coal-fired power stations, with another five countries creating 529 similar units. Despite these extraordinary figures, New Zealand has unbelievably committed for 10 years to pay an astonishing annual $1.4 billion in taxpayers’ money to the UN Climate Accord Fund, which China does not have to subscribe to until 2030. Some of this UN money is then distributed to the same six so-called undeveloped countries that are building these 1012 coal-powered stations. With the huge economic problems that New Zealand now faces because of Covid-19, this annual payment seems to be totally unacceptable.
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By David Wojick October 26th, 2020
Precision research by physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden has determined that the present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are almost completely saturated. In radiation physics the technical term “saturated” implies that adding more molecules will not cause more warming.
In plain language this means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little or no further impact on global warming. There would be no climate emergency. No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like; with no effect. Continue Reading →
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Censorship of knowledge and ideas is now expanding from campus to schoolroom
Knowledge; Robert Reid, 1896
Bad ideas owe their advance into mainstream thinking not just to bad people but also to otherwise decent people going along with such notions out of cowardice or other weakness.
The censorship of any thinking which conflicts with the orthodoxies of identity politics is increasingly destroying the western university as the crucible of reason, along with its core purpose to advance knowledge through the free play of evidence, ideas and argument. Continue Reading →
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Left-wing green ambitions are increasingly exposed as hollow, and with NZ firmly ruled by Labour, we stand to lose our society to those destructive dreams. Dairy farms are already being replaced by trees. Michael Kelly has analysed green energy goals in New Zealand and the UK. Now Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor with CFACT, explains how the Green New Deal (GND) will harm America. And doing all this by 2050? FORGET IT! His email to us says:
As more details emerge about Hunter Biden’s emails and Biden Family connections to China, Russia, Ukraine and other countries that would provide most of the metals and minerals America would need under any Green New Deal, we should contemplate how much some families, companies and countries would be enriched by the GND — while others would lose their jobs, see their energy prices skyrocket, and watch their favourite scenic vistas and wildlife habitats get blanketed by wind turbines, solar panels and biofuel plantations. We would also observe mining, processing, manufacturing, fossil fuel use and child labour soar to their highest levels in human history in faraway places that would be ripping up their own backyards, processing those materials, and making all those GND turbines, panels and batteries. I lay it out in this article. Thank you very much for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
Some will profit, while most people’s lives, living standards and environment take a big hit
Paul Driessen
October 2020
Some 90% of all US wells are now hydraulically fractured. Fracked wells in shale formations open up vast supplies of oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids that previously were locked up and inaccessible. Fracking conventional wells expands and prolongs production, leaving less energy in the ground. Continue Reading →
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A big thank you to all our visitors for pushing up our traffic numbers. We’re delighted to see so many people (in New Zealand and overseas) curious about climate and policy. Continue Reading →
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Our atmosphere and climate 2020 (pdf, 8.74 MB)
The latest climate report from the Ministry for the Environment is quickly distracted. The first page includes Maori creation myths that dismiss normal science. For a climate report, it’s preoccupied by spiritual speculations from unknown poets who laboured to describe the world with their eyes shut.
We know this sort of philosophical song-writing from the English tradition, though Christian stories make them more accessible than this. The waffle is deeply opaque when crafted in Maori that’s unintelligible to most of us, as surveys clearly show few speak it well. Continue Reading →
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Just a few days before the election, and here’s a copy of the latest Green Party newsletter ramping up the attack on our farming communities. New Zealand farming is productive, virtuous and widely admired, but you’d never hear that from the Greens. Continue Reading →
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Thomas Sowell explains in a video:
Slavery is a very big subject. I have in my home an entire bookcase of nothing but books about slavery in various parts of the world and various times in history. Continue Reading →
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Barry Brill, lawyer, former cabinet minister, captain of industry, formidable student of public policy and chairman of the NZCSC, thought back in March the impact of the Level-4 lock-down cure would be about 30 times worse than the disease itself. Real data now shows it was 190 times worse. It prevented perhaps 1000 deaths at a cost of $NZ8.5m for each year of life saved, which was a startling increase in the usually accepted value of $NZ45,000 for a Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY).
The Australian BUSINESS REVIEW reports:
New Zealand’s hard lockdown policy is thought to have prevented the deaths of 1000 people at a cost of $NZ8.5m ($7.8m) for each year of life saved, according to a new analysis casting doubt on the effectiveness of Victoria’s extended shutdown.
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Our daughter and her two boys have been stuck for five months living with us, since they were visiting from Burma (Myanmar) when the NZ lockdown began on 26 March. Her partner has been trying to get out of Burma, where they’ve lived for a few years, and now hopes to connect with a direct NZ flight due to depart Seoul next month. Continue Reading →
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James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change, says the Green Party’s clean energy plan would run New Zealand on the energy nature provides. Continue Reading →
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New Zealanders are more satisfied with the Government’s efforts to combat climate change than they were a year ago, but fewer than half actually rate the effort as good.
Last month’s IAG poll didn’t ask people what they might pay to fix climate change — and shame on them, for previous surveys show very low willingness. Families must be fed, so there’s little sense of climate change urgency. Thirty-one percent were more concerned about the effects of climate change on them than about any influence they might have on climate change.
Continue Reading →
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