Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Yes, I did notice the "And there might be minerals there!" comment in that, and as i was typing that comment, in the back of my mind was "but with this current government..." And considering developing cool new IP then selling it to the first foreign company that comes along then sit around wondering why we never get rich seems to be a long-standing NZ tradition, I'm not sure any other government would be terribly much better.
Basically, we need smarter leadership.
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Capture: Two Tone, in reply to David Hood,
The Dunedin Chinese Garden may post-date your time here.
Ah, yes, but only just. I certainly do remember talk of its construction in the year or so before I left.
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Capture: Two Tone, in reply to David Hood,
Dunedin architecture
The top one is the Anglican cathedral (St whos? I forget...)? I haven't seen it from that angle, for whatever reason, but that looks like the back of its front and the spire of First Church in the background.
The second one.... Dunedin? Looks extremely Chinese from that angle except for the very tip of the eave.
The plants and your 120 years before/after are amazing.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Wow. All the more reason to diversify our export base, I think.
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I'm finding both Bart's and Lilith's arguments equally compelling.
Surely the desired outcome of the R&D Bart is arguing for would be products, specifically grasses and bacterias, that could then be sold to the world's dairy (and sheep, beef, deer,...?) farmers, earning bucketloads by selling these high tech, high value added products? Wouldn't that earn back the government's initial R&D spend and keep money rolling in for ages as we kept developing newer and better grasses and bacteria? It would also reduce the need for all that supplementary feed, thereby discouraging the slashing and burning of Indonesian rainforest and giving Singapore a break from annual smog crises caused by Indonesian forest fires and many other environmental benefits. None of that looks like a subsidy to dirty dairy to me. Indeed, it looks like a smart investment.
As for what Lilith's saying about water, surely we should be pricing water smarter to encourage dairying in areas like Waikato, Taranaki and Westland that are fairly well suited to it and discourage dairying in areas like Canterbury which are not? And shouldn't we also be putting a cost on pollution of water supplies - both ground water and lakes and rivers - to encourage farmers to clean up their act? I have no idea how to do that, though.
But also, if we're going to invest in R&D of new, better grass and bacteria for dairy farming, surely we should also be investing in R&D of new, better strains of crops suited to areas like Canterbury, so that farmers can make a decent living without having to jump on the dairy bandwagon?
At the very least, couldn't we move from being merely China's dairy and raw log farm into being China's dairy, raw log and cannabis farm? Perhaps even get a slice of the R&D/new product creation/high value added product export game?
And wouldn't all of that help diversify NZ's export base and cut our reliance on low value dairy exports and create new jobs in science and technology and more and new career paths for budding NZ scientists?
Maybe this comment reveals why I'm just a loser* English teacher and not a mega-rich business man, but all of the above looks win-win-win to me.
*don't worry, being a loser has got me a pretty cool, interesting life, I'm quite happy this way.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I’m talking about the business/marketing consequences of NZ being seen to be doing nothing much to address climate change.
Ok I see. But since most of our biggest export earners go to China I’m not certain that it’s true.
I would argue it will soon become true. Fonterra's involvement in 3 food safety scandals already has question marks hanging over Brand New Zealand in Chinese consumers' minds. And what Lilith said about tourists liking to swim in lakes and rivers - Air NZ flying Yao Chen and other Chinese superstars out to NZ is going to backfire big time when Chinese tourists start posting photos of lurid green lakes and rivers to Weibo with comments to the effect of "Hey look! NZ has filthy, polluted water just like us!". And earlier last year, I can't remember if it was during the DCD or botulism-that-wasn't scandal, I saw what looked very much like advertorial sneaked out the back door of a Dutch dairy company or trade promotion organisation to a friendly (because paid off? Not unlikely) to the effect of "Look! Dutch infant formula is clean and the Netherlands has super-strict quality control!", with a definite hint of "Not like those filthy bloody Kiwis" to it. So, yes, we do need to worry about the marketing side of it.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Sacha,
Why China?
Thought they’d probably have more non-market-reliant solutions.
Fair enough. I think I just listed a few examples, too. Trouble is I don't see these non-market-reliant solutions being of the kind our current government deems politically correct.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I do think that the reliability and cost (environmental) will drop significantly as makers develop these cars.
Agreed. After all, isn't that how regular petrol cars developed? I very much doubt a Model T is anywhere near as fuel efficient as a Mondeo, and I'm sure the technology used to build Model Ts was far more destructive than that used in modern plants.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Sacha,
Must be examples from places like China for one.
Why China? I thought countries like Denmark were way ahead in wind power, for example.
I'm not sure China's heavy investment in nuclear power would go down terribly well in NZ. And for all the investment in renewables and nuclear, China's still very heavily dependent on coal.
One upside of China's political system is better strategic planning, but that doesn't always translate into action, and it can take a really long time to get the ok of all the Party's factions. And some like the ability of the Party to just Get Shit Done without having to worry about the niceties of democracy or public opinion, but public opinion plays a much bigger role in Chinese politics than I think most Westerners realise, and although I'm sure the likes of Steven Joyce and Judith Collins are envious of the Party's ability to bang disobedient and truculent heads together until they get what they want, I'm not sure terribly many kiwis would really appreciate living in that kind of reality.
And Beijing's traffic restrictions (and the new smog alert system that sees the restrictions getting tougher once the alert hits a certain level) and lottery to get permission to buy a car aren't really all that good - they're symptoms of a serious problem that is as much social as environmental. And restrictions on buying cars, whether Beijing-style lotteries or Shanghai-style licence plate auctions (meaning licence plates in Shanghai easily cost more than many lower-end cars) seem to be having a perverse side-effect of encouraging people to buy bigger, heavier, gas-guzzling European and American luxury brands.
China's PV production took off big time, to the point they swamped their own market.
I haven't seen much progress on the solar-thermal power station under construction in Yanqing County lately, although more may be happening than I'm aware of.
But on the plus side: Beijing has been phasing out coal for heating in the downtown area and is moving to phase out coal in the outlying areas. Fleets of all-electric taxis are springing up - in Beijing they're limited to the outer exurbs for now, but they're there and they're expanding. And obviously that means the supporting infrastructure like charging stations is also being built. Last time I was in NZ I didn't see much in the way of solar water heaters, which I don't understand, because they're really popular here - rooftops have forests of them, and when I went to Xishuangbanna years ago the fancy hotels in Jinghong advertised 24 hour hot water, because everybody else was relying on low-tech solar heaters that gave hot water only in the late afternoons. Beijing's coldest county, Yanqing, has all-solar bath houses in the villages, and they work even in the middle of winter.
But really, I think NZ is better off looking to NZ for solutions to NZ's environmental problems. Like what Bart's talking about getting better grasses and bacteria so cows and sheep produce less methane, and basically all of what Auckland Transport Blog keeps saying about improving transport infrastructure.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Our rail infrastructure sucks, slow track mostly. Trucks are more flexible and roads are cheaper to make, but trucks destroy roads. I’m guessing we just don’t have the throughput to make constructing a good rail freight system viable.
But didn't we used to have a much more extensive rail network? I was under the impression that the dominance of trucks and slow decline of rail freight is more about economics - trucks being effectively subsidised at the cost of rail. And this post at Transport Blog seems to cast some doubt on the narrow guage = slow trains and similar stories told about NZ's rail network.
But yeah, I'm just as way out of my depth as everyone else.