The Daily Blog Open Mic Wednesday 3rd June 2015

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openmike

 

Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

 

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7 COMMENTS

  3. When Green meets Blue who wins, here in Wellington we have a Green Mayor and a number of supposedly Green councilors along with a high concentration of those who vote Green at the ballot box,

    This from my local rag the Cook Strait Times, ”Council sign-off $90 million for runway”(extension),

    ”A majority of Councilors approved putting the cash toward the project if the business case for the extension stacks up”, unquote.

    What of the ‘case’ for the ecology and enviroment should be the real question here you would think,

    Having realized the major fight it would have had with ‘everyone’ effected here in the South-eastern suburbs with it’s initial intention to place the runway extension in Evans Bay to the North the Council has done a quick about face and decided to fill in another 90 meters of the Cook Strait to promote carbon emissions from even bigger planes being able to land and take off,

    Part of me has been having a quiet snigger at this wanton ecological vandalism, i mean hell the Lyall Bay ‘surfies’ no longer need ponder artificial reefs as a source of better surf as the Council will have effectively built them a wave generator,

    A 90 meter runway extension into the strait will effectively direct 90 meters of water that now breaks East of the current runway Westward into Lyall Bay,

    Even a mild southerly storm as late as last week meant that debris was hurled onto the local roads in the area resulting in their closure,

    The snigger of course is because i quite enjoy Nature, in all her raging glory, laying waste to the puny construction efforts of man where they both come into collision,

    Should as i suspect, the planned runway extension ‘amplify’ the wilder southerly storms we get 3 or 4 of a year here it wont be a matter of just storm tossed debris that overcomes councils efforts to keep roads open,

    It will be the wholesale destruction of whole sections of such roads as well as any man-made structure that such amplified waves might reach…

    • Personally i support an extension to Wellington Airport…reason being …

      The alternative to an extension to Wellington Airport is the development of the airport at Kapiti Coast …..and this land was virtually stolen in recent times from the local Maori by developers in the hope that it would eventually replace Wellington Airport….(check out the history and the developers concerned…friends of who?……you wont be impressed)

      …and remember Jonkey nactional around about this time of the airport controversy arguing that Wellington was dying….

      ….also remember the super motorway up to the Kapiti Coast from Wellington?…you know the motorway that nobody wanted and everyone virtually said was a waste of money?…well of course it went ahead anyway…i wonder why? ( for whose long term plans?)

      • Yes exactly, you would support an extension to Wellington airport, and, you obviously couldn’t give a toss about increased carbon emissions and increased ecological damage likely to be caused by the extension to the surrounding coastline,(not to mention the local infrastructure and private property),

        After all the middle class wanker’s who fly off to Sydney or Melbourne 2 or 3 times a year to do their shopping from Wellington airport shouldn’t be ‘inconvenienced’ by the fight against carbon emissions right, they after all put out there recycle bins every week and plant the odd patch of trees in the Valley right,

        What is this need for an alternative that you write of???, there is no need of an alternative to Wellington airport just as there is no need for an extension to the runway at that airport,

        Quoting the Prime Minister at me would only have me considering you in the same light as i consider that particular speck of humanity,

        Wellington, far from dying is a vibrant medium sized city with facilities that match or better those of any other city in this country and less of the problems,(plus our thugby team is at the moment No1 in the super competition)…

  4. Kevin, I can’t see your link because I don’t use FarceBook. Would it be possible for you to make it publicly viewable without logging in?

    I’m curious, are Shell’s figures based on the assumption that we will extract and burn all the remaining fossil fuel reserves we know about? This is highly unlikely for two reasons. Firstly, the energetic return on sucking the last dregs of any given oil source are generally the same or lower than the energetic cost (Energy Returned on Energy Invested is crucial to understand). Secondly, even “mainstream” players are starting to actively investigate moving away from fossil fuel dependence, at least since the IEA World Energy Outlook report for 2010 stated that we most likely passed peak oil in 2006 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2010/11/101109-peak-oil-iea-world-energy-outlook/).

    Also, do their figures factor in the massive carbon contribution of farming animals for meat, as explored in the doco “Cowspiracy”? The globalised meat (and dairy) industry depends at every level of its supply chain on fossil fuels, from the mining, refining, and transport of super-phosphate, to the transport of meat from farm to supermarket to table. It’s reasonable to assume that energy descent will result in a massive decrease in animal farming, and its carbon emissions.

    It seems to me that retooling our entire techno-economic system to run entirely on renewables, and a much lower overall energy budget, is at least a big a challenge as how to deal with a few degrees of temperature rise.

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