Unless someone like you…
May 1st, 2012 • Conservation online
“Unless someone like you, cares a lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not!” the Lorax - Dr Suess
Kia ora from the ‘Aotearoa Is Not For Sale’ Hikoi, or g’day from the march for ‘kiwi’s opposing essential service sell offs’.
80% of us oppose SOE partial privatisation - that’s like the same numbers that like Marmite.
There are so many reasons why YOU need to be in Wellington on Friday (and it’s definitely not the weather). If we relinquish control of our SOEs to overseas corporates, directors, shareholders and politicians we risk the very land on which we walk on and depend – sounds mellow-dramatic, but electricity is the very life-blood of our economy. New Zealand’s heart beats on this indelible and, in New Zealand, mostly renewable resource: most is currently owned by ALL New Zealanders including ‘Moms and Dads’ and their kids.
As fossil fuels run out, electricity is the only practical option available to replace them. Every car company in the world is developing electric cars, because they know what’s coming (’Mr Fusion’ hasn’t happened so there is 110 new electric models for 2011/2012 alone). If we put OUR electricity in to the hands of overseas interests, we expose ourselves to a future in which we are NOT in control.
We are opposing the sale of our State Owned Assets – Mighty River Power, Genesis Energy, Meridian and Solid Energy – Air NZ, TNVZ are also included. If you want to see some detail behind the scenes visit: facebook: ‘boycott mercury energy’….to see who’s pulling strings and got their fingers in the sticky pieholes.
Turn up in droves to Palmy & Welly to make sure we keep our independence for our children and our children’s children, or our nieces and nephews.
Aotearoa IS NOT FOR SALE.
Palmerston North: Protest rally agains Asset Sales – Wednesday 1pm @ the Square
Johnsonville: Thur, May 3, 8am - Johnsonville railway carpark (Moorefeild entrance). Protest rally against Asset Sales and Peter Dunne. If Dunne retracts his support of the MIXED OWNERSHIP MODEL (MOM) bill, National and ACT can’t pass it.
Contact: John Maynard 027 220 7903 save.our.soes@hotmail.com
Wellington: Gather at Te Papa 12 noon this Friday and march to Parliament.
Please bring colourful signs, and dress up – it would be appropriate to wear BLUE – (think about it), don’t dress down.
In the words of the Lorax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lorax
Be there, or be boxed into a corner [:-(]….
Forward, post, share, care, bare, as you see fit.
Craig Salmon
Mobile +64 21 412 741
MAKE UP YOUR OWN MINDS…here are some responses to that email:
Well said Bruce.
On top of that, I’d like to add my two cents’ worth.
1) “80% of us oppose SOE partial privatisation…” Surely you’re not meaning 80% of all New Zealanders. The current government stood openly at the last election for partial asset sales. It got elected – hence it has a mandate from the majority of New Zealanders on this issue. Labour made quite a fuss against asset sales, and didn’t get elected.
2) My understanding is that only 49% of these assets are being sold, in an attempt to offset the uncontrolled government spending of the past that is increasing the debt burden on our children (and we’ve all seen (EU) where that road leads). 51% must legally remain in government control, thereby ensuring that the statement “If we put OUR electricity in to the hands of overseas interests, we expose ourselves to a future in which we are NOT in control” is false, since the government will always have a majority controlling interest in these assets.
3) The 49% being sold can be bought by all New Zealanders – namely the “‘Moms and Dads’ and their kids”. This allows personal NZ ownership of these assets, rather than just by proxy through the government. Which is better – just continue raising taxes to cover deficits, or allow people to invest personally in their own country’s assets?
4) Electric cars are not the way of the future, not for a long time anyway. Electric energy has a basic problem in that it is difficult to store – batteries are the only viable option. Therefore batteries must be recharged constantly, and from mains power. This means more grid electricity must be generated to cope. Current tech is not advanced enough to recharge these car batteries in sufficient time. To refill your petrol-powered car (chemical energy) takes only a few minutes, while recharging batteries takes hours. Longish trips become impractical, as you have to break your journey every hundred kilometers or so for several hours while the battery recharges for the next hundred kilometres. That’s assuming of course that you can find a convenient charging point out in rural areas, if that’s where you’re headed. Also a study recently in China by the Univ. of Tennessee found that, surprisingly, electric vehicles have higher environmental impacts than conventional vehicles (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es202347q). It’s not surprising sales of electric cars are well below expectations. Hybrids make more sense at our current level of technology.
5) Fossil fuels are not running out, at least not for many, many generations. The “Peak Oil” scare you often hear about applies to conventional sources only. Shale reserves guarantee hundreds of year’s worth of oil and gas. The US is estimated to have 1.5 trillion barrels of oil from oil shale, five times the conventional oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Their extraction of natural gas from shale has seen prices drop from $12 to leass than $5. The UK has estimated offshore shale gas reserves of 1,000 trillion cubic feet, meaning about 285 years at their current consumption. Up to now it has been uneconomic to extract these, but new techniques are being developed all the time. Shell’s ICP for shale oil is an example. These new techniques have promise of producing oil at less than $40 per barrel, and are much more environmentally-friendly than past techniques. In NZ we have the East Coast Basin formations (Waipawa and Whangai) that hold much potential.
Regards,
Bob
> Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:19:34 +1200
> Subject: Re: Palmy: Wed 1pm @ the Square, Johnsonville: Thurs 8am @ railway carpark – Welly: Fri 12noon @ Te Papa – Hikoi ‘Aotearoa is NOT FOR SALE’ – All INVITED
> From: bruce@hoult.org
> To: craigesalmon@gmail.com
>
> Sorry, but that’s full of stupid.
>
> “Every car company in the world is developing electric cars, because
> they know what’s coming”
>
> What’s coming is huge profits if the entire fleet is replaced.
>
>
> “As fossil fuels run out, electricity is the only practical option
> available to replace them.”
>
> Electricity isn’t a replacement for fossil fuels, a quarter of our
> current electricity and almost all of any future expansion other than
> nuclear is MADE FROM THEM.
>
> As at 2007, 28% of NZ end user energy was delivered as electricity.
> 23% of that (6.4% of total energy) was from fossil fuels while 77%
> (21.6% of total energy) was from renewables.
>
> 63% was delivered to the consumer as fossil fuels, for a total of
> about 70% when you include electricity.
>
> If you want to replace current fossil fuel use (including electricity
> generation) with renewables then you’re going to need 70/21.6 = 3.24
> times more renewables than now. And that’s not allowing for any
> increase in demand.
>
> At one time we got 80+% of our electricity from hydro. That’s down to
> about 55% now, and we don’t have a lot of rivers left to dam.
>
> Wind generation is about 3.7% of NZ electricity at the moment (2010).
> About twice that amount already has resource consent, and about double
> that again is proposed but not yet consented. So we may well get to
> about seven times current wind generation in the foreseeable future.
>
> That could replace quite a bit of the fossil fuels currently used for
> electricity generation, though not as much as you might think as
> oil&gas stations are used for peak loads while wind is (unreliable)
> base load.
>
> To use wind-generated electricity to replace not only current fossil
> fuel electricity but also current non-electricity fossil fuel use
> would require about 80 times more wind generation than we currently
> have, or about 26 times more than is currently consented.
>
> I don’t know how you could even do that, especially as the best sites
> are rapidly becoming taken.
>
> NZ is in a much better position than most of the rest of the world. At
> least we do have 3.7% of current electricity from wind (vs under half
> a percent globally), and a plausible way to get to 15%-20%. And wind
> here is reliable enough to produce 50% of rated capacity, unlike
> 20%-25% in Europe and the USA.
>
> Even so, there is NO WAY it is going to replace oil and gas and coal,
> even in NZ. It’s impossible.
>