Transport and climate action

There are mandates, and mandates. The mandate fairly claimed by the newly created Auckland Council’s inaugural mayor, Len Brown, was for building the city rail link. However since Len Brown’s election, a National-led government has been re-elected with, it would...

New Zealanders have been told to put up or shut up: Show me how you’d go faster? Show me how you’d do anything different? Told by their Prime Minister, John Key, no less—in response to widespread incredulity that a ship with 1700 tonnes of bunker fuel aboard could sit...

Aotearoa must urgently re-invent its tourism model. Currently it is heavily dependent upon air travel, which will increasingly become cripplingly expensive thanks to peaked oil and user-pays for greenhouse gases. Aside from the obvious need for more-fuel-efficient...

Possibly not panning out exactly as the National Party planned. By freeing up the Rodney seat, Lockwood Smith stated he was facilitating more firepower to be directed to the defence of the planned Pūhoi–Wellsford motorway—his position as speaker necessarily limiting...

Footnote added 2 November 2010 It was for all the right reasons. In 1984, when nuclear warships were banned from visiting Aotearoa, the French military was to continue testing nuclear weapons beneath Moruroa and Fangatafoa for more than 11 years. And the following...

Dam the Mahurangi River and generate electricity! Such a proposal would face fierce opposition. But what if the dam was already in place—built more than a century since? The dam, otherwise known as the Wilson cement works weir, is located almost beneath the Elizabeth...

Master mariner Melvyn Bowen warmed up his audience with a quiz. ‘Where am I?’ he asked of the dozen or so who turned out on Friday evening to hear from the commercial sail aficionado. The first image of the presentation was of Melvyn stood in a wheelhouse featuring a...

Event Presentation by Melvyn Bowen, Warkworth 14 November 2008, 7.30 p.m. Venue Catholic Church Hall, Alnwick Street, Warkworth After thousands of years powered by sail, commercial navigation switched over completely to fossil fuels. Since then, the revival of...

In a perfect world, economic drivers would be indistinguishable from environmental drivers. Readers of Mahurangi Magazine will no doubt range from climate change sceptics, all the way through to those in the ‘chances are we’re already dog tucker’ camp. But regardless...

This piece was going to be titled: Too little, too slowly—pray it’s not too late. But then it would have been doing the Labour government’s announcement on climate action a huge disservice. And it wouldn’t be doing any better than the New Zealand Herald editorial that...