frogblog

Denver Light Rail

While the US has a very different greenhouse gas profile to NZ, there is one area of commonality which is transport. The US has made massive investments in roading and surprise surprise as a result has totally car dependent development and sprawl with associated high emissions.

This is pretty clear in Denver and Colorado with eight lanes or more of congested freeways filled with truly massive SUVs heading in all directions. Hummers don’t actually look that big here because all the other ‘cars’ are so ridiculously large.

But this is contested ground. Denver has had a debate about mass transit versus freeway expansion. The result is that while freeways have expanded so has the light rail system, which is new and pretty damn fine. They also have a free electric bus system running every few minutes up and down the 16th street mall, which is the main central city shopping and eating zone.

The light rail has been very successful, as usual beyond expectations of planners (Salt Lake City and Phoenix also into buildng new light rail amongst others). An interesting side effect of the rail has been the increase density of housing around the light rail - People like living near the light rail - they don’t have to spend time stuck in traffic on the interstate freeway and it makes for better quality living.

There has also been a parallel move towards people wanting to live in the city rather than sprawling out to the edges.

We can see the future starting to emerge in transport but it is limited by those who cling onto the past and by the infrastructure that we have inherited from generations before.

Here’s one that I was not aware of. According to today’s Denver Post the US govt in 1969 decided to demonstrate the peaceful uses of nuclear energy by letting off a bomb near Rulison Colorado to loosen up natural gas - part of the Plowshares Program.

It was a 43 kiloton device set off at 8000 feet undergound designed to fracture rock and release natural gas. It worked, 455 million cubic feet of gas was released.

But sadly it was so radioactive it was unmarketable. And the govt instituted a no-drill zone in the area so that radioactive gas wouldn’t be extracted.

So now they’ve decided to slowly shrink the no-drill zone so they can access gas that hopefully won’t be full of tritium.

Disclosure: I’m in the US as a guest of the US Govt, as part of the International Visitor Leadership Program.

I’ve previously blogged that one of Obama’s tools in the battle to get a climate change bill through the Senate is the US Supreme Court ruling of April 2007 that the Clean Air Act can be used to regulate CO2. This means that if the Senate won’t pass climate change legislation then Obama can use the Clean Air Act, which will be more clumsy and more unpopular with the polluting industries.

But he has another string in his bow also which is the emergence of state based cap and trade proposals for greenhosue gases.

I’m in Denver today and we’ve been looking at the Western Climate Initiative (amongst other things). This was an initiative from a number of western US states and a couple of Canadian provinces to look at what they could do about reducing greenhouse emissions when the US federal govt was controlled by Bush. It continues now and includes the possibility of setting up their own greenhouse cap and trade system.

Now it would be complex to establish such a system but it does raise the stakes if the Senate rejects taking action at a federal level. If the US were to have two or three multi-state cap and trade systems it would be very complex for the industries involved and then they would also have potential regulation by the EPA. Surely better for them to have one federal system…

Of course some of these corporations and politicians have been in denial about the science for years so they also have the capacity to be in denial about the regulatory realities so it’s no surprise that they continue to run ads on TV against the the American Clean Energy and Security Act (Waxman- Markey) passed by the House.

The Republicans have also announced that they intend to run ads targetting leading Democrats who supported the Act leading up to COngressional elections in 2010. The absurdity is that they will blame the unemployment that came from Bush’s poor regulation of the banks on the climate bill that will not yet have any effects.

A question for the 86 MPs who voted against the Green Party’s medicinal marijuana bill last night:  will you deny your husband/wife/mother/father/daughter/son effective pain relief if they have the misfortune to suffer a terminal illness or undergo chemotherapy?

A question for the 86 MPs who voted against the Green Party’s medicinal marijuana bill last night: do you accept that medical professionals - repeat medical professionals  - confirm that marijuana provides effective pain relief for a variety of medical conditions with fewer side effects than other drugs?

A question for the 86 MPs who voted against the Green Party’s medicinal marijuana bill last night: if you trust our doctors to prescribe powerful pharmaceuticals in a responsible fashion, can you not trust them to prescribe marijuana?

A question for the 86 MPs who voted against the Green Party’s medicinal marijuana bill last night: do you know that medical marijuana laws have been successfully implemented in several countries around the world and the sky has not fallen?

A question for the 86 MPs who voted against the Green Party’s medicinal marijuana bill last night: where is your compassion?

Here’s one that left me speechless with incredulity…

Fed Farmers Dairy chairman Lachlan McKenzie addressed the organisation’s AGM  yesterday and made some quite ridiculous and irresponsible comments on the progress that farmers have made in cleaning up waterways.

This time last year, Fish and Game New Zealand was calling on the government to regulate production in the agricultural sector. My how the tables have turned. NIWA and DairyNZ’s last report showed that water quality is no longer declining in the intensive dairy catchments despite a major increase in animals. Now that the scientific evidence is on our side maybe Fish and Game can actually focus on its real job… All I can say is that it is a shame our most vocal critics suffer from selective hearing when it comes to the great strides dairy farmers have made in recent years.

Hmmm… selective hearing - that’s not good? Well, let’s have a look at the NIWA report that Mr McKenzie cites….

The results of the NIWA survey on river quality released last week show very clearly that as agricultural use of land increases, water quality is deteriorating. Of the 77 monitored sites tested, nitrogen levels rose at 52 sites and fell at none. Phosphorous levels increased at 22 sites and fell at only nine. Lead authors Deborah Ballantine and Robert Davies-Colley say that while there have been ’spot’ improvements, overall the quality of water in New Zealand rivers continues to get worse. They say the links between deteriorating water quality and agriculture are clear.

Mr McKenzie is the one selectively reading the science. Just yesterday Environment Minister Dr Nick Smith released two new reports on freshwater quality, one of them a baseline study on at water quality in dairy farming catchments. The Minister himself shot-down Mr McKenzie argument:

There is a significant water quality issue emerging in areas of intensive farming, particularly dairying… It is no surprise that the report identifies degraded water quality in these areas and reinforces the need for further Government initiatives.

I don’t for a moment diss the great work that some farmers are doing to take responsibility for the impact of their stock on waterways. Jeanette has been visiting as many sustainable farming operations as she can in recent months to learn what responsible and innovative farmers are doing, and earlier this week, Kevin Hague blogged on a great community initiative in Golden Bay that has seen the Aorere River – a heavily farmed catchment – dramatically cleaned up to the point that aquaculture farms at the mouth of the river are healthy again.

Despite these initiatives, water quality in farmed catchments across the country is still declining. Until that trend genuinely reverses, there is no point using selective science to pretend otherwise. In fact it is grossly irresponsible to say that “the tables have turned”, and that “the scientific evidence is on our side’ when the trend is the opposite and in dire need of reversing. The Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture made this quite clear at the recent launch of the Dairy Strategy.

Mr McKenzie is doing NZ farmers a disservice with his misleading statements.

Who knows??

The Government (or any of its officials) wouldn’t front at the recent Reviewing Accident Compensation Summit. The hot topic of the day was privatisation but participants were left in the dark about whether National will keep pushing in this direction.

Both the Greens and Labour did attend – check out Sue B’s speech, where she outlined that:

“For us, the underlying principle is the provision of equitable and adequate rehabilitation and compensation, based on the fundamental principles and goals espoused in the Woodhouse Report.”

So what happened at the summit - arguments on privatisation raged with Roger Kerr at al rolling out their same old arguments that the magical hand of the market would make everything better, when asked for evidence they didn’t have any apart from the market is always best.

Roger hadn’t even bothered to read the Price Waterhouse Cooper [PDF]report  that found ACC has relatively low administrative costs.  For example, in New Zealand, workers pay on average 78 cents in every $100 toward their compensation scheme, but in Australia (which has some private provision) the figure is $2 per $100.

So will National follow their magic market ideology and their business roundtable buddies and privatise ACC? Who knows?? Heres hoping they see sense and don’t…..

Here’s a compelling video from the great people at 350.org.nz urging all of us to get off our bums and have our say at the Government’s emissions target meetings around the country over the next couple of weeks.

It is vitally important that we turn out in numbers and let the Government know that the future is not negotiable!

Contrary to rumours spreading fast, I have it right from the folks at MfE that you do not have to register in order to have your say. They would like you to register so they have a sense of the numbers, but it is not mandatory.

I’ll be coming back here soon with more information on what you can talk about, some facts and figures, and some other advice. The important thing is that you turn up and be heard, whatever your opinion. In the meantime, enjoy the video!

Hi, here’s my regular column for the New Zealand Truth - this time looking at the SIS involvement in my life - and mine in theirs:

Last month the SIS released a heavily edited version of the file they kept on me from 1968 onwards.

The file is evidently in two volumes, and 330 classified reports on me have been withheld. The few lessons I take from what I have been allowed to see so far are that:

• The SIS was very active during the Cold War period in relation to anyone they judged to be subversive, even when just a teenager at school – as I was when the spooks first started keeping an eye on me.
• They had an agent right inside one organisation to which I belonged, and quite possibly within others as well. The spies weren’t quite as incompetent as some commentators made out in the Playboy and meat pie days.
• However, the information they collected on me was quite random, with rather a lot missing and some strange fabrications and suppositions.
• The way my file comes to an abrupt end in early 1999 is a little odd as I was still very involved in organising protests against the APEC meeting later that year. This sudden conclusion may have something to do with the fact that after Keith Locke’s records were released in early 2009 the SIS came under heavy pressure not to keep files on sitting MPs – even though I didn’t enter Parliament until December 1999.

I welcome the recent increase in media and public scrutiny of the SIS.

I believe we all need to know more about the agency paid for by the taxpayer and tasked with identifying, watching and analysing people who are a threat to New Zealand’s security.

While there will always be a need for a high degree of secrecy in its operations because of their very nature, I reckon more should be done to review and cull personal files that are kept on people like myself and goodness knows how many others.

Even the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Paul Neazor, said in March that he was concerned about the SIS’s ‘vacuum cleaner approach’ to collecting information on suspect individuals, and that security needs should be weighed up against peoples’ right to privacy.

Parliament has a special committee on security and intelligence which is supposed to have oversight of the SIS.

Its current members are John Key, Rodney Hide, Tariana Turia, Phil Goff and Russel Norman.

I certainly hope the committee is doing more these days than just accepting whatever the SIS Director tells them.

I trust this new generation of political party leaders are girding their loins to truly watch the watchers, a function needed in any democratic society.

While I accept that there will probably always be a need for some form of security intelligence service in our country, there must also be effective checks and balances on just what that service is up to.

And I hope that whoever the SIS is keeping an eye on these days, there is a genuine reason for doing so, and that any records being kept are both fair and accurate.

National has just cut $19 million of funding for the Greens’ Enviroschools programme. Does this mark the end of one of our most successful initiatives? I talk to Green Education Spokesperson Catherine Delahunty on the fate of teaching for a sustainable future.

Losing our Enviroschools (MP3 and OGG)

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.