by frog
My Kiwidiary today remembers this blast from the past:
[On this day] Derek Quigley, at the Young Nationals Conference, speaks against the ‘Think Big’ programme, 1982. Muldoon announced Think Big in 1979, aiming to develop heavy industry. It carries the industrial era’s unsustainable style which wreaked eco-havoc, but also produced a legendary new skate park named Skatopia.
The Budget 09 announcement on extra funding for infrastructure cited “schools, telecommunications, roads and hospitals” and houses for Government infrastructural investment, not bad except for the new motorways bit. But will loosening of environmental protection laws mean a new Think Big led by the private-secto, building the same old concrete edifices with large eco-footprints like large hydro and irrigation dams?
Or will we ‘Think Forward’, big and small, centralised and distributed, with a Green New Deal… www.greennewdeal.org.nz
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Sun, June 7th, 2009
Tags: Budget, climate change, economy, environment, green new deal
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
The $10 billion extra proposed to be spent on state highways over the next decade will surely go down as the biggest waste of money in NZ’s history if it goes ahead.
Everyone will say:
“Oh gosh remember back in 2009 when we were just starting to hit peak oil and people thought that a reduction in petrol prices was going to last longer than just the recession…. and they built all those motorways… what dumbasses”.
*sigh*
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A fitting end to the end of the oil age, at least we will have something to ride our bikes on as we leave the dying city behind, half finished highways leading to nowhere.
Anyway I can’t see it going ahead, the price of oil is going back up and by the time they have finished trying to keep the Resource Management Act people happy there will not be enough oil left in the world to start any new projects.
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Frog old thing
You seem to have lost sight of a little bit of reality over the weekend!
The Green New Deal is a Green Party policy paper, the Government is led by the National Party who have their own policies.
Why would the National Party adopt, tooth and nail(*), a Green Party policy umbrella?
SO, the Answer to your Question is . . . . . . . No!
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* Tooth and Nail – the bitter end, the very last parts of the human body to decompose, used to indicate that the entirety has been consumed.
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What was interesting is that in one of Paula Bennett’s responses to a question in the house last week she seemed quite willing to talk to the Greens about further initiatives to save jobs – as she admitted the numbers looked pretty good.
I suggest pushing the housing component of the Greens New Deal in particular, due to the HUGE number of jobs it would create.
I would also suggest pushing the transport stuff, but Steven Joyce is far too ideologically blinkered to even consider it.
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jarbury – the Housing component of the GND will not create jobs, just preserve jobs in an industry that is suffering massively during the downturn. Keeping them employed for three years building state houses save the industry from decimation, saves the taxpayer from paying all that dole to qualified builders and lowers the waiting list for state houses, getting people off the street.
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haha the green new deal.
Keynesism is alive and well in the green party. You aren’t creating any jobs frog you are just moving things around.
You borrowed money + energy to create all these homes, If building the home was a sound investment someone would already be doing it, I would suggest the Green party is more interested in proping up housing prices and rewarding the land gentry. There is a reason the builders are out of work, no one can afford to buy houses, so the obvious solution is that house prices need to fall, how does increasing the supply of houses allow the price of houses to fall??? I await a warped response.
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Why did the Romans build all those roads when they had no oil?
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Frog, a lot of those jobs are already being lost – so a bit of both I think really.
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Indeed jarbury – that was my point. A lost job recovered is not “created”. Many of the insulation jobs will be created, because the programme is being expanded hugely. However, a certain number are just being “preserved”. I know it is semantic nit-picking, but our critics love to nitpick green stuff, while ignoring that fact that our current government is spending billions of their stimulus package without any cost benefit being done at all!
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Did frog (and Jarbury) miss BorgWarner’s announcement that it intends to double the fuel efficiency of all new spark ignition engines within a few years by replacing antique spark plug technology with ECCOS (Electrically Controlled Combustion Optimization System) radio frequency electrostatic ignition technology?
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/06/eccos-20090602.html
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That’s all good Kevyn, but like electric cars it’ll be a decade or so before any more than a tiny fraction of vehicles are using this new technology.
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Electric cars simply move the pollution from the road to the generating plant and dump. They are the most amazing bit of greenwash I’ve yet seen, and have completely fooled the many, but not the few.
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Jarbury, If it is simply a matter of replacing the sparkplug/condenser/distributor system and remapping the ECU with minimal component cost differences then this technology could be applied to all new and existing spark ignition engine assembly plants within five years which means that within five years of that two-thirds of cars on the roads will be using the technology. It is a common oversight to think in terms of the average of registered vehicles without factoring in the the fact that annual vkt reduces dramaticly over the first five years of ownership as cars shift from businesses to private owners and that a similar effect happens once vehicles are older than 15 years and start to need a lot of TLC and an ever expanding tool kit
I don’t know if this technology is retrofittable but I suspect that if it is then the benefits will be big enough in a peak oil world that companies with experience of California’s Clean Air Act aftermarket device compliance will be prepared to make the investment needed to create a quality retrofit industry.
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Strings, By “the few” I presume you mean Norwegians, Californians and the French, who are all at the forefront of the electric car movement and who all benefit from low fossil fuel contributions to their electricity supplies.
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This system is not going to change and it will become more worse in the near future. The world is changing but the system is not changing with the world.
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Did Turnip28 really just ask how increasing the supply of houses causes house prices to fall? LOL
By the way, on the subject of internal combustion engines, can anyone tell me why we don’t use alcohol (methanol or ethanol) for running domestic cars. Is it just a price thing, or is there a technical limitation?
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Regarding housing policy, my only criticism (potentially) is that building all those state houses would increase concentration of state house tenants if they were all retained.
The one thing worse than Otara is Otara with three times as many state house tenants living in the same area. It’s essential that if housing redevelopment does increase densities, some of those extra units are sold to reduce concentration levels.
HNZC have the land to build thousands upon thousands of additional units within Auckland alone. Numbers of state houses can be increased AND concentration reduced if it’s done cleverly (like we will hopefully see in the Tamaki Transformation Project).
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