Submission On The Government Policy Statement On Land Transport 2024
This submission provides feedback on the draft Government Policy Statement on land transport 2024 (GPS 2024). GPS 2024 outlines the government’s land transport investment strategy over the next 10 years, the funding available, and where funding should be directed to deliver on this strategy. Our submission provides feedback on the new strategic priorities, identifies inconsistencies which conflict with the stated intent, identifies items that are missing from the policy statement, and items that we support.
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February 2024
CONTENTS
– COP28’s potential impact on climate change
– Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists
– Carbon released by bottom trawling
– India rebuilds coal stocks to ensure electric reliability
– World groundwater levels showing ‘accelerated’ decline
– Short extracts from Reuters website
– French farmers
– Solid state batteries update
– Information from Energy Source and Distribution magazine, Jan/Feb 2024
– Some recent statistics
November 2023
CONTENTS
– Some environmental statistics
– Global warming rate
– China and India struggle to curb fossil fuels
– Renewable hydrogen takes flight with octocopter
– Space-based solar power
– New Scottish blade a ‘step change’ for tidal energy
– Power grids investment needed
– World’s tallest wooden tower to be built in Australia
August 2023
CONTENTS
– Tracking Clean Energy Progress: IEA Report
– Selected charts tracking how countries are meeting their commitments to reduce GHG emissions
– China’s Climate Priorities
– Exxon Mobil 2023 energy outlook
– Calls for crackdown on fossil fuel company greenwashing
– Solar power cell innovations break key energy threshold
– Mining giants trial world-first hydrogen pilot for alumina
– South Korea’s Kepco joins Western Australian hydrogen hub
– Prospectors hit the gas in the hunt for ‘white hydrogen’
– $4.6 billion plant in South Africa will make ‘the fuel of the future’
– Farmers on frontline as Dutch divided by war on nitrogen pollution
– World’s largest ‘wood city’ to be built in Stockholm
– Attending ESR Committee Meetings – A request for feedback
June 2023
CONTENTS
– The clean energy investment boom (pictured)
– Rock flour from Greenland can capture significant CO2, study shows
– The path to radically lower emissions
– Global Energy news
– L.A. and other cities are recovering, but not their downtowns. Why?
– Asia’s largest timber building
– A review of the book “What we owe the future”
Building For Climate Change
Current scientific advice indicates the key design requirement for the safety of all humanity’s infrastructure and the wellbeing and sustainability of natural ecosystems and species is an 80% reduction of fossil fuel production within two decades.
To meet social & economic needs while phasing out this energy source, we will need to consider the consequential issues of a sustained decline in energy supply and material consumption in all sectors of the economy.
Read MoreMeeting The Net-Zero Challenge
The Government’s current proposal is to broadly accept the Climate Change Commission’s budgets from their 31 May 2021 final report, with minor changes related to forestry emissions. But based on the available information, the Commission’s emissions reduction targets for 2030 are far weaker than is required for New Zealand to do its part in meeting the key goal of the Paris Agreement to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees C.
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Submission on Measures for Transition to an Expanded and Highly Renewable Electricity System
We recommend to commence work on a vision of how New Zealand will look without fossil fuels and then to develop a pathway how to get there. This consultation document assumes a great manufacturing effort over the next decades of power lines, power pylons, windmills, PV panels, electric cars, rail tracks and other infrastructure. This will all be done predominantly by using fossil fuels with associated emissions. It will also be done on the backdrop of diminishing resources of raw materials including crude oil. In terms of energy we are also dealing with a reduction of the ratio of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROI) while aiming to produce new infrastructure and trying to maintain or replace existing infrastructure all built with fossil fuels at a high EROI ratio.
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