The “food-miles” campaign to discourage long distance food imports reflects a profound ignorance of food transport economics.
Owen McShane
It’s Great to Come Home – but . . .
It’s Great to Come Home – but . . .
Why Urban Planners Love Global Warming
Why Urban Planners Love Global Warming
Why Planned Integration of Land Use and Transport will Not Achieve its Goals.
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Featured News
There’s Nothing Fair About Canadian Health Care
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
Transformers: More than Meets the Eye
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
Followers or Leaders
Our leaders have long been enthusiastic promoters of New Zealand as a leader in world opinion. But they normally refer to political opinion. We may well be trend-setters in giving the vote to women, cradle to grave welfare, and even in rejecting nuclear weapons, but...
We’re all paying a terrible price for outrageously unaffordable housing – and it’s entirely unnecessary
“Relative to incomes, housing in major New Zealand cities is now some of the most expensive in the world,” Don Brash, chairman of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, told the Parliamentary select committee looking into the affordability of housing today. “And...
“We looked up to the Environment and when we looked down the land was gone!”
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Who Knows How to Make a Carbon-Neutral Pencil?
Alert readers may have noticed an apparent contradiction in my last two columns on ‘carbon-footprints’. The first column opened with: “Government has floated a proposal that all buildings be assessed for their carbon footprint before issuing a building consent. This...
Irresistible Forces Meet an Immovable Object?
Government has floated a proposal that all buildings be assessed for their carbon footprint before issuing a building consent. This is yet another half-baked scheme which will make housing even less affordable without delivering any measurable benefit. No one knows...
The Good News
Smart Growth has always been a policy in search of justification. It started out as a means of pricing blacks and Hispanics out of white enclaves in the US. It worked then, and still does, but proved “inappropriate”. Then Smart Growthwould “save” productive rural land...
Does Auckland have a Death Wish?
The Grinding Costs of Kyoto A group of us working on a paper will attempt to assess the present costs of our Kyoto commitments and from that work out what New Zealanders are being asked to accept as the “cost of carbon”. Most people talk of carbon costs of $5 – $40...
Our Two “Established” Religions
The Third Asia-Pacific Regional Interfaith Dialogue, held at Waitangi earlier this year, pointed up some of the ironies which have developed in New Zealand’s own relationship between Church and State. The major functionaries were somewhat upstaged by the presence of...
Some random thoughts on Sales, Marketing and Fair Trading.
While Dairy products are fetching ever higher prices, wool prices are languishing. Worse, the leaders of the industry seem resigned to their fate. This is surely remarkable. At a time when everyone from Dictators to ditch-diggers is besotted by things “natural” surely...