timjones's blog

About 70 people attended the joint Engineers for Social Responsibility/
Sustainable Energy Forum conference on "Responding to Oil Depletion
and Climate Change" in Auckland on Saturday 26 July. Most of the
conference presentations, plus the conference statement and report,
are now available online at

http://www.sef.org.nz/conferences.html#2008

I've also reproduced the conference statement, which has been
distributed to various media outlets and is the basis for ongoing
discussions with Auckland local authorities, below.

Regards
Tim Jones

This article appeared in the Dominion Post (Wellington) on Monday 21 July.

Over a barrel - a new vision needed

In November 2007, when the world oil price was nudging US $90 per barrel, I wrote an article entitled “The Future of Oil” for the Dominion Post. The article explained that oil prices were rising because world oil production had been virtually static since 2005, while demand had continued to rise.

The Royal Society of New Zealand has released a statement setting out the basic facts about climate change in a clear, non-technical way. The Introduction to the statement says:

The Radio New Zealand Sunday Group discussion on Peak Oil and the future of oil supplies, broadcast on Sunday 8 June, is now available as a podcast from the Radio NZ site:

http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/sun/sun-20080608-1005-Sunday_Group_for... (12.5 MB)

It's about 30 minutes long. Chris Laidlaw, who ran the discussion, chose to focus mainly on the international situation, but there are some references to NZ in there.

The participants were myself, Richard Hale from Hale & Twomey, and Rob Jager from Shell New Zealand.

- Tim

This year's Sustainable Energy Forum (SEF) conference will be a joint conference with Engineers for
Social Responsibility (ESR). It will be held at Unitec in Auckland on Saturday 26 July.

The conference theme is "Responding to Oil Depletion and Climate Change".

The programme and registration form are now available online at

http://www.sef.org.nz/conferences.html

Hope to see you there!

Please forward this information to interested individuals and networks.

Venue: St Johns in the City Church, cnr Willis and Dixon Streets, Wellington

Please Attend - This Is Extremely Important

Transit have begun consultation on the Ngauranga to Airport Transport
Strategy - and this could see more tunnels, more roads and more flyovers
being built through the heart of our city. The result will be more CO2,
more dependence on oil, and a worse quality of life for Wellington residents.

But there's still time to change the plan. Already there's a strong push
to make the city more pedestrian and cyclist friendly, and to invest in

Wellington City Council recently made a commitment to carbon neutrality. But the newly-released plan for revamping east-west transport in Wellington - the Ngauranga to Airport Strategic Transport Study - suggests "solving" Wellington's transport problems by spending massive amounts of money on building new roads and road tunnels.

With world oil prices nudging over US $100 per barrel in the past few days, the media is suddenly paying attention again. Simon Tegg, who's produced an excellent paper on what's wrong with the Government's oil price forecasting - see http://greens.org.nz/campaigns/peakoil/OilOutlooks.pdf - is being interviewed on National Radio this coming Thursday, 10 January, after the 10am news, on the coming peak in world oil production and its implications for NZ. Should be worth listening to.

- Tim Jones

I was very pleased to find out at Climate Change Festival in Wellington this weekend that there is an active Transition Towns movement in New Zealand. Transition Towns, http://www.transitiontowns.org.nz/, are towns where a group has taken on the responsibility to plan the transition to a lower-energy and lower-emissions future. It's a concept that's gained a lot of traction in the UK and Ireland, and now it's coming to a town or suburb near you.

Electric vehicles are hitting the news regularly these days, and there's been some good discussion of them on this site. But are they really the answer - or an answer - to our transport problems? And can electric public transport also help to lessen transport's wretched greenhouse gas emissions record and make us less vulnerable to Peak Oil?