For those who don't read The Standard, I've 'lifted' a comment by lprent from today's post on the petition opposing deep-water oil extraction, and, as you see, pasted up their poster as well :-)
"For me (and many people) the issue isn’t about the uses of oil or gas as you mistakenly seem to think is the main issue. That attitude speaks volumes about your monumental ignorance on the issue.
It is that NZ is completely unready to handle oil-spill disasters while actively soliciting offshore oil exploration and extraction in areas that are literally kilometers under water. We also essentially have no effective (ie knowledgeably inspected) controls over the oil companies or their exploration crews. We also have no way to realistically put such a control regime in place in less than a decade.
Oil companies are amongst the worst organisations in the world at being massively environmentally dirty if they can get away with it. Try the Nigerian deltas if you want to see how they will crap all over the landscape if there are no effective controls on them. Quite simply they are an industry where if you give them an inch, they will contaminate a mile with leaky pipes because it is cheaper to bribe a government minister than it is to fix their equipment.
NZ’s economy is largely based on producing from reasonably sustainable resources – farming, forestry, fishing, tourism, etc. Only a complete moron would let oil companies come in here and start destroying parts of the ecology that those industries depend apon. Of course that is what our past and current MED ministers or Brownlee and Parata appear to want to do. They simply don’t have the expertise in their department or in Maritime NZ to control the oil companies, to put in effective legislation, or even to evaluate the oil companies proposals for risk to other industries.
After that of course there are the issues of what this will do to our obligations under the Kyoto agreement and its successors and the question of if we want this country to extract that oil now (when it will be worth a hell of a lot more in a few decades). These are the issues that this government is trying to avoid looking at while they arrange to have their friends make a quick buck at our expense."
1 comment:
If you have a govt whose economic policy is based on borrow borrow and borrow on the never never from our overseas masters, they end up controlling you your people and then your country ....if National get back into power..well these problems is only the start ..until it will be our democratic freedom itself ....
It is predicted our oil supplies will finish for good at the present demand rate in 2030 ...for good means no more its all gone... our overseas masters will insist we drill for oil ...we owe them ..to continue to eat etc we will have to oblige and stuff our environment !!
Post a Comment