A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
Re: Our energy giant, September 4 column.
Clive Bibby hits one nail on the head but misses all the others. Big hydro generators are indeed reliable, efficient, and clean — once their initial dirtying has been done. For what we have, we should be grateful, and conservative. Stop wasting it
on the likes of Comalco.
However, we do not need more energy at all. Cheap energy in the past has led us into a lethal addiction which must be cured, not fed. Progressives with the brains to see this are not ideological loons. Nor did they invent ideology: the ideological right-wingers, of which Mr Bibby is a magnificent specimen, did just that, but have always pretended theirs was not an ideology.
His rudely expressed disdain for biodiversity reeks of numerous pseudoscientific and ideological qualities that today’s commentators would call colonialist and totalitarian, and I would give other adjectives much too impolite for this newspaper.
The green lobby in the Government is not dictating many parameters of choice at all. There is, thank goodness, a green tinge to the emergent policies, but it is muddied grey, even within the Climate Change Commission, by continued pandering to ongoing growth. Further, the choices should not be “for our own survival”. It is possible, and beneficial, to have a somewhat wider consciousness than that.
