New Zealand was on Saturday night expected to revoke a ban on drilling for oil and gas amid fears of blackouts, as Labour plans to impose a similar crackdown on the North Sea.
The country’s coalition government is preparing to invite energy companies to resume exploration in the three major offshore fields that supply most of its gas.
It comes after National Grid operator Transpower was last month forced to warn families to limit their electricity usage to avoid a shutdown during a cold snap.
The decision to reverse the ban, made by resources minister Shane Jones, will be a setback for green activists and likely to be regarded as a blow for Labour after Ed Miliband has repeatedly pledged to halt new drilling for oil and gas in UK waters.
“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”
Talking of Labour and the dangers they poe to UK, some more evidence
Labour and a covert plot to sneak Britain back into the EU fold
Labour have a murky record of post-election bombshells which are not mentioned in any manifesto. They made ferocious efforts to keep secret the plan to raid private pensions, a devastating move which would have cost them many votes in 1997 had it become public
So it is no surprise to find that Sir Keir Starmer’s party is covertly working to reverse Brexit, as revealed in The Mail on Sunday today
The disclosure comes thanks to Fiona Urquhart, chair of Labour International, the group tasked with rallying expatriate British citizens to vote for Labour in next month’s Election
Perhaps thinking nobody in Britain would notice, she told a Majorca newspaper that Labour is now planning to re-establish free movement for in the EU…
Plus
Starmer thinks we’re here to serve the NHS
Because, as I have been trying to explain for some time now, Sir Keir is a dogmatic revolutionary, not a normal politician
His formative years were spent as a very hard Leftist indeed, active and fierce. He has not changed that much – this also explains his problem over women having penises
Labour [has] a covert plot to sneak Britain back into the EU fold…Sir Keir is a dogmatic revolutionary…His formative years were spent as a very hard Leftist indeed…
So let’s enjoy some political masochism and vote for Reform, annihilate the Tories and grant Starmer a mega-majority! What could possibly go wrong?
Still think that twat Sunak has a chance of winning, Theo?
Pcar sums things up nicely regarding Sir Kneel.
As for Theo, UK is screwed anyway after nealy 30 years of socialism, so we might as well let the Bolsheviks finish the job.
The new govt in NZ seems to be doing a reasonable job in in rolling back Jackboot Jacinda’s lunatic legacy. She learned everything from Blair you know.
One thing though, why do energy companies have such inappropriate names ? Transpower ? Really ?
My favourite was the Danish state oil company DONG.
Theo – yeah, let’s allow the Tories to shit in our mouths and pretend it’s chocolate instead.
@Theo
It’d help your cause if half of the Tory party didn’t have the same aims as Starmer.
I would think that most people who oppose Labour now accept they’re not going to get a credible opposition to Labour with the Tories still around. So to finally kill the party a Labour government’s an acceptable price. It really can’t be much worse.
Agreed?
It really would do everyone a favour if the Tory party took the revolver & bottle of whisky into the study & shut the door behind it.
Talking of stupid names:
Great! British Energy
I also smile at the one that tells us they make bras from petroleum.
Otto, let’s not forget Powergenitalia.
bis nails it.
The current incarnation of the Conservative Party needs to be taken around the back and given a bullet in the back of the head. Only then can a credible right of centre party develop to counter the socialist nonsense we’ve had from Cameron onwards. Almost none of the current Conservative Party have the vision , desire or ability to do this. Any that have are excluded from positions of power by Sunak and/or the Blob.
Transpower in NZ was named long before the “Trans” movement such as it is, began. It is so called because when NZ privatised/split up the power systems in NZ, they created a single company to handle the natural monopoly part – the transmission of electricity up (and down) the country. Much of NZ’s electricity comes from Hydro, and as we all know, you generate Hydro where the water flows, not where you want the electricity to be. So there is quite a lot of transmission and the transmission company is called rather obviously, Transpower. Make sense ?
And TP is responsible for balancing the loads and generation, which it is why it was the one warning about a shortfall of generation capacity. That shortfall arose because NZ is doing too little to increase the base load capacity available, most of the investment has been in on-shore wind – which can work to a reasonable extent in NZ because it can be balanced with the Hydro, when the wind blows the water is held back for later use. But unfortunately on still cold nights when demand is high, wind is worthless and if your base load gets too high, cuts will happen. Some caseload investment has occurred, primarily Geothermal. The situation at the time of the warning was exacerbated because several base load stations including the only major thermal plant had units down for planned maintenance – BEFORE the main winter months when base loadings are traditionally higher.
The problem has occurred also because our small but useful gas reserves have dropped much faster than expected. The normal response would be to drill new wells into the known reserve areas to keep the flow at higher levels – all fields can and do suffer from reduced flow for a variety of reasons. But NZ can’t readily do the normal thing because when the arbitrarily shut down all exploration, every suitable rig departed for greener pastures and the owners are (as one can understand) less than enthusiastic on doing a temporary move back. The opening up of exploration is likely to be of limited effect as any change of government would simply reapply the ban, so rig owners are understandably wary. So in the long run, electricity WILL be rationed at times of need.
The South Island is ideal for hydro and the North for geothermal. I’d have thought. I always considered NZ as a mixture of Iceland and Norway in that respect ( with more sheep and an east coast that looks like Cornwall ).
Are there other suitably burnable/convertible gases in such geologically active areas ?
BiW
Still think that twat Sunak has a chance of winning, Theo?
No, and I never did. What I want to avoid is Labour having a mega-majority.
Ottokring:
UK is screwed anyway after nealy 30 years of socialism, so we might as well let the Bolsheviks finish the job.
That’s the unthinking nihilism of the pub bore. And it’s not true. The UK’s problems could be solved by a determined right-wing government that gets elected by building a broad coalition, as the Tories did in the 80s.
Steve
yeah, let’s allow the Tories to shit in our mouths and pretend it’s chocolate instead.
That’s for Lib Dems….Anyway, Labour’s policy turds are bigger and viler than the Tory policy turds, and you’ll be choking on them soon…Bye-bye Brexit…
BiS
It’d help your cause if half of the Tory party didn’t have the same aims as Starmer. They don’t: most Tory policies are unacceptable to Starmer. And as Starmer refuses to spell out his aims, how would you know whether half of the Tory party shares Starmer’s aims? The Tory-Labour equivalence hypothesis is for the hard of thinking.
Jimmers
If you want a more right-wing party than the existing right-of-centre party, it is irrational to destroy the right-of-centre party first and give the leftist party a huge majority with which they will entrench leftism in UK law and institutions, thus making the success of a genuinely right-wing party more difficult and less likely. Meanwhile, Farage now supports PR, which would guarantee a Labour/LD/Green/SNP/etc coalition for the foreseeable future.
Theo, they had it for fourteen years. How convincing is it to sat they are going to improve health care access or stop the boats or stop handing out visas like sweets at drag queen story time? They’ve got to go because they are rubbish, and that is how elections work. We don’t vote people in on a reasonable expectation of competence, we vote them out because of the lack of it.
leftist party a huge majority with which they will entrench leftism in UK law and institutions, thus making the success of a genuinely right-wing party more difficult and less likely.
Theo ! Don’t you see ? Look at the ruins that surround you. It is too later. It has already happened. There is no ‘ centre right’ party in Parliament. There are only different shades of Social Democrat.
“The opening up of exploration is likely to be of limited effect as any change of government would simply reapply the ban, so rig owners are understandably wary. So in the long run, electricity WILL be rationed at times of need.”
Yup, unless they devise a scheme for paying the energy companies in advance, the loot to be held in a neutrally-managed account in, say, London, then why would a rational businessman invest a penny in NZ hydrocarbons – or UK hydrocarbons either, for that matter?
RK
The Tories undoubtedly deserve a period in opposition. However, Labour will only make things worse; and the smaller the Labour majority, the better. And a vote for Reform is, in the majority of constituencies, effectively a vote for Labour.
Ottokring: Some social democrats are less bad than others….And Starmer is a socialist, not a social democrat.
Listened to this Corbet report podcast with “Billy T” from, NZ. That nasty piece of work Adhern went after him with the full force of the state and he made a documentary about it; River of Lies.
The interesting part is about he is pretty scatting to the current so called conservative government. (from 12 minutes in).
Horse face Marxist extreme left. “New boss same as the old boss”.
He even says their new conservative PM wanted even harsher measures than horse face.
https://corbettreport.com/riveroflies/
I am amazed that “Vote Tory and get nothing, peasant scum, but Labour will be worse” is not doing better in the polls.
And you’d have gotten away with it, too, Theo.
If it weren’t for those pesky meddling voters.
@Theophrastus – “What I want to avoid is Labour having a mega-majority”
Then you need to be prepared to vote Lib-Dem if you’re in a constituency where they might win.
-“it is irrational to destroy the right-of-centre party first ”
No. It;s like if you have an old and diseased apple tree that bears little fruit. The first step is to get rid of it and prepare the ground to make it fertile for the replacement.
Charles
I’m all for voting tactically to minimise Labour’s majority.
Your analogy is misleading and self-serving. Apple trees are not like political parties. As the late Sir Roger Scruton observed, organisations and institutions ‘are easily destroyed, but not easily created’. The work of destruction ‘is quick, easy and exhilarating’, while building anything worthwhile is ‘slow, laborious and dull’. This applies to political parties in spades.
@Theo: what if lots of Conservative constituency branches just declared independence and then joined Reform? The conservatives in those branches could point out the socialists that Reform should reject for membership.
True there might have to be a bit of unravelling of who owns what if there is a local Conservative Club but it would still be far quicker than starting a new party from scratch.