Climate Change: We don't need a "magic bullet"

Lots of bad news about the climate today, with the UN reporting that emissions have started rising again and that we need to slash them by 25 - 50% by 2030 to have any hope of staying within safe limits, and Stuff reporting that great chunks of Lower Hutt could be underwater by the end of the century, and uninsurable long before that (so if you live in Petone, move now, while you can). There's also a piece on Newsroom about the current dispute over methane and farmers' "no net warming" bullshit, and that's what's got me thinking today.

For the past twenty years, New Zealand's debate over agricultural emissions has been dominated by the idea that actual reductions are "too hard", and that what we need is a "magic bullet" which would allow business-as-usual to continue. The "fart tax" was aimed at funding research into one, and when that failed, the government pretended it was doing something by throwing tens of millions of dollars a year at scientific research. Meanwhile, because they were "too hard", actual emissions reductions were ignored.

But in fact, we have some perfectly non-magical solutions to agricultural methane. The first one is the RMA. Impose stocking limits, and regulate the size of the herd down over time. The average dairy cow is killed after five years, so this doesn't even require farmers to do anything different, other than not replace some of those they slaughter.

The second one is the ETS. Imposing an effective head-tax per cow based on average emissions would internalise the price, and in theory the market will do the rest (in theory, if carbon prices are allowed to rise, rather than artificially capped for the financial comfort of polluters).

Of course, if we tried to implement either of these options, it would become crystal clear that what farmers really object to is doing anything or paying anything or changing anything they do in any way (meanwhile, the rest of us have been exposed to the ETS for a decade, and we pay the full cost of emissions on our petrol and power). Like the oil & gas industry, they simply want to keep destroying the planet for their own private profit, while dumping the costs on the rest of us.

The question is, how long are we going to let these fuckers get away with it? Because they are now directly threatening our lives and homes. Are you going to let them flood your house and kill your grandchildren? If not, you need to make it crystal clear to politicians that you want action, now, or you will vote them out and replace them with someone who will act.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, probably the last for the year if there's end-of-year urgency. First up is National's Muldoonist dam bill, the Tasman District Council (Waimea Water Augmentation Scheme) Bill, designed to bypass normal processes and steal part of a conservation area for a dam to enrich farmers. Sadly, it looks like it now has government support and will pass (though not until March). If you're in the Tasman District and unhappy about this, the way to change it is to vote your council at at the local body elections in October. It killed Ruataniwha, and it can kill this too.

Once that's done, its on to the third reading of Gareth Hughes' Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill, followed by the rest of the committee stage of Simeon Brown's Psychoactive Substances (Increasing Penalty for Supply and Distribution) Amendment Bill. If they finish that, then they should start the second reading of Andrew Bayly's Arbitration Amendment Bill. I don't think they're likely to get further, but even if they do the next bill up is another second reading, so there will be no ballot tomorrow.

Contempt is contempt

Two weeks ago, the UK parliament voted unanimously to order the government to release its full legal advice on Brexit, so that it would be available to them ahead of their "meaningful vote" (whatever that means) on the final deal. But despite accepting at the time that they would have to publish the advice, the government is now refusing to do so:

Downing Street has refused to commit to publishing the full legal advice given on the Brexit deal despite a unanimous resolution by the House of Commons, in a move likely to spark a major new process row with Labour and Tory Brexiters.

No 10 has only agreed to publish a “full, reasoned position statement” – a summary of the legal advice rather than the full text – which Labour said would not comply with the terms of the Commons vote.

The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, said the offer was completely unacceptable and said Labour would use every parliamentary mechanism available to challenge it.

This is both deceit from the government (quelle surprise), and a naked contempt of parliament. As for what to do about it, over the weekend parliament sent its serjeant-at-arms to arrest a visiting US executive and drag him to parliament to force him to disclose documents about Facebook. They can do no less here: send the serjeant-at-arms to Downing Street, arrest the Prime Minister, and lock her in the clock-tower until she complies.

A referendum on MMP?

Over the weekend, Justice Minister Andrew Little suggested out of the blue that the government was thinking of holding a referendum on the electoral system as well as on cannabis reform and euthanasia in 2020. As for the specifics, it would be to enact the recommendations of the 2012 Electoral Commission review:

A vote on possible changes to MMP is likely to involve decisions on whether to lower the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament to 4 percent and whether to do away with the coat tailing provisions.

Little goes into a bit more detail here. But while he's absolutely right about the unfairness of denying seats to the Conservatives, by linking it to removing coat-tailing, the proposal does as much damage as it remedies. As I noted at the time, at best the Electoral Commission's proposal works out to be roughly as representative as we are at the moment. But in some cases (e.g. 2002) it gives us a much less representative Parliament than we have at present. And that makes it a step backwards, not a step forward. We absolutely need to drop the threshold (IMHO we need to abolish it entirely, or set it to whatever it takes to get a single seat). But as long as there is a threshold greater than the vote required to get two seats, the coat-tailing rule enhances proportionality and representation rather than diminishing it. And if voters don't like the fact that it makes some electorates more crucial than others, the solution is simple: make it irrelevant by abolishing the threshold.

Labour's preferred changes are blatantly driven by self-interest: support their coalition partners while nobbling National's (National's preference for the status quo is equally self-interested, since they benefited from coat-tailing until ACT became a one-man laughing stock). But given the deadlock in the political establishment, bypassing them and putting it to voters in a referendum is fine - its our voting system, after all. But on the current proposal, I will be voting against, and encouraging everyone who wants a properly representative democracy to do likewise.

We should steal Norway's electric vehicle policy

If we want to have any hope of avoiding dangerous levels of climate change, New Zealand needs to massively reduce its transport emissions. On this, the world leader for change is Norway, where 40% of cars are now electric. How did they do it? A feebate system, taxing dirty vehicles to fund clean ones:

Close to 50 per cent of new car registrations in Norway are now full battery electric or hybrid cars, helped by tax incentives and other sweeteners.

Large petrol-driven cars are taxed heavily while EV buyers don't pay import taxes or VAT in Norway, where cars and petrol are expensive.

Free inner city parking at chargers and permission to use bus lanes also helped boost uptake but these incentives are being wound back with more decisions being made by different cities.

In September 10,600 new cars sold in Norway were electric, dwarfing New Zealand's fleet which stands at just 11,000 registered EVs although the rate of increase in the fleet is accelerating.

Its an obvious policy, but it would mean change - and vested interests don't like that at all. So instead, we have some meaningless aspirational target, with no real policy to make it happen (sure, EVs don't pay road-user charges, but that's a tiny part of what is needed). If the government is serious about climate change being "my generation's nuclear-free moment", it needs to act like it. And stealing Norway's policy would be a good place to start.

Fixing Australia's pervasive corruption

Australia is a corrupt nation. State and federal MPs and parties think its OK to take kickbacks, allocate contracts to their donors or mates, and accept donations in exchange for favourable government tradition - and they are occasionally prosecuted and jailed for it. But those prosecutions don't seem to be enough, and the corruption continues. Many states have established independent commissions against corruption in an effort to change this culture, but the federal government has resisted all efforts. Until now. Thanks to the loss of the Wentworth by-election, the Australian government no longer has a majority. And so it has been forced to vote for a motion supporting the establishment of a federal ICAC to avoid a humiliating defeat. Of course, they're dragging their feet on the specifics, but hopefully those two will be forced on them.

As for why this is necessary, just yesterday it was revealed that all three major federal parties had corruptly concealed donations:

Australia’s three major political parties failed to declare sizeable donations from corporate interests seeking lucrative government work, mining approvals or favourable tax policies, the Guardian can reveal.

The Liberals failed to declare a $10,000 donation from Raytheon, an arms manufacturer that was at the time vying for defence contracts, including on Australia’s major shipbuilding and submarine projects. The party’s South Australian branch has blamed the failing on a “clerical error”.

The West Australian Nationals failed to declare a $20,000 cheque it was handed by Mineral Resources, an iron ore miner seeking government approval to access new deposits in environmentally sensitive and unique mountain ranges in the state’s Yilgarn region.

Federal Labor failed to properly disclose a $100,000 donation from the car salary packaging industry, received the same financial year the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, wrote a letter to the industry, pledging to maintain generous tax arrangements.

Which really does make it look like they were trying to sell policy to the highest bidder, while keeping it secret from the voters they were betraying.

This corrupt culture needs to be stamped out. The sooner Australia gets a federal ICAC to put these crooks in jail, the better.

Climate Change: Magic Beans

In the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk, the "hero" trades his family's future for some magic beans. And that's pretty much what the 8 Rivers "clean energy" project the fossil fuel industry are currently pushing boils down to. The basic idea is that they burn natural gas to produce hydrogen fuel, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and a bit of electricity. So far, so business-as-usual. What's different is that they claim they will capture and store the resulting carbon dioxide, so all of this will be environmentally OK. Obviously, this ignores the harmful effects of that fertiliser, which poisons our rivers and turns into the dangerous greenhouse gas nitrous oxide which is almost 300 times worse than carbon dioxide, but still: the removal of carbon dioxide emissions would be a major benefit. So, should we do it?

Hell no. The problem is that carbon capture and storage is an experimental technology, and we don't know if it will work. The world is littered with failed CCS projects, and usually rather than shutting down the plant just keeps on polluting. So there's a high chance that instead of a "clean energy" plant, we'll end up with the same old dirty energy we want to eliminate, spewing out greenhouse gases for fifty years while the world drowns. And that is simply an outcome we can not risk. If we want electricity, it is better to use renewables. If we want hydrogen, it is better to use renewables. We don't want synthetic nitrogen fertiliser anyway, so that's a cost, not a benefit.

Then there's the problem of leakage. In theory, carbon dioxide stored in empty gas fields should stay down there for thousands of years. But we don't know whether it actually will, and that assumes that it actually gets there in the first place (some projects leak above ground), and that it is properly maintained (difficult to assume given the timespan involved). But quite apart from the climate effects, depending on location a leak could be catastrophic. In 1986, a burp of naturally stored carbon dioxide beneath Lake Nyos killed over 1,700 people. Unless storage sites are carefully chosen, they could turn into similar carbon bombs.

(The regulatory issue here is fascinating. How do you regulate something that must last longer than human civilisation? Even in the short-term, how do you prevent the sociopathy incentivised by limited liability from causing companies to take the money from "storing" emissions, then declaring bankruptcy and abandoning them to leak? Any solution has to start with tossing away limited liability, shattering the corporate shell, and holding beneficial owners responsible, all the way up the corporate chain if necessary. It needs to involve ongoing and absolute liability for leakage. And probably a bond to cover the full cost of all stored emissions. Anything less, and a government is selling out its peoples' interests to polluters).

Globally, this technology is expensive failure, pushed only by cranks in the fossil fuel industry who want to pretend nothing has changed. It is not something we should bet our future on, and its certainly not something the government should fund. Rather than betting our future on magic beans, we should use technology we know works and does not risk environmental destruction: renewables.

What "no new taxes" really means

So, National leader Simon Bridges has promised no new taxes if he becomes Prime Minister, and to cancel both fuel tax increases and any capital gains tax. At the same time, though, he's promising to spend more money on core public services, and demanding the government end teacher's strikes by "prioritising funding for teachers". So which is it? Because pretty obviously, the government needs money to do things, and that money comes from taxes. And while the right loves to beat the drum about "waste", the fact is that there isn't any - and certainly when National had nine years to look for it, they found none (or at least, none of any significance that could be re prioritised to fund meaningful policies).

Like local body candidates who promise low rates, MPs who promise lower taxes are really promising to starve government and underfund public services we all depend on. To let the schools, hospitals, roads and everything else decay for the sake of a slogan. To leave people sick or homless for the financial comfort of the rich.

Every politician who promises this should immediately be asked whether they think our schools and hospitals are good enough, whether our teachers and midwives are paid enough to keep them doing their jobs, whether we have enough state houses, whether we need more mass-transit in our major cities, whether EQC has enough money to cope with a natural disaster. And if the answer to any of those questions is "no", then they're simply a hypocrite, and lying about their commitment to public services. Alternatively, if they say "yes" - if they think that this is as good as it gets, that we somehow can't or shouldn't have the same public services our parents enjoyed, then they should be made to own that view publicly, so we can vote accordingly.

A very British bribe

The UK parliament is about to vote on Theresa May's brexit deal, and the numbers are looking dodgy. So the government is trying to line up support any way it can - including by giving MP's knighthoods:

Conservative Brexiteers have reacted with fury to Theresa May’s decision to award a knighthood to a veteran Eurosceptic MP ahead of a knife-edge vote that could kill off her Brexit deal.

Sir John Hayes was given the honour in a surprise move by Downing Street on Friday, which immediately prompted accusations of “cronyism” from political opponents.

[...]

Sir John, a former minister who supports bringing back the death penalty, has expressed his doubts over Ms May’s withdrawal agreement but has not revealed whether he would vote against it.

The MP for South Holland and the Deepings is not believed to be among the Tory MPs calling for a no-confidence vote in the prime minister – an attempt that now appears to have stalled.

This is bribery, pure and simple. But isn't it so very, very British?

Climate change: Cross-party?

Over on Newsroom, Rod Oram has a long column on National and the upcoming Zero Carbon Bill, arguing that cross-party support is ncessary for the policy to work, and urging National to listen to the climate leaders in business rather than the "foot-draggers in farming". Which would be nice if it happens, but I suspect the reality will be that National demands the policy regime be compromised to protect those very foot-draggers (for example, by excluding methane from the target) as the price of their support. And then the question becomes "is a fatally compromised deal worth it"?

I would argue that it is not. Cross-party support for a compromised target is cross-party support for failure. And this is a challenge we can not afford to fail on. A long-lasting, politically durable regime that does not do what is required is worthless. In fact, its worse than worthless, in that it locks in failure for the long-run.

If National bows to its foot-dragging instincts and demands an inadequate target as the price of their support, the government should refuse. Instead, they should call out National for wanting to destroy the planet, legislate a strong target, and run on defending it at the next election.

No freedom of speech in Spain

Another week, another Spanish comedian being legally threatened by the Spanish state:

A court in Madrid is investigating the Catalan comedian Dani Mateo for a TV gag during which he blew his nose using the Spanish flag. The entertainer has been summoned for this coming Monday.

The police union Alternativa Sindical Policial pressed charges against Mateo for hate crimes and insulting Spanish symbols, accusations that then triggered the investigation.

If convicted Mateo could face a year in jail.

Being able to mock the state and its symbols is an essential part of freedom of speech in a democracy. And the sorts of countries that ban it? They're the sort of places that jail rappers for their lyrics, charge people with "rebellion" for peacefully advocating independence, or beat people for trying to vote. In other words, not democracies at all.

Democracy vs Facebook

The UK Parliament has been investigating Facebook for some time over the Brexit referendum and Cambridge Analytica scandal. But so far Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has refused to appear before them and answer questions. So now they've upped the ante and seized Facebook documents from a visiting third-party CEO who had obtained them as part of a lawsuit in the US:

Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.

The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.

Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. In another exceptional move, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to his hotel with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order. When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.

The UK parliament's contempt powers are ill-defined, and haven't really been exercised for some time, but in theory they could have imprisoned him until the next election (though the interaction between that, the Bill of Rights Act 1689 and the UK Human Rights Act and ECHR would have been fascinating). The documents themselves are subject to a non-disclosure order in the USA, of which the UK parliament has just forced a breach. Facebook will probably threaten to sue over that, but they won't get anywhere in a UK court because claims against parliament are simply non-justiciable. If they punish Six4Three's CEO for providing them, then that would seem to be a contempt of parliament which would expose them to sanctions in the UK. And now the committee has the documents, they can publicise them however they like under full cover of parliamentary privilege. But most interestingly, the UK parliament is subject to its Freedom of Information Act, so the documents could be requested (though probably not until the inquiry is over).

The fallout from this is going to be fascinating. And it will be interesting to see if any other legislatures take the hint that global corporations are globally vulnerable and take similar action to advance their own inquiries into how Facebook is used to undermine democracy and incite murder and genocide.

The indoor vaping ban

The government has announced plans to including vaping in the Smokefree Environments Act, banning it from restaurants, bars, and workplaces. Which is fair enough. I don't really care what people do to themselves with informed consent, but when you're emitting clouds of noxious crap, that no longer applies, and its perfectly reasonable to tell people to take that shit outside. As for advertising and display restrictions, that should depend on the harm they do. The evidence on that seems to be that they're significantly less harmful than conventional cigarettes, and that supports a lower level of regulation (and in fact, greater availability to allow for harm reduction). The Ministry of Health's Regulatory Impact Statement goes over these issues, and it looks like they support exempting e-cigarettes from most of the display restrictions. But it also recommends not including vaping in the Smokefree Environments Act, so the government has chosen a much tougher stance there - which suggests they may be more restrictive on display as well. It will be interesting to see what legislation finally emerges.

Climate change: Still rising

California is burning down. Australia's ongoing drought has seen Sydney blanketed in a huge dust storm. Here in New Zealand, the Taieri plain has flooded for the second year in a row. And meanwhile, greenhouse gas concentrations just keep on rising:

The main greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change have all reached record levels, the UN’s meteorology experts have reported.

Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are now far above pre-industrial levels, with no sign of a reversal of the upward trend, a World Meteorological Organization report says.

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now,” said the WMO secretary general, Petteri Taalas.

“The science is clear. Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed.”

We're now at 405.5 parts per million - more than 50 ppm above safe levels, and over a hundred more than pre-industrial levels. And this is not only warming the planet, it is driving our weather to more violent extremes. While its difficult to connect any particular event to climate change, its easy to connect the trend. And that trend is one of increasing damage and devastation. If we want to stop it, that means stopping warming, and that means cutting emissions as quickly as possible, focusing on those which will make the most difference. Sorry cows, your time is up.

Climate change: Not a good solution

Engineering New Zealand has weighed in on what we can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and as expected their solutions focus on energy and transport (agriculture not really being their department). And most of it is the expected stuff: more wind and renewable energy, better energy storage, alternative fuels, mass transit, and a higher carbon price to help drive all these changes and effectively tax stupidity. But there's one miss: variable road pricing:

Use more variable road pricing to lessen traffic. Unfortunately, electric vehicles create traffic as much as fossil-fueled ones. Engineering NZ suggests reducing congestion on city roads using digital, variable road pricing that changes in line with actual demand, and doing the same with parking prices, to encourage people to use ride-sharing and other options at busy times. They also suggest cutting city car parks. "Driving down demand for rush-hour roads and parking means regulators making brave decisions," says the group.

The theory here is that pricing will manage demand and force behaviour changes. But what it means in practice is doing to getting to work what spot-price retail electricity does to power bills. The technology is also inherently massively invasive of privacy - it requires tracking every vehicle on priced roads so that they can be billed, which means effectively monitoring people on every trip. Throw in the fact that workers don't control working hours or commute times, and what it seems to be is a way of driving the poor off the roads so the rich can have shorter commutes in their giant filthy SUVs - a policy which would no doubt appeal to Mike Hosking, but which doesn't promise anything to the rest of us.

But fundamentally, it misses the point. Climate change is not about traffic management - it is about greenhouse gas emissions. Policies need to be focused on reducing or eliminating those emissions. This policy is not about that at all, but about efficient traffic flows. It may produce marginal gains, but these are incidental to its real purpose, and meanwhile it punishes clean and dirty vehicles equally (and if it didn't, it would be easier simply to tax the dirty and skip the rest). Its not a climate change policy, but a regressive and invasive traffic management policy looking for an excuse. If we want to reduce transport emissions, we need to ratchet up the efficiency of the transport fleet on the way to taking dirty, polluting fossil fuelled vehicles off the roads entirely.

Disappointed

When the Greens ran for election, one of their core promises was to ban new mining on conservation land. But now it seems that has been delayed again, and the consultation won't even begin until next year:

Consultation on the role of mining in parts of the conservation estate may not get underway until next year.

The government proposed its ban on new mining on Department of Conservation land a year ago. A discussion paper had been scheduled for September but even in August that was looking ambitious.

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage said she hopes to get the consultation underway in “coming months.”

“We are working to complete a public discussion document,” she said in an emailed response to questions. “Ministers recognise it is a significant issue and wish to put forward good information for the public to consider.”

Obviously this is disappointing - the mining ban and ensuring that conservation land is actually for conserving was a core promise, and the sooner it is implemented, the sooner conservation lands will be properly protected. And given that they've made it clear that current miners will be protected, its not clear what further information is required - information on current mines simply isn't relevant if the proposal doesn't affect them, and I'd already expect DoC to have the case for "conservation" actually meaning conservation sorted. So why the delay?

Climate Change: Aussie banks are burning our world

Australia is one of the world's worst climate criminals. Run by climate change deniers, constantly threatening to pull out of climate change agreements, focused on fossil fuel exploitation, they seem to be intent on burning the planet as fast as they can. And unfortunately, their banks are the same. A report from 350.org has found that the major Australian banks operating in Aotearoa have loaned over $21 billion to the fossil fuel industry, providing them with the capital to keep destroying the planet:

“Banks are a direct link between everyday people and the fossil fuel industry. Since 2015, our Australian-owned banks in Aotearoa have loaned over $21billion to the fossil fuel industry. Financing fossil fuels is irresponsible, risky, and immoral, and it’s time that we demand our banks to stop fueling the climate crisis.”

The report ranks seven banks in Aotearoa on their lending and investment policies.

ANZ, Westpac, National Australia Bank (including the New Zealand subsidiary BNZ), and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (including the New Zealand Subsidiary ASB) are all given an E ranking, and described as the ‘bankrollers’ of fossil fuels.

These companies are basicly in the same ethical position as arms dealers, profiting from encouraging death and destruction. And we should treat them as such.

The good news is that NZ-owned banks - the Co-operative Bank, Kiwibank and TSB - are better. None is a financier of climate change, and TSB has banned "investments" in destroying the world (but not yet banned loans). The message is clear: if you want a better planet, you should take your business to a company which supports it.

The full report is here. 350 also has a petition to NZ banks demanding they go fossil-free, which you can sign here.

Are Lime tax-cheats?

The playbook of silicon-valley startups is simple: disrupt (ignore the law), disintermediate (insert yourself as the middle party of a transaction), profit (by selling your loss-making company to a bigger sucker, while selling the information of your customers to everyone you can). Uber ignores laws on taxi services. AirBnB ignores laws on both rental properties and hotels. But with Lime Scooters, the law they seem to be ignoring in New Zealand is GST:

At the risk of adding another “maybe Lime is bad” article to the pile, the electric scooter hire company could be dodging a shitload of tax by charging users via a US company and not adding GST.

Don’t get me wrong, aside from Lime being a bit pricey I quite like the thrill of caning it along a bumpy footpath with the wind flowing through my unhelmeted hair, weaving perilously between the pedestrians and councillors making their merry way on boring old foot.

But from what I can tell, when you hire a Lime scooter using the company’s app your credit card is charged by a US operating entity, Neutron Holdings, and these charges do not include GST. I say “from what I can tell” because, despite repeated questioning, Lime won’t actually tell me.

The law is pretty clear: if your turnover is more than $60,000 a year, you need to register for GST. There's no question that Lime's service is taxable, so if they've failed to register and are failing to collect or pass on GST, they've committed a criminal offence. The Spinoff estimates the amount of tax being avoided at a million dollars a year. And that's getting into some pretty serious tax cheating territory, the sort of stuff which should see people prosecuted and in jail. And the fact that Lime's answer is anything other than "of course we are paying GST, we obey local law because we're not sociopathic grifters" is worrying.

But there is an easy way to find out: while Lime doesn't have to provide a tax invoice for most rentals because they're under $50, they are required to provide one on request to any GST registered person (and failure to do so within 28 days is a criminal offence). So, The Spinoff or some other publicly-minded journalist could rent a scooter "for work", then demand an invoice. If Lime doesn't provide one, both publicise the fact and report them to IRD, then watch the latter like hawks to ensure that the law takes its course.

We need fewer cows

Writing in The Spinoff, ecologist Mike Joy presents the answer to most of our environmental problems: fewer cows:

The problems faced by New Zealand’s environment, particularly freshwaters and soils are wicked, complex and intertwined. After struggling with these issues for a half a lifetime, it strikes me with great clarity that if you look at each in isolation they seem intractable; but when you grasp that there could be one single solution that addresses them all, then suddenly there is a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.

Take, for example, a subset of the many environmental issues facing New Zealand, such as bacterial and pathogen contamination of water and soil, excess nutrients in waters, excess sediment in waterways, freshwater habitat loss, groundwater contaminated with pesticides and nutrients, and the huge loss of the mauri of waterways. Any of these issues appear impossibly hard and/or expensive if evaluated in isolation for costs, or for the difficulty or value of resolution.

But if there was one action available that substantially addressed all of the issues listed above, then the decision would be simple – take that action. When multiple gains can be made for the cost of a single action, and the combined gains far outweigh the single cost of that one action, the next move is obvious. When it comes to the freshwater crisis, a single solution does exist – simply, reducing farming intensity: less cows.

Reducing the number of cows will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve water quality, and preserve freshwater habitats. It also looks to be profitable for farmers, because they don't have to waste money on fertiliser to support overstocking. So why don't we do it? Because the entire agricultural industry is invested in either high volume, or in quick-fix solutions for specific problems which become unnecessary if we remove the root cause. But ultimately, its the best way to get our environment back.

NZDF is hiding evidence

When the government announced a public inquiry into "Operation Burnham", its SAS revenge raid which resulted in the deaths of six civilians, NZDF said it would cooperate fully. They lied:

The Defence Force has given up just 324 documents out of more than 17,400 relating to 2010 Afghan SAS raids, it has emerged.

[...]

Deborah Manning, a lawyer for villagers allegedly caught up in SAS raids, said she learned overnight about the scale of documentation yet to be disclosed to the inquiry.

Of the 17,400 items deemed relevant, the Defence Force have catalogued and processed around nine per cent, or 1600. Only 324 have so far been provided to the inquiry.

Previous advice, received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in July said there were more than 2000 items of classified information . "That is quite a difference in number," she said.

Whatever way you look at it, this seems like a long way from the full cooperation that was promised. It needs to be made clear to NZDF that they work for us, and that as an institution they must cooperate completely with the inquiry and provide everything it asks for - or those in charge will be prosecuted, fired and replaced with people who will cooperate.