Jake

By Jake Roos, 22 December 2022

Low Carbon Kāpiti set up the ‘Don’t Burn Our Future’ campaign in July 2022 to try and stop the government from bringing in its planned biofuels obligation law. We’ve campaigned hard this year in a multitude of different ways which are documented on our campaign webpage and Facebook page. We have distilled everything, all our arguments and evidence, into our submission to the Environment Select Committee, who have the task early next year of reviewing the bill and recommending changes. Have a read – as you’ll see, it is a comprehensive demolition of the whole foolish concept of using the law to force people to use biofuels, when those biofuels are inevitably made from food crops and actually increase emissions.

But enough from us for now! We asked our supporters what they’d like to tell the Select Committee, and here’s what they said:

By Paul Callister, 17 November 2022

Every great city has a park at its centre. While Paraparaumu is not New York, we can learn from that city’s visionary planners. We now have the potential to create a park at the centre of our own community.

Due to a bankruptcy, 28 hectares of centrally located land is for sale in Paraparaumu. This is advertised as prime commercial or residential land, but much of it is wetland with seasonal standing water, as shown by a closeup view of the ‘For Sale’ sign. This land is flood prone and, aside from the low sand dunes, not suitable for development.

By Jake Roos, 11 November 2022

Asher Wilson-Goldman and myself presented to the Transport Select Committee inquiry on 27 October on behalf of Low Carbon Kāpiti regarding restoring passenger rail services between our cities. You can read our submission below, which was prepared in large part by Paul Callister (Thanks Paul!). Also, due to the action by Restore Passenger Rail protestors blocking SH1 at Johnsonville to coincide with it, there was added media attention at the committee. This article on NZ Herald about their action has some video of us presenting, as we were moved up when RPR’s audio failed.

We ended up having about 25 minutes to speak and answer questions. We stressed the need for rapid action to reduce emissions and that improved passenger rail could deliver this in the short to medium term with sufficient focus. Questions from National were relatively hostile, with Simeon Brown indicating he thought existing Intercity coach services were all NZ needs, while Labour and the Greens were more sympathetic.

By Jake Roos, 21 October 2022

Solar photovoltaic panels have become a mass-market product whose deployment is now being driven by market forces instead of government subsidies. Aotearoa NZ never had subsidies for solar PV – we are reaping the benefits of those set in other countries, some decades ago, that led to development of the industry and the subsequent plunge in costs.

In 2021, the world installed 168GW of solar generating capacity. By contrast, the entire electricity generating capacity of NZ is 9.7GW.

Despite the pandemic, global solar capacity doubled in 3 years from 2018, bringing the world’s solar fleet to 1,000 gigawatts (GW) in April 2022.

By Paul Callister, 10 October 2022

This is the final blogpost of this series. It has been a collection of articles on local and national issues leading up to the local body elections. In this final post, we will look back at some of the themes we have covered and consider what it means to take responsibility as we face the future together.

While New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions are relatively small on a global scale, our per capita emissions are among the highest in the world. On average, each Kāpiti resident creates 6.3 tonnes of CO₂ per year. Over half of this is the result of transport.

Some international research suggests we need to quickly bring this down to a maximum of 1.5 tonnes CO₂ per year.