2011-08-29 14:15:21 // Sustain Team
// The Idealog Blog
| 1 comment
Bathurst Resources, an Australian company backed by Chinese money, has secured consents for an Escarpment mine on the Denniston plateau near Westport, with numerous groups outraged by the decision and Green Party climate change campaigner Kennedy Graham calling it “the most egregious example yet of ignorant decision-making in our national energy development”.
2011-07-18 10:16:48 // Sustain Team
What’s been going up and down when it comes to New Zealand’s commercial energy consumption trends as of late? The New Zealand Energy Data File: 2010 Calender Year Edition, newly released by the Ministry of Economic Development, offers a mixture of results. One of the biggest trends of note is that since 1990, energy demand has, on average, grown at half the rate of GDP.
2011-07-11 11:45:33 // Deirdre Robert
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Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's announcement yesterday that from 1 July next year big polluters will pay AUD$23 (NZ$29) for every tonne of carbon emitted into the atmosphere has, not surprisingly, garnered quite the reaction. Kiwi ands Aussie scientist generally love it, but when it comes to the biggest Aussie polluter of all—the coal industry—it's a different story altogether. Not surprising when you consider about 80 percent of the country's electricity is generated from coal.
2011-06-24 09:20:21 // Sustain Team
// The Idealog Blog
From the late 1990s onwards, it seems wind and solar installations grew faster than any other power plant technology across the world. To put that into perspective, that’s about 430,000 MW total installed capacity between 2000 and 2010. That’s the good news according to a new report from Greenpeace, 'The Silent Energy Revolution: 20 Years in the Making'. But the organisation is at the same time cautious about the news, saying it in no way signals the end of fossil fuel-based power generation.
