Jacinda Ardern is big on virtue signaling, and none is bigger than her fanciful grandstanding about climate change. During the 2017 election she said that her father knew about the effects of climate change – he’d seen them in Kiribati – and during her campaign launch speech in Auckland, Ardern called climate change “my generation’s nuclear free moment“.
Well, that “moment” is now covered under a mountain of coal dust:
New Zealand burned more coal for electricity production in the first quarter of this year than any quarter in nearly a decade.
The revelation comes the day after a “transformational” climate change report that slated successive governments for its inaction on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise.
The latest New Zealand Energy Quarterly for the period January-March 2021, released today, showed the amount of coal burned for electricity production had more than doubled from the previous quarter to nearly 430,000 tonnes.
This was the highest burned in a quarter since 2012, and helped bring the overall share of renewable energy down to 79 per cent, three percentage points lower than this time last year. […]
With below-normal rainfall, hydro generation was down 9 per cent on the back of lower hydro lake storage levels and generators preparing for a drier than usual winter.
This factor, coupled with a tight gas supply which saw an 18 per cent drop in the past year, saw higher coal imports to meet demand for electricity generation.
Importation of coal was 0.3 million tonnes this quarter (up 25 per cent since March 2020, but down 21 per cent since December 2020).
Coal imports for 2020 were 1.08 million tonnes, and 798,723 tonnes of that was used to generate electricity.
NZ Herald
Yet again the Prime Minister’s rhetoric and slogans are not matched by reality. Her captain’s call to destroy the oil and gas industry has directly led to the expansion of coal imports into New Zealand.
Worse still is the fact that most of the coal is imported from Indonesia and so will also have transportation emissions to factor into it.
New Zealand is blessed with an abundance of coal, but the government has decided to “leave the coal in the hole”. What that really means is that coal in New Zealand is un-mined but we import ever-increasing amounts from third world countries, complete with their dreadful human-rights records.
Of course unwritten in the article is the failure of New Zealand’s much vaunted “renewable” energy sources which, apparently, aren’t being renewed. Ironically, we’ve been told that due to “climate change” we should be experiencing loads more rain or is that droughts…or both…that should fill, or is that drain…oh lordie, it’s so confusing. All that is evident is dams aren’t full and the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t always blow…leaving us needing thermal power generation in the form of the monstrous and well-built Huntly power station.
When the Prime Minister promises anything, we can all be assured that the opposite will occur.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD