I got Chastised for Owning a V8 Last Week

I felt like I was being made out to be a bad person and it shocked me. I’ve always considered myself a green person. I have planted tens of thousands of trees, lobbied for feed-in tariffs to make it attractive and economical to get the masses to install solar power. I’ve encouraged ride-share systems and spend a lot of my working time encouraging people to use public transport and to reduce the impact of congestion. I point out to people when their car or truck is blowing soot from the exhaust pipe and if I pick up rubbish that others have thoughtlessly discarded.

Since I was little I always loved Corvettes. As a boy i would watch them on TV and see the odd one in real life. As an adult I had a business associate who owned one while I just had a replica model.

The colleague who castigated me used to work for a car manufacturer and has a passion for motor vehicles and motor sport and maybe he was just envious of me that I have a sports car, but it made me feel bad. It shook me, perhaps because the car is an indulgence.

I didn’t bother telling him that I have cancer and that it made me decide to do a few things for myself and my family that were on my bucket list, things that like most of the people I know, I never expected to achieve. Anyway, now when I drive my 350 Chevrolet, people give me the thumbs up, kids stop and look at it as  drive past as I did so many times when I was little and I see big grins light up on their faces, just like I did. People compliment it and I feel like they feel happy for me in gas stations. They don’t know my circumstances and might think I’m rich. I’m not. The only new vehicle I have owned in my entire life was a no gear pushbike.

I have my dream car and I spend as much time cleaning it as driving it, which I find therapeutic (it helps me take my mind off my next lot of tests), while listening to business coaching, self improvement and music podcasts. It’s in great condition, doesn’t blow smoke (and neither do I), I never deliberately speed (in fact I am helping to test a green driving app) and  so the engine is never working hard, it is in fine tune so there is very little pollution, in fact I think it drives much cleaner on high octane petrol than the average car let alone the diesel soot smeared black smoke spewing trucks I see delivering frozen food to retailers.

I have spent half of my life working in voluntary unpaid positions after work, from boards and committees including as a Civil Defence Rescue Team Leader, Chair and committee member of boards including a music centre that has taught thousands of children to play music on instruments they couldn’t afford to own, volunteered in a food centre providing vegetables at farm cost to people who couldn’t afford to pay retail, fund a guide dog, support charities and worked hard all my life.

I indulge myself a little when it comes to my guitars and continuing to lean music and have done some travel (most of it on business with very little time for myself) and I consider myself to be a good citizen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m far from perfect and have room to be a better person, but I do care about my community and my environment.

But I do have cancer and I do have a bucket list. I thought I’d wait until I retired before I went and had a but more fun and I’ve recently been pointed out that I am no longer insurable for health and life. Obviously they consider I have a long life span ahead! I haven’t given up on that myself.

I do my best not to judge other people and I’d like to suggest that people who are quick to judge or try to make me feel bad for finally owning my (second hand) dream car should have a close look in the mirror. I hope they never find themselves in a similar situation to me.

 

 

 

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Electricity, disasters and Feed In Tariffs

I’ve been itching to write more about FIT for ages as you will know if you have been reading my blogs. If you didn’t, my last blog was pretty much a summary of my thoughts which started with the Christchurch earthquake.

Prior to that for a few years I have been wondering why a ‘clean green’ country like New Zealand only went so far as to provide subsidies for roof insulation and clean heating. Where is the NZ Green Party on FIT, I asked 2 years ago. I’m not even sure where the party is on much at all at the moment and its election year, when National has launched its new policies on oil and gas and other efficient power sources like coal.

In fairness I do have to acknowledge that Environment Minister Nick Smith did through caution to the wind at the NZ Wind Energy Conference this month, but he also made the point that you need windy places and probably also noted the frequent opposition any time someone wants to set up a wind farm. Personally I like them and if they are silent, I wouldn’t have a problem looking up at them on a hill somewhere.

Dutch windfarm

I have 2 interests here, the first one is renewable energy in the form of solar panels, with the ability to feed power into the grid, but also the ability to make individual households and businesses more resilient in times of crisis.

The common thread anywhere in the world when there is a disaster is that the power goes off. In my recent posts this month I have discussed a whole range of issues where we are so reliant on electricity today that there are a variety of problems after the crisis is over.

I want to again acknowledge the heroism of electricity workers and supporters who risked life and limb to get things up and running as quickly as possible.

Anyway, back to my story. Imagine if we followed on from the subsidies to put insulation into our roofs, by offering subsidies and Feed In Tariffs for installing solar panels on the roofs. This is something we should be doing anyway, but imagine if a large number of people were still able to have at least some electricity when the grid is down. They would still potentially have phone communication, they would have lighting, heating, the ability to wash themselves and much more.

We could find ourselves with a renewable energy source that doesn’t pollute, makes people much more aware of power consumption, involves the community and provides greater resilience while allowing us to get closer to meeting our commitments to reducing carbon waste that we so obligingly adopted with the Kyoto Protocol.

It has been said that I am wont to be verbose. I don’t necessarily want to change that because I am intensely interested in what I write about, however I don’t want to lose you dear reader (borrowed that from Stephen King). So here’s what I’m going to do. I am going to write an new series of shortish blogs on the benefits of FIT for New Zealand in the hope that more people will understand the massive potential benefits to New Zealand and put some pressure on the politicians and energy authorities to do something about it.

I’ve done some reading on the topic and found the paper by Miguel Mendonca of the Birkbeck Institute of Environment, Birkbeck College, University of London particularly helpful. He also wrote the book Feed-in-Tariffs Accelerating the Deployment of Renewable Energy. You can find more information here. He discovered that FIT could work in the UK, that it had many positive benefits above and beyond the basics of a renewable energy source and I plan to discuss some of these from a New Zealand context. I also find it interesting that some people (who perhaps are the ones who wanted Henry Ford to breed faster horses instead of horseless carriages) say there is not enough sunlight in NZ to create an acceptable level of energy. Kiwis who go to UK for their OE’s don’t often come back recounting stories of endless sunny days.

So lets explore what FIT’s and solar power can do for NZ, for our resilience, for our GDP, for our commitment to the environment, for industry, for entrepreneurs and to generally show the world that we are in fact as green as we say we are. There are some amazing benefits to be had along the way.

Please come back and check out what I have learned.

Doesnt look that shabby

Proposed carbon tax for new and used car imports into New Zealand

I was surprised to read this one in the Herald this morning, where the Government is considering a levy on all car imports coming into New Zealand, based on their CO2 emissions. According to National’s finance spokesman Bill English, this could add $10,000 to a Holden Commodore based on $150 per gram of CO2 emitted per kilometre travelled, above the standard of 214g CO2/km.

Sound like more revenue gathering to you? It does to me. They want levy’s on our petrol, they are going to build PPP toll roads (as long as there are alternatives I don’t have a problem with this one) and as always are very innovative in taking back any income tax reductions that they offer us in other ways.

If they do this, have no doubt that this will affect you, just as their engineering of interest rates has affected the whole economy and is driving some people out of their homes. The thing is that people are already straining the public transport systems a increased fuel costs bite into their home budgets forcing them to leave their cars at home.

Yesterday, on my way back from visiting some car manufacturers (ironically), I had to turn off my air vents because a bus was blowing great plumes of smelly diesel smoke right into my car’s air con system. A little further on the motorway I got stuck behind one of those Japanese import refrigerated trucks that was likewise blowing exhaust soot at me. The back of the truck was almost black from soot that has come out of its exhaust. I’m not sure I’d be keen to buy the food he was transporting.

So here’s the thing. Instead of taxing vehicles as they come into the country and penalise everyone indiscriminately (and yes I do understand that CO2 is not the same as the soot smoke I was complaining about), why not tax all cars at the time of Warrant of Fitness testing for the percentage of pollutants they have control over. Make the owners of smoky, sooty, poorly tuned cars pay the levy, or just like any other warrant failure, go back to the garage, get their car correctly tuned and go back for another try.

It seem to me that, because many countries already have stringent motor vehicle emission standards, the quality of the exhaust output on new cars is going to continuosly improve. It’s the cars, vans, trucks and buses that we have here already that are the problem and if we cause enough pain for those vehicles to be tuned up, a lot of the problems will go away.

The Government is very keen on users pay, so make the real polluters pay, not just a blanket levy on every vehicle that comes into our country. It’s very simple really. It’s transparent and the Government will not be opening themselves up to complaints of revenue gathering. It would be far more consistent with their user pay policies and their claims that they want to reduce pollution by bringing in these levy’s.

As a footnote, a question for someone. Do the bus companies have their own testing station and produce their own Warrants of Fitness? How is it that there are so many smelly buses on the road puffing great clouds of black smoke at pedestrians and cars behind them. Why do people have to hold their breath as these buses go past. How do they get away with it?