Squeamish Officials Confront Clash of energy supply versus altruism choice in South Seas

The closure of the Marsden Point oil refinery underlines the success of New Zealand’s Labour government in capping its own energy industry.

The enthusiasm of the incoming government was demonstrated when in it immediately announced legislatively enforced cut backs in oil and gas exploration and production.

The fact that this proclamation was made to a gathering of university students was itself indicative of the target voter market that Labour intended to lock in.

A doctrinally be-dazzled mainstream media skirts around New Zealand’s developing energy dependence symbolised by closing the Marsden Point Refinery, the nation’s only such installation and the keystone investment in the nation’s quite recent industrialisation era.

Disclosures meanwhile from international energy regulatory authorities to the effect that the government’s de-industrialisation countervailing offset emission trading certificates are losing in global markets their fungibility, tradeable value, was discretely buried.

Then came Ukraine. This demonstrated how an ideologically-triggered reliance on foreign energy supplies placed the once energy independent world into the grasp of the world’s most vicious despot suppliers.

This has led to a clash of cultures in New Zealand which is simply too awful for anyone to point out. It is the collision between the all-embracing climate ideology and traditional humanitarian ideals.

New Zealand’s official politico-media class hysteria over climate rests on the determination of international bodies to frighten the nation. They do so by calculating the sparsely-populated nation’s contribution on a per-head basis.

Even this produces a world contribution percentage that can barely be expressed even in fractions of a single decimal point.

Also smoothed over in the interest of ideology is that most of this is from grazing animal methane which is a short lived gas.

US cabinet members insist that the Russian supply embarrassment is merely an awkward interruption in its Net Zero policy, its real and true objective.

In New Zealand which has long pointed the way to the most purist climate ideology the cost of this same ideology is forecast by the respected NZIER consultancy as $28 billion.

This is similarly brushed off. So is the effect on Taranaki the nation’s energy region which also happens to be the only industrially diversified district.

Moscow’s embassy in Wellington will have used New Zealand as a Western-attitude sampler, bellwether, in all this.

The embassy is the most effective of foreign legations in the capital ensuring that its officials who are adept with colloquial English gauge personally opinions and that these same officials enjoy a longevity of service in order to cultivate their contacts.

They will have reported for example how New Zealand’s very large number of officials with job descriptions involving climate ideology become so unnerved at any suggestion from international organisations that New Zealand is somehow not pulling its weight globally, that it is failing to meet its “targets.”

These international organisations constantly urge these same officials to be ready to get their climate agenda “back on the table.”

At first this priority was to be resumed as soon as the Covid emergency subsided

Now it is once the Ukraine war, an authentic crisis, has receded from the public consciousness.

More worrying still is New Zealand’s contribution to the overheated evangelical fervour emanating from the COP26 convocation in Glasgow.

This had the effect of showcasing to the Russians especially the silliness that had overtaken Great Britain. Boris Johnson radiated the impression that diets had become Britain’s priority and that a Net Zero scheme had become the once energy-exporting nation’s overall and overriding strategy.

The Russians saw how there was no effort to manage the expectations from COP26. They saw how Boris Johnson’s climate fervency was a by-product of his own recent domestic rearrangements.

Then Johnson became wrapped in the kind of backsliding-in-high-places dottiness that from time overwhelms the Establishment in Britain. This time it was who had been partying-and-where during the Chinese plague lockdowns?

This, on top of the grip that United States progressives have on the White House now combined to reassure the Russians of their own grip on the West’s energy requirements.

The Russians also continued to wonder after the uncoordinated evacuation of Kabul why those responsible kept their jobs, and even appeared to flourish in them.

The ensuing Ukraine war has emerged as a direct challenge to hitherto sacrosanct new western ideology which in its way has proved to be as enduring and as indelible as anything communism once engendered among its adherents.

Nations in the political grip of it are now required to make up their minds over which cruel despot will fill in their energy shortfalls.

There becomes introduced a clash of cultures, one that the politico-media class deems so sensitive that they can only dance around it.