NZ’s Climate Change Ministry scores spectacular own goal – praises well-known sceptic
New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment has sent a letter of praise to the author of two bestselling books debunking human caused global warming, telling him that “New Zealand needs people like you”.
Ian Wishart, who penned the climate change book Air Con and the sequel Totalitaria, was stunned to receive in the mail a letter this week on Ministry for the Environment paper, headlined “2014 Green Ribbon Award nomination from Mr David Slack for Global Warming Truth”.
“Congratulations on your recent Green Ribbon Award nomination,” the letter began. “These national awards recognise the outstanding contributions of individuals, businesses and communities to protecting and improving our environment.”
While informing Wishart that he had not made the finals, the Ministry’s Deputy Secretary for Organisational Performance Mark Sowden wrote, “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the work you are doing. I commend you on your effort and commitment.
“New Zealand needs people like you who contribute every day to protecting and enhancing our environment. You should be very proud to have your work and passion recognised and I encourage you to keep working towards a clean, green New Zealand.”
Full story and letter here: http://www.investigatemagazine.co.nz/Investigate/12757/nzs-climate-change-ministry-scores-spectacular-goal-praises-well-known-sceptic/
Too Funny
New Zealand has a conservative government – maybe it was intentional.
It’s well merited.
There’s nothing that does more to harm the environmental movement and the combating REAL problems caused by REAL pollution than all this global warming bull$hit.
“New Zealand needs people like you who contribute every day to protecting and enhancing our environment.”
Makes sense to me.
It fits the Hanlon’s razor nicely: stupidity before malice.
“green New Zealand”.
I suppose the parts that are brown, white, grey etc don’t count.
Any political movement that is based on a single colour, is by nature cherry picking.
Actually, it might be we are seeing another government leader as enlightened as Australia’s current realist -Tony Abbott. His Green Scheme is smart “if you think CO2 is your enemy, plant more trees”.
Although rather than making it a big budget point scoring project, just send every voter an, SMS or Twitter note that they can collect a seedling or 2 from the local nursery.
What is does show (barring a Reality Change) is that these people are happy to rubber-stamp anything at all as long as it mentions Climate Change. They don’t even bother to read the summary.
Par for the course, I reckon.
Follow up question to Jerome’s say 1:02
Are you sure they can read AND understand what they just have read?
Maybe NZ, as an island nation, is nervously watching that ever growing Antarctic Ice Pack. You too could get a edgy, just thinking even a little global warming from CO2 could prevent the Antarctic icebergs the size of New Jersey from mucking up your shores, harbors, and shipping lanes.
CO2 makes the world greener apart from some possible heating. Oxygen is just a by-product of that greening.
Our mates on the shakey islands just off Australia are always good for a laugh. We have fought together in time of war and fight each other on the battle fields of sport. Given half a chance they are a sensible lot, they too like us have removed a green left wing government. This award may not be a mistake but a clever slap in the face for the tree huggers.
Classic, NZ has an ETS with the carbon unit linked to the European CER which is currently about 10 Euro cents about 16 NZ cents, so the market is sorting everything out as usual. The current value of NZ’s carbon position under the Kyoto protocol is about $12M less than it costs to maintain the infrastructure and bureaucracy to keep it going. A classic case of policy based on vapourware being dealt to by market forces. Unfortunately the net effect of the ETS is that it has raised prices for consumers and costs for our exporters and has had no effect on CO2 or the temperature of the earth, so as with most Green policies the net benefit is negative.
gather the antarctic is sending some nice icy cold blasts to NZ..:-) all that melting..you know…:-)
Not winning isn’t a great tragedy.
Rush Limbaugh was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t win.
Hillary Clinton was nominated for a National Merit Scholarship. She didn’t win.
And Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture. It didn’t win.
Rush Limbaugh was nominated for best author of a children’s book. He won, so anything is possible.
Well done Ian!
Do we call you “Swampy Wishart” now?
You are now entitled you to tie yourself to a tree outside a fracking site. : > )
Hlaford says:
May 29, 2014 at 12:29 am
It fits the Hanlon’s razor nicely: stupidity before malice.
Have you heard of Simon’s razor? Stupidity and malice.
http://classicalvalues.com/2009/08/it_aint_america/#comment-34499
It is unwise to attribute to malice alone that which can be attributed to malice and stupidity.
And: http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/11/malice-and-stupidity.html
By the wording, it seems more like a form letter sent out to many all at once and not individually worded per recipient.
Reminds me of how my father, then a citizen of West Germany, almost got a decoration from East Germany. While visiting his brother’s family there, he cleared some piled-up driftwood from a brook that used to flood the village. Only after they had nominated him for the “silberne Aufbaunadel” did the local party committee find out that he was from the evil West …
In Spanish they say “autogol.” –AGF
“””””…..Joel O’Bryan says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:44 am
Maybe NZ, as an island nation, is nervously watching that ever growing Antarctic Ice Pack. You too could get a edgy, just thinking even a little global warming from CO2 could prevent the Antarctic icebergs the size of New Jersey from mucking up your shores, harbors, and shipping lanes……””””
When I was down there for Christmas / New year 2006 / 7 there was a whacking great Antarctic iceberg; coulda been a Manhattan size, came floating up off the New Zealand coast. It got close enough that one of those enterprising helicopter tourist outfits, was flying tourists out and landing them on that thing. We were in Canterbury, at the time, but I gave a pass to the idea of traipsing out there myself. And I don’t think they need the water, so no point in lassoing the thing.
Plenty more where that came from though if you ever need some water full of penguano !
Incidently, I have written PM John Key several times, and told him that NZ could lead the pack out of the wilderness, by saying nyet on Kyoto; their aggressive agriculture and tree farming, makes them a carbon sink just like the USA is a carbon sink. But his science minister likes coolade, so he doesn’t listen to me. Well he did get the green mussel fur problem cleaned up for me.
And as Wayne job mentions, ever since April 25 1915, we have been joined at the hips to our convict brothers from the big island, even though they do talk funny.
But then, we are about the only chums in the area, that we’ve got, so we have to like each other.
george e. smith says:
May 29, 2014 at 7:28 am
—————————————————-
That gave me a chuckle lol
Perhaps they are learning from the Aussies. I’m sure they would disagree, but from here the two countries look similar. For example, they appear to be the only two countries in the Anglosphere where you can buy PediaSure in powder form.
Q, What do you call a cultured Australian?
A. A New Zealander.
(It’s great to read that there is still lots of fun between you two nations. I enjoyed my time living among you)
“Tis well you know the common English! Cause iffen you’d said “lives between you two nations”, your feet would be wet. (Or do youse guys stand on two meters nowday?)
Susan Oliver says:
May 29, 2014 at 12:10 am
New Zealand has a conservative government – maybe it was intentional.
============================================================
New Zealand has a government of idiots who are
sleep-walking into the future with their eyes wide
shut.
With motor vehicle fuels teetering on the brink of
becoming very scarce and very expensive, over the
next fifteen years, they are continuing to encourage
urban sprawl by building more motorways. They pay
lip service to “public” transport by selling publicly
owned and operated organisations off into private
hands which egregiously refuse to cooperate with each
other and defend their `licensed’ territories as rigid
inefficient monopolies instead of cooperating for the
greater good of getting people out of their cars.
Of course, this makes trying to travel anywhere in NZ’s
cities an exercise in frustration because nothing meets
up with anything else and nothing is reliable any more.
Come to NZ and if you try to use public transport, then
on your own head be it. Citizens run *several* motor vehicles
to be sure of being able to get to where they need to go reliably.
Hilly terrain renders bicycles in many urbs unusable, except
Christchurch which is flat. Predatory drivers make any trip
by bicycle particularly exciting, if not suicidal, and earthquakes
in Christchurch add a … special piquancy.
Auckland City is already suffering the consequences with almost
all day gridlock. Not bad for a city of a mere 1 million or so…
Wellington (pop approx. 200,000) is almost as bad. There are only
1 million people in the whole South Island but it snows in winter, rains
in summer, and shakes in between
We here in NZ [via the current Government] are playing a waiting game; we didn’t sign-up to Kyoto2 and have allowed cheap EU carbon credits to swamp the market.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/brian-fallow/news/article.cfm?a_id=16&objectid=10846305
Our Prime Minister thought CAGW was all BS before he got into power; now his Govt just kicks the can down the road, watches the fiasco in Australia re carbon taxes etc etc, and knows that the scam is slowly coming to an end.
My guess is the dose of reality being taken by the EU via Putin’s threats will lead to ETS’s etc dropping off the political radar by 2020. Remember the EU’s airline ETS – quietly buried when China said “No”.
Thank you John:
John de Melle says: May 29, 2014 at 10:23 am
Q, What do you call a cultured Australian?
A. A New Zealander.
I was too embarrassed to say it myself;
also, if you can’t cheer for NZ, always cheer for anyone playing against Australia!
“A A New Zealander”
As Prime Minister Muldoon said of NZers migrating to Australia.. “It improves the IQ of both nations.”
JC
An earlier NZ Prime Minister, David Lange, said he was happy with the continuing emigration of New Zealanders to Australia “because it increased the average IQ in both countries”.
Well, It appears we have some dissenters and differences of opinion.
So just how many NZ Prime Ministers did say emigrating to Australia raised the IQ of both countries. I thought it was Muldoon myself, but it seems like a popular pastime.
And I have always said, if you can’t find a Kiwi to cheer for, cheer for the nearest Aussie.
Sounds like Sophocles is a candidate for emigration to Australia.
When I last visited in 2006, I found the Auckland public transport to be duck soup to use. But I always walked everywhere when I was a kid; or took a train, and driving in either island was a breeze for me in 2006. But then, I do have a California drivers licence NZ driving or pedestringing, is simple compared to the idiocy we have in California, with cars and pedestrians moving on the same piece of road at the same time. No roundabouts, or Barnes Dance in California.
And bicyclists in California, are just domestic terrorists.
It sounds like Sophoclies is a member off the Green Party. The Prime Minister is a conservative and appears to have little time for the warmist/green dialogue of the NZ media.
“sophocles says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:03 pm”
I am a New Zealander living in Australia. I am also British. I used to live in Wellington and then Featherston, in the Wairarapa over the Rimutaka Hill road on state highway 2. In the 50’s, or there abouts, there was an American Army base stationed in the Wairarapa. The then commander of the base offered to build a road from Upper Hutt across the Rimutaka Hill road, eliminating the current, highly dangerous road, and single rail tunnel. The offer was out right refused on the grounds that no-one would live that far north of Wellington and it would cost too much. Around the same time the rail siding to Martinbourough was ripped up leaving one single road, which does flood out, in to and out of that town, State Highway 53.
It takes as long to drive from Wellington to Auckland as it does to drive from Swindon to Endinborough. And about 50% of road user charges (RUC’s) goes into the consolidated fund, largely to fund politicians pensions!
A key question remains: “Does New Zealand really need people like Mark Sowden?”