Biodiversity and energy must-reads

Massey ecologist Mike Joy has written a must-read opinion piece in the Dominion Post on how short-term profit-seeking, economic analysis and the legal system, the Government, the Resource Management Act, and well, all of us, have failed to slow New Zealand's decline in biodiversity. Government failures and ecological apathy bite back.

Joy highlights the role of consultants and lawyers acting for resource developers.

Simply put, it is expensive to limit environmental damage. So predictably the economic incentive for the evasion of the laws that are there for a public good, quickly became a big money-spinner for lawyers and consulting firms.

These law firms and environmental consultancies have been successful at helping their clients evade the RMA. They have increased profits for developers/polluters while undermining the ecosystems that sustain us all; effectively allowing private profit from public loss.

And Claire Browning has a good post on Gerry Brownlee's 'fossilised' 'fuelish' energy strategy Filty rich: our developing energy strategy.

Claire Browning asks:

Can we, in clean green conscience, keep digging for coal and drilling for oil, postponing the inevitable, and increasing the global carbon burden? How do we justify that, to the rest of the world?

No, its insanity.