NEWS ... page last updated 11 January 2010

Topical issues

Resource Management Act: On 1 October 2009 the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Act came into force. The amendment makes extensive changes to the Resource Management Act with the intention of reducing cost and delay in the planning process, but without compromising environmental protection.

Global warming: is carbon sequestration the answer? One suggested answer to the problem of global warming has been carbon sequestration, in which carbon dioxide is captured and stored instead of being released into the atmosphere.

The technical problems however are immense. A typical large coal-fired power station in the United States will consume around 6 million tonnes of coal per year. On average it will produce something like 2,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hour, which will occupy in excess of one million cubic metres. That's equivalent to a cube 100 metres high by 100 metres wide by 100 metres long. The logistics of processing that volume of gas every hour can be imagined.

As well as dealing with the output of existing power stations, additional new stations must be allowed for. The two big coal consumers, the US and China, are both building new power stations on a huge scale. The US currently has approximately 90 new stations being planned, while China is commissioning a new power station every one to two weeks on average.

While sequestration techniques have been successfully applied to pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide presents a challenge of an entirely different order. It must be questioned whether sequestration will be a practical method of controlling emissions.

In a lighter vein ...

Humour, trivia and items of useless information.

But what does it really mean?

Sometimes it pays to read between the lines - for example:

	Statement	Meaning
	The company has an outstanding record in business	It has a reputation for not paying its bills
	The company's performance is consistently outstanding	It owes money to everybody
	We now see it as a long term investment	In the short term it's a dog
	Her input is critical	She's a complainer
	The athlete distinguished himself in the race	He came last
	This is an incredible result	Completely unbelievable
	He has a visionary outlook	He's a dreamer

How to manufacture news out of nothing: Our news media are skilled at creating news even when nothing real has happened, for example:

Anniversaries. Every day is the anniversary of something, and an enterprising journalist can always trawl through history and find an event to write a story about. For example, "Today is the nth anniversary of September 11 / sinking of the Titanic / Battle of Trafalgar..." The technique allows to endlessly relive the past - between 1989 and 1995 we revisited the Second World War as the 50th anniversaries of significant campaigns and battles came up. After a short break we repeated the process for the 60th anniversaries.
Links and parallels. An easy way to expand a small, unremarkable item of news into a major feature, for example: "Last night the interisland ferry 'Aratere' broke down in Cook Strait" leads on to "it was the latest in a series of mishaps ..." and "the incident was close to where the 'Wahine' sank in 1968..." and "it follows a bad week for ferries, with disasters in Bangladesh and the Philippines".

Commission an opinion poll. Some media-run polls are reasonably scientific but others do no more than fill air time "...dial 0900-xxxxx for Yes, 0900-xxxyy for No, ask the bill-payer first".

Story about a story. No sooner that a feature film or mini-series is screened, we're treated to a feature on how it was made. Film-making used to be a magic art, now it's as transparent as any other.