Tom Bennion: Banning Oil and Gas Exploration.

Tom Bennion is an environmental lawyer. Like Shaun Hendy in the previous episode he sees reductions in air travel as vital to reducing emissions. I wanted to delve into details about the EEZ, the RMA and the Treaty of Waitangi. But this time we talked mainly about the recent amendments to the Crown Minerals Act, the result of the recent refusal to allow offshore exploration in New Zealand waters.

He’s offered to come back, and I’ve offered to prepare for that – if you want to help me prepare, but passing on questions for Tom, here’s your chance. I’ve also prepared a short animation aimed at the main talking points in articles criticising the decision, and I’m working on a long article to provide a bit more detail.

03:49 Messing with the lines of power
05:34 Having the conversation with skeptics
07:04 The Sarah Thomson case - looking back at the decision
08:04 The Sarah Thomson decision 33% chance of failure
11:12 Oil and Gas decision talking points
11:58 The Big Answer to the leakage question
12:44 MBIE Regulatory Impact statement
14:44 The currently very low carbon price
15:59 Shipping and bunker fuels
17:14 Unburnable fuels
19:34 Astro turfing
24:49 The stop fly movement
26:14 Reductions in flight
28:14 Education now out of step with the needs of the future.
30:39 Carbon offsets as predatory delay
31:44 Shane Ardern and the lost teaching moment around methane
33:14 Hopes around digital tech - measuring emissions from the farm
37:14 Old techs and highly distributed solutions: cars as batteries, rooftops as stations
40:44 The genius of necessity.
47:59 Renewable prices dropping too fast
51:44 The last harrah of flight
55:24 How does the realisation hit
57:34 Earth scientists witnessing the anthropocene
01:11:24 Climate response act
01:16:44 Groundswell of people sick of worrying - faced with a grief
01:17:44 'The future is hopeless, so let us begin'
01:24:44 Imagine if we over-corrected
01:26:14 Changing the economic model, and our world view.
01:32:44 Tamping down this volcano - the enormity of the anthropocene
01:38:21 Tom's one big wish
01:39:44 Investing in Hydrogen?
01:40:44 Alex Steffen - you have to be so alive to the thinking that will hurt you.
01:43:44 Surprising low tech alternatives
01:50:44 The community as your team of law clerks.

Next episode is with Catarina Gutierrez, cycling advocate, social enterprise builder and woman who gets shit done. We’ll talk about the urban environments we want to build and the way we want to live in them. That should be out a little quicker than this episode – it turns out that the oil and gas thing is pretty huge.