@pezmico

All right, how about this :

Whenever I have taken the effort to read a Greenpeace position paper, it has invariably turned out to be full of concealed assumptions, unjustifiable jumps of logic, and misstatements of fact, leading me to believe that it was in fact a piece of flim-flam, not offered in good faith.

The sad fact is that fuel-minerals policy does not exist in a vacuum. New Zealand has a number of sizable energy uses which are currently met by fossil fuels, and no clear path away from that.

Now, for instance, you can simply assume that the world demand for milk, butter, and cheese is going to disappear in the coming two decades or so in the face of increasingly acceptable plant-based alternatives ; but any position paper prepared on that basis would be as difficult to take seriously as one that assumed that a country known for its everlasting gloom was going to become a global center of solar energy development. Or you can do as the Dutch government set out to, and implement affirmative measures to destroy the dairy industry. But that is a separate fight which again cannot simply be assumed as a starting point.

http://sizeofbelgium.com/a-lot-of-forestry

So long as the demand exists, then, it must be met, either from domestic production or from imports. Once this is recognized, reasonable discussion can take place on how to meet it. But it is precisely this that Greenpeace does not like to do.

Aside from the macroeconomic implications of importing fuel for the needs of export-revenue-earning industries, there is the geopolitical context to consider. Some of the major suppliers of fossil fuels in the global market, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, are also major sources of instability and promoters of conflict. And New Zealand, as a small country currently without an oil refinery, dependent on imports of refined products, is it exceedingly vulnerable to supply disruptions as well.

The sad truth is, if getting off fossil fuels were easy and straightforward, it would have been done in 1973 when the price of oil, up to then the cheapest energy source in most places, quintupled overnight. As it proved, coal and gas increased their share over the following decades, but in most countries (barring France) the overall structure of the energy economy changed very little.