Submersible Power Station Symbolises Abrupt Shift in Class Politics as General Election Nears

The social licence accorded to pine plantations is transferring to solar power schemes as the hazards of pine are being revealed in the extreme weather that these forestry schemes were supposed to avert.

The emphasis is on solar power in spite of still even more obvious hazards.

These are illustrated by the official determination to ramrod through the Auckland solar farm at Helensville in spite of the site having been underwater this year for several days at a time.

Quietly the government seeks to transfer responsibility for the troublesome pine plantations to local government.

The covert nature of this backtracking is easily achieved because the main political parties until even a few months ago demonstrably supported the plantations as they basked in the international approval for them.

The transfer of official and all-party enthusiasm into solar is now also encouraged by the dismal failure of repeated carbon dioxide pine plantation related auctions where reserve prices were not met.

The decision to sideline timber with its attendant problems in favour of shifting the emphasis to solar is a tacit one.

The reason is that both Labour and National went all out on the timber scheme and disregarded alternatives available to them under international covenants.

This is why the emphasis is now on solar.

The impression given is that these vast solar installations will be equipped with shoulder-high panels with sheep safely grazing beneath these modest structures.

In fact the panel arrays scheduled for sites such as Helensville and Wellington regional tourist areas will be the size of houses.

So will associated ISO container sized structures for electrical current flow control and battery equipment interspersed among these panel arrays.

Aware of this new electronic emphasis international finance companies are positioning themselves to take advantage of these solar projects with their higher value over the pine planting schemes.

They are doing so because these electromagnetic installations carry more direct and realisable trading payloads internationally than the increasingly uncertain offsetting benefits of the tree plantation schemes.

The gigantic BlackRock investment firm of New York is not usually publicly clutched to the bosom of a Labour party, let alone one in government, and with such glee.

But New Zealand’s Labour government shone with pride in announcing that the investment banking colossus was setting up in New Zealand to work with the government in establishing a flotilla of solar projects.

Not so well known is the German Aquila Group headquartered in Hamburg which is already active with financing at least three scheduled large-scale solar projects in both islands.

A political mystery is why the government keeps silent about New Zealand this year achieving a 93 percent of its reticulated power from renewables in the form of its dam sites and the now little-mentioned geothermal technology.

The reason for politicians keeping silent about this international triumph is so extraordinary as to be unbelievable.

It requires us to step back to that moment when Christopher Luxon took over as leader of the National Party opposition.

In what must rank as the greatest example of candour in Oceania, he proclaimed quite simply that his objective was to win back the 413,000 National supporters who had defected to other parties. He was definite about the number.

They are the reason why in New Zealand the parties delicately edge around the whole power topic, and especially around its costs to the taxpayer.

They skirt also around the one about prime farmland by definition being low-lying, but close to community grid sub stations, being taken out of production and carpeted with electro chemical solar industries

We now come to the official silence about the 93 percent renewables achievement. Such an announcement would have given the 413,000 privileged voting sector the impression of official complacency.

It could have conveyed an impression of self-satisfaction.

To the effect that the governmental foot had eased on the renewables pedal in a political smugness indicating a fading of faith, of a diminution of the earnest intensity needed in pursuit of this clique’s single issue; King Charles’ cause……

The single issue climate voters are known to dwell in the more upscale metropolitan suburbs, and especially so in Auckland where the mainstream media conscious of these individuals high net worth ignores the bizarre and newsworthy matter of the Helensville submersible solar farm evolving in their midst.

The party leaders meanwhile know that their general election outcome is quietly residing in the nation’s urban and virtuous drawing rooms which are so far away from the sound and the fury on the streets about schools, hospitals, crime, farms, supermarkets, homelessness.

In their determination to appease and cultivate this well-to-do voting sector politicians will put the rest of the electorate to any expense. They deliberately ignore that New Zealand is anyway almost 90 percent renewables and in fact substantially ahead of exactly the northern hemisphere countries which they are so eager to impress.

In their anxiety to demonstrate their eagerness politicians will stoop to any approach as they prostrate themselves and thus their country too before these internationals.

An example is the way in which they deliberately ignore the nation’s innovations in renewables technology.

Geothermal especially escapes official memory, even consciousness, in the politico-bureaucratic collective and weird determination to demonstrate a kind of juvenile we-can-do- better humility to its northern hemisphere superiors, as they are viewed.

Prigojine Liquidation Confirms Fate of California Banker Sergey Grishin

The death of Sergey Grishin of alleged sepsis in a Moscow hospital concluded intense cross border personal litigation centred on revelations about the oligarch’s private life and which in turn was to lead to his liquidation.

Oceania’s leading web site on legal topics Lawfuel had picked up details of the banker’s domestic life and it was now that the California-based oligarch sought to close down such intrusions by making an example of the Wellington-based Lawfuel site.

The saga involved white shoe law firms on both sides of the Pacific in a case that occupied New Zealand’s own High Court and saw orders for seizures of computers and documents at large as the oligarch exploited every avenue available to discover the source of the stories about him that by now were appearing in Fleet Street.

The ferocity of the oligarch’s focus on Lawfuel prompted New Zealand’s National Press Club to make submissions to the nation’s Law Commission and to do so in tandem with its New York - based affiliate the Overseas Press Club.

The doggedness of the oligarch’s pursuit of Lawfuel continued to the end and was marked most recently by orders served on the site’s host in the United States.

Sergey Grishin was constantly associated with the intervention at the time of the collapse of the old USSR with plundering its central bank in a series of opportunistic manoeuvres.

More certain is that rather later he somehow achieved a large measure of control over the Rosevro bank and at a time when Western money poured into Russian energy.

The Rosevro bank, still a mid-level Russian trading bank, was a leader in transferring this money back to the West.

Furnished with a slice of these funds Grishin now moved to California where Grishin busied himself with a content factory for the tittle-tattle sphere of social media.

He and his wife became society figures, a profile capped when Grishin sold at a discount according to realtors his Montecito estate to Harry and Meghan.

Even now, and even after the rather brutal details of his marriage melt down started to appear in the feminist press and as far afield as New Zealand Grishin might have side stepped the long arm of the Kremlin.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed this for Grishin who found himself having to condemn it, and to note also that he wanted a United States passport.

Along with scores of others he now went on a list of miscreants who had caused hindrance or embarrassment to the Kremlin autocracy.

He too now became liquidated under a procedure of plausible deniability in which the manner of his demise shrouded the outcome which was a blunt warning to others to keep their heads down.

How was Grishin lured back to Russia?

Now we find a similarity with the extinction of Evgeny Prigojine tempted back by the Kremlin by redemptive promises of spearheading the Kremlin insurrections in Africa.

Prigojine was confident enough to have carelessly omitted sweeping his own Embraer aircraft for remotely activated and barometric bombs.

Grishin was no Prigojine. Significantly though his demise came when Russia is anxiously demonstrating to China that Russia must be considered an equal partner in the de-dollarisation scheme, the one to replace the USD as the world currency.

Grishin with his high profile in California and surrounded by an aura of having broken the Russian central bank plus his proven laundering of Rosevro money was walking, talking evidence of Russian banking porosity, unreliability, and above all, vulnerability.

His sale of the Montecito estate to the Sussexes for the price of a Sydney or Auckland “mansion” had failed to elevate him to royal circles.

Cafe society in California seemed more preoccupied with his domestic affairs rather than his ability as an international currency manipulator.

So when the Prigojine forgive and forget format call to Grishin came from Moscow to do big things there such as leading the development of the new world reserve currency……………………