Letter Published in the New Zealand Listener - Not So Green Vehicles - December 21, 2014

Letter written to comment on a - too focussed - article on electric vehicles in the Listener that did not discuss alternatives.

The “Charge of the lite brigade” (November 23) on hybrid and electric vehicles made me wonder if buying one would have been like buying a plasma TV a few years ago: a nice idea but why buy something technically inferior to what you can see coming?

Hydrogen, the “LCD technology” of motor vehicles, is close: Hyundai is scheduled to start selling a mass-market, hydrogen-powered vehicle next year, and Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and others are close behind. Hydrogen is clean – what comes out the exhaust is water vapour – and it can be clean to produce, unlike the polluting production of batteries. It’s also much easier to refuel, and the infrastructure required is only a fraction of the complexity of that required for electric vehicles: think of a hydrogen-fuelling system alongside the pumps at your petrol station.

Letter Published in the New Zealand Listener - The Christchurch Rebuild - March 22nd, 2014

Before you read this, please know that I lived in Christchurch for 45 years and so do have some understanding of the city.

The following was published in the Letter's to the Editor column -


Watching the Christchurch rebuild, the pain of which is exacerbated by the current flooding, makes me wonder about the wisdom of the path being taken. Rebuilding a CBD in a low-lying area that is geologically unstable and was slowly being abandoned by the citizenry even before the earthquakes doesn’t recognise that Christchurch was already evolving into a city of multiple centres.

Maybe that process needs to be allowed to continue to allow a city centred around a higher, drier collection of smaller conjoined centres interspersed with low-lying green space.

David Cohen
Dunedin