It might sound harsh but Tiwai subsidies can go

A DECADE ago, we asked the Tiwai smelter if they would want to help us build a community cycle trail at Manapouri.

They told us they do not fund community projects.

News that Rio Tinto is threatening Southland with a smelter closure made me think about the expression about silver linings and clouds.

Seriously, Southland is quite a rich province and does not need to be subsidised by the rest of the nation so it can have a dinosaur industry.

I am a great proponent of lateral thinking. I think the smelter is not doing the region any favours in the 21st century and is in fact stifling innovation.

If it were up to me, I would take the money spent on subsidising Rio Tinto and use it for startups and smallbusiness creation like Silicon Valley does.

Southland has the luxury of playing it safe at the moment but taking a little risk brings out the real creativity.

You never know until you cut the strings.

Aaron Nicholson

Manapouri

RIO Tinto has interest in or owns 13 aluminium smelters worldwide, including Tiwai. In terms of tonnage produced, Tiwai represents 8% of total Rio Tinto world production.

There is only one reason Rio Tinto ships alumina from its Queensland refinery to Bluff and that is the lowcost, subsidised, carbonfree power from Manapouri.

Meridian and Transpower need to stand firm and not be pressured by local interest groups.

The Government should advise Rio Tinto the price of power will increase if they do not uplift all the waste lying around in Southland warehouses and ship it back to their Gladstone refinery where they are better equipped to deal with toxic waste.

The people in Southland should act now to prepare themselves for the inevitable closure of Tiwai Point as someone will pay more than Rio Tinto for Manapouri’s carbonfree power as the country grows and demand for renewable energy increases.

Bob Currie

Auckland

[Abridged]

Carbon dioxide

IF atmospheric carbon dioxide forces warming of the earth (Letters, 23.10.19), why were each of the six major ice ages initiated at a time when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present, and why do ice core measurements show that during the past six interglacials, the temperature rises some 650 to 1000 years before the atmospheric carbon dioxide content rises?

The ice core data indicates that a rise in temperature drives atmospheric carbon dioxide content, not the inverse. Bruce Spittle

Ocean View

JFK

ALTHOUGH I am old enough to remember both the 1960 election and the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I was blissfully unaware of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

My thanks to the ODT for marking this date, when the world stepped back from the abyss of nuclear war.

Sadly, too many today live in blissful ignorance of the most dangerous moment in the history of mankind.

As the old saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Next time around, there may no longer be the politicians with the courage and intelligence of Kennedy and Khrushchev: both men had to outmanoeuvre their own military hawks, and each man knew the personal risks he faced in doing so.

Khrushchev was replaced within a year and died in ignominy. JFK lived another year before his own untimely end.

Though we may lament the execution of John F. Kennedy, he had not lived and died in vain, because we are still here despite the military.

Hugh O’Neill

Dunedin