Change our economic assumptions

Re Wellington Airport’s $1 billion expansion plans, everyone needs urgently to understand two fundamental principles:

1. The exponential function. Economic growth, whatever percentage, is an exponential function. It is delusional to consider continuous economic (and population) growth on a finite planet as anything other than a serious danger to us all. It should be compulsory for every citizen to watch Professor Albert Bartlett’s videos of his lecture ‘‘The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function’’ to bring some seriously needed insight. (Search YouTube.)

2. Jevon’s Paradox. In defence of Wellington airport’s expansion in the face of scientific criticism of it worsening global warming, an Air NZ spokesperson said, ‘‘. . . but air travel is becoming more efficient’’. But Jevon’s Paradox, first recognised during the industrial revolution in the UK in regard to coal production, states that, contrary to common intuition, the more efficiently a resource is being employed, the greater the use of that resource. Greater efficiency will not help global warming when it is the basis for more affordable and increased air travel.

Our continued wealth and health demands that we must stop growing our consumption and revolutionise our exhausted economic assumptions.

John K Monro, Martinborough

Can we really say we are taking climate change seriously when Wellington City Council is giving consent to increasing the size of the airport by using the land currently occupied by the tree-lined fairways of Miramar Golf Club.

Also, is the projection of doubling airport traffic entirely the wrong projection – I thought we were supposed to be reducing air travel. This begs the question: exactly where are my ‘‘feel good’’ carbon credits going – hopefully not on this $1 billion revamp. Shocking.

Tom Reid, Camborne

Polar melting’s effect

Geoff Cole (Letters, Oct 18) takes the average annual rise in sea level over the last 60 years, and multiplies this by 80 to project a total sea-level rise by 2100 of 19.52cm; and on this basis questions the assertion of a 1.5m sea-level rise by 2100.

I think Geoff is missing the rapidly accelerating melting of the polar ice caps, which has really taken off in the last few years. The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are melting at a really scary accelerating rate.

As this ice melts into the sea, it raises the sea level.

Last year, the world’s leading climate scientists warned that we have about 12 years to take decisive actions to hold temperature increase to a maximum 1.5 degrees. If we can achieve that, polar ice melt, and hence sea-level rise, can be slowed, to perhaps 0.5m by 2100.

However, if the world continues on a high-emissions track, sea-level rise is likely to be approaching 1.5m by 2100. Indeed, there are reputable scientists who consider it could be more than 2m by then, if major action is not taken.

Jim Heffernan, Northland

Individual’s choice

The chief executive of the Maxim Institute (Oct 22) says the End of Life Choice Bill should not go to referendum because people are too ignorant to ‘‘grapple with all the serious concerns

. . .’’, that we should trust MPs to do the job.

MPs have done the job twice before and voted down voluntary euthanasia, despite increasing and majority support for law change.

Assisted dying is a deeply personal matter. The option is an individual’s choice. The irony is that those opposed express fear that the choice will be

interfered with by other parties. At the same time they want us to trust other parties.

I would suggest the Maxim Institute is afraid the bill going to referendum will produce the result it does not want. Lindsay Mitchell, Eastbourne

Aside from assurances about the psychologically vulnerable who ‘‘don’t want to be a burden’’, there is one outstanding question for me re the euthanasia bill.

Is the ‘‘8 per cent’’ whose suffering modern medicine can’t help a scientifically proven figure or akin to the often-repeated 20 per cent who in the 1990s were said to suffer sexual abuse in childhood?

Professor David Richmond, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at Auckland University, maintained in a January 16, 2018 article, Doctors up to task of caring for our dying, that in his 40 years of medical practice as a physician, geriatrician and terminal care manager that he had never seen a person dying with unmanageable suffering. He continued that ‘‘we cannot judge the effectiveness of today’s palliative care by comparing it with what was available even 10 years ago’’.

He concluded by criticising assisted dying proponent Dr Jack Havill’s assertion that the rule of double effect allows doctors to ‘‘pretend’’ not to be killing a patient when in fact that is their intention. Richmond informed us ‘‘the Belgians and Dutch themselves report thousands of elderly and frail people are euthanized each year, most outside the legal guidelines for such acts’’.

Can both be right?

Steve Liddle, Napier

Academic cowardice

Massey University has done it again. Another craven exhibition of academic and intellectual cowardice. If the lectures on feminism were indeed cancelled due to safety concerns raised by threatened protest action, then what penalties await those who posed such a threat to public safety? Have the offenders been identified? Were the police informed? If not, why not?

A Dominion Post interviewee recently suggested that universities are ‘‘supposed to look after trans-gender students’’.

I beg to differ. I suggest universities are ‘‘supposed’’ to facilitate objective, critical discourse, providing an education being their primary function.

In attempting to justify its odious position, Massey has offered the pretext that, if the lectures had gone ahead, they would gave ‘‘caused harm’’. (To whom? How?)

I think back to the immediate aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures. George W. Bush, on what appeared to be national television, claimed ‘‘great harm’’ had been done to the US as a result. I suggest that if ‘‘harm’’ can come to an entity by dint of the truth being told, perhaps that entity needs to take a long hard look at itself.

Anthony Taylor, Paraparaumu

Will of the people

New Zealand is to have a referendum on legalisation, or decriminalisation, of cannabis at the time of the general election in 2020. This referendum will be non-binding; Parliament will not be obliged to pass the laws that implement the result of the referendum.

This is exactly the situation of the United Kingdom on Brexit. A small majority of voters indicated that they wanted out of the European Union more than three years ago. But members of Parliament have not been able to agree to any withdrawal agreement with the EU.

The will of the voters, as shown in a referendum, is not always translated into the will of the parliament, even though the same voters elect the members of that parliament.

Peter D Graham, Island Bay

Flaming silly

We have problems in the building industry and it is not just with lack of tradesmen.

I have a question for the architect of Auckland’s Sky City Convention Centre. I note that the roof was constructed with bitumen, dried hay and plywood.

The question is why did you not also include kerosene lamp lighting?

Harvey Daniel, Island Bay