We have a government in power right now who right from the get go have been proud to call themselves transformative.

The impression they are trying to give is that they are willing to deliberately change things to make things better; to transform the way we do things for the good.

But of course that’s not the way things work.  Any act of transformation will have some aspect of it that will come at a price and some things will take a turn for the worse.  The trick is to balance things and so more is improved by the transformation than is damaged. Transformation runs into the law of unintended consequences and the second law that everything is connected.

One of the things this government is most proud of transforming is the oil and gas exploration business in New Zealand.  But the fact is they don’t want to transform it.  They just want to eliminate it which is a different thing.

So yesterday I got an email from Greenpeace telling me about something that had not been widely reported.

Oil majors Chevron and Equinor have abandoned their oil and gas exploration permits off the east coast of the North Island, leaving just Austrian oil company OMV as the last remaining oil giant in New Zealand.

Greenpeace senior campaigner, Steve Abel, was super chuffed saying  “we’ve seen the rats fleeing New Zealand’s sinking oil industry for years, but we’re really down to the dregs now with these two majors quitting New Zealand, leaving OMV isolated.”

"Unrelenting peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and iwi opposition up and down the country has already forced the withdrawal of Anadarko, Petrobras, and Shell, and saw Equinor give up their Northland permits.", he boasted.

But maybe he should just hold his horses.  Firstly the Northland exploration area and permits have always been considered to be marginal.  In fact the only commercial hydro-carbon area in New Zealand remains Taranaki unless we get lucky. So it's no big thing

But the second thing he should tai hoa on is the departure of Equinor.  As Pattrick Smellie points out this morning in the Herald, this Norwegian gas explorer is a world leader in transitioning towards decarbonisation.  They realise you don’t just stop mining hydrocarbons, you use the proceeds to fund a transition to a new world.  We could learn much from them but they’re now gone.

The other thing about chasing the explorers out is our dwindling supply of natural gas.  Gas fires our industry.  Fonterra and milk production is heavily dependent on natural gas but so are heaps of other industries. If we don’t find new gas we’ll have to fire up the industries with a different fuel.  At the moment the only option is to import coal. Or stop making milk with the obvious impact on our economy

Did you hear that Greenpeace and the government? Your decision to stop oil and gas will bring back coal.  A far dirtier thing. Is that the unintended consequence? Or are you also wanting to end dairy as so many accuse you of which would be political and economic suicide.

Transformation needs a start but it also needs an end.  Stopping oil and gas is a start.  But where do we end out? There is no solution in hand so we don’t know where we’re heading. Transformation can’t be abrupt.  It’s about evolution not revolution. This government seems determined to break stuff without knowing how to make stuff in return.