Jones cultivates a love of petrochemicals and theatrical dismissal of climate change.

He enhanced that today with the announcement of a new oil and gas prospecting licence in the Canterbury Basin, where many have drilled and found too little in the past.

But when ‘Jonesy’ says “drill, baby, drill”, he’ll do it for any kind of indigenous energy source.

What Jones hankers for is not energy, but energy security.

So do all New Zealanders, as yet another crisis in the Middle East – itself an environmental and climate change disaster – plays havoc with global prices and supply chains for oil and its pervasively necessary products.

If you don’t believe in climate change, then don’t. Believe instead that in an increasingly fragile and dangerous world, the importance of energy self-sufficiency is back with a vengeance.

Covid was bad enough for collapsing demand for oil, but that didn’t bother anyone because they couldn’t drive their car anywhere anyway.

This time around, it’s a supply issue.

If the complaints over today’s petrol prices seem shrill, imagine what it will be like if petrol and diesel start to run out for even short periods.

In this environment, the argument for a renewed push for decarbonisation becomes not only unassailable, but also more capable of sparking agreement across the political spectrum.

The decarbonisation agenda is, in effect, writing itself every day that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, but it is a rewrite that platforms energy security as much as it does climate change action.

the political opportunity is to urge abandonment of fossil fuels to save the planet from massive economic disruption by bringing energy production close to home, using existing and fast-emerging green technologies to replace oil in the energy supply chain.

Jones is all for this.

He secured the $60 million that is spurring on research and investment in super-critical geothermal heat – a potentially endless source of renewable energy capable of meeting all New Zealand’s energy needs and more.

Working with Japan, the US, and Iceland, there is a global push on to find materials that can last in the 400 degrees Celsius-plus super-critical environment.

Solutions may take 10 years, but progress is happening and involves combining existing technologies in new ways to achieve commercially sustainable outcomes.

Harnessing that heat could allow New Zealand to make enormous amounts of green hydrogen at export scale while converting much of the New Zealand economy to run on carbon emissions-free hydrogen.

It is this prospect, for New Zealand to be a major source of green hydrogen in the future, that has seen Japanese industrial conglomerate Obayashi dabbling in hydrogen project here for years already.

Likewise, Jones blurted this morning on Radio New Zealand about an emerging prospect to tap ‘white hydrogen’ that occurs along seismic faults in New Zealand’s geology.

Shane Cronin, a professor of earth sciences at The University of Auckland, confirmed that to Carbon News this morning, and will be briefing the Minister shortly.

Backed by Auckland’s Uniservices commercialisation arm, Cronin says New Zealand has strong potential for naturally occurring hydrogen in a number of places where interactions between rocks and water over millennia produce so-called ‘white’ or ‘natural’ hydrogen.

The trick with harvesting this gas is not to produce it. It already exists. Rather, it is to capture the very light gas as it moves through geological chokepoints. Commercial possibilities exist. Venture capitalists are in harness.

Cronin wants to talk to Jones partly because the law relating to hydrogen needs some work.

These developments are at the ambitious end of the possibilities starting to emerge for New Zealand to become much more energy self-sufficient than it is.

Elsewhere, New Zealanders are taking matters into their own hands.

Across the land, people who’ve been toying with generating solar power on their rooves and charging an EV using sunlight are dusting off their calculations in light of the Iran war.

Batteries, the long-time enemy of rooftop solar economics in New Zealand, are coming down in price. Chinese brands, like Syg, lead the way for battery power and longevity. Solar arrays are already competitive.

An entry level EV from Chinese automaker BYD can be bought for less than $30,000, the cost of a petrol car.

Regulation is pivoting to encourage distributed generation, where householders can sell power back to the grid.

While any national energy strategy should foster a range of alternative sources, the government’s already difficult task of justifying the fast-tracked procurement of an LNG import terminal is now even harder.

This range of developing alternatives to fossil fuels is well underway because of the green technology boom that climate action has spurred.

However, their moment only comes when oil becomes expensive, which it is already, or when it starts running out, which it could do soon in New Zealand and other parts of the world.

None of this should be controversial.

For one thing, it is an underpinning strategy at the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, our globally highly regarded sovereign fund.

The Super Fund has been getting out of oil because climate change makes it a long-term declining risk asset, let alone what happens when wars choke supply.

Instead, the Fund seeks alpha in high-growth green technology plays, where it believes the future lies.