Stagione 1
We got the Power!
Health and Medicine
Food...Yum
Water, Water, Water
We Have Aggregate
About 92% of New Zealand's electricity comes from sources that need no imported fuel at all. Rain falls, steam rises, the turbines turn. On paper this is the episode where we're fine. Then you ask who built the turbines. When Mercury spent $90 million refurbishing Karāpiro, the work went to an Austrian firm — whose predecessor had supplied the original turbines at Kaitawa in 1948. Even Arapuni, the first state-built dam feeding the national grid, was built under contract by a British company. "We used to do it all ourselves" turns out never to have been quite true. So this isn't a supply-chain story like food or water. It's a maintenance and manufacturing story. Hydro at 54–58%, geothermal around 22%, wind just over 9% — none of it needs a tanker. All of it needs transformers, control gear, bearings, castings and the technicians who know them, and almost none of that is made here. We also go looking for what a reverted, smaller version might look like, including a Rotorua workshop building micro-hydro turbines out of recycled Fisher & Paykel washing machine motors. At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com
Ask how long a New Zealand hospital lasts without imports and most people think about medicines. The more frightening answer is the tests. PHARMAC funds around 3,000 medicines. Almost none are manufactured here. Tens of thousands of medical devices are registered for use; virtually all are imported. Gloves, sutures, tubing, catheters — largely imported. Surgical consumables start being rationed within weeks. But the vulnerability that gets least attention is diagnostic reagents, which are almost entirely imported and would begin failing within months. Without them, blood testing, pathology and imaging analysis stop. Clinicians can still treat what they can see. Everything else, they're flying blind on. We work through eight areas of the health system, and find the damage spread very unevenly — some problems manageable over years, others life-threatening inside a month. At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com
New Zealand produces food for three and a half times its own population — and still imports most of what it eats. That paradox is the whole episode. We're self-sufficient in five of the seven major food groups: fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, seafood. The two we fall short on are legumes, nuts and seeds, and starchy staples — wheat, rice, oats. The calorie backbone of the modern diet. The reason is 150 years of optimisation. Pastoral farming occupies about 40% of New Zealand's land area; horticulture, the stuff that directly feeds people, occupies 1.5%. We grow what the world pays most for, and buy back what we actually live on. So what would the isolation diet look like? Nobody starves. But you'd be eating a great deal of lamb, butter, potatoes and kiwifruit, and almost no bread. At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com
New Zealand will never run out of water. That's not the problem. We get around 550 cubic kilometres of rainfall a year, one of the highest per-capita freshwater endowments on earth. The question is not whether the water exists — it's whether we can get it out of the ground, through the pipes, treated to a safe standard and into the tap. On that, we're far more dependent on the outside world than most people realise. We follow the chain from source to tap: the treatment chemicals we make here and the ones we don't, the 73,000 kilometres of pipe built mid-century and now past its design life, and the honest engineering answer on how long a network lasts without replacement parts — a serious degradation curve beginning within two to five years. Plus Christchurch, which drinks deep artesian groundwater so clean it needs no chemical treatment at all, and would still be running long after everywhere else started to struggle. And Moa Point in February, which showed us what a major wastewater plant failing looks like with no external shock at all. At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com
After the oil episode, some good news for once. New Zealand sits on the boundary of two tectonic plates, and that violence has been generous with us: world-class gold, vast ironsand, rich geothermal fields, limestone, coal, and more aggregate than we could ever use. On construction materials, we are very close to self-sufficient. If the ships stopped, we could keep building. The gaps are somewhere less obvious. Drawing on GNS Science's 2024 assessment — the most comprehensive survey of New Zealand's mineral potential ever published — we map what's under our feet against what a modern society actually consumes, and find the shortfall sitting squarely in the materials that advanced manufacturing depends on. A geologically young, tectonically active country turns out to be unusually rich in some things and starkly empty in others. Further reading: GNS Science, mineral potential of New Zealand (2024) At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com
New Zealand does not have an oil refinery. Not "a small one" — none at all. Marsden Point closed permanently in April 2022, and from that moment every litre of petrol, diesel, jet fuel and marine fuel burned in this country arrived on a ship, already refined, from Singapore, South Korea or Australia. Before the closure we could at least process crude ourselves. That buffer is gone. So how much is actually in the tanks? Fuel importers are legally required to hold 21 days of diesel, 24 of jet fuel, 28 of petrol. The Wiri terminal holds about six days of supply for Auckland. Auckland Airport holds roughly two days of jet fuel. Two days. We work through the pipelines that would decide how fast it unravelled — one of them carries about 95% of Auckland's fuel — why the West Coast has no backup at all, and the week in 2023 when the Chatham Islands nearly ran out of diesel because a single ship built in 1988 went into dry dock. Further reading: National Fuel Plan (SP 04/24) At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com