The main advice for avoiding the spread of corona virus is to limit personal contact with other people, especially at large gatherings, such as sports matches and concerts. The increasing use of the internet has actually been doing this for a few years and it may be that corona virus will accelerate this trend.  We sometimes forget that Google has only been in business for 22 years and the internet is still relatively new and not yet fully developed.
The USA has suspended passenger travel between the USA and Europe but there are many business people who need to conduct business between the two continents and if they can’t travel then they will set up Skype or other video service meetings and do business that way. This has been the case for some years and traveling to foreign countries has always been one of the perks of international business but it is expensive and time consuming so companies could insist on employees doing more without a physical visit.

​A big point of personal contact is at work, especially in large offices, and many people have been working from home, either permanently or for several days a week, but if a company was faced with closure how many staff could do their work from home? Once a company finds that it can manage with half or most of its staff at home would they go back to a big office or would they relocate to smaller premises and make the savings?
Doctors are going consultations by Skype to limit infection but we could get used to it and the doctors might find it more efficient and use it more. If we had reliable instruments at home for temperature, blood pressure and a mini electrocardiogram, as we have on a phone app, a diagnosis of simple ailments can be done without a personal visit.
Universities are putting a lot of lectures on line and this Covid19 disruption to education will lead to a big expansion in online learning. Making use of a really good online presentation does not detract from education and can help many students of all ages continue education by not being present in a classroom. It might enable university students get a good degree without the huge expense and debt of attending a university in a faraway city. 

​An increasing number of people are choosing to do their supermarket shopping on the internet and either have the food delivered or collect it from a secure locker at the store. To date most of these people are those that are short of time and do it for convenience but could a supermarket manage with 75% of its customers shopping this way, and if the customers like it would it continue for ever?
If a supermarket did not have to deal with customers would it move to an industrial estate and handle it’s orders like a spare part distributer or like Amazon? We would then have a fleet of small vans driving around the town delivering food. Expanding use of home delivery is why Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric vans from Rivian for last mile deliveries and with a warehouse roof full of solar panels supplying power and eventually autonomous self-driving vans, it would be a cheap delivery service.  It is all part of the growing trend for online shopping

​Attendances at sporting events, exhibitions, cinema and concerts have been falling for years as people have been getting a better experience from online and TV performances, the atmosphere of a live performance is worth going for but watching online will surely continue to grow.
Youngsters are using their phones for social interaction and people date and eventually marry via the internet. This trend towards online interaction has been growing for some years and is just a different form of living which will continue to establish itself in society.
Life is not going to be the same again.

The Covid19 crisis has highlighted a problem for the oil companies that was slowly unfolding but has now gone into overdrive. We passed peak oil somewhere around 2005 but it was hidden by fracking extraction techniques that enabled a lot more oil to be extracted. As a result, we have a had a mild glut of supply for nearly twenty years, particularly from the USA, Canada and Russia and this has kept the price slightly depressed to around $70.
Unlike most other commodity industries there is almost no storage in the system for oil and it relies on a steady progress of one hundred million barrels a day from the wellhead to the user.
Fracking is a more expensive method of extraction and needs a higher oil barrel price to make a profit but, because of the oversupply, some oil wells were making a loss and many were only breaking even. The banks were supporting the losses because most of the costs were in discovery and drilling and it is better to keep pumping and selling the oil than to shut and cap the well.
​Before the Covid19 crisis the demand for oil was already slowly falling and the price was going down and the price had fallen to $30 and now the Corona19 has collapsed demand and the situation is not going to change for some months.
For technical reasons oil wells cannot be switched off and on and, once they are shut and capped, a new well will have to be drilled. Once the storage tanks are full, and at a hundred barrels a day this won’t take long, wells will have to be shut down. Many of the oil fields are almost depleted and are not going to be reopened so there will be an instant loss of capacity.
Clearly the whole oil industry will be under extreme stress and the banking industry that has been supporting them with billions of dollars of loans will also be at risk.
When the world reopens for business and demand increases back to the old rates of consumption I suspect that we may be short of supply and the price could rocket, but whatever happens, nations will want to have a more stable and controllable supply of energy and will enlarge their renewable electricity capacity of wind, solar, geothermal and hydro.
Big changes have been forecast for some time but this is a real ‘black swan’ event and will bring changes that we were not expecting to see in our lifetime.
(A black swan event originates from the northern hemisphere and from a time when the only known swans were white and therefore black swans were not going to happen.)

​Tourism is a major source of income in New Zealand and all regions are chasing the tourist dollar so what can we do to get our fair share. We routinely see articles about Queenstown and sometimes you would think that there was nowhere else in New Zealand worth visiting.
Most tourists arrive by plane into Auckland and from there disperse by plane, bus, car, bike and campervan heading South or North. The majority head South so we need a major, not to be missed, destination in the North to bring them this way and I believe that we have one in the Bay of Islands.
Sixty years ago, long before the internet, when I was in the UK, I knew that the Bay of Islands was one of the most beautiful places on the planet and the iconic name still has a world wide reputation which we can capitalise on. If we could work on this world wide brand name the whole of the Far North would benefit, just as Wanaka and Invercargill benefit from Queenstown.
I manage two websites for walkers, the BOI Walkways and the Kerikeri Five Waterfalls and the BOI one gets six times as many page views as the Kerikeri one which illustrates the power of the Bay of Islands brand name.
We have five small towns in the Bay of Islands each with their own character and with a little bit of tweaking and marketing we could make a package that would be worthy of a ‘must do’ for tourists.
Kawakawa is the most southerly community and has the railway, the cycleway and the Hundertwasser toilets and now has the new tourist information centre which makes the town the gateway to the Bay of Islands. Opua is an excellent marina and yachting centre. Russell is an old and interesting whaling town. Paihia is a tourist centre with beaches and ferries to the islands plus of course about 65 cruise ships and the community has done wonders to promote the town. Kerikeri is the largest town of the group with the heritage areas of the Stone Store and Kororipo Pa plus its vineyards, fresh fruit and vegetables.
Towns do better when they have an identity and recognising these features and amplifying them gives tourists something to believe in, that they are going to see something unique.
These towns, plus the others in Northland, are all working hard to make their towns attractive and fine places to live in but individually they do not have the reach of an existing internationally recognised brand name like the Bay of Islands.
As a start I am trying to link the walking tracks in the BOI area together into a network and promote it as a walkers destination that features the Islands, the rivers and waterfalls, the heritage and environmental beauties into a single holiday  and we will see how it goes. 

​We all know that greenhouse gasses are warming the planet and we have to reduce them, but who is responsible and where can we make savings? The two big sources in New Zealand are burning oil for our transport and methane from cattle in our agricultural industry and they are both at about 40% each of the total.
Our greenhouse gas emissions per head of population are about 6 tonnes per person and this is roughly the same as Europe and China while Australia is about 18 tonnes and the USA at about 22 tonnes while India is down at 2 tonnes. Most developed nations are falling as they convert from coal to gas, solar and wind power for electricity generation, while the poorer nations are increasing as they industrialise.
New Zealand has a very large dairy and cattle industry compared with other countries at around 10 million head of cattle this amounts to 2 head of cattle per person. The UK for instance has around 5 million beasts against 66 million people or 0.08 head per person. If the UK had the same proportion as New Zealand, they would have 122 million head of cattle, but the UK ratio is similar to the rest of Northern Europe. New Zealand is clearly in a league of its own.
The problem for us is the way that we account for the emissions, in that the cows emit here and we have to account for this, even though we export 95% of the milk product. Australia on the other hand exported 380 million tonnes of coal which, when burnt, will make 800 million tonnes of CO2 at 32 tonnes per Australian, and they do not count this against their, already bad figures.
Our dairy and meat produce are all paddock grass fed and of the highest quality and when we export this, we give the recipient country a huge help in their trading emissions account. China for instance is the manufacturing workshop of the world and they have a huge emissions tonnage as they industrialise. We import finished goods from China and do not account for the emissions that they made in the manufacturing and so we should accept the ‘give and take’ in the balance of emissions and manufacturing. We get their manufactured goods emission free and they get our dairy products emissions free.
In my view, we should give the farmers a free pass on the emissions and concentrate on helping them with fencing, to keep cattle out of the streams, and in the longer term move away from cattle farming altogether and concentrate on using our fertile land for more intensive and productive arable and horticultural farming.
We also need to remind ourselves that only about half of the houses in New Zealand are connected to a sewage system and so we need to address that problem if we want to pump drinking water from the aquifers and from our rivers.