Twenty years ago, on 20 March 2003, the US and its few allies brought “shock and awe” to Baghdad, starting the Iraq war. At the time, I was an under-employed consultant / house husband in Windsor, California, taking the kids to school and back, cooking dinners, and volunteering in the regional parks and with the local search and rescue team. So safe and so secure, the war was still to change my life.
Having narrowly avoided the military draft during the Viet Nam war, learning of its horrors through correspondence with my older brother who was drafted and served two tours, and living with the sad carnage of the war’s aftermath, I was against the Iraq war, and the invasion of Afghanistan before it. I joined thousands of others demonstrating against these wars in their build-up, in Santa Rosa and in San Francisco, but to no avail. Americans were still angry about the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and wanted retribution. Comprehending the history, politics and lies that the Iraq war was based upon seemed to be the least of their concern. Even seemingly rational newspaper columnists echoed the ridiculously unrealistic talking points of Bush-Chaney-Rumsfield neo-conservatives. America could build a liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East – what were they smoking? Now, at this anniversary, we get to relive that sad, disgusting and ultimately pointless episode of history. Weapons of mass destruction, Abu Ghraib, IEDs, Guantanamo Bay, drone warfare, Islamic State. I recall opening the local newspaper in the mornings, to be confronted by the photos of the young military men and women who’d died in Iraq the week before, smiling proudly in their dress uniforms. Thankfully, we were spared pictures and home towns of the untold hundreds and thousands of dead Iraqis – the collateral damage – but we knew they were there. And it was all just heart breaking. I would meet my neighbour in the street in the mornings, collecting the mail or putting out the rubbish and we would work ourselves into a near frenzy of anger at our government, its lies, its disregard for international law, its abdication of its own founding principles. How could they do this, so soon after the great folly and atrocity of the Viet Nam war? When a consulting job in New Zealand came up, I jumped at it. Here was a quiet country, not at war with anyone, least of all with itself, like America was. The news was about traffic accidents and maybe the occasional murder, often just a coroner’s report from a crime committed years ago. A progressive country, seemingly interested only in bettering itself and the lives of its people. When that consulting work turned into a job offer, I jumped at it again, leaving my adult sons at home and moving Hamilton. My wife moved back after 6 months of home sickness and I began a new life alone. That was 20 years ago. Since then I’ve shifted towns, found new loves and become a citizen. I still follow American politics, but mostly for its entertainment value. No one, it seems, can out-do Americans when it comes to “man bites dog” stories or its mad roller coaster of electoral politics. Happily, I don’t feel that same anger anymore. But I do still feel a tinge of sadness for the betrayal of national ideals that America’s recent wars represent, and how they appear to have changed the discourse of its democracy. There are still prisoners at Guantanamo bay. Drones are still conducting extrajudicial executions. If anything, the number of outlandish lies rattling around in the highest halls of government seems to be increasing. Can it ever recover its dignity enough to be trusted again? I’m sad to say that 20 years ago I gave up on trusting my home country and decided to join a new one. It’s been a good decision. But with this decision, comes a sense of vigilance – we cannot let the same thing happen here. Without fear or favour, we must always hold our political leaders to account. We need to trust that they will tell us the truth.
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The future of New Zealand’s domestic transport needs should be trains.
Robert McLachlan and Paul Callister, in a 13 February article in the Conversation, make a good case for restoring long distance passenger rail in New Zealand as a way to decrease the emissions of passenger travel and reduce our energy use. Decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is a given; rail yields only a small fraction of the emissions per passenger kilometre compared to personal automobile or air travel. Electrified, rail would do even better. The case for decreasing our energy use is just as important. One of the cold, hard facts of our times is that humanity is losing the ability to use its most abundant, readily available and convenient form of energy – petroleum. Losing it, by giving it up to prevent run-away climate disruption, or losing it simply by running out of it. Either way, finding an energy source that will replace it will be difficult and cost us more - cost us more in terms of the energy investment required to produce it in the first place. Scientists call this Energy Return on Investment or EROI; the ratio of the energy you get out of a fuel or energy collecting device, divided by the energy it takes to find it or build it. For modern oil production, this ratio is about 20:1. In other words, it takes the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to get another 20 barrels of oil. Since it requires much less oil to produce new oil, we have been living in in times of surplus energy. Think of what it would be like if it took one barrel of oil’s worth of energy to find two barrels of oil, or an EROI of 2:1. We’d be spending half our energy just getting more energy, and that’s not including the energy needed to transport and refine that oil into fuel, nor the energy needed to build the machinery to use that fuel. There certainly wouldn’t be much energy left to do other things. Since the discovery of oil, we’ve grown used to having a large surplus of energy. And, our modern society has put that surplus energy to good use – producing our food, heating our homes and travelling the world – all the good things about modern life. It is estimated that today’s society requires an overall EROI of at least 14:1; anything less and we start lose things we’ve come to expect. This all matters because the EROI of new renewable energy is generally less than what we’ve become accustomed to. Wind power is the best of the bunch, coming in between 10:1 and 30:1, but it is intermittent and needs backup power or some type of energy storage, such as batteries. This adds cost and energy, bringing the EROI of wind down. The EROI of solar is less, between 4:1 and 7:1 and again needs backup or storage because the sun doesn’t shine all the time. What about renewable fuels? Bio-methane has an EROI of about 3.5:1 and ethanol from corn is 1.6:1; it takes almost as much energy to make ethanol as you get back. The EROI of green hydrogen is less than 1:1, which means it takes more energy, in the form of electricity, to make it than you get back when you use it. These low EROIs might be worth it, if the fuel has high energy density and is easily transportable, but they leave very little surplus energy for the rest of society. The reality is that we will struggle to replace petroleum with energy that has even half the EROI of oil. You can see where we’re headed. As we replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, we’ll need to expend much more of our energy budget just to get that energy. There will be less energy around for other things. Barring some miracle technology, such as cheap nuclear fusion power (remember the old saying: just 20 years away and always will be), we are headed for a world where energy availability will be much like it was when our grandparents were children. We need to start planning for that low energy future now. This is where electric trains come in. They are the most energy-efficient, low emissions way to move goods and people over land. Steel wheels rolling on steel rails are far more efficient than rubber tyres on asphalt roads. Trains can be electrified without the need for batteries and charging stations, replacing long distance trucking, which is presently struggling to find a low emissions replacement for petroleum fuel. So, thinking long term, our best investment for domestic transport will be in upgrading, expanding and electrifying our existing rail system. It was high noon in the wild west town of Aotearoa.
Sheriff Cabinet Ministers was busy at his desk, sorting through citizens submissions, when Deputy “Greenie” Shaw bursts into the room. “Sheriff, it’s the Climate Breakdown Gang again. They’re back and causing trouble. If we don’t do something, somebody’s going to get hurt!” Sheriff Ministers knew what had to be done. It was all laid out clear in the Zero Carbon Act. He rose from his chair and reached for his trusty sidearm, hanging on the peg by the door. Those troublesome Emissions Boys would be no match for the Revamped ETS, its shiny emissions-killing metal gleaming from the holster. He strapped on the weapon and reached for the door. But then he thought, “Wait. What about inflation? What about the election? What about my corporate buddies at the Parliament Saloon? Nobody understands the ETS anyway. What the hell.” The sheriff turned back and sat back down at his desk and went back to the submissions. Greenie, wide-eyed and exasperated, piped up, “But sheriff, we’ve got to do something! Mayor Ardern has promised the townspeople that we’d be net zero of those emissions by 2050!” “That’s another 27 years away, Greenie“, grumbled the sheriff. “Plenty of time to deal with those emissions. Now go away, I’ve got paperwork to do.” “But, what will we tell the townspeople? They are expecting us to get out and fight those Emissions Boys with the ETS!” “I’ll just hit them with another request for submissions. That’ll shut them up!” What? Wait a minute! That isn’t how the story is supposed to go! The sheriff is supposed to go out into the streets and fight the bad guys, not hide in his office doing paperwork! But faced with the choice of either strengthening the ETS, (i.e., NZ Emissions Trading Scheme) by letting emissions prices rise, as the Climate Commission has recommended, or holding emissions prices down for another year, our cabinet ministers blinked and voted in December to keep the prices low. So, we are in for yet another blowout of the cost containment reserve, releasing more emissions credits into the market than planned, making it incrementally harder to reach our ‘net zero by 2050’ emissions goal. So much for using the ETS to cap our emissions. This little episode, the latest in a long list of disappointing episodes involving the NZ ETS, points up its fundamental weakness – it is a beast that is easily defanged. Which is perhaps why The New Zealand Initiative, a conservative think tank advising the National Party, likes it so much. They argue that government incentives and regulations to control emissions, such as banning the import of petrol engines by 2035, as recommended by the Climate Commission, are not needed because the ETS is all that is needed to do the job. But, we all remember what happened to the ETS under the last National government. The emissions price went from $21 per tonne CO2 in 2011 to just $2 per tonne by 2013, recovering to $19 per tonne by 2017, when Labour returned to power. In essence, the last National government was quite successful in defanging the ETS, stopping nearly all progress in reducing New Zealand’s emissions along the way. Good for business but bad for the planet. So, considering this latest example of how easily the ETS can be softened, and even by a government that has declared a climate emergency, it is clear that we should NOT put all our climate mitigation “eggs” into one basket, like the ETS. Government incentives and regulations, on the other hand, are harder to “defang” because, once handed down, industry starts to take action. The government ban on coal-fired boilers after 2037, for example, would be difficult to change because industry has already started to invest in the change to other fuels. A new government relaxing the 2037 ban would be met with howls of anger from industry, asking why they want everyone to change horses in mid-stream. Businesses do better in a stable regulatory environment, so regulations made well in advance give them time to plan and make the necessary changes with minimal disruption. So, don’t despair, Deputy Shaw. There are other guns we can use to fight off the Climate Breakdown Gang. Sheriff Ministers just needs to be pushed into having the courage to use them. If there were any doubt that our country’s electricity generation market is badly broken, the recent report by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, Aotearoa 350 and New Zealand First Union should put it to rest. The report points out that since 2014, the three majority government-owned electrical power generators – Mercury, Genesis and Meridian – have paid out more in dividends to shareholders than they made in after tax profit. Really?
First of all, as any businessman will tell you, paying out more in dividends than you make in income can only be sustained by borrowing or selling assets. So, why are they doing this? Second, and perhaps more importantly, these companies need to be ploughing their revenue back into new renewable generation projects to feed New Zealand’s growing electricity needs, not paying it out to shareholders. These companies are owned mostly by our government. Didn’t they get the memo that the country needs for more renewable energy? The Climate Commission has said that national electricity generation needs to increase by 20% over 2018 levels by 2035 in order to meet the anticipated needs of industry and transport. Yet, according to MBIE data, wind and geothermal generation – two important renewables - have remained relatively flat in the 6 years between 2015 and 2021, growing by an anaemic 12% and 3%, respectively. Meanwhile, coal generation grew by a whopping 72%, making up 7.0% of the country’s electrical power in 2021. This slowing of new renewable generation is hard to believe, considering wind generation grew by a phenomenal 280% in the decade before 2015 and geothermal generation grew by 140%. So, why the slowdown in investment in new power after 2015? The Climate Commission has suggested that the hesitance of the generators to add new power is due to the uncertain future of the Manapouri power, if the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter closes down. Manapouri represents 13% of the country’s electrical generation and if diverted into the national grid would certainly depress wholesale electricity prices. They think generators are worried that if electricity prices fall they might not be able to recover their investments in any new generation. So, they are sitting on their hands. The reason for the high dividends may be more subtle. When the three 51% government owned generators entered the share market, a significant portion of CEO and executive team pay was given as what are called “long term incentives”. This is basically the ability to purchase company shares at a discounted price if certain performance targets are met. This is a program that didn’t exist before 2013 because there were no shares to sell or give away prior to the public share sales. Experience with this type of management pay in the US shows that it can have a perverse effect on company strategy, narrowing the focus of otherwise diverse company objectives to a single goal – to bring stock price up. And, one obvious way to do this is to pay large dividends to shareholders. So, we’ve ended up with a near monopoly of three government-owned and highly profitable power generation companies with an obsession to pay large shareholder dividends and an apparent indifference toward investment in new renewable generation that the country desperately needs. Add to this a power market structure that incentivises electricity scarcity to raise prices, which has caused residential electricity prices to rise 20% faster than inflation over the last 14 years! With a power generation system this dysfunctional, it is little wonder that Meridian Energy is promoting a project to send excess Manapouri Hydro Scheme power overseas as green hydrogen, while Transpower, the government-owned electricity system operator, warned us of power shortages last winter. Our electrical power system is clearly not acting in the best interests of the country. Solutions are readily in hand. In 2014, the Labour party, while in opposition, presented a power plan that would create a government company to be the single buyer of power generation that would then on-sell this power to retailers. This company would negotiate fair prices for existing and new power generation and make sure Aotearoa New Zealand has enough renewable power to decarbonise its energy needs. Earlier this year, the deregulated power market in Australia, which is similar to ours, was taken over by the government market operator, in a manner similar to what Labour proposed, in order to prevent a system crisis. Our government could easily do the same thing and get the country’s electrical power system back on track. When is this government going to recognise the problems with our electrical generation system and do the right thing for the people, the economy and the country’s low carbon future? I walk our dog in the Taylor River Reserve each morning I’m in town, treading the stretch between Monro Street and Wither Road. It is a quiet time, when I contemplate my world.
My favourite place is the river bed, where, in summer, I see the river play hide and seek in the gravels, popping up here only to dive back underground there. In the wide open river channel south of the Burleigh Bridge, I navigate over gravels sculpted by a violent dance between physics and chaos we call the winter floods; a small patch of land still shaped by nature’s hand. It is this immortal hand, with its timeless power and beauty, which gives me pause and a sense of awe. I also see the debris of my species, infused in the gravels and discarded along the paths. Plastic bags, polystyrene foam, synthetic rubber, polyester clothing and discarded electronics, all making their way to the great rubbish dump that has become the ocean. What will be the result? My mind flashes to Greek tragedy, where the hero is brought down by his or her arrogant confidence in their own strength or beauty, their hubris. Does humanity, in its new-found power over nature suffer the same tragic flaw? Is this unnatural rubbish I see in the river bed the seeds to this downfall, poisoning our land and seas, as bacteria turn this new food source into toxic waste? My mind skips to the rocks in the river and to the newly designated geologic epoch – the Anthropocene; when the works of man dominate the world’s geology. The bricks, broken tile and glass are there in the river bed for some future geologist to mark our time in the sedimentary record. I was born in a different epoch – the Holocene, a time of warm and stable climate after the last great global glaciation. Now in the Anthropocene, I see change all around me. Newly powerful and erratic weather is upsetting life’s delicate cycles. Humans and their livestock overwhelm the land. Disease, pests and weeds invade what remains of the natural planet. Every corner of the planet explored for mineral wealth and petroleum. I’m reminded that the Anthropocene is also the time of the earth’s sixth great extinction. Will humanity succumb to this extinction as well? All these things to wonder as the morning melts away. The anger in the animal farming community about the proposed agricultural emissions levy is understandable. No business is happy about a new fee that they will have to pay, at least not on this planet. Add to this weather disasters, new freshwater regulations, high fuel prices; there is a lot on their shoulders at the moment.
So, was the process to develop the levy something the government did right? Let’s step back and look at how this all happened. The 2019 Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act specifies a 10% reduction in biologic methane emissions by 2030, in order to meet the nation’s 2015 commitment to the Paris Agreement. The Act passed Parliament unanimously, so it would appear that all major political parties agreed to it. National signed the 2015 Paris commitment and Labour put forward the Zero Carbon Act. So, like gravity, agricultural emissions reduction is not just a good idea, it’s actually the law. Much to the climate activist community’s dismay, rather than add biologic methane to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the government agreed to form an industry-Māori-government partnership, He Waka Eke Noa, to hash out a program to achieve this emissions reduction, starting in 2025. He Waka Eke Noa includes 11 major farming industry groups, including Federated Farmers, Beef & Lamb, Dairy NZ and Horticulture New Zealand. In that democratic governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed (that’s us), this was something the government did right. Agriculture needed to be part of the plan. After 3 years of work, the partnership’s recommendations were published in May of this year and the government’s plan, based upon those recommendations, was put out for consultation in October. So, what were the partnership’s recommendations? The partnership recommended a farm-level, split-gas levy. In other words, a levy on individual farm businesses rather than on farm product processor businesses (such as Fonterra) and that farm businesses pay different levies for methane and the long-lived, farm-derived greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide from fertiliser. The levies would be calculated and paid annually. Farm businesses would receive incentive payments for the uptake of approved methods to reduce emissions and receive payment or credit for on-farm carbon dioxide sequestration, such as through riparian planting, which are not presently eligible for ETS emissions credits. Levy revenue would be invested in research, development and extension services (i.e., technical advice & information) and to a fund dedicated to help Māori landowners. Industry and Māori oversight boards would be formed to provide recommendations on levy rates & prices and the use of revenue. So, which of these recommendations made it through to the plan in the government’s consultation document? Just about all of them. The principal point of difference appears to be that the oversight boards would provide advice on the use of plan revenue, but not on levy rates & prices. The fox doesn’t get to guard the hen house. While farmer anger is understandable and regrettable, the need to reduce these emissions appears unavoidable. In most economies, including ours, polluting industries pay some sort of fee or tax for their pollution, in order to encourage a reduction in that pollution. Business sectors of New Zealand’s economy heavily dependent on fossil fuel use, such as process heat and trucking, already pay for their pollution through the ETS. The farming of ungulate animals (cattle, sheep & deer) produces about half of our country’s greenhouse gas pollution, so it is too large to be ignored. While the agricultural emissions levy may be a hard pill for the animal farming industry to swallow, it does have an upside. As countries in the developed world take steps to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, they recognise that their domestic animal farming industries are at a disadvantage in competing with imports from countries that do not limit emissions. There has long been talk of “carbon tariffs”, or a special tax on imports to address this. In the European Union, it is called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which if adopted, would take effect in 2026. New Zealand’s dairy, meat and wool exports will be ahead of the game when these tariffs arrive. This also would be something done right. “Every one of us will love someone who is still alive in 2100.” This simple yet prophetic statement by young New York climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa struck a chill down my spine. My granddaughters.
You see, the year 2100 is not just an occasion to pop champagne corks to the dawn of a new century; it is a year when most of the world’s climate models mark their results. Ms Siddiqa’s statement gives us pause to consider what kind of world our loved one will live in. A review of climate model results give us a few ideas. First, we need to choose on which pathway of greenhouse gas emissions the world society is heading. The most recent reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6-WG1, 2021) give us a series of scenarios, called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from which to choose. The most ‘forgiving’ pathway (SSP1-2.6) suggests warming to just over 1.8°C by 2050, relative to pre-industrial times, followed by a slow decline to about 1.7°C in the year 2100. As of now, the world has warmed by about 1.1°C, so we are already well over half way there. However, in order for us to follow this pathway global greenhouse gas emissions would need to have peaked in 2020 and they did not. According to the International Energy Agency, emissions made their biggest increase yet in 2021, more than offsetting a pandemic-induced decline in 2020. This increase is also apparent in the concentration of CO2 measured in the earth’s atmosphere. It continues to increase and this increase is accelerating. Think of this like a carload of teenagers seeing how fast they can go on a lonely country road. They can see the turnoffs they need to take, but are still accelerating, with foot on the pedal, when they should be slowing down. This is us with greenhouse gas emissions right now. So, it looks like we’ll miss the turnoff that would have put us on the RCP 2.6 pathway. The next pathway (SSP2-4.5) puts us at warming of about 2.7°C by 2100. Here, global emissions peak in 2040 and start to decline thereafter. There is still a chance that we can make this pathway, so it is where most optimistic observers would put us today. If we assume this is the turnoff our carload of teenagers is able to take, we can tap into the results of climate models to see what conditions likely will be for our loved one in 2100. Sea level will have risen about a half a metre and will continue to rise. If our loved one lived on the coastline, they would have moved by now to a place farther inland. Housing would likely be in short supply due to the others fleeing the advancing coastline and due to the need to house climate refugees from elsewhere, such as the Pacific Islands. Summers will be hotter, with more very hot days. Our loved one will need reliable electricity for air conditioning. Instances of intense rainfall will have increased in frequency and intensity, leading to more flooding, road closures and crop damage. Droughts will be longer and more intense. Combined, these point to reduced food supply. Our loved one will likely find it harder both to get to the market and to find food when they get there. Changes to beloved ecosystems will be evident all around them. Forests will show signs of widespread tree mortality due to heat stress, drought and disease. Once-healthy forests will become prone to wildfires and pest invasion. Wildlife along the seashore will have changed, due to progressively warming and acidifying seas. Migration of fish to higher latitudes will have impacted coastal bird and marine mammal populations, decimating many beloved bird and seal colonies. So, life, in all likelihood, will be harder and less certain for our loved one than it has been for us. While there certainly are things we can all do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, there are other things we can do to soften the impacts of climate instability – under the banners of adaptation and resilience. Here, we can take guidance from the IPCC (AR6-WG2, 2022): “Climate resilient development is advanced when actors work in equitable, just and enabling ways to reconcile divergent interests, values and worldviews, toward equitable and just outcomes.” In simple language, we need to work together, listen to each other, learn to reconcile our differences and make sure no one is unfairly disadvantaged. This means sticking together, no matter what. Ms. Siddiqa went on to say, “That loved one will either face a world in climate chaos or a clean green utopia depending on what we do today.” Utopia maybe not. But let’s give it our best shot. Tom Powell – Climate Karanga Marlborough
Tim Jones – Coal Action Network Meridian Energy is considering a proposal to make green hydrogen with the electrical power that would be freed up by the possible closure of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter in Southland, and export it around the world. At a time when New Zealand is running short of electrical power, this is a very bad idea. We need this power to stay here! As you have probably read, there is lots of talk about green hydrogen in the domestic energy industry. It can be made from ordinary water using electricity, creating few pollutants and little greenhouse gas in the process. Although its overall energy efficiency relative to batteries is low, it can be compressed and carried in tanks, making it one of the few fuel options available for long haul trucking, transoceanic shipping and aviation. Overseas markets for green hydrogen are forming. As you might have also read, New Zealand came dangerously close to running out of electricity this last winter. As early as June this year, Transpower, the nation’s state-owned enterprise responsible for electric power transmission, warned that domestic supplies of electrical power from the various independent generators were not keeping up with demand. Just last month (September), Transpower again called on generators to make more power available. Part of the blame for this situation can be reasonably placed on New Zealand’s ‘competitive’ power generation market. The market was originally designed to create competition between generators, so as to provide consumers and industry with the cheapest power available. As with many good intentions gone wrong, though, the market instead incentivises power shortages, giving generators the highest market price when electricity supplies are short. So, generators get more for their electricity when demand is high and aren’t keen to add new generation unless the power market is ‘tight’ enough to assure them a reasonable price. It is little wonder that the average wholesale price of power has been steadily rising. The average wholesale price of electricity for the first quarter of 2018 was $87 per megawatt-hour (abbreviated “/MWh” – enough to power a little over 1000 homes for an hour), while the average price was $174/MWh during the first quarter of this year. Little wonder, too, that power generators have been reporting strong profits in recent years. However, the Tiwai Point smelter reportedly pays Meridian a bargain price of only $35/MWh as of January last year, so it makes sense that Meridian might want more money for its power. But it doesn’t want to put this power into the domestic market because the extra power would cause the wholesale price of power to drop. Remember, the generators get a higher price when electricity supplies are in high demand. Thus comes Meridian’s interest in someone building a green hydrogen plant to take the power at a higher price when its contract with the smelter expires in 2024, and keep that power off the domestic market. In comes the Southern Green Hydrogen project, with two Australian firms vying to become the lead developers. The project is touted to become the largest green hydrogen project on the planet, which analysists say could earn hundreds of millions of dollars in export revenue while helping decarbonise economies here and overseas. There will only be a small market for green hydrogen in NZ so, in essence, the plan is for our power – power which New Zealand taxpayers paid for in the Manapouri Hydro Scheme and still 51% owned by the government – to be exported in the form of green hydrogen for profit, while the rest of the country endures winter power shortages. And this is no small amount of electricity. The Manapouri hydro scheme represents 13% of NZ’s electricity generation. Imagine what lower and more stable electricity prices would do for New Zealand households and industry, if Meridian instead released that electricity to the national grid. It is clear that, in our present situation, this proposal to export our electricity as green hydrogen doesn’t make sense. No less than Simon Upton, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, has told the government so. With the government pushing for more electric vehicles on the roads and for industries to replace fossil fuel-fired boilers with electric furnaces and electricity-driven heat pumps, the country is going to need a lot more electrical generation in the future. Selling what excess power we have as green hydrogen overseas when the country is facing power shortages is the epitome of bad planning! It is time this government developed a coherent energy strategy to guide our communities and our economy into the uncertain energy future ahead. Supporting the use of this precious resource for another export industry would certainly not be a good start. Tom Powell
Marg comes into the kitchen and begins emptying rubbish from her pockets into the bin. Tom: “Marg, what are you doing?”. Marg: “What does it look like? I’m putting rubbish in the bin. We’ve run out of council bags, so I’m putting it here in the kitchen until I get more bags this afternoon.” Tom: “I mean, where did you get all that rubbish?” Marg: “I pick it up in the reserve when I walk the dog. It helps keep things tidy and I worry about all the plastic going into the soil and the river.” Tom: “Isn’t that the council’s job?” Marg: “Which would you rather? Have the council pay someone to pick it up and pay for it in our rates, or just pick it up ourselves while we’re out there?” Tom: “OK, I see your point about the council. But, what are you worried about with plastic? I understand plastic litter is ugly but it doesn’t hurt anything.” Marg: “I’ve read that scientists have now found bacteria that feed on plastic and break it down into other chemicals.” Tom: “Well, there you go! Plastic pollution solved! Just let the bacteria eat it all up. What’s there to worry about? Marg: “I’ve also read that they are beginning to find that some of those breakdown chemicals are toxic.” Google Assistant: “Scientists have found that bacteria that digest the common plastic polyurethane produce toxic chemicals, such as 4,4-methylenedianiline and 2,4-toluene diamine, which are possible carcinogens and pose environmental risk to aquatic and terrestrial species.” Tom: “Umm, that can’t be good. So we need to stop using, what was it? Poly-aeroplane? Google Assistant: “Polyurethane. It is used in the manufacture of sports shoes, nappies, kitchen sponges, furniture and foam insulation. It’s in many products.” Marg: “So Tom, what happens if some new bacteria pops up that can feed off all the other plastics used in agriculture but leaves behind toxic chemicals? The soils might become too toxic to grow anything. Plastic in the oceans might end up turning fish toxic, like when we had that scare about mercury in fish. So what would people eat?” Tom: “Well, I suppose we could grow our food in glasshouses. Don’t know that I could give up fish, though.” Marg: “And, that’s not to mention the damage it might do to wildlife and the natural world. We could be poisoning the planet for generations to come!” Tom: “It all sounds pretty scary, Marg. What we can do about it? I suppose giving up plastic would be the answer, but plastic is such great stuff – lightweight, strong, waterproof, doesn’t rot and can be shaped into most anything.” Google Assistant: “One solution being considered by the New Zealand government is called ‘product stewardship’, whereby manufactures take responsibility for plastics in their products, recycling them at the end of their useful lives. It is part of what is called a ‘circular economy’” Marg: “I certainly hope we can do something like that, Google. Otherwise, we’re in a bit like a Faustian Bargain.” Tom: “A ‘fast-tin’ bargain?” Marg: “It comes from an old medieval tale. A man named Faust made a deal with the devil to gain wealth and power in exchange for his soul.” Tom: “So, what happened?” Marg: “Faust messed everything up, hurt innocent people and went to hell.” Tom: “So, how is that like plastics?” Marg: “Plastics are great stuff, as you say. They add to our society’s wealth and power. But there is a price to pay later on, by future generations, for all the plastic pollution left behind.” Tom: “Oh, I see what you mean. But we didn’t know that plastics were going to be so dangerous.” Marg: “But we always knew that they were made from chemicals that weren’t natural, and we knew that many of those chemicals were bad for us.” Tom: “Yeah, I suppose we should have known, if we’d stopped to think about it.” Marg: “It’s a bit like climate change; petroleum has given society great wealth and power but, unfortunately, future generations will have to pay the price in terms of an unstable climate.” Marg: “But, I suppose, unlike Faust, we can stop and do something about it by keeping plastics out of our environment and cutting our greenhouse gas emissions.” Tom: “Well, Marg, from now on I’m all for recycling things made out of poly-aeroplane!” |
Authors
These are a collection of opinion articles principally written by CKM member Tom Powell for the Marlborough Express. Tom is a retired geologist who came to New Zealand in 2004 to work in the geothermal industry on the North Island, is a New Zealand citizen and now lives in Blenheim. Some articles have been written by other CKM members, and their names appear with those articles. Archives
December 2023
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