This is one of those posts that gets me in trouble. Thankfully, not being on social media reduces the hate mail substantially, not that I particularly care what the quickfire responders think; a reasoned debate is so much more fun, though so much more absent these days.
I wrote this and then relegated it to the draft bin, but this popped up recently.
A 5000-hectare historic station on the East Coast may soon be turned into a foreign-owned carbon farm.
Newshub understands the sale is all but final - it's pending approval from the Overseas Investment Office.
Locals are devastated and say it's the beginning of the end for not only farming in the region but the region itself. - 5000-hectare historic station on East Coast could soon be foreign-owned carbon farm
To give you an idea of the size of this sale, it would roughly encompass the whole of Wellington City from Tawa, Karori, the South Coast, and all of Eastern Suburbs. Imagine all that planted in pine.
So, I will talk about trees, the end of the world, and climate change. In particular, I will talk about how stupid the current carbon tree scheme is that has been put in place by this government and how planting out the country in pine owned by foreign investors is probably the most idiotic plan we have ever seen.
It’s beyond idiotic; it’s destructive. It’s tearing apart rural communities, souring the ground, reducing farming land significantly, and is a pointless activity to impact climate change on any level.
We could be doing a lot better, but again, government policy from a bunch of desperate political wonks, leads us down the left-hand path of Morris Dancing and Climate Emergency panics rather than practical steps to slow down climate change and prepare to mitigate against it.
Sour Ground
When you walk through a pine plantation, you notice a few things. It’s quiet. Far too quiet. The usual birdlife that you find on the farm or in native tree tracts is far less. We notice it with one of the pine belts on our property; it houses far fewer birds than the native lagoon and some large elm shelterbelts, most likely because pine trees crowd out all other food sources from growing.
Any undergrowth aside from the hardiest weeds is missing. You walk silently across ground that has been covered in pine needles, literally smothering anything else that tries to grow. The biodiversity of plant and animal life is lowered significantly.
It’s dry in here as well. Unnaturally dry, pine trees need a lot of water and have a fibrous root structure that sucks the water out of the surrounding ground, and if they can, any nearby aquifers by default.
Multiple studies have shown that as pine forests grow, aquifers shrink, springs dry up, and streams disappear. As climate change increases drought, pine forests will exacerbate the situation. Large scale pine forests are often referred to as “Green Deserts.”
So why are we doing this?
The government has signed everyone up to specific carbon targets over time. We either need to reduce our emissions to meet those, offset them by getting rid of carbon (by planting pine trees), or pay for them to be offset (prepare for a carbon tax soon adding to an already heavy tax burden on New Zealand.)
The ideological and straightforward view of policy wonks is that by planting pine forests, we can do this. Of course, it is also backed by massive business here and internationally. You can be confident that they are not only making money out of it, but they are also offsetting their emissions to escape future tax penalties.
The government tell us that it also creates new jobs, pays for new infrastructure, can be sold as an asset, strengthens communities, and a host of other positive spins (read bullshit) spat out by PR experts to justify a death march into the future.
Generally, the bullshit spin comes down to this; by planting pine forests, we trap carbon and slow down the rate of warming. The amount of carbon we trap with forests will be equal to, or more, than the number of carbon emissions we make as a country; therefore, we will be carbon neutral or better.
Worse, many of the blocks of land being sold are going to foreign investors. They can use this to offset their emissions. That means that they can plant pine trees on our productive ground on the other side of the world while they continue to pollute themselves.
But that’s not how it works in reality.
A quick lesson on climate engineering
We are often told that managing climate change is easy. It’s easy to buy an EV, plant a pine tree, get on a bicycle, or buy carbon credits to offset your sins.
The reality is that if we want to stop and reverse climate change, then we have to do three things:
Lock up the carbon
Stop emissions
Other terraforming
Locking up the carbon is generally done by planting trees, and in New Zealand’s case, pine trees. And I want you to remember something now, once the carbon is locked up, you can’t let it out again, or your emissions are out the window again.
We need to slow down emissions. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen anytime soon. We’ve known about this global issue for five decades or more and have chosen to avoid it because a) it is political suicide to get people to do it, and b) it requires everyone to do it, so that’s fucked it from the start.
Australia is consenting to a gas mine in Queensland that will increase the entire country’s emissions by 60% per year. Overall, increasing power needs, thanks mainly to data centres and population growth, are growing the coal burn significantly, including New Zealand, allowing a vast data centre to be built in Southland in the future.
Other terraforming is possibly where we will end up and is likely problematic. Terraforming is some mass technology used to shift the climate globally and rapidly.
If you want a good primer on this, read Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. In it, a billionaire posits that we can cool the earth’s atmosphere quickly by releasing sulphur into the atmosphere, as it reflects sunlight. Significant volcanic eruptions see the same effect.
The problem with terraforming is no one knows its impact on a global scale. Terraforming one part of the earth could have unintended consequences for other regions.
Pine trees and carbon
The simplistic view that pine trees will save us all by sucking up the carbon and avoiding a bunch of taxes is madness.
First and foremost, it takes a very long time to do that, around fifty years or so, for the tree to mature. Then, you can’t do anything with it because if you do, all the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Some figures show that creating timber means that only 50% of the carbon from the tree, with the rest, is retained. But think about it, have you seen an electric-powered forestry site? A sixty-tonne battery-powered logging truck? All the heavy machinery battery operated? An entire lumberyard that runs on nothing other than renewable generated electricity?
The supply chain must always be examined.
So, in that case, you need to plant twice the trees at a minimum to meet your offset of carbon, and you must ensure that any buildings you construct with the milled timber must stay there forever.
Good luck with that.
Worse, with vast tracts of land planted in trees, we can also expect to see associated forest fires. Rural communities barely cope as it is today when it comes to firefighting. Most of them are volunteers, they are dealing with ageing equipment (and ageing themselves), and not many people are rushing to join the ranks.
Fires will be massive, widespread, and utterly devastating. Given that some blocks are thousands of hectares, getting fire services in to put out the fires will be a mission and once it has a good head of steam, using aerial firefighting techniques (if we had enough of those resources to start with) becomes problematic. And burning forests release the carbon they have stored.
Unfortunately, we don’t have enough land to plant out to match our emissions anyway. You could plant the whole country in pine, and it wouldn’t be enough.
To finish it right off, there is some evidence that as forests warm, they start to give off carbon. In a rapidly warming world, forests will likely begin to release their carbon once they have passed their saturation point.
The scale of it and the human costs
Once you’ve planted farmland in pine, you’ve lost it as a food-producing platform forever. Theoretically, you could remove the pine (so releasing the carbon) and spend a massive amount of money returning the soil to something productive. It is doubtful that this would be financially viable and impossible with the new laws around fertiliser, not to mention their escalating costs.
By 2050 the World Bank asserts that the global population will need 40% more food. However, by 2050, we are likely to have a land and water (50%) deficit greater than today because farms are being retired worldwide.
That’s a pretty stark set of statistics. We will not be able to feed the world by 2050, not far away now, based on our current land usage.
New Zealand was losing farmland even before the spectre of pine forests raised its insidious head. Between 2009 and 2019, we lost an astonishing 28.7% of our farms, dropping from 69,510 to 49,530. That’s nearly a third of our farms in a decade.
Federated Farmers said that between 2019 and mid-2021, 70,000 hectares of land were sold to forestry companies. Of course, the government disputes that figure; they do but can’t provide their own.
In the Wairarapa, it feels like every month, we hear of another productive farm being sold into forestry. Under the government’s instruction, the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) has fast-tracked sales to international interests.
Farmer’s are often given an exceptional offer on their land, the kind you can’t turn down, as the rules (as I understand them) are once an overseas company that wants to buy makes a bid, then other local bidders are invited to meet or exceed it. Thus, there is a chance for local owners to retain farmlands within New Zealand for farm usage.
But the, multinationals have deep pockets and can afford to offer two or three times the value of a farm with rising carbon prices. This puts it firmly out of the reach of even large conglomerates.
Some parts of Wairarapa, not named here, have been almost entirely sold now to forestry interests, destroying not only productive farmland when the world needs it most but also the communities that thrive around them.
Of course, the community is not something that a politician understands unless they lived in a rural one at some point.
Communities thrive around farms, and as forestry moves in, roads decay, schools close, health services shut, pubs close their doors, neighbours are set on neighbours for “selling out”, and the sound of a billion pine trees sucking the life out of thousands of hectares is all that can be heard.
Our paddocks are a lot drier than this time last year, with the hint of drought in the wind. We’ve had 5mm of rain this month and have already resorted to irrigating what we can and starting to buy feed for what is feeling inevitable.
One of the significant issues that we have at the moment is that the conversation hasn’t moved beyond attempting to control emissions into adaptation. New Zealand could reduce its emissions to zero, but the rest of the world won’t, and the stark reality is that climate change will continue to happen.
To protect the country against that, we need to adapt now. Accepting that change is here and getting worse. But when we try to adapt, such as the Wairarapa Water Scheme abandoned after two decades of investigation, ideological interests get in the way.
In what should have been a slam dunk, the scheme got canned, despite having government support and local government support.
Wairarapa MP Kieran McAnulty said he was “gutted” by the decision.
“What a wasted opportunity. This scheme would have brought so many benefits to our region,” he said. “That is why this Government backed it with $7 million through the Provincial Growth Fund.”
About half of the $7 million PGF loan has been spent to date.
The Greater Wellington Regional Council also invested around $7 million into earlier investigations into a possible scheme prior to Wairarapa Water Ltd taking up the development.
The scheme was expected to a major part of the Wairarapa Water Resilience Strategy and be central to accelerating land use change as a significant climate change response, Lusk said.
Lusk said the development work already done by the project team could picked up again “when conditions allowed”.
“It is very hard to imagine a comprehensive climate change solution in the Wairarapa without community water storage.” Wairarapa water scheme project abandoned
This was the kind of adaptation that was required. So why did twenty years of planning get flushed down the drain?
Because a small group of residents, activists and greens managed to torpedo it, most of them are not even living in the region. Some of their reasons were the height of perverse thinking:
Wairarapa only wanted to do this because they wanted more dairy farms, which of course, are evil. The reality is that the number of farms is reducing in real-time. Farmers are reducing herds here because they are adapting.
It would create “greater water dependency.” This assumes that rather than storing the water for when the need is more significant, it would be sold out to increase, you guessed it, dairy farms.
The time will come when there was not enough rain to fill the dams. So farmers should adopt some other way by changing land use. Apparently, that land use will be growing cactus, because that’s all that will be left, desert. As far as I know, water is needed for anything you produce on a farm.
This ideological green death machine consists of wealthy individuals living in ivory towers within cities with enough money to run batshit crazy PR campaigns.
It is the beginning of the end of the world. While those small, vocal, wealthy groups drink milk in their lattes, enjoy a steak twice a week, use coal to power their EV, rural communities in New Zealand are suffering now and set to suffer further. No doubt their investment stocks include electric car manufacturers and carbon credits, set to soar and soar.
Because that is what it always boils down to, money and greed.
Hilariously, with the continued drying out of the Wairarapa, we won’t even be able to grow pine trees. There won’t be nearly enough water for that. A pine tree uses more water than a cow drinks on a good day.
Don’t get me wrong. We need to do something about climate change and the associated issues. But sticking our head up our arse and following death-cult ideology from poorly educated people who sit in comfortable ivory towers handling Twitter and Facebook is the path to hell.
We need to adapt now or die, and pine trees won’t save us.
hi Ian drop me an email jamiefalloon@xtra.co.nz. There is way more to this discussion than can be followed in a comments section, and too many generalisations by all in this discussion. I can show you pine forest with the same diversity as native and vice versa. solutions aren't linear, and planting many areas of pine on my farm have made a huge difference to the land that has been left pasture and the biodiversity around my farm. Most of the last 30 years people have been trying to stop us farming so it is ironic that now we are told we have to keep farming. As little as 3 or 4 years ago we were being told that lab based food would be the end of farming, so you cant blame people for making a decision in their own best interests.
Disclaimer i farm 750ha of hill country and have 400 hectares of pine tree and approx 100 ha of native forest and forest remnants, and a career in forestry and farming