Dear readers, I hope you are doing well after Cyclone Gabrielle, wherever you may be. It’s been a hideous week across most of New Zealand, and the damage is extensive.
When I was growing up, the Cold War hung over our heads. Most of you who are Generation X and older will remember this. We came within inches of a global nuclear war, time and again. Raymond Briggs produced an astounding popular comic novel, “When the Wind Blows“, following an English couple who slowly died from radiation poisoning following a nuclear war. It impacted those generations like “Watership Down” (how on earth that was ever considered a children’s book still amazes me).
Today’s end-of-the-world scenario, hanging over everyone’s heads, is Climate Change. Well, it’s one of them; you can also throw a few others in. But the so-called “discussion” around Climate Change is making me angry because there can apparently be no rational debate about it. The politicking, greenwashing, misinformation, disinformation, and companies greedily making billions from this problem is astounding.
So buckle up, dear reader. This is about the Climate Change discussion in a rural context, and I am sure I will get in trouble for it. I promise I will be back to the humour of the farm soon, save to say we dodged a cyclone bullet this week, for which we are most thankful.
Pour a drink, we’re going on a journey, and it may take a little time.
The reality is that the climate is changing. This is undisputed. The climate has always changed and always will. Since 1900, the world’s population has gone from 1.6 billion to 7.9 billion; logically, humans are changing the climate. We are, generally, polluters, and we know that sticking stuff in the air changes things. It’s indisputable. We do stuff to the atmosphere, and the world seeks to bring back balance and order to the system.
The problem is how we approach this. Because right now, it’s all over the place.
Imagine living in a small town at the top of a valley. Mountains and forests surround you. In the distance, at the bottom of the valley, you can see smoke and know that a forest fire is heading in your direction. So how does the village react?
The villagers first head to the town square, where they start arguing about what and who started the fire. It’s the farmers; clearly, they’ve started the fire. But wait, no, it’s the visitors who drive their petrol cars through the area on weekends. It’s the miners. Then a fight arises over how we can prevent fires in the future. We should run the farmers off their land and ban visitors, and the debate becomes heated.
Meanwhile, the fire gets larger and closer. Ash is starting to fall in the village square, and the smell of smoke is thick in the air. The villagers start to argue about who will pay for this fire. Should we levy a tax on residents? They wonder if planting different kinds of trees will help. What if you could buy into a trading scheme so that if you contributed to the fire, you could feel better about it?
The fire reaches the bottom of the village and starts to burn several houses. The villagers are incensed. No one is taking responsibility for how this fire started! No one is being accountable! They hunch over their phones, rant, rage on social media, and suddenly all are forest fire experts. A demonstration is organised, and a counter-demonstration is also. People are told they must buy battery-powered cars and ride more bicycles.
The fire creeps closer, and no one notices that their is no fire station, nor fire trucks.
Of course, in this case, the forest fire is climate change. We’re arguing about how we stop the fire and who started it rather than preparing for it and ensuring that we reduce the risk of starting another one in the future.
What has made me increasingly angry this week is different people and organisations releasing press releases and posting on social media that what has happened in New Zealand is all the fault of farmers, including the deaths of our people. It’s disrespectful, tone-deaf, and offensive and shows that most new actors have a burned-out husk where the human soul should be.
People have lost loved ones in this storm, and in some cases, they won’t be able to put them to rest for days and weeks because the water table is so high they can’t be buried. That’s the reality. We still need to respond and recover, with hundreds, if not thousands, still unaccounted for. But these hardcore fanatics and Greens, rather than putting on a pair of gumboots and saying, “how can I help” are happy to score political points and attempt to sell, in the case of Greenpeace, some more subscriptions.
All around the country, farmers are mobilising to send feed to the affected regions. They are starting to figure out how to get into those places with shovels, diggers, trucks, and machinery to help. The government is doing the same. Aucklanders are doing the same. This fanatical minority is shouting from the edges like an insane street preacher, and it’s pissing us off.
The clear response now needs to be an adaptation. We need to adapt to this new normal, which will be expensive. I fear that with the way that our government works, at a central and local level, this won’t happen. The red tape, lack of funding, under-investment over decades, and poor decision-making have created vulnerable communities.
But we are not focussing on adaptation and protection; we are still arguing about how this started and how we can prevent it, and some ideas are just not feasible and causing problems themselves. We need to build resiliency, not level tax disproportionately across the country. Planting forests won’t help us, and the emissions trading scheme will fail.
But the zealots refuse to believe this and would rather attack the person than debate the issue. So let’s look at two options that are not going to help but are being vigorously pushed by the powers; using pine trees to pull carbon out of the air and the emissions trading scheme.
I’ve written about the folly of pines as a means to save the world. You can find that in a column titled “You can’t eat a tree.” Grab another drink, have a read of that if you haven’t, and come back here.
But let’s talk perhaps a little more factually about trees. Melanie Newfield is a local writer who has a substack called
What I like about Melanie's writing is that it is unemotional, factually based, and very well-researched. She's not biased, and finding well-researched information about climate change is difficult.Melanie recently wrote about how much impact planting trees really have on climate change. I’ll leave the link to the full article at the bottom of this column; it’s worth a read. I’m going to summarise (probably badly.)
While planting trees has some effect, so many variables are involved that it’s not an effective option. It takes a very long time for trees to grow, reaching their maximum carbon-sucking potential, but then as they mature, that rate drops off. All the carbon is released if they die, is burned, or is otherwise removed. Forest fires also burn the soil, which releases yet more carbon. Natural forests are more efficient at storing carbon.
In fact, it is far more important to protect the forests that we have than plant new ones. … if tropical deforestation were a country, it would be the third largest emitter after China and the USA.
So we need to protect what we already have, and we are not doing that worldwide.
Worse, my view is that planting pines in New Zealand on productive land is a massive loss to the country. Communities are destroyed, it is ineffective at offsetting emissions, they don’t act well to absorb carbon, and they are often badly managed. We see the result of this in Gisborne.
Melanie gives her conclusion.
Looking beyond the disagreements on the detail, it’s clear that planting trees isn’t going to solve our problem without a drastic reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere. If we want to reach “net zero”, which is where we are putting no more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than we are removing, then most of that has to come from reducing emissions, not planting trees.
I do encourage you to read her entire article. Now, final topic, let’s talk about the emissions trading scheme and whether that is effective.
Spoiler alert, it’s bullshit, but you knew that already.
The Guardian has been researching the issues and has found that carbon credits are largely worthless, and the system itself is likely causing more harm than good.
To me, the carbon trading scheme has always felt like the same scheme that Enron tried and, more alarmingly, rather like trading in bitcoin.
The idea is that you buy carbon credits to offset your emissions. The money is meant to go into a practical way of carbon offsetting, such as planting forests or buying them.
The world’s largest carbon offsetting scheme shows that more than 90% of its tropical rainforest carbon credits are worthless, making no impact on climate change, except perhaps in the negative. Verra, an NGO based in Washington, is the largest player in this area.
Guess who was heavily involved in setting up Verra and its rules?
Our old friend, Shell.
These companies effectively buy existing forests or land to plant trees. That is very much what is happening in New Zealand.
“When I visit other territories, nearly all of them are in contact with a business related to carbon. Normally they arrive with a promise of big money if the community agrees to set up a project. Sometimes they don’t let communities have access to their lands as part of the agreement but we live from hunting and fishing. For me, it’s dangerous,” she says. “The most cruel thing is they arrive in communities with long legal documents in English and don’t explain what’s in them. Many Indigenous communities don’t read or have low literacy, so they don’t understand what they’re agreeing to.” The Guardian - Carbon Pirates
That’s a quote from Fany Kuiro Castro, a leader from the Colombian Amazon. And the same thing is happening here.
Last month, in New Zealand, Dame Anne Salmond penned an article for Newsroom titled “NZ’s fatally flawed climate change strategy.” It’s not her first; in March last year, she wrote “The folly of carbon farming with pine trees.”
They are well-researched and worth reading. The government has a serious problem. Not only is the impact of allowing large multinationals to buy productive land and then destroy it and the surrounding communities, but it’s also worthless.
That is a massive issue for the government because its basic strategy is to offset emissions through these schemes to meet our obligations. If this is worthless, then the cost could be very high.
It is highly likely the ETS scheme will collapse in the next few years.
Like Shell’s role in setting up Verra, in New Zealand forestry interests have been heavily involved with the ETS. In the ETS, for instance, the very high rewards given to monoculture pine plantations ignore the carbon emissions involved in site works, planting, trimming, harvesting, transporting and processing the logs, and the costs of the environmental devastation associated with plantation forestry.
According to an FAO study, the global forestry supply chain emits about twice as much carbon as it sequesters. Given the length of New Zealand’s forestry supply chain, with most logs being sent unprocessed to China or India, and the short life of most of their products, a rigorous life cycle analysis of its emissions profile is likely to prove sobering.
Trees. Don’t. Work.
Again, don’t get me wrong; New Zealand has a place for forestry. It’s a long-time industry and just a shame that we don’t process to create products here but stick them on a ship and send it somewhere so that someone else can create a product before selling it back to us.
I’m not saying that New Zealand should not continue to reduce emissions. Offsetting is folly. However, in the global scheme of things, when you have China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Germany, Korea, Indonesia and literally dozens of other countries emitting on a global scale, I am often left with the question, “what’s the point?”
When Shell is heavily involved in the emissions trading scheme, the credibility of the scheme is shot.
Trees won’t work, but New Zealand hasn’t figured that out yet. It is highly likely that the government will move to tax us, perhaps by stealth, to try and buy their way out of emissions numbers.
None of this focuses on adaptation. None of the tax taken goes into subsidies that build resilience. The village is on fire, and the village idiots are arguing about who started it.
Perhaps, like an increasing number of countries, we should start putting together legal cases to sue the largest emitters in the world and use that money to start building better infrastructure for what is to come.
We have always had devastating storms; what makes it different now is that we’ve grown into and built into areas that we perhaps shouldn’t have. We haven’t maintained infrastructure. We’ve cut corners. We haven’t kept up with our flood defences. Of course, the storms are increasing in frequency and intensity.
What is most distressing is that some of our politicians are perpetuating myths when we are still recovering from a large cyclone to further their personal interests. Rural folk are in the gun, again, not just farmers, but all of us who support rural. Remember them when it comes to voting this year.
Where you can donate to Cyclone Gabrielle victims, I’d strongly recommend you choose a local charity or Federated Farmers, so your donation doesn’t get diluted.
Until next time, stay safe.
Updated: Dame Anne Salmond: “Logs like bulldozers - why the East Coast feels betrayed.”
Thanks for the shoutout Ian, I'm glad you found the article useful. I get your frustration with people blaming / saying I-told-you-so when people are suffering so much. In fact, this Sunday's newsletter is a reminder to people to apply a bit more thought about discussing climate change right now.