A recent Forest and Bird Newsletter contrasted the anticipated loss of 100 jobs in the Department of Conservation with the announced doubling of the number of people employed in the Ministry of Economic Development’s unit aimed at expanding the oil and minerals industries. The newsletter comments that some of those who will lose their jobs with DOC are expected to be people with strong scientific and technical experience who know what would be lost if mining or other destructive developments were to take place on conservation land.
Forest and Bird are right to be suspicious. The Minister for Economic Development has given ample evidence that in the thinking of the government the economic gain to be had from fossil fuel exploitation balances any environmental damage it causes. They have had to backtrack from the initial plan to open up some of the most highly protected conservation land for mining, but there’s every indication that they will continue to hover and find other opportunities to prize open land that ought to be left undisturbed, in order to extract fossil fuel from it. The same Forest and Bird newsletter set out the organisation’s hope to save the Denniston Plateau from a proposed new opencast coal mine which would destroy 200 hectares and increase New Zealand’s coal exports by up to 63% per year. And that would only be the beginning. The Australian company holds mining permits across the Plateau, which would generate an estimated 50 million tonnes of coal. Continue reading “Leave fossil fuels undisturbed.”
I was a little startled a few weeks back to see in a Waikato Times column written by former National Party MP Michael Cox the extraordinary claim that the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption “shot out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire years on Earth”. I don’t know where he derived this from – no doubt it’s floating around somewhere in the denial world, though even there it seems possible that he misunderstood what he was reading. Anyway it served to support his view that talk of human-caused warming is a Left-inspired crusade to compensate for the collapse of communism! I was able to say in a letter to the paper how ridiculous the Pinatubo statement was, and pretty much everything else he said as well. 
I have been reading the impressive court statement made by American climate activist Tim DeChristopher before receiving a two-year jail sentence for making fake bids at an oil and gas lease auction of parcels of public land in Utah in December 2008. The sentence was harsh but evidently not because the offence was particularly heinous. “The offence itself, with all apologies to people actually in the auction itself, wasn’t that bad,” said the judge. No, the serious matter was DeChristopher’s “continuing trail of statements”. The judge 
America is much better in technology than governance. That’s the sentence that leapt out at me and remained prominent throughout my reading of economist Robert Repetto’s book America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward. I sought the book for review because, although its focus is on the US, what happens there will crucially affect the rest of us, in terms of both the level of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and the likelihood of international agreement to limit them. The book doesn’t exactly inspire hope on either count, but it is constructive in the path it suggests for the US to follow and puts the ball squarely in the court of the policy makers.