Tag: agriculture

Self-interested, myopic hot-air

AtomHeartMother.jpgNew Zealand’s farming leadership have not distinguished themselves in the debate about climate policy. Federated Farmers president Don Nicholson has called for NZ to set no target for emissions reductions and for agriculture to be excluded from the emissions trading scheme, and former vice-president Frank Brenmuhl is still ruminating on the need for more debate on basics:

Political expediency has ensured the scientific debate has been reduced to a battle between believers and deniers.

No prizes for guessing Brenmuhl’s position… It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to point to an excellent analysis of agriculture’s role in the ETS by Adolf Stroombergen at Infometrics. He is scathing of Federated Farmers:

Once again we hear Federated Farmers bleating about the potential burden placed on them by an emissions trading scheme, proclaiming that farmers are doing all they can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hence any carbon charge on agriculture would be pointless. Rubbish.

Stroombergen doesn’t mince his words:

Arguing that agriculture should not be part of this mechanism has as much merit as arguing that it should not pay ACC premiums linked to its accident rate, or that it should not face fines for polluting waterways.

Merit has seldom been a key feature of Federated Farmer’s arguments about emissions policy, but Stroombergen notes that:

The self-interested myopic hot air from some in the agricultural sector has fortunately been given little credence.

Perhaps Nicholson and Brenmuhl haven’t got the ear of the right people in the National Party. We should all be grateful for that.

Why did Nick Smith hide the facts on forestry?

targetGovernment ministers have deliberately played down the role of forestry in meeting emissions targets, documents released under the Official Information Act suggest. Diligent digging at No Right Turn has uncovered a Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry paper [PDF] titled New forest planting and harvesting intentions under high carbon prices, which makes clear that forest planting will increase significantly under a stable Emissions Trading Scheme, and that even a modest ($20/tonne) carbon price could trigger planting of up to 100,000 hectares a year — a rate not seen since the forestry boom of the 1990s, and enough to offset a huge chunk of NZ’s emissions to 2020 and beyond. Climate change minister Nick Smith did not mention these figures during the target consultation process, though it is clear he must have known about them. His failure to front with the facts on forestry amounts to a clear attempt to manipulate public perception of the difficulty of meeting steep targets, and raises serious questions about the agenda driving government policy.

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The size of a cow

AtomHeartMother.jpg NZ’s farming leadership remains in denial about the need for action on climate change, as a remarkable speech [full text, Stuff report] by Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson demonstrates. Addressing the Plant Protection Society’s annual conference in Dunedin yesterday, Nicholson took swipes at Keisha Castle-Hughes, Greenpeace and the Green Party:

It’s not the reality that Greenpeace or the Green Party informs people before they ‘sign-on’. There’s no hint of a real solution apart from some ‘great leap backwards’. No, the vision they extol is instead apocalyptic. It is designed to create a climate of fear and don’t the anti-progress agents love fear. A fear of no oil, rising sea levels, extinction and starvation. It’s moral brainwashing without facts or context.

No real solutions on offer? No facts to support calls for action? It looks to me like Nicolson’s the one who’s making stuff up — and leading NZ’s farmers down a commercially disastrous path in the process.

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Farming carbon: part of the solution?

This column was published in the Waikato Times on July 14

dairy-farmCould New Zealand agriculture be part of the solution to climate change?  We know all too well that it is part of the problem – and that’s not an accusation, by the way, just a recognition.  But problems are there to be tackled, and what is called carbon farming looks like one way in which agriculture can substantially contribute to climate change mitigation and at the same time improve the soils on which it depends.

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The first cut is the deepest

targetThis week climate minister Nick Smith and international negotiator Tim Groser start their 2020 emissions target roadshow, ostensibly taking the pulse of the nation on the question of what target New Zealand should commit to in the run-up to Copenhagen in December. Much of the argument will undoubtedly centre around the costs of taking action. The government has already signalled it won’t commit to targets likely to damage the economy, but there is a bigger question to consider — what emissions cuts does the world have to consider in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and how should New Zealand play its part? Any cost to the NZ economy is only a small part of that overall equation, and (arguably) not the most important. I want to examine what “the science” is telling us about a global goal and how we get there, and what that means for New Zealand. The leaflet produced to accompany the consultation process is pretty feeble in this respect, so I make no apologies for going into some detail here.

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