Planting boom hangover on its way: get more trees in the ground, starting now

In the latest episode in Hot Topic’s election coverage, forestry consultant Piers Maclaren looks at a forestry issue that seems to be missed by all the major parties.

New Zealand faces a major carbon problem in the period from 2023-2038, resulting from the imbalanced age-class structure of our plantation forest estate. Let me explain.

Forestry is a cheap and easy way to sequester carbon, but it is not a total global solution because at best it could possibly offset some 10% of the carbon the planet is likely to emit over the next 100 years from the burning of coal. Afforestation is merely the converse of deforestation, which has been responsible for something like 20% of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution. Afforestation can help reverse some of that portion.

Afforestation takes a landscape of low carbon density (for example, pasture or short scrub) and changes it to one of high carbon density – a forest. If the forest consists of an even balance of trees of all ages, then it will be in a steady-state situation — neither a carbon sink nor a carbon source, but
carbon neutral — and will remain in that state in perpetuity. The act of establishing a forest therefore constitutes a sink, but the maintenance of a forest is carbon neutral. This applies to all types of forest, and it is irrelevant whether the trees are felled with a chainsaw or by storm damage; whether the trees are removed from the forest, converted to some product and ultimately oxidised, or whether the biomass decays within the forest; or whether the trees are removed in clusters, or are widely spaced individuals. The point is that the removal of some component of the forest — for example a harvestable block of trees within the estate — is exactly counterbalanced
by the growth of all the other blocks.

Continue reading “Planting boom hangover on its way: get more trees in the ground, starting now”

A snake swallows the elephant in the room and then flogs a dead horse – climate change politics in NZ Election 2011

Possible the longest ever title on a Hot Topic post: Simon Johnson continues our series on the NZ election by examining the entrails…

So whats happening with climate change in the election?

Elephant swallowed by the snake
I was originally thinking about writing a wonkish post comparing climate change policies between parties. You know the sort of thing. Which parties have policies that reflect the seriousness of the impacts the science predicts? Who has got the science wrong? Which politicians are all talk and no action? What are the minute details of the each party’s NZETS policies. Such as delays to sector entry dates, partial price obligations and varying free unit allocation regimes in the . MEGO, anyone? (My Eyes Glaze Over….)

Then I thought, Nah! I am looking through the wrong end of the telescope. You know what really strikes me about climate change in the election? It’s the absence. It is as if climate change is nearly completely absent from the campaign. When climate change does pop up, it’s portrayed in simplistic soundbites.

Continue reading “A snake swallows the elephant in the room and then flogs a dead horse – climate change politics in NZ Election 2011”

Agriculture: National’s double whammy on the environment

Here’s the first in a series of NZ election special articles from Hot Topic’s contributors. More pithy comment to follow… Last week I was open-mouthed when I heard the National Party release its environment and climate policy pretty much in the same breath as  releasing the agriculture policy (same province, same day). I can’t figure out how they thought these two things went together — well, in a good way anyway.

Climate change: no mention of the importance of the issue, the alarming reports coming from the scientists.  A lot of blather about keeping up (or perhaps “down” would be a more appropriate term) with other countries. Slowing down the ETS. Never mind that our actions are among the smallest in the industrialised world (see the Climate Action Tracker’s assessment here — rated “inadequate”).

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The scientific yardstick for political policy

I was pleased to see the Labour Party’s announcement that it is opposed to the Southland lignite development planned by Solid Energy, and went looking for more detail in the party’s climate change policy.  The opening paragraph of the policy statement struck me as more direct than I expected:

Climate change poses an enormous global threat and severely threatens our way of life. It is occurring more rapidly than previously predicted. Humankind is pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere on a scale far greater than the ability of the environment to absorb them.

Against this background the decision to oppose the lignite development in spite of its claimed financial benefit makes perfect sense: Continue reading “The scientific yardstick for political policy”

Too Many People?

In 1932 I was born into a world of 2 billion people.  Nearly 80 years on there are 7 billion, more than three times as many. My own small country New Zealand has nearly tripled its population in that time. I confess to feeling anxiety about the capacity of the globe to sustain this level of population, let alone the further billions we can expect this century. Does that make me a populationist? That’s the term used by Ian Angus, editor of online journal Climate and Capitalism, and Simon Butler, coeditor of Australian Green Left Weekly, in their new book Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis to describe people who attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers. The authors don’t. They attribute climate change and other ecological challenges to the growth imperative of capitalism, and their book takes issue with those who see “overpopulation” as a cause of the threats to the environment.

Continue reading “Too Many People?”