Misguided emissions policies, priorities and people
Released 11 Aug 2009
Don Nicolson, President of Federated Farmers, speech to the 62nd Anual Conference of the New Zealand Plant Protection Society
I am delighted to be here today to be a part of the 62nd New Zealand Plant Protection Society annual conference.
The work you do is invaluable to farmers and to the New Zealand economy.
I would like to acknowledge your President, Trevor James, members of the Executive Committee and distinguished guests.
You have a packed programme and as a humble sheep farmer from Southland, I am in awe of your society's contribution to New Zealand agriculture.
My speech today is full of challenges from my Federation to your society and to all people of reason. I will be laying down a challenge to the almost religious aura accorded to climate variation.
In this I will deliver my punch line in reverse.
This is to ensure ears won't be closed to what I hope will be a compelling and logical argument.
My speech is ultimately a clarion call for research-led solutions to the human aspects of climate variation. I say human, as the greatest influence on climate is planet Earth and the solar system in which we exist.
Before I give climate variation both barrels, I first wish to encourage you and your society's vigilance on biosecurity and hope to engage your support too.
It seems perverse that an economy so heavily based on an absence of biological nasties, has so porous a border.
The fact we have not encountered a truly serious incursion is luck and not good management.
Last year almost 600,000 sea containers passed through our ports with no physical inspection. No less than 91 percent of all sea containers came off ships and went straight through to their destination.
Not to mention the thousands of tonnes of bulk cargo that came in freighters.
Palm kernel has been found to contain living organisms and if hearsay is true, that includes the body parts of dead mammals.
Most New Zealanders are completely unaware that German Wasps only came into New Zealand in the 1940s, followed by the common wasp and paper wasps in the 1970s.
One can only imagine what picnics were like before wasps.
To the list of picnic problems we can add the aggressive and invasive Argentine ant, which is now endemic. There have been several eradications of fire ants too, the most recent only this year.
The $24 billion dollar question is this. How on earth did such invasive insects slip past the border? How on earth can the 66 biosecurity incursions in the last 12 months be explained away?
Of equal interest to your society is the one-way street of grains coming into New Zealand.
Australia operates stringent biosecurity that precludes the importation of kiwi grain, if we had the grain to export that is.
As a net importer of grains, New Zealand is far less choosy. A number of foreign seeds per tonne of Australian grain have been detected. This includes ryegrass and roundup resistant ryegrass.
After milling in New Zealand, the waste stream is often sold off as feed. It just takes a viable seed or two to survive milling and we have a pastoral ticking time bomb.
The shame is that very few people are listening.
It's also reflective of a frightening complacency that pervades New Zealand. We sit smugly within our vast sea moat, just as the French did in their forts within the Maginot Line in 1940.
Biosecurity is like war.
In 1940, rather than attack head on, the German's simply went around the most extensive and expensive fortification system ever built.
In New Zealand in 2009, we have that same ‘Maginot Mentality', anchored on ‘intelligence-led' profiling and, of course, our big moat.
The threat won't necessarily come in the few thousand containers inspected, but in the hundreds of thousands of containers not inspected.
Foot and mouth disease is, after all, one of only two threats that could decimate New Zealand's economy.
The other being a cataclysmic earthquake striking Wellington.
That's why Federated Farmers lays down the challenge to Biosecurity NZ by aptly labeling it Insecurity NZ.
Indeed, Biosecurity is the one area of Government that we would like to see hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. It is the one area of Government, where thousands of eyes are better than a handful.
It's the one area of Government that needs to increase staff and not make cuts.
Yet priorities appear to be an economic weak link.
I say this as New Zealand moves to commit to an emissions reduction target.
If we are truly committed to ‘saving the planet' then you would imagine we would be investing heavily into science and research.
This is, after all, an area of interest for your society.
But no, what New Zealand is committed to is not solutions but appearance.
I say this to make both a political point and a practical one.
If saving the planet is the prime motivation, then when in history was civilization saved by the implementation of a tax?
A tax being what the Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS, is.
Could you have imagined the last of the Roman Emperors, Romulus Augustus, with the German hordes banging on the gates of his palace, turning to his advisors to recommend they tax the barbarians out of existence?
Farmers are dumbfounded that the world's best brains believe ETS-like policies will suddenly turn climate variations around.
Get the ETS today and suddenly tomorrow glaciers will cease retreating and the polar ice caps will stop melting.
I have news for them. They won't.
I have news for Greenpeace, the Green Party and supporters of the 40 percent target, which is actually 62 percent given 1990 is the datum.
Emission reduction targets won't work either.
It seems surreal that we are investing so much faith, money and energy in a tax and a target.
The truth is that the solution rests in rooms like these with your scientific colleagues around the world.
Back in the early 19th century, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population.
It is one of the blackest pieces of prose ever written and viewed the world's ability to feed the masses as constrained by nature. In other words, starvation, conflict over resources and disease would keep the global population in check.
The world was producing as much food as it ever could. The Greens would call it ‘Peak Food.'
In 1820 the global population was 1.02 billion. In 2009, however, 6.7 billion people inhabit the earth.
I bring up Mr Malthus for several reasons.
Neo-Malthusians can be seen in the anti-globalisation and green movements. Peak oil, peak food, peak carbon.
They're the ones who hold the word ‘peak' to their chests. The notion is that this is all beyond the planet's capacity to meet human needs, so we need to throttle back under threat of disaster.
The Maginot Mentality also applies to current climate change policies. A tax and target will do it all.
The shame for the neo-Malthusians is that peak food is a mirage. Science, embodied by organisations such as the Plant Protection Society, has found a way to increase yield and productivity.
Generation after generation.
We farmers took your work to assist in feeding the teeming mass of humanity.
That's how we feed 5.6 billion more people in 2009 than we did in 1820. A 557 percent increase.
Demographers are now predicting the earth's population will hit 10 billion by 2050.
In the course of some 230 years, the earth's human population would have increased by nine billion mouths or 880 percent.
Can we feed them, yes we can.
I have confidence that science will keep farmers ahead of the game. We are realistic optimists and history has proven us - not the neo-Malthusians - right.
This is all central to Federated Farmers belief that setting targets to reduce emissions will fail.
It can't work and won't work. Targets cannot work and will not work.
Setting targets to cut global emissions ignores the increasing global population and those new human beings will consume.
It's like trying to hold an incoming tide back with your hands. The tide will simply envelop you.
This is why we have faith that research and not a tax or a target is the ultimate solution. Yet this is a solution that is being underinvested in.
Look at it like this.
Between 1990 and 2007, global emissions grew by 34 percent. In the same period, the global population increased by 1.4 billion mouths or around 27 percent.
Do you see the correlation? The increasing size of humanity is in line with increasing emissions. How on earth will a tax and a target solve that, when New Zealand does not produce 99.8 percent of global emissions?
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.
Take Greenpeace ambassador, Keisha Castle-Hughes. Her latest movie, The Vintners Luck, is backed financially by the New Zealand Film Commission. It was shot in France, had its world premiere in Toronto and is being marketed by its ‘stars' far and wide.
We know it takes one kilogram of carbon to produce a litre of milk but how much carbon is needed to produce and distribute a movie?
There's no mention of solutions by Greenpeace and its acolytes. It is predicated on the here and now.
The world is not set in aspic - and this is what sets humans apart and makes us adaptable as a species.
People have two choices; to either fear tomorrow or roll with it and adapt. Farmers and scientists together have proven this ability to adapt and evolve.
Humans also crave progress, not regression. Are we really going to deny 3.3 billion more human beings access to what we enjoy?
Yet, the most bizarre notion is that climate variation is somehow new. That it is unique, unparalleled and frightening.
An Inconvenient Truth started this notion and I had the point rammed home during a recent television debate.
The fact that low lying Pacific Islands may be subject to rising sea levels is truly sad. It is catastrophic for them and will lead to social upheaval.
Yet it isn't new.
About 6,000 years ago the Sahara Desert wasn't a desert. It was a savannah, with lakes, rivers and fish. Over the following 2,000 years the Sahara underwent its metamorphosis into the world's largest tropical desert.
I wonder what Dr Russel Norman, Charles Chauvel or Keisha Castle-Hughes would have made of this change if they lived back then?
Would they have railed among the 14 million human beings on Earth at the time to halt global warming?
No doubt ‘ban the bronze age' would have been the cry from some. De-stock the Sahara would have been a call from others.
Ms Castle-Hughes would have made a documentary, should the technology have existed.
The Sahara's transformation from fertile farm land to sand was more dramatic and more apocalyptic for people living there than anything we have seen to date in the 21st century.
At about the time the Sahara finally turned to sand around 3,200 years BC, the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae was being established on the wind-swept Orkney Islands off Scotland's northern coast.
Aside from being the most complete Neolithic settlement in the world, it is proof of climate variation. Archaeological evidence points to a climate that was much warmer back then than it is today.
Around 2,500 BC - after about 600 years of flourishing - the Orkney's suddenly became colder and more inhospitable. Skara Brae was abandoned. What became of the inhabitants is unknown but sand covered it up for thousands of years.
Step forward to the fifth century AD.
The Saxons became a nomadic tribe due to climate variation when their coastal settlements were inundated by rising seas. The Saxons became nomadic barbarians for hire.
Fighting both for and against Rome.
In the fifth century AD, with Rome in terminal decline, the Saxons were invited to Britain by the Romano-Britain's. At that time Picts from the north were making raids into Britain so armed muscle was needed. One barbarian to neutralise another.
Except it was a little too successful. The Saxons liked what they saw and decided to stay. The rest, as they say, is history.
Roman Britain became Saxon Britain.
In other words, the Britain that emerged and the history we have today was created by climate variation. World history would have taken a completely different turn if those Saxon villages were not wiped out by rising seas.
In fact, I wonder what Dr Russel Norman, Charles Chauvel or Keisha Castle-Hughes would have made of this fifth century dislocation?
No doubt they would have railed for international conventions against retreating glaciers and rising sea levels. Again, human activities would have been fingered so the burning of peat, the forging of steel would have been banned by treaty.
I wonder what the 190 million human beings alive at the time would have thought of this. Would they have embraced every form of environmental protection or rolled with it and adapted?
Well, lucky for us all they adapted.
Climate variation shapes civilization as much as landform. Its influence on human history is unquestionable. Homo sapiens would never have evolved into the most successful species the planet has seen without climate variation.
Today it seems many believe the Earth's landforms are perfect. Change has gone from being a natural occurrence to being exclusively man-made.
Increasingly, norms in the digital age are being overlaid on geological time.
We live in an age of mass communication, where everybody has an opinion on everything. A well designed website and a webcam can be as powerful a tool as a doctorate and years of scientific study.
Communication is instantaneous.
You send and receive email in a fraction of a second. Opinions are made and shaped by this increased tempo and it influences the media.
If you are not first to a story, you are last.
Few people understand just how old our planet is. To many people, 50 years is a very long time.
Humans have been around for 10,000 of the 4.6 billion years our planet has existed. This means our species has been only around for 0.0000021 percent of Earth's existence.
It's a blink of an eye when compared to the long history of our planet. That means the last 20 years, where climate change has become central to policy, is an incredibly miniscule amount of time geologically.
This is not to say that the activities of the Earth's population have not affected the climate.
It's just to illustrate that climate variation is nothing new. Yet it's being interpreted by those who do think it's new.
This is how come people demand action. But action on what exactly? Even if every human adopted subsistence living tomorrow, the past affects of our activities would still accumulate.
The clincher is that the world's humans will not go backwards. Let us instead look forward.
Due to the weight of billions of more human beings - some 3.3 billion more in fact in the next 40 years - any attempt to cut emissions, as I said earlier, is doomed.
That demands solutions and I don't mean a tax or a target.
This is where Federated Farmers diverges from the Government, its policy advisors and the many people and organisations calling for big emissions cuts.
It's why we say don't set a target.
Federated Farmers backs The Skeptical Environmentalist, Dr Björn Lomborg, in calling for research - not taxes.
If New Zealand put 0.05 percent of GDP into research instead of the emissions trading scheme, it would pump $87.5 million into low carbon initiatives.
In the United States that figure would be some $11 billion, while globally, over $34 billion would be raised. This is money that could be invested in pastoral research, into using the Earth's oceans as sinks and developing biological scrubbers.
Remember, it is designed to offset human emissions.
We are not talking about mirrors in space or other outer worldly solutions. We have to be careful about trying to take on the planet as the planet will always win.
What a sizeable amount of money into climate change solutions delivers is the means to become more efficient while reducing the footprint. It recognises that there is science we can only dream of today, which will become available over the next 40 years.
That's where farmers pledge to work with scientists, Government aside.
Outside of the area, Federated Farmers is urging Government to implement a pathway to bring total research and development spending up to 3 percent of GDP by 2029 - a threefold increase on 2008.
What I need to reinforce is that New Zealand doesn't produce 99.8 percent of global emissions. Worse, the 0.1 percent that supposedly comes from pastoral agriculture doesn't reflect the 1 percent of humanity we can feed. It doesn't reflect the fact that, while half of the country's emissions profile, agriculture accounts for 64 percent of exports.
The debate is skewed to the negative when in fact unsubsidised agricultural efficiency makes New Zealand a good global citizen.
On behalf of New Zealand's farmers, I salute your society and the way you partner with farmers to make New Zealand a prosperous country.
We need to work together to ensure that all New Zealanders look to progress and enlightenment - not fear and regression.
Thank you and I wish you all the best for the rest of your conference.
