Charlie Pederson in the DomPost
Today’s DomPost has a column by Charlie Pederson in the “Greenzone” section. You may recall Charlie is the president of Federated Farmers who specialises in attacks on environmentalists - an interesting inclusion in the environment section.
In his column he argues that “extreme measures such as … stopping [farmers] from intensifying are not economically sustainable in an industry that is proudly subsidy free”.
Firstly, dairy intensification is consuming the aquifers and polluting the rivers. The vast majority of lowland rivers are too polluted for swimming. The Canterbury aquifer is dropping every year but still the dairy conversions continue and the industrial agriculturalists with their 3000 cow herds simply drill the bore even deeper to get to the water. Intensification is threatening the future of the dairy industry - environmentally and also our by undermining our marketting as environmentally friendly.
Secondly, unless dairy covers the cost of the increase in greenhouse emissions since 1990, it will be taxpayers that pick up the bill for the carbon credits and effectively subsidise dairy. At this stage this excess looks like being 38million tonnes CO2 equivalent which at a conservative $20 per tonne would cost the taxpayer $760m.
Charlie does refer to the 10 in 10 campaign by the Feds - to ask their members to reduce their nutrient loss by 10% in 10 years. As Nandor pointed out some time ago, this target is ridiculously low.
The dairy industry trades on New Zealand’s clean and green image. There are lots of farmers who are doing their bit to clean up their farms and waterways. But Charlie seems more interested in representing industrial agriculture and that is not helping with our clean and green image - or reality.
May 12th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
couldnt agree more russ. peterson has an exceptionally miopic view of cost and competitiveness.
his opinion piece reads like a narrow minded advcacy of growth at all costs. like with the aa posts here recently, you’ve got to expect a degree of industry advocacy, but his position (which seems more entrenched by the day) is so short sighted:
“…extreme measures such as stopping farmers from improving their land or stopping them from intensifying are not economically sustainable in an industry that is proudly subsidy-free. reducing agricultural productivity is not socially acceptable in a country where every citizen’s standard of living is dependent on agriculture’s continues success.”
the irony of his opinion is laughable. for him the solution lies in industry self-control “rather than regulation”. does the phrase “there’ll be no business done on a dead planet” ring a bell?
unregulated intensification like we’ve seen around the north island lakes and in canterbury is tantamount to subsidy. dairy reaps the benefits of intensification while everyone else picks up the cost.
although bordering on poor taste i couldn’t help raising a smile at the audacity of a wgtn animal rights groups suggestion that peterson go vegetarian following a reccent heart attack. i dont agree with their extreme stance on animal rights, but the opportunity to poke a little borax at an opposite extreme was clearly too tempting.
cheers
mike
May 13th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
“Subsidy free”, eh? As I see it, farmers and others are effectively grabbing a subsidy from future generations, who will have to bear the costs of the greenhouse gas emissions being produced now. These generations could probably do with a spokesperson.
May 14th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Russel I agree with what you are saying. As I live in Canterbury I will tell you the results of what Charlie’s sophistry looks like. If only I had a photo.
Driving back from the Rakai Greens meeting the other evening from Dunsandle to Coalgate I drove through a very deserlet land scape of cleared and burning paddocks. I asked Mojo what was going on.
Large tracks of land that was forrestry belonging to the Selyn District Plantation Board has been cleared to make way for dairy farming.
This I feel is a total disregard for the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol. Further more it is as if this farmer Council is deliberatly giving the Greens the fingers.
Afew months ago there was an Easterly breeze that blew the smoke from the burn offs right up to Lake Coleridge. It was so thick that I had an asthma attack.
I have now braught this issue up with the Rakai Greens so Grace has kindly put it on the agenda. iT’S ABOUT TIME WE GOT TOUGH WITH THESE BAST****!!
May 14th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Yes, it is a massive subsidy by taxpayers to farmers. But, I don’t think we should fall in to the trap of saying ‘it’s a subsidy’ and assuming that the ‘it’s bad’ automatically follows. That implies an allegience to a market model which I think many Greens would be uncomfortable relying on. Using taxes to subsidise things, thus encourage them, is sometimes really good. It depends what we’re subsidysing and why. Subsidising the development of solar or insulating rental properties is something many Greens would advocate. Subsiding the climate change emissions of dairy is not. I’m just pointing this out, not implying others don’t get it.
That’s why we need to look at what the Government’s saying, and where they are placing economic incentives. If you talk carbon neutral but the incentives in your economy perpetuate the status quo, it’s just spin. Likewise the National Party. Great that they want to set targets, but are they really prepared to stop subsidising the unsustainable behaviour of farmers and tilt the playing field in favour of looking after our environment? Will they set rules that make it more profitable to conserve natural capital and resource than spend it all on one generation? We have yet to see any substantial policy in this direction from either big party.
With the budget coming out this week, it will be interesting to see not just whether Labour is prepared to invest seriously in sustainability but also whether the National Party is prepared to criticise them for failing to.
Molly
May 14th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Drakula you may be interested to know that Eyrewell forest in North Canterbury is also being clear felled for conversion into dairying.
They have even applied to take more than their share from the Waimak river as well as the usual aquifer robbery. Enviroment Canterbury is power-less to stop this as they have already lost in court to other dairying interests in mid-canterburys stressed aquifiers zone.
Who are the “Enviromental Vandals” responsible for this development?
Ngai Tahu Corporation
May 14th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
How much water do they want? 3.2 Billion litres+ per day
http://www.ecan.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/81BEBCD5-4A31-4FD1-A01B-A5F37C010 FBA/0/preliminary.pdf
May 14th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
i think you’re bang on molly. most rational people “get it” with regard subsidies - which merely confirms the non-rational approach of pederson: “an industry that is proudly subsidy-free”.
onceler, the water issue seems as bad as you paint it - if not worse. i had a crack at a wider view of the water issue a while back. we export water. it’s as simple as that. it cant continue at this rate. isn’t that the definition of un-sustainable resource use?
drakula, “total disregard for the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol”? when it comes to land use economics if what costs isn’t priced it’s ignored.
remember the initial defense to the airport taking land in “the castle”? “its the vibe of the thing your honour…” the spirit of kyoto doesn’t mean jack ’till it works within the prevailing system - the market economy. we’re getting there. slowly.
cheers
mike
May 14th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
I concur with “Drakula”, North Canterbury looks like it’s been bled dry. I recently travelled from Rangiora to Motueka via the Lewis Pass, and found that even in late April, there were drought affected grass-lands right up into the hinterland of the Waiau River gorges. I’ve seen browned-off grasslands in Marlborough many a year, but this was something I hadn’t expected to see in autumn.
My childhood included some years in the Waikato, surrounded by share-milking dairy farmers, whose cattle and electric fences were hazards of our exploratory rambles from paddock to paddock, finding shortcuts to our friends’ houses. Neither then nor now have I ever noticed any concern for the effects of the effluent discharged by dairy sheds; merely an all-consuming interest in the price paid by the Dairy Board/Fonterra per weight of butterfat.
The combination of greed and ignorance is never so strong as when those who are greedy can make themselves wealthier by professing ignorance of any social concern which might limit their wealth-generating potential.
I doubt that the Charlie Pedersen’s of this world will ever acknowledge the harm they do, and have done, to future generations of NZ citizens, until perhaps their own narrow lives are affected by some natural consequence of their own actions.
Start by water-metering the dairy farms, and maybe they’ll understand how much more environmental degradation they each account for. Or disallow them from accessing bores that tap the Canterbury aquifers. The land in Canterbury is not so rich that it can sustainably run as dairy pasture for very long; irrigation and fertilisation will cause river degradation far more swiftly than Didymo can destroy, if cow-cockies are let to have free rein to develop as much dairy pasture as they can consume.
But hey, my rural ramble finished a week ago, I’m back to being a city girl, so ignore me at will….
May 15th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Intergenerational subsidies are something New Zealanders don’t want to confront unless it is our generation that is subsidising the next generation, then there is a vested interest in stopping the subsidy.
A simple example of how these subsidies can be addressed was Vogel’s Immigration and Public Works Act. This authorised the Treasurer to borrow money to build the infrastructure needed to attract immigrants. The loans would be paid off by the immigrants in the future.
Much of the infrastructure was built to open up Crown lands for settlement therefore much of the money to repay the loans actually came from the increased land values.
This lend-subdivide-sell-repay_the_loan method of time transfer is still the basis of property development today. Crucially the intergenerational subsidy occurs when the current generation “borrows” a resource and omits to “repay the loan” at the end of the process.
On the other hand the pay-go method of road funding that we have had since 1930 has the current generation paying for the future generations roads. Resentment of this led to the funding crisis in the 70s and 80s because that generation refused to pay for this generation’s roads, gifting this generation with a “backlog” of roadworks which this generation resents because future generations will get all the benefits of fixing the backlog. Ditto for public transport of course. Perhaps the solution is for public transport capital investment to be borrowed and repaid from future carbon credits.
The dramatic restrictions on local body lending in the mid 1970s till the end of the 80s has led to most infrastructure upgrades also being funded on the pay-go system. Councils either have to borrow or increase their rates to fund infrastructure upgrades. No amount of government enquieries will change that fact, but they will definitely gloss over it.
May 15th, 2007 at 7:49 am
MikeyMike
Water is one of the few things we CAN export if we’re half clever about it. The rainfall on the West Coast of the South Island is prodigious. What we cannot do is export it effortlessly, export it for free, export it without noticing that we’re doing it. We also export energy in every kilo of Aluminium we smelt. Same argument as the water. For THIS country there is some surplus available above our requirements, in the natural income available of both water and energy (think geothermal and wind in bulk).
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/05/01/giant-wind-turbines/
… but not this much bulk
and tidal energy through the straits and under Auckland. No doubt at all we can have quite a bit more than we’ve got.
Point is, we have to be aware of what we are doing. Not one in a hundred even suspects it (you are uncommonly perceptive).
I don’t even bother going on about it though, because I expect that barring other interventions it is going to get more difficult to ship these things overseas. I wonder too, why we have no lumber industry and insist on exporting the raw logs. Russia is apparently a bit smarter than we in this. The waste from the lumbermill is valuable and combustible wood, easily formed into pellets for heating fuel. Something else we export along with giving up the jobs in the lumber mills and having the higher prices for lumber here.
One day there will be sanity in government… but I think there needs to be another 40 million years of evolution first.
respectfully
BJ
May 15th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
The Selwyn Plantation Board is half owned by Christchurch City Council. It was originally set up to conserve the soils on the plains. The Ashburton [Borough Council](?) is going to do the same thing (I think)
jh
May 15th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Actually (with regard to high-country tenure) part of me wonders what our urban environment would look like if the state owned the land and (good-guy) town planners and architects dictated what we could build where and how.
jh
May 15th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Pedersen is also on record for saying we need to keep pigs and chickens in cramped cages so they don’t eat each other. He knows nothing about the scientific consensus that free range production problems are problems of management whereas the suffering from cramped and barren conditions is inherent in the system. Even if he is too illiterate to read scientific papers (after all most do contain some big words), he should be listening to free range farmers among his own members. Pedersen’s stunning scientific rebuttal to the FAO paper detailing the damage caused by farming was “it was written by a vegan”.
It is worrying that this scientific illiterate is on the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee giving “advice” to government (actually telling them what they want to hear) on animal welfare matters.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
bj
we’re ill advised to export water if its impact is negative. sure west coast s.i. generally has a water surplus, but it has insufficient other resources to “utilise” it. primarily, a lack of productive land.
if they could “export” the water over the divide to canterbury you’d be getting somewhere. but somehow i dont think this or the next generation (kevyn) would think that scale of infrastructure investment was wise.
cheers
mike
May 16th, 2007 at 10:37 am
BJ, perhaps we should be making the canterbury dairy farmers buy their water from the West Coast? Could be a solution to the pressure on the aquifer.
I dont think we have really seen the damage that phosphates has done to our water supply all over NZ. The chemicals will continue to leach for years and years. Look at how our Lakes are dying.Dairying generates huge income and pays a really huge amount of Tax but they really need to start agressively cleaning up what they do. It can be done and statements from this idiot Pedersen dont advance their cause at all. He should go and they should get people in who proactively improve systems in use. Afterall it is possible to have an Organic Dairy farm. Others do it, so why not in Canterbury?
May 16th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
bj, blue “has your number”.
“Water is one of the few things we CAN export if we’re half clever about it”
rubbish. we’re not going to find a way to get water from west coast to canterbury in a hurry. many cantabrians ARE half clever and nothing’s been suggested to date.
i suspect if we were to move water across the alps we’d use all the energy that our energy exporters (as you put it) need. some reality bj.
if we continue exporting natural capital (in the form of dairy, and yes, hydro fuels tiwai point, so exporting alu. is also exporting water) we’re exporting our future. in which case mr pederson’s livelihood hangs in the balance.
cheers
mike
May 16th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Thanks Once Bitten for that link I have alerted that to others and I think Katie shares my concerns that these fu** wits only know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Next time I go that way I am going to take a photo and I urge any one travelling up those roads to take photo’s and put the time and date on the back of the photo and put it on this blog.
Documentation is important it’s one of the best weapons of the activist.
May 16th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
MikeyMike
It’s possible to move the water without penalizing yourself so greatly. What is actually the issue is collecting it before it rushes all the way to the ocean. That’s something that will take a bit of construction and piping and such. Not particularly difficult. A collection reservoir and a pipe to go over/through the mountains… parts of it would be sealed to manage to run as a siphon. Some of the energy of the water descending to the reservoir could be used to lift it, some water would thus escape to the sea. A longer pipe can avoid some of the lift. Or lift it with pumps and power them from hydro on the other side where the water is falling….
What I describe IS possible and do-able and will even be economically feasible and attractive once the price of not having enough water on the side of the mountains where the cows live gets high enough. I don’t know many “Cantabrians” so maybe they’re smart or maybe not, or maybe none of them have thought through the issue… yet. Their shortage of water is a relatively new thing, a decade or so ago the aquifer was healthy enough, no?
The water is there. It needn’t cost a lot of extra energy to move it, even without drilling tunnels through the whole of the alps. There is a cost of forgoing the straight collection of energy as it runs down the western slopes with the water wasted into the sea at the bottom, but that’s never been energy we were counting on.
Not impossible at all.
respectfully
BJ
May 16th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
I think one of the problems is a lack of valleys on the west coast (ie as far as big hydro schemes go anyway.
jh
May 16th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Actually in terms of reservoirs I was thinking of simply closing off part of one of the fjords. With water on both sides it wouldn’t even have to be particularly strong.
respectfully
BJ
May 17th, 2007 at 2:17 am
Drakula
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde).
Unfortunately this quote was widely misused by opponents of rogernomics, in the days before the internet made it easy to check obscure facts. Its real meaning sums up Charlie Pederson’s attitude to combatting global warming. Might I respectfully suggest you use the full quote whenever you are confronted by a climate deniallist or any of those “whats good for the environment is bad for the economy” loonies.
BJ
There is one simple fact you have overlooked. Inland Canterbury has a much higher elevation than any accessable reservior site on the West Coats. The Southern Alps are the result of colliding tectonic plates. The collision point is at sea level on the western side of the Alps a mere 20km from Aurthurs Pass summit. This is why the Otira Viaduct has a 1 in 8 gradient. Canterbury is on top of the worlds biggest shingle fan and the inland plains are well above sea level. Consequently the Otira rail tunnel, which provides a river to river connection, slopes steeply down from east to west. Therefore your irrigation tunnel will need to move water a long way uphill, although you might be able to acheive this with conventional windmill technology rather than using electric pumps.
May 17th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Kevyn
Thanks for pointing out that the plains are higher. How much I suppose I would have to look up and then there would be an efficiency penalty, but it really does not matter. It can be done… and windmills supplement a pure hydro scheme nicely.
The real point is that the water is valuable as long as it is collected before it mixes with the sea and becomes salted, and that there is a lot of it and it comes down on the west coast in amounts that are larger than in most other parts of the planet, not merely more than what is useful on the west coast. This is certainly a surplus and to retrieve it before it reaches the sea would be a middling big project that would pay off for many generations.
Hydro energy is not wasted water unless the last 100 meters of so of head is used completely, otherwise it can be retained for irrigation too… but even loading it onto sailing ships and scooting it around the coast or over to Oz ( think “Adelaide” ) could be worthwhile. There’s energy value is in it not being mixed with the sea yet.
The waste we’ve tolerated in our arrangements is not small.
Heating uninsulated houses with electrical resistance heat because we have so much hydro-electricity that its pretty close to free is an attitude problem NZ had 20-50 years ago… and we’re getting smarter now, but as my sainted Aunt used to say “too soon old, too late smart”.
respectfully
BJ
May 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
i like your style bj. it seems far fetched, but hey, i guess since incas and the chaco canyon folk managed to do it we too can harness water in such an abstract context. although for some reason these people aren’t about today….
your thinking looks to come down to price of water in a situation of relative scarcity. w.coast heaps, oz and canterbury none. i wonder how desalination costs stack up against your pipes and siphons. if you say it can be done i’m happy to accept your word.
gilt edge infrastructure bonds anyone?
May 18th, 2007 at 12:56 am
BJ
Since the really heavy rainfall is in south Westland maybe your scheme could pump the water around the southern tip of the Alps to the storage lakes in the MacKenzie basin, reversing the flow in the hydro canals, then over Burkes Pass down onto the plains.
Solves the hydro storage and water shortage problems with one scheme.