It’s the tide we should be reacting to, not the waves

August 3, 2011

One of my favourite beach activities as a child, and even more so as a young father, was defending sandcastles as the tide came in. The drama of building temporary walls and channels to deflect the next encroaching wave was always very entertaining for me and the (other) kids.

In the end, of course, the construction was washed away and we settled back to swimming or ice creams. (Unless, that is, the sandcastle is constructed above the high tide mark. But then where’s the fun in that?)

Watching the temporary fixes being set up in recent months in many of the world’s most powerful economies to avert or postpone debt crises has much the same feel about it. Watching the short-term, narrow-focus reactions of our own consumption-addicted citizens, and of many politicians and business leaders, to the adjustments makes us look more like the children than the grown-ups in this game-changing drama.

America’s shameful political confrontation this week over its unthinkable debt situation is the ultimate in wake-up calls. But what do we in New Zealand learn? We worry that interest rates may go up a bit, or the cost of milk may rise, or some other relatively minor effect. We see the waves approaching and build little protective walls (if we care at all), but we still refuse to see the tidal advance.

Economies around the world are becoming less stable by the month, but we continue on our merry way in the hope and expectation that the little adjustments our governments make will sort it all out or at least protect our little castles. Our leaders feel happy if they can divert the waves one by one hoping that the citizens are not disconcerted by the real global picture – at least until after the next election.

The metaphor of waves and tides applies equally to climate change, which advances even more slowly than economic collapse. Weather events become a little more extreme each year, small ecological changes are seen over observable periods of time, but still in everyday living these seem like series of waves to be deflected and we cannot see the tide advancing.

So we tinker with policy decisions such as emission trading systems and carbon taxes, recycling and energy saving. Meanwhile populations at large, encouraged by the mantra that economic growth is everything, see such initiatives as obstacles to progress. We cannot see the larger picture – the tide coming in – over a longer time period.

Pessimistic, yes. But societies based on both corporate capitalism and environmental disinterest will, if there is no commitment to change but only to tinker, eventually be washed away. And it will be a painful process.

Trouble is, apart from trying to avoid or minimise personal debt, I have little idea what ordinary folk can do about the economic situation, except to keep our eyes open and hope for the emergence of more business and political leaders who can put real sustainability into practice ahead of the growth imperative.

2 Comments | Business, Climate change, Economics, Environment, Politics, Social issues | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Economic development and the environment

September 20, 2010

I see Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee is using the problem gamblers’ argument on this topic. In an address at the Petroleum Conference in Auckland this morning, he is quoted as saying:

“The development of New Zealand’s natural resources and the protection of the environment are not mutually exclusive. It is only through a strong economy that New Zealand can afford the expenditure required to look after and improve our environment.”

Where have I heard this before? Oh yes: “We need pokie machines and the TAB in order to raise funds to pay the services to help problem gamblers.”

So Brownlee’s underlying argument, if this quote is an accurate reflection of his thesis, is that we need to keep mining and digging and sucking out natural resources because otherwise we wouldn’t have any money to fix up the environmental degradation caused by mining and digging etc etc.

And even if the stupidity of this argument held some water (apart from helping developers to rationalise their way out of having guilty consciences), the problem is that even while economic development was rampant during the past decade, funds for conservation and the environment were nevertheless being reduced anyway.

4 Comments | Business, Environment, Politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Kiwirail should not be required to pay its way

May 19, 2010

I may be wrong but … there seems to me to be some faulty economics going on behind the decision to put the pressure on Kiwirail to pay its way. Or is it just a case of starting the debate with the wrong set of assumptions and being totally unable to change our mindsets?

The charge that a rail network in New Zealand needs to be subsidised and therefore should be scrapped just doesn’t wash with me.

Most of its services cannot pay their own way because they cannot compete with road services (trucks for freight, cars and buses for passengers).  But do roads pay their way? Of course not!

We all heavily subsidise roads through taxes. If all road users (freight firms and private vehicles) were to pay for ALL the costs for the creation and maintenance of all roads, through some all-enveloping road user charge (such as tolls based on vehicle weight) rather than through taxes, then we would be not only screaming at the cost but also looking for some alternative – including public transport and rail.

The trouble is, we have a fundamental, rarely questioned assumption that roads should be there so we can drive on them whenever and wherever we wish, and that the government must make them available seemingly for nothing. This assumption has an obvious corollary – that alternative transport modes are add-ons to our car-based lifestyles and must therefore pay their way (because we rarely if ever use them directly).

This is feeble but sort-of okay until we start to look out a decade or more into the future, with fuel costs continuing to rise and roads getting increasingly clogged with heavy trucks (requiring higher-capacity roads at huge cost to subsiding taxpayers). It seems obvious to me that the realisation will eventually dawn that winding down rail for short-term, political reasons has been foolhardy.

So then we will find ourselves debating the seemingly prohibitive costs of buying land and re-laying tracks to build or re-open parts of the network that were sold, left to ruin, poorly maintained or built over.

Christchurch city shows one pretty obvious example of how hindsight is easy but paying for winding back abandoned networks is horrendous. Once it had a tramway system, now all gone. The cost of re-establishing one small part of it (for tourists) has been huge, and this would be magnified greatly if old suburban routes were rebuilt. Much running argument in that city centres on the need (and huge cost) of a light rail system to serve the future. If only all those abandoned networks had not been thrown away, it may have been possible!

And now we have the prospect of closing down existing smaller railway services that cannot pay their way. Doubtless Kiwirail will also sell some of the land these lines occupy in order to free up more money, making it even harder and more expensive for the lines to ever be rebuilt when they do become potentially desirable to run.

5 Comments | Economics, Environment, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

The big lessons from volcanic ash and oil spills

May 10, 2010

One problem with being a worrier about the way the world is going is that when your predictions become reality it’s hard to know what to say without sounding holier-than-thou.

I don’t like being told “I told you so” by anyone else, so I prefer not to say it to others when what is obvious to me, but is negative lefty thinking to others, turns out to actually happen. And generally you can hardly be pleased to be right, because what you’re right about too often results in a mess that you really, really don’t want.

But every now and then things happen that cause you to sit up, put two and two together and say: We are going in the wrong direction! It’s obvious. Why could you not see that this was going to be the result? I did tell you so.

Two recent events have made it abundantly clear that unsustainable activities eventually have downstream costs which even the cheerleaders of relentless economic growth acknowledge are horrendous.

Now I didn’t predict the eruption of that volcano in Iceland, and the ensuing disruption to air traffic. And I didn’t predict the accident at the oil rig off the US coast. So I won’t say ‘I told you so’ about these specific events (though some people actually could).

But what I have thought, spoken and written about for many years, and am being proven correct often enough, has been that the more we allow ourselves as residents of this planet to become dependent upon economic growth and the unsustainable tools of growth, the more likely a disaster results when mother nature or human error throws us a curve ball and these tools let us down.

The volcano event has shown how dependent most of us are, mainly indirectly, on scheduled air services. When they’re interrupted for days or weeks, products cannot get to market, people get stranded, people run out of funds to live, business contracts are threatened or breached. And the thing is …. we can’t do anything about it. Good old Mother Nature reminds us that she’s in charge. No amount of management skill, market-driven competition, economic growth or new technology has any real effect.

I’m not saying that good public management skills, sound trading markets or new technologies are poor goals. I’m just saying that we all need a level of self-sufficiency in our places of living, our communities, and our lives such that our existence is not threatened by distant acts of nature. Disrupted, maybe; but not seriously threatened. Making us ever more dependent on remote technologies and activities is just not the way to go.

(I wrote about this in this article on the Haiti earthquake.)

And then we come to the oil rig situation – an even more salutary event with far longer-term implications and an even more obvious lesson for us. Here I’m going to borrow ideas and a few sentences from an opinion article I read in the Christchurch Press (May 3), written by The Times’s Simon Barnes. It was his piece that prompted me to think: I should be writing in the same vein, because I sure think the same.

As we watch on TV the desperation of the Americans who live and earn their livelihood by the coastline that will now inevitably be ruined for decades by the incoming oil slick, it is impossible to see any good side to this. There is no grey area, no “Yes, but ….”, and certainly no bright side. We’ve got it wrong, and we’re going to pay for it.

Those Americans whose jobs will be ruined by the destruction of the seafood stocks will be directly affected. The rest of us will be affected by the resulting costs and how they ripple through our economies.

And although the operator/owner of the exploded oil rig, BP, and its technology suppliers are directly to blame, we’re all indirectly responsible. Everyone who whinges every time the price of petrol goes up, and who demands the right to use a petrol-powered vehicle to go wherever they please, has played a part in this and every costly mistake made within the petroleum industry (including the tanker whose short-cut caused damage to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last month). The oil suppliers are merely responding to demands from addicted consumers for petrol at the cheapest possible cost – which inevitably means ‘cut corners if you have to, I want my petrol now!’

As Simon Barnes put it: “These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction for oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment – oil at any price – is madness. Treasure this spill; it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.

“We crave oil like a junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.”

Sorry for copying that bit, Simon. But it’s exactly what I’ve thought about the attitude of too many people who lack any longer-term respect for our environment, and he’s said it in far better words than I could have used.

And so I say, with feeling, “I also told you so!”

23 Comments | Business, Community living, Environment, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

Mining on DoC land may not be such a bad thing

April 12, 2010

I’ve waited a couple of weeks before writing on this issue, partly because of my recent busyness but mainly because I am still ambivalent about whether or not to fully oppose suggestions that Department of Conservation (DoC) may be considered for mining.

As a greenie, I should be expected to take a strong stance against such a suggestion, but I find myself surprisingly open to some of the arguments for it; or at least I feel no trenchant, dogmatic opposition.

Like most Kiwis I’ve heard on the subject recently, I’m certainly against wholesale hacking into conservation and environmentally sensitive land. But could it be done in a sustainable or sensitive way? Perhaps in some ways, yes.

The first thing that has me wondering is suggestions of land swaps. Some protected land packets that contain valuable resources could possibly be swapped for some not currently protected but equally (or more) valuable in ecological terms. I do believe that some of the compromises on land use and impact mitigation projects that have been publicised in recent years – where the business or organisation that despoils one area “compensates” with some special work on land related to the project – have been worthwhile and a positive improvement in the local environment.

In such cases, I feel that trenchant opponents are rejecting these compromises purely on ideological grounds, with black-and-white statements that ‘this land is in the DoC estate so under no circumstances whatsoever can they touched ever in the foreseeable future and beyond’. This sort of conservation does not give me confidence that its proponents are living on the same planet as I am.

I know about the “thin edge of the wedge” argument, but fearing a loss of control shouldn’t mean we never ever consider anything new.

The second argument that leads me away from dogmatic conservationism arises from accepting that the real world we’re trying to live in does need metals and other mined resources. We can certainly bemoan the amount of consumer trash that we’re urged to buy, the gadgets and status symbols, but all bar a tiny minority of first-world citizen (i.e. most of the people reading this blog) still accept a modicum of them as standard accessories in our lives. Do we really want to go back to the days before computers, phones, bikes, mechanised transport, etc?

These things have to be made, and even if the number of them produced each year was halved they still require certain minerals as the raw materials and energy to fashion the ones we do need. (There is a heap of hypocrisy in opposing all modern conveniences. I well remember the days back when mobile phone cell towers were being erected in Christchurch that the protest groups trying to stop construction were amassing their supporters using their cellphones!) We may decry the proliferation of electronic gadgets, but there’s no going back and if we think about it most of us wouldn’t want to if we could.

So if minerals and energy (coal to fire the power stations of China and India) are going to be used, they have to be mined from somewhere. Isn’t it just a bit precious and even selfish of us to say that we’ll use the products but will not allow our country to be involved in the supply of raw materials? I’m not saying that therefore New Zealand should become one vast open mine, but I don’t think we can wash our hands of the whole mining thing altogether while still enjoying the benefits.

A third argument is around the effect on the New Zealand “100% pure” image that would be tarnished by some mining on a few small parts of conservation land. To me, this is a weak argument. There are already heaps of activities that are spoiling this “purity” brand association – dairying, trucking instead of rail, industrial poisons to name a few. Visitors know about them. This problem is not one for the mining industry, it’s a problem for the people who decided on the unattainable and therefore deceptive “100% pure” brand used to sell the country to tourists. It’s already false advertising.

One further small factor in my consideration of this issue is the long-term value of the residues of some (though certainly not all!) industrial operations. I know I’m not alone in saying that one of the activities I enjoy most when holidaying in several New Zealand locations, especially on the West Coast, is rambling around old mine workings – mainly gold and coal – such as at the back of the Ross township. Ugly and polluting in their day, these sites are now fascinating and nostalgic. What is to say that some proposed “surgical” mining operations today may not one day be great history for 22nd century tourists?

Having said all that, there are to me other significant factors that really worry me about proposals to mine conservation land and sensitive areas.

For a start, the idea of doing this in beautiful places that people actually visit regularly or even live near, such as on Great Barrier Island, is really not on. The price of messing around with such accessible and public places is too great for the potential wealth to be uncovered. I would be inclined to at least think about new mining if it was confined only to areas that very few people ever actually visit or see.

Secondly, I don’t trust any of the outlandish profit figures (the hundreds of billions of dollars) suggested by those trustworthy politicians (sarcastic joke moment!) such as Gerry Brownlee. They’re just guesses and they know it, but they can’t help throwing them in because they know we’re stupid.

And as for the use of the rationale that, because Australia is wealthy due to its preparedness to mine its minerals, we should do the same in order to catch up to our cousins. For a start, we won’t; and even if we could, I’m one of many that don’t particularly want to, given the cost to our environment and way of life here.

So after all this waffling, I come down to what I think is my own position on mining, be it on ordinary land or the conservation estate. It’s all about sustainability.

It’s the same argument that drives all debate on economic growth versus the environment. Growth is a fact of life. Trying to stop it is futile. The task is to try to make it as sustainable as possible, both by moderating useful types of growth (e.g. safer cars, more nutritious food, better land use, better medicines) and eliminating harmful types of growth (e.g. excessive product packaging, tools of warfare).

I may be wrong but . . . . . I think some mining in New Zealand, even in certain hard-to-access conservation sites, can fall within an acceptable range of sustainable growth activities, as long as great care is taken to minimise impacts wherever possible and to use some of the wealth generated by mining to improve other related aspects of the environment that would not otherwise have been undertaken.

But that’s easier said than done. The difficulty to strike this balance was there on John Key’s face for all to see on TV, when answering questions about the government’s mining plans, as he squirmed uncomfortably trying to have a dollar each way.

11 Comments | Environment, Politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

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