What we are faced with is not just mindless, irresponsible scaremongering from poseurs in and around Wellington’s Beehive for their nefarious political ends; now we have it in Auckland in what was once hailed as the nation’s No 1 daily newspaper, the New Zealand Herald.
There was a time when the Herald could be relied on absolutely for accuracy in its reporting and knowledgeable integrity in the writings of its editorials and its columnists. No longer, it seems from this heading on yesterday’s leader:
A “carbonless economy” no less. How has journalism in New Zealand sunk to such degradation? This is not the deliberate bias already proclaimed by Herald owner NZME’s main competitor in print journalism, Stuff. This is simply gross ignorance by people who should know better.
Even Level 9 schoolkids from their earliest lessons in science know what Wikipedia tells us about carbon:
Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Carbon’s abundance, its unique diversity of organic compounds, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth enables this element to serve as a common element of all known life. It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.
Surely the most junior cadet in the newsroom, let alone the senior journo charged with composing the paper’s editorial, should know that a “carbonless economy” is a “nil economy”, because there would be no life on Earth to create or sustain an economy or anything else.
This would apply even when witless Heralders try to excuse their ignorance by saying that everyone knows that when used to relate to climate the term “carbon” means the gas carbon dioxide (hereinafter CO2).
CO2 is the essential basis of all life as we know it. It is a colourless, tasteless trace gas, non-toxic except at very high concentrations. Through photosynthesis, it is the basis of nearly all life on Earth. In photosynthesis on land, sunlight hitting chlorophyll (the green pigment in plant leaves) enables CO2 and H2O (water) to react, producing the sugars that form plants, with oxygen released as a by-product.
Herbivores and omnivores eat the plants, and carnivores and omnivores (including us humans) eat the herbivores. A similar structure of life exists in the oceans, with phytoplankton carrying out the photosynthesis. Without CO2, land and marine plant and animal life would not and could not exist. Elements like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are also essential for plant life, but they are more akin to vitamins – it is the CO2 that is the main plant food.
We ordinary mortals have a right to expect that those who presume to preach to us, such as editorial writers, do their preaching from a sound basis of learning as well as the ability to string words together. This latest example by the Herald shows us how wrong we are (which leads me, once again, to express gratitude to the country’s most widely-read website, The BFD, for providing this opportunity to correct not just the obvious bias of what passes these days for news media – in fact, now invariably views media – but also their downright ignorance of simple physics).
Never before has there been such a crying need for accuracy and informed integrity in journalism – the stuff of news presentation and comment. So much of the political estate and the commercial community are committed to misleading us mere mortals – whether they do it from honest but badly mistaken and ill-informed belief, or deliberately in an attempt to rule the world – we are being fed a lie for which there is no justified or proven foundation. Worse, we, the people, destined to become the victims of the intended desecration of the prosperous and comfortable lifestyle handed down to us by our ancestors, seem unable to counter this insidious forced march backwards to times of hardship and deprivation from which we thought we had advanced.
Nothing more demonstrates this sad (and unnecessary) situation than the report released the other day by the Climate Change Commission, which my colleague Bryan Leyland has described as:
“a grab bag of policies without any comprehensive scientific, technical and economic evaluation, and as the report makes clear, there are huge uncertainties in almost everything they recommend for action. For instance, they make it clear that they do not have a credible solution to the problem of keeping the lights on in dry years or in dry years without gas or coal…
“Everything in the report relies on an assumption that man-made greenhouse gases cause dangerous global warming. When I asked the Commission and then the chairman to provide convincing evidence based on observational data they were unable to do so.
“The Climate Commission has confirmed writing that it has no scientifically convincing evidence to support the very reason for its existence.”
Another colleague, Peter Morgan, CEO and executive chairman of the Environomics Trust (NZ) has had a similar non-reply from the Commission and its chairman, and I’ll cover that in next week’s column, together with some suggested counteraction.
Meanwhile, chew on this from Wellington restaurant chef Martin Bosley on what on what an inability to cook with gas will mean:
“Gas is efficient, it’s quick and controllable. It’s immediate. I need to cook your piece of steak and I put a pan on the element, I turn the gas on and it’s instantly hot. The pan gets hot and away we go. When I’m finished I turn the gas off, or if I need to slow it down I can, and again it’s immediate.
“With electricity, you turn the element on and you have to wait for it to heat up,” Bosley said.
“It takes longer to do so it’s just not a very efficient way of cooking.”
Bosley said electric induction equipment is slowly becoming available for commercial sections, but he describes it as “prohibitively expensive” currently.
Fitting out a kitchen so it is fully electric would be a mammoth shift for New Zealand restaurants, he said.
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