Derek Daniell
F.A.R.M.
The Climate Change Commission report states that planting trees does little to help New Zealand towards carbon neutrality…”We can’t plant our way out of climate change.” But it goes on to say that the upper limit for the value of carbon should be lifted from $50/tonne to $70/tonne immediately, and then lifted by ten percent per year plus inflation!
This will accelerate the sale of good farm land to carbon speculators.
The report desires that pine tree planting purely for carbon capture should discontinue after 2050. Meantime, subsidised payment for carbon will ensure the loss of farm land for the next 29 years.
The report recommends that 16,000 hectares per year be planted in native trees, ramping up to 25,000 from 2030 on. That’s wishful thinking. Who is going to do that, given the much higher cost of planting, the greater failure rate, and the lower income from slower growing trees? And native forests earn nothing other than subsidy income.
The only reason that more land hasn’t been sold into trees already is that some farmers have chosen to accept a lower price for their farm from purchasers who want to farm. If the price of carbon continues to be pushed up fast, more and more good farm land will be sold into trees. This land use change is caused by an artificially created market. Government subsidies often lead to stupid mistakes. The last time that the New Zealand government interfered in the land market was the Land Development Encouragement Loan scheme, accompanied by the Stock Incentive Scheme, around 1980. Soon there was an oversupply of sheep meat in world markets, leading to low prices for more than a decade, and prompting a government bailout of farmers with Supplementary Minimum Prices. Most of the land developed under LDEL reverted to woody weeds. Taxpayers paid for the entire debacle.
What will be the market for wood in thirty years time? Will there be a market? Currently, eighty per cent of our log exports go to China, where it is milled into boxing for concrete, used, then burnt. So much for carbon capture! It’s a farce.
“A net-zero strategy premised on forestry means that you eventually run out of land.“
There is no mention of the beneficial aspects of fossil fuels outside their use for transport: heating and cooling, plastics, synthetic fibres, and nitrogen fertiliser. It is said that there would be enough food for only three billion people without nitrogen fertiliser. Plastic waste pollutes our rivers and oceans, yet we continue to use excess packaging. Synthetic fibre waste is getting into the oceans’ food chains, yet our kind government doesn’t support the use of wool.
The value of protein in food continues to rise. As the world population continues to increase, and as overfishing reduces the protein from the sea, there will be increasing value in our farm produce. But meat production will slump as millions of hectares of farmland get converted to pine trees. Why not let wilding pines spread across the barren scree slopes of the South Island? It would cost taxpayers nothing. Or is that too much like common sense?
There is a school of thought that the world will turn vegetarian. Currently, 86% of the world’s population eat meat. Our favourite companion animals, cats and dogs, eat meat. The animals that we admire in the wild eat meat: dolphins, whales, the big cats. From a farming point of view, high crop yields are dependent on killing ALL the animals and plants which threaten your harvest. So much for vegetarians’ concern for animal welfare…they are just fooling themselves.
Chemical defences against animals and plants soon become ineffective. The integration of animals into farming systems helps balance the return of organic matter to soils, and acts as “the perfect filter” between plants and production of a wide range of produce with high protein content.
New Zealand scientists have recently developed a prebiotic called Knewe. Knewe improves the efficiency of the rumen, resulting in greater milk production, or weight gain in young animals, for the same volume of feed. This efficiency gain will offset methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and replace the subsidies for tree planting deemed necessary to reduce farm GHGs.
The move to electric transport will bring a further strain on world mineral resources, with big cost increases guaranteed. And what about the waste problem of battery disposal? To what extent is New Zealand’s virtue signalling on climate change a naive chance to create political reputations? To what extent will it allow New Zealand to remain competitive in the world economy?
The report focuses on GDP, forecasting that the recommended moves “will reduce GDP by only one percent.” What about the impact on people’s living standards? Not a mention…but one estimate of paying the rich people who plant trees is a reduction of household income by 16.5%. And that’s only a fraction of the cost on households promoted by this report.
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