Green Blog
– November
Possums,
Oh-Posssums…. I know, it’s hard to do it right for everybody. And as it seems reading
the title of last month’s Chronicle, even controlling New Zealand’s
bush pest number one – the possum – will collide with some people’s sentiments.
Oh well, I must admit that these small marsupials can elicit a sort ‘cuddly
feeling’ when they look at you with their large black eyes and perhaps even
with a little one peeping out the pouch. And in its native Australian bush, it
might even be a welcome nightly visitor to the back porch, sort of like the
squirrels of my native Germany.
But alas, this is not Australia,
and our bush and its native fauna and flora have not evolved together with
possums. So there, put a few possums out here to breed in the wild, as some of
our forebears did and a whole ecosystem gets challenged. In New Zealand,
possums have no predators keeping their numbers in check and our plants grow
without the protective Sodium Fluoroacetate that some of their Australian
cousins have learned to produce inside their leaves to keep themselves from
being devoured by an out of bound mob of possums. This plant chemical,
occurring naturally in Australian, African and South American bush plants is
also known under the trade name 1080….
Evolution
works wonders indeed, and it will eventually create a balance in which
predators and pray live in stable ecologies supporting each other. But this
takes time – lots of time indeed. And this process can not cope with ‘homo
sapiens’ and his ‘unintelligent design’ very much. Within a few hundred years
of shipping species around the globe we have disturbed a lot of ecosystems. New Zealand is
a prime example. Putting effort into limiting the worst of it must surely be a
good thing. So, ok then, let’s send the Possums back to Oz, weather in form of
mittens, hats, socks or whatever. But let’s not get to sentimental about them
in the process of doing this.
Back to
other things: I went to listen to Jeanette Fitzsimons today, talking about the
latest news on the two main topics on the mind of many people these days:
Global Warming and the End of Cheap Energy. She has just come back from a visit
to Europe and the US
to gather information on these issues. On the global warming front the latest information
coming out of research projects of the past years is not looking very
promising. It seems that the facts are direr than any predictions made a decade
ago. Especially startling is the speed with which the North Pole seems to melt
away.
One should
perhaps point out that the North Pole ice cap is a floating ice sheet, on
average only some 3 meters thick. So it dose not take much warming to produce
enough melting to make the ice thin enough to be broken up on the edges and
swept away by summer storms to warmer latitudes and melted away. An area three
times the size of New
Zealand has this way been lost from what
once was considered a permanent ice sheet in the last two years alone! And
guess what, where once was white reflective ice, there is now dark absorbent
ocean sucking up the summers solar heat. So warming begets more warming. And
once the ice cap resting on the Greenland
continent gets moving to the oceans below, sea levels will start rising a lot.
The Green
Party has organized November 4th to be a national Climate Change
Action day, where ribbons will be placed around lamp posts in coastal towns to
mark the 7m or so above today’s mean high water mark – a mark to which the
ocean levels would rise if Greenland melts…
Any guess where this mark is in Coromandel
Town? I’d think you
probably get up to around the old hospital on Rings Road perhaps, if you wanted to be
sure to keep your garden ornaments…
The other
issue of concern, the end of cheap oil, is of cause the flipside of the same
story. We are in the predicament of having to pay the price – soon – for the
lifestyle we enjoyed in the few generations since the industrial revolution.
This lifestyle was enabled by one thing, and that was cheap and abundant energy
squiring from the ground in form of Oil. Energy from fossil fuels is driving
our economy, virtually all of our transport and much of our chemical industry.
The same process that is raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere to levels now
confirmed to be higher than in any time for the last 650,000 years – and that
is not to say it was higher before then, we simply can’t yet look back that far
– is fuelling virtually every aspect of our lives in one way or the other. And
now of cause, if you believe many renowned scientists, we are at or near the
time when this stream of energy will begin to slowly wane as we exhaust the
most productive oil wells. The price of a barrel of Oil has tripled already in
the past few years. A small reminder of what is still to come.
Jeanette
Fitzsimons told us what some European countries are doing in preparation. Sweden for
example, with just over twice of our population, is investing two dollars into
modernizing their railroad system for each dollar spent on roads! New Zealand
invests about 3 cents into railroads for each dollar spent on roads! We could
in principle produce a lot of electricity in New Zealand from sustainable means
– water, wind and waves. So an electrified railroad system connecting the main
centres might be a key to the future survival of our transport infrastructure.
Jeanette
also reported back from the efforts made in California on energy saving policies. With a
strong political guidance and legislature and a far reaching strategy California managed to
cap the growth of its electricity demand to zero from the mid seventies to
today. This may sound unbelievable, but it is apparently true. Due to large
gains in efficiency, savings and smart use of technology, they have managed to achieve
substantial economic growth without an increase in electricity production.
Jeanette
also spoke on the Bio-Fuel revolution. It seems that technologies are emerging
that will make use of wood as a resource for the generation of diesel fuel
through the generation of Syn-Gas or Ethanol through fermentation. New Zealand
might be well placed to produce a sizeable portion of its liquid fuel needs in
the future through such processes. However even the production of ‘green’ fuels
comes at a price. Already some of the last large areas of Indonesia’s
rain forests are felled to make way for cocoanut plantations in order to export
cocoa nuts to feed the growing demand in Bio Diesel produced from cocoa nut
oils. And it would be completely unethical to accept that maize or grains grown
on fertile lands be reduced to fuel for the wealthy nations while thousands die
from starvation in the 3rd world. We must not let the bio-fuel
revolution grow to compete for the essentials to life with the poorest nations
on the planet.
Often I
think, it is easy for us, living in an under populated country rich of natural
beauty and in no danger to run out of home grown resources to forget about the
state of the planet at large. We might think ourselves to be immune to much of
all this perhaps. But surely, we must measure our efforts on a fair per capita
basis. And as such we are, as Jeanette puts it, the 11th worst
nation when it comes to Carbon emissions. When it is about saving the world for
future generations, everybody counts. Thus perhaps just as Cevron CEO David J.
O’Reilly said: “Will you join us?” … in his public campaign to tackle the Peak
Oil issues, Jeanette pointed to the membership forms laying out for those who
wanted to join the Greens.
Thinking
about it? Then go to www.greens.org.nz
and perhaps you will join us to make green policies stronger in New Zealand.
We will need it!
Thomas
Everth