Deborah Burnside: Stock up on tinned food – the end is nigh

Deborah Burnside (right) says the push to move away from agricultural food production is disturbing. Photo File

I was once a little like, Greta Thunberg ... at 12, although I smiled more.

It was the 80s. In darkened school halls we were fed a constant visual stream of whales being slaughtered; industrial waste being poured into rivers, starving Ethiopians and, this was the scariest - the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation.

I pestered Dad about building a bomb shelter in the backyard, checked regularly that Mum had plenty of cans in the pantry and spent more time than was probably healthy worrying about that mushroom cloud heading our way.

So this 'end is nigh' rhetoric is nothing new. What is new though is the way the consistent, impending doom narrative is being delivered to our young people.

On one hand we have Greta barely keeping her emotions in check, claiming to us all, 'you're stealing my childhood', yet on the other, almost no coverage on the letter from 500 scientists stating that there is no climate emergency.

For that you have to go looking, to have at your disposal a healthy level of scepticism. If you do have an angst-ridden teen disturbed by climate emergency talk in your household though, it's easy enough to find.

If I had a teenager, wanting a day off school to march due to the world ending before they reached 30, I'd be saying … excuse me, what?! Who told you this?

A Swedish 16-year-old.

Oh yes … and she knows this how?

Because … she, umm does. It's science.

You know I was told around your age (by science) that the sea would have already risen by one and half metres by now, right?

But Mum, she took a yacht to the UN meeting and is reducing her air travel to save the world. I want to reduce my air travel and save the world.

Well, you're ahead of the game then aren't you (given most NZ teens are not jetting around the world).

So it's not that I'm a, 'middle-aged-white-man-who's-triggered', but someone that has lived this before. In fact the UN has also done this before. In 1992 they used Severn Cullis-Suzuki and her message delivered then is very close to Greta's now.

It's never okay to use children to push a political message that is ultimately about charging taxes for emissions. For that is what this is about. Convincing us all that paying money for 'this' will somehow change 'that'.

The sale and purchase of carbon credits is big business, some $800 million was taken in by the NZ Government last year, but only forms part of the total carbon-go-round, yet makes little to no demonstrable change to our environment nor the level of carbon in it.

For our own easily quantifiable costs here in Hawke's Bay, over one and a half million dollars was charged to us all in carbon credit purchases at the landfill tip face last year. The impact on reducing waste to landfill … zero. The reduction in emissions through payment of this sum also … zero.

I checked with our landfill's accountant what would happen if this tax simply stopped, overnight. The answer … nothing … except maybe a reduction in the gate rate by $25 per tonne. Perhaps that might go some way toward stopping rogue dumpers leaving their waste in our drains and at riversides.

Something to think about anyway as the Government considers what it will set new carbon credit prices at and contemplates its application to our farmers as those taxes are passed on to us all.

Most disturbing is the New Zealand teen, in reaction to this worldwide movement of looming catastrophe, Sophie Handford, claiming that we need move away from 'relying on agriculture for a lot of food production'.

When our own citizens, no matter what age, are so fundamentally brainwashed as to speak so eloquently on ceasing to eat what is produced by agriculture … then our climate and its fluctuations are not the biggest problem we face.

When our farmers make up less than 3 per cent of the workforce yet bring in almost 70 per cent of our overseas income, while feeding us all … to have our next generation consider that they ought to be helped into new professions is the greater worry right now.

How dare they.

* Deborah Burnside is an author, businesswoman and environmentalist.