Don Nicolson: Better technology is the answer

Opinion

Could greenicide enter the English lexicon as a corruption of that all-defining slogan, clean and green?

When politicians and lobby groups are stuck for an answer, clean and green is trotted out as a reason to justify anything and everything. Yet isn't clean and green really about agriculture?

Most farmers are clean because of high standards of farm management. Most farmers are green because farms are our offices as well as our homes. The vast majority of New Zealand's farmers take environmental management very seriously.

Yet clean and green has been corrupted into greenicide, being the adoption of green policies at any cost.

Take Greenpeace's Sign-On campaign, for example. It calls for a 40 per cent reduction in New Zealand greenhouse emissions by 2020. Except the unpromoted reality is that it's more like 64 per cent, given we traipse all the way back to 1990. Sign-On expects people to suspend commonsense, basic economics or any semblance of logic. Just sign on to commit greenicide.

That's what starlets like Lucy Lawless, Keisha Castle-Hughes and the left's favourite businessman, Sir Stephen Tindall, want us to do. Except it doesn't seem to apply to them, given how they make or made their money.

For hard-working families, Sign-On means losing your job, turning off the heating and giving away the car. That might get people to a 64 per cent reduction but it isn't living, is it?

That's the fatal flaw in setting any target to cut emissions. People may sign on with good intentions but does that change behaviour? Are New Zealanders using more or less electricity after this year's earth hour?

Humans, you see, instinctively yearn for more and more, which is how Sir Stephen made his many millions from The Warehouse. What happens if you overlay that instinct on a global population that will grow by 3.3 billion people by 2050? Logic tells us where global emissions will head and it won't be downwards.

Yet climate variation is real and billions more human beings will build pressure. But the cause isn't necessarily the emissions we make as living organisms, but the goods and services each and every future human will consume of the environment - starlet and businessman included.

In the face of a 49 per cent increase in the earth's population, reductions can't work and won't work. That's being honest and realistic.

It's not being defeatist, but calls for a more sensible response than the negative, apocalyptic future extolled by Greenpeace and its Malthusian acolytes.

Things are never as good or as bad as they first seem - they are just what they seem. The convenient truth is that humans evolve.

Technology will enable humans to prosper and grow and that's a positive and realistic vision of the future farmers support.

Controlling emissions demands an investment in science research and technology. This reconciles a basic human yearning "for more" without killing our planet.

It's also why Thomas Malthus' theory has been proven wrong time after time. Progress is optimistic, yes, but so is being realistic about the means to achieve that better tomorrow. There is science we can only dream about today that will become available in 10, 20 or 40 years' time.

That's why the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen negotiations seem more like a big jobs scheme. Too much spending is on policy, appearance and spin, not nearly enough is spent on solutions.

While it may surprise some, Federated Farmers backs the Skeptical Environmentalist, Dr Bj rn Lomborg, in calling for research and not taxes.

If New Zealand put 0.05 per cent of gross domestic product into research instead of the emissions trading scheme, it would pump $87.5 million into climate variation research. In the United States, that figure would be some $11 billion and globally, over $34 billion would be raised.

The amount raised also illustrates New Zealand's very small part in a much bigger global picture. New Zealand doesn't produce 99.8 per cent of global emissions.

New Zealand can lead internationally on research without killing the economy.

The heroes aren't the doom merchants who tell us how to live, but the scientists and farmers who enable us to live and prosper. Greenicide is not the solution.

* Don Nicolson is the president of Federated Farmers.