SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Where are the farmers?

SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Where have all the farmers gone?

By Pattrick Smellie

It's not every Monday evening you end up watching a bloke knit for an hour.

That was my vista at the first of the Government's public consultation meetings on setting a target for greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2020, in Wellington. We have to have a target by August, in the lead-up to the post-Kyoto climate change summit in Copenhagen just before Christmas.

The big room at Te Papa was packed to the gunwales, with maybe 450 people, many seated on the floor.
I squeezed onto a couch at the back. I could just see the top of Environment Minister Nick Smith's head when he stood up after every four or five speakers in a meeting, scheduled for 90 minutes, that ran for two and half hours.

The front of the room disappeared completely for a moment when, in an inspiring moment of group-think, the room rose as one in support of the "40% by 2020" target that Greenpeace and Oxfam are campaigning for.

That's saying we should commit to reduce our climate change-inducing emissions by 2020 to 40% below the levels they were in 1990 - a cut of more than 60%. Despite promising to cut them under the Kyoto Protocol, our emissions have risen since 1990 by more than 20% as various feeble efforts to rein in our energy-intensive ways have fallen at various lifestyle-driven hurdles.

Ominously, perhaps, just about the most effective contributor to slowing the growth in carbon emissions has been the global economic crunch, which started in the rich countries and is not necessarily over yet.

Further bouts of debt-bubble wealth destruction may be yet to come. The trouble is that for all the good a crippled world economy might do for a warming planet, it's a moot point whether that will be top of mind for people caught up in the inter-generational economic ruin this implies for large chunks of today's rich world population.

Nonetheless, not only is it being suggested with a straight face that we should pursue such a huge emissions cut, but also that we believe it can be achieved in the next 10 or 11 years.

I'm sorry - pull the other one. Despite the admirable number of bicycles chained up outside Te Papa last Monday, there was little evidence in the generally affluent middle class audience, of truly sustainable lifestyles.

The knitting bloke may well have been onto something, but even he might be disappointed if the 2020 target were achieved, since it would almost certainly mean no more sheep's wool. Already unprofitable and carrying a huge weight of methane emissions that no one knows how to deal with, the sheep industry's days may well be numbered if climate change adaptation is allowed to play out as it probably needs to.

Certainly, if the lofty global goals being bandied about have any chance at all of being met, something will have to give.

The loftiest of these this week was the G8's resolution to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees by 2050. I was unaware that King Canute is among the leaders of the world's most powerful economies. Climate change science is just too unceratin to be sure we aren't already well past the point where a 2 degrees warming can be stopped.

Therefore, we must adapt. In China, the US and Australia, that means using far less coal to make electricity and driving far fewer cars.

In New Zealand, it's about farmers.

For methane, granted, there is no easy solution. But that is not true for the 16% of our greenhouse gas emissions that are nitrous oxide. A big part of the answer already exists in the already-profitable use of nitrification inhibitors.

Nitrification inhibitors are almost like a kind of magic, offering a triple whammy benefit of halving New Zealand's current nitrous oxide emissions very quickly (that is, around 8% of current total emissions); reducing the impact of nitrates from animal urine leaching into fresh waterways; and improving pasture growth, thereby cutting down on phosphate fertiliser use.

"It's the cheapest way to grow new grass, especially in early spring," Ravensdown's CEO Rodney Green told BusinessWire this week. What nitrification inhibitors allow is further intensification of rural land use while limiting existing environmental downsides.

Given that New Zealand's only serious productivity growth in the last 15 years has come from intensified land use, and that the Government is grappling with freshwater quality issues created particularly by dairy intensification, it seems a no brainer to be cracking the whip to get this technology taken up.

If it takes a price on carbon to make farmers make the investment, then it's time to get on with it, especially if they quickly start being able to account for the value of that carbon reduction. The Sustainability Council has calculated that New Zealand could wipe out its projected carbon deficit of 14.7 megatonnes in 2012 with such farming technologies, which are profitable and already available. But they would need to be implemented right now.

The fact that almost no one is talking about this kind of approach, to include our biggest climate change contributor into the national savings target, is a staggering demonstration of how powerful the old guard farming lobby remains.

Instead, there is an unquestioningly protectionist debate going on about when, how and whether to include agricultural emissions in New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme at all from 2013, and with no plan to fully expose agriculture to carbon costs until 2030.

Taxpayers will cover farmers' emissions costs in the meantime. A new era of climate change-driven New Zealand farm subsidies looms.

That's not good enough. If very large, meaningful cuts in nitrous oxide emissions are available now, using technology which will also contribute to improving fresh water quality, then we should be trying to make it happen.

The fact that it helps grow more grass without more fertiliser and is profitable for most farmers begs the question: "what's the problem?"

Till very recently, the problem might have been measurement. Emissions savings from nitrification inhibitors vary greatly from farm to farm and are affected by the weather. However, accepted approaches to NO2 measures are now in the relevant UN climate change schedules. The stage is set to overcome that legitimate obstacle.

That still leaves the problem of methane and that's a much knottier problem. It's the main reason a target of 40% by 2020 risks looking kooky rather than committed.

Like the crisis of an economic collapse, the only way humans have so far found to deal with crises is to go through them, with all the unintended, random pain and learning that goes with them.

In the meantime, we live in hope of adaptation and a global politics emerging that does slowly bring the climate issue back under human control in some way. New Zealand needs a place to stand in that process.

Our very high agricultural emissions are that place.

It means that for those who say New Zealand shouldn't try to lead the world in this stuff, the question must surely be: "why not at least try?"

Like the Cairns Group's slow but steady impact on the GATT and WTO rounds, there is a self-interested position for New Zealand to take in being seen to tackle the contribution our backbone industries make to global warming.

If we don't at least aspire to that, we'll get minced by being too rich to help bring agricultural emissions down through targeted funding to the developing world, and too small and too poor to fight our own peculiar corner.

(BusinessWire)

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