Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
There appears to be little support for the view that treated sewage discharges to water should be stopped.
Of course not, provided it's actually treated, not just sat in a collection pond for a couple of weeks before being sprayed about and left to run into waterways.
Fully-treated sewerage is potable, and even modest treatment reduces the pollutant levels dramatically. But we're not talking about urban areas discharging their treated sewerage to, mostly, the sea, we're talking about farmers who won't fence off waterways, or do anything else to reduce the pollution that their activities is causing.
The developments in sewerage treatment over the last two decades mean that most urban areas are discharging lower levels of pollutants than they have done historically. It's a nonsense to try and blame that for what's happening to our waterways.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
I’m simply saying that there is a limit to the size of the national deficit ; the difference between export receipts and import expenditure.
Stopping borrowing from overseas in order to fund our property obsession would be a spectacular start. That's the vast, vast majority of our trade imbalance.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
So what is the populace prepared to forgo in response to the reduced national income?
Why must it be an either-or? Why can't we just stop bloody subsidising the polluters and, instead, divert the money into low-footprint, high-value exports like software development? If we could just keep our hands on some of the great tech that's developed here, instead of seeing it sold off to foreign investors who don't have to sit in line behind property speculators and farmers when they want to get money from the bank, we'd be a lot further along the path of reducing our near-total reliance on agriculture.
Hell, why don't we just stop exporting logs and start exporting wood products? No real change to environmental footprint, since most of our electricity is generated from renewables, and the income difference is enormous. We could stop exporting straight milk powder, too, and start exporting the value-added products that the powder is going to be turned into at the far end. We don't have to give up things, we just have to give up being utterly fucking moronic about what we export.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
Do you mean that the citizens, en masse, would have preferred to have fewer microwave ovens, LCDs , new cars ,synthetic carpets ,heat pumps, imported foods , computers etc. etc. etc., rather than have the increased export dollars that resulted from the sucking up of the water?
The citizens were never presented with a choice. They were presented with a fait acompli that the water was going to be sucked up, and despite their stated wishes by way of their electoral choices that sucking-up was going to continue.
Taking a longer view, citizens were never asked if they were happy to bequeath their children unswimmable waterways in return for a higher standard of living. Maybe they'd have said yes - in fact, given the reactions to any suggestion that toning down the environmental footprint might be a good thing, I don't think it's a stretch to be fairly sure that the answer would have been in the affirmative - but maybe, presented with the bald truth instead of post fact PR spin, they might've decided that it was better to focus on non-agricultural pursuits as a way of getting export dollars.
It's not like the only way we can get money from overseas is by selling agricultural products. That it's the way we make most of our money now is not an eternal truth, and it reflects policy settings that have fucked with our environment that it remains the super-dominant export earner. We could earn money in other ways, if the policy settings were to change.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Sacha,
The decline would lag from the previous government’s term as well – but we can only imagine how bad our position will be in a few more years.
Of course there's some lag, but if National were actually the environmental messiahs we'd probably have seen less of a decline, possibly even a stabilisation. Dropping 14 places in four years is pretty serious, particularly since I doubt that 2008 was the benchmark year. As things stand the current government have done next to nothing about anything related to environmental improvement, aside from their efforts over domestic fires (and I believe a lot of that was actually the councils, as my understanding is that we don't have a national standard on wood-burner particulate outputs).
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
The most important thing is that our exploitation of our environment is sustainable i.e. the resource base is not being depleted. And it is equally important that we residents are comfortable with the compromises that are necessary to maintain the altered environment, economy and society that we all wish to live in.
It appears that the citizenry are only just becoming aware what compromises have been pushed through in shadow to this point, and they're far from happy. The ECan autocracy, where the government put in appointed patsies to ensure their farmer mates could continue to suck up water without impediment, was merely the most blatant instance of a "compromise" being forced upon the citizens over the top of their expressed wishes. The burghers of Canterbury elected the councillors, knowing the collective's stance on water rights issue, only to have someone else come along and force a different tack.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Also taken from the NYT story:
In 2008, New Zealand ranked first among 146 countries in Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index , which ranks countries on the quality of their environmental policies. The report compares international data on criteria like habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and protected marine areas.
In 2012, however, the country slipped to 14th.
That points to something in the policies, or lack thereof, of the current government. Even if it's just a solid track record of indifference and inaction.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Russell Brown,
It has much more of the John Roughan but what if the experts are wrong? vibe about it.
I haven't read it, but the quotes in here immediately made me think of Roughan. He's so thoroughly anti-progress, anti-urban, anti-environment in his witterings about public transport and roads that he would be the perfect hatchet man to call for the execution of the messenger on this topic.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I cannot see this this announcement can have caused dirty rivers.
Others have mentioned ECan already, so I won't, but how about National's refusal to impose strict water quality standards for councils in the last term?
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Hard News: Judging the judges, in reply to Arnaud Wylie,
Sorry, you what? That page is incomprehensible nonsense.