On the 14th of November, a group of New Zealand Farmers protested in Wellington. A copy of the speech notes of Andrew Hollis, a new Tauranga council member who spoke at the Rally has been provided to The BFD.
Who am I… I’m a geologist (now city Councillor). I have been studying the Earth and its systems for years. For me the spectre of human-caused climate change reared it’s head in 1990. Since then I have been called a “denier”. I call those in charge of this scam “deceivers”. NZ has been heading down a pathway with closed eyes and closed minds with regards to the climate. The latest is the Paris Accords where we will apparently beggar ourselves to kowtow to the UN.
It also seems that farmers will bear the brunt of changes to tax rules to try and pay for our commitments. However, it appears that farmers far from being responsible for emitting CO2, may well be New Zealand’s best absorbers. The accounting our government uses for CO2 emissions does not include grassland or fruit trees and vines. It turns out that untilled grassland absorbs nearly as much as pine plantations per hectare. AND it can keep doing it beyond the life of a pine tree.
Grassland binds soil together whereas soil is literally destroyed by pine plantations. No allowance is made for native plantings which are often the makeup of riparian planting. It’s almost as if there is an agenda at play here.
All of this and it also looks as though CO2 is not the villain it has been made out to be by the Deceivers. Not one climate model based on the thermostat model of CO2 concentration works within cooee of reality. Climate models use a thing called parameterization for all the hard to measure pieces of the puzzle… water vapour being one, you know… clouds. Many other authors call this fudging. The process brings the model up to date historically and then fails to match reality going forward in much the same way that financial models can tell us after a stock market crash what went wrong but have never accurately predicted any future movements.
By the way, methane consumed by livestock is 6% of the carbon consumed by the animal. The remainder is returned to the earth in the form of urine, manure, milk, wool, steak or any number of other products but not methane. In horticulture, how much CO2 does it take to make an olive, avocado, kiwifruit or grape? All carbon trapped and not released by the orchardist and yet no accounting made for it. Why not? Could it be that no tax is available that way?
Here is the fun bit…. the methane emitted is from sugars made by grass which took CO2 from the atmosphere. No new carbon added… none. And 94% of the total is removed from the atmosphere. It is possible to show that farming and horticulture in New Zealand is not only carbon neutral but is likely to be a carbon credit.
The only time a farm releases carbon is upon tilling the soil. You know… to plant soy for biofuels as an example.
Importantly, if CO2 is doing little or nothing to warm our planet then how on earth is this anything to do with farmers? At the moment 87% of NZ is living in cities all using cars, buses and SUVs to get around and yet are baying for farmers to clean the planet? Because farmers are seen as “The Rich Bastards”.
In short, there seems to be a push to make farming so expensive that land will be freed up to have pine plantations planted on arable land. This will ruin the soil structure, allow massive amounts of NZ soil to run off and release mega tonnes of carbon in the coming decades at the cost of NZers.
Please push back with the information that farms collect as much carbon as pine plantations. Let’s get the carbon accounting accurate and honest and don’t pay anything for climate mitigation.
Carbon is the elixir of life – don’t let the Deceivers fool you, or anyone else.
Time to end the guilt tactics.
Time to stop blaming farmers.
Time to remind townies where pollution actually comes from.
Time to stop overseas investors ruining food growing farmlands at our expense.
Time to realise you can’t eat trees.
Just do the maths right and stop the attack on farmers. “
