Two days ago, on the Sunday "Insight" programme on National Radio, covered this proposal very well. I have downloaded the programme to my server, and you can hear it here. I have no major criticisms of the programme as it stands, but again, by treating the matter as just another local environmental vs. development issue, we are again missing the overriding issues that are the background to this proposal. Our continued failure to acknowledge these overriding issues means that again and again we will have to keep discussing and arguing these sorts of proposals. It is a kind of environmental Chinese water torture, a constant drip of destructive proposals, another river, another ridge, another geothermal field, which we seem powerless to deal with. Can't we just turn off the tap?
I am sure there are some major economic positives from this proposal, especially for the West Coasters, just as there are major environmental negatives, but my issue with this project is that it arises from a chaotic and unthinking electricity and energy planning in the government and industry at large. I have previously criticised our electricity reforms, and it is exactly this sort of project that comes about because of the split up of our electricity generation sector and our inability to debate the wider issues. The Forest and Bird Protection Society are one of the opposers of this project. If you click here you can hear something about their position, as explained by Debs Martin. She at least understands the real issues, indeed she quotes this dam as representing just six months of new generating capacity needs, which I worked out in my letter, below, independently.
After listening to the "Insight" programme, I composed the letter below.
Dear Team
Thanks for your expert coverage on this scheme. I missed the first few minutes of the programme, but isn't this scheme just another example of this country's inability to simply join the dots? Peter Parker says we don't need a dam on every river or a wind-farm on every ridge line. But the problem is, if we continue to need a 1.5% increase in power generation each year, and a policy of no new generation other than by renewables, then we will need all these dams, and all these windmills, otherwise where will this power come from? Don't forget that a 1.5% increase in power generation is a doubling of power generation within 46 years. Where can we envisage all this being provided by renewable generation? This actually represents a reduplication of the Clyde, Manapouri, Wakaito, Ben More, Waitaki, Wairakei, and every single renewable facility we already possess, and half as much again (as all our present renewable still only provide for about two thirds of our electricity generation). The predicted output of this Mokihinui dam, about 350 GWh per year, will provide for less than sixth months of our growth in demand.
The disconcerting reality of what this means in major damage to out countryside and the sheer cost in raw materials and energy inputs has yet to percolate through to the politicians, business and the public, or maybe it has, and it is being negligently discarded. The Green party says we need a central integrated planning agency, of course we do, the reason we don't is because this is politically unacceptable in our present market driven electricity economy. The fact this isn't actually working, and never could for that matter, is of course never examined.
The basic problem is, as always, our inability to exist in an economic system that isn't predicated on growth, and that we are now in New Zealand, and in the world at large, approaching or have passed the limits of the planets resources to provide our perceived needs. How often do you hear, from anyone other than in the Green Party, and other fringe lunatics, a thought that we could achieve as much and rather more cheaply, by making do better with what we already have? Energy efficiency in New Zealand is a joke, and even the new legislation on building construction and energy conservation are still grossly inadequate and read like something that Denmark produced forty years ago.
The other problem is our burgeoning population, high natural birth rates, many in immigrant families, and high immigration rates, are making our population increase by about 1% p.a., a doubling of our population within 70 years - this is very high by any advanced OECD nation standard. We hear a lot of rhetoric about sustainability but the single biggest factor in achieving this is a sustainable population, and this is almost never discussed. We live in an "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" world, where, like the Red Queen, we keep having to run faster to stay in the same place. Population issues are almost never examined, except when we look at countries like Ethiopia or Kenya, but each New Zealander uses the world's resources at a rate ten times greater than any Ethiopian, and the reality of our human stresses on our environment are now becoming obvious, over-fishing, water availability, water quality, lake eutrophication, top-soil loss, carbon emissions, coastal erosion, loss of habitat, etc. Most New Zealanders don't understand that in any robust ecological examination of our population and the way we use our resources, we are already an overpopulated nation.
Prof. Albert Bartlett says the greatest problem with humanity is our inability to understand the exponential function. An economic growth, of 2% p.a. sounds innocuous enough, but it means a doubling of economic activity within 35 years. It also means, that during those 35 years our use of resources is as great as all the use of resources as we've ever used in the past. The mathematics may be robust, but our planet isn't. There are physical limits to how much resources we can extract from our environment, and we are approaching, or passed them now.
We can't keep on doing this. As long as we keep treating the matter of the Mokihinui River dam and other power proposals as parochial issues related to local environmental issues, power losses along transmission lines, and perceived power needs of regional communities, and not examining these wider issues, we are never going to get to grips with our fundamental and serious inability to understand the limits to growth. Our urgent need, now, is not to continually increase our consumption, but to get to understand that we have already overshot our ecological limits, and to make do rather more intelligently with what we have, including our present population.
I would like to have seen some questions to David Parker, and Meridian, and other players in this proposal about these greater issues, and an insistence of some long-term answers.
Yours faithfully,
Thanks for your expert coverage on this scheme. I missed the first few minutes of the programme, but isn't this scheme just another example of this country's inability to simply join the dots? Peter Parker says we don't need a dam on every river or a wind-farm on every ridge line. But the problem is, if we continue to need a 1.5% increase in power generation each year, and a policy of no new generation other than by renewables, then we will need all these dams, and all these windmills, otherwise where will this power come from? Don't forget that a 1.5% increase in power generation is a doubling of power generation within 46 years. Where can we envisage all this being provided by renewable generation? This actually represents a reduplication of the Clyde, Manapouri, Wakaito, Ben More, Waitaki, Wairakei, and every single renewable facility we already possess, and half as much again (as all our present renewable still only provide for about two thirds of our electricity generation). The predicted output of this Mokihinui dam, about 350 GWh per year, will provide for less than sixth months of our growth in demand.
The disconcerting reality of what this means in major damage to out countryside and the sheer cost in raw materials and energy inputs has yet to percolate through to the politicians, business and the public, or maybe it has, and it is being negligently discarded. The Green party says we need a central integrated planning agency, of course we do, the reason we don't is because this is politically unacceptable in our present market driven electricity economy. The fact this isn't actually working, and never could for that matter, is of course never examined.
The basic problem is, as always, our inability to exist in an economic system that isn't predicated on growth, and that we are now in New Zealand, and in the world at large, approaching or have passed the limits of the planets resources to provide our perceived needs. How often do you hear, from anyone other than in the Green Party, and other fringe lunatics, a thought that we could achieve as much and rather more cheaply, by making do better with what we already have? Energy efficiency in New Zealand is a joke, and even the new legislation on building construction and energy conservation are still grossly inadequate and read like something that Denmark produced forty years ago.
The other problem is our burgeoning population, high natural birth rates, many in immigrant families, and high immigration rates, are making our population increase by about 1% p.a., a doubling of our population within 70 years - this is very high by any advanced OECD nation standard. We hear a lot of rhetoric about sustainability but the single biggest factor in achieving this is a sustainable population, and this is almost never discussed. We live in an "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" world, where, like the Red Queen, we keep having to run faster to stay in the same place. Population issues are almost never examined, except when we look at countries like Ethiopia or Kenya, but each New Zealander uses the world's resources at a rate ten times greater than any Ethiopian, and the reality of our human stresses on our environment are now becoming obvious, over-fishing, water availability, water quality, lake eutrophication, top-soil loss, carbon emissions, coastal erosion, loss of habitat, etc. Most New Zealanders don't understand that in any robust ecological examination of our population and the way we use our resources, we are already an overpopulated nation.
Prof. Albert Bartlett says the greatest problem with humanity is our inability to understand the exponential function. An economic growth, of 2% p.a. sounds innocuous enough, but it means a doubling of economic activity within 35 years. It also means, that during those 35 years our use of resources is as great as all the use of resources as we've ever used in the past. The mathematics may be robust, but our planet isn't. There are physical limits to how much resources we can extract from our environment, and we are approaching, or passed them now.
We can't keep on doing this. As long as we keep treating the matter of the Mokihinui River dam and other power proposals as parochial issues related to local environmental issues, power losses along transmission lines, and perceived power needs of regional communities, and not examining these wider issues, we are never going to get to grips with our fundamental and serious inability to understand the limits to growth. Our urgent need, now, is not to continually increase our consumption, but to get to understand that we have already overshot our ecological limits, and to make do rather more intelligently with what we have, including our present population.
I would like to have seen some questions to David Parker, and Meridian, and other players in this proposal about these greater issues, and an insistence of some long-term answers.
Yours faithfully,
Meridian's intenet site has a short film about this project. I have downloaded it to my site and you can see it by clicking here. I was flabbergasted, I thought the film was nauseating, Joseph Stalin's USSR couldn't have done propaganda better, you know, the laughing happy workers on the collective farms, the well muscled and healthy workers in the steel factories, here its the happy trampers striding along the beautiful mountain track or the contented kayakers paddling across the pristine lake. If anything convinces me that this project must be stopped in its tracks, it was this film. No company that can produce something so odious can be trusted with our pristine environment.
The Mokihinui River Gorge (thanks for Forest & Bird)