She had a kindly voice on the phone; I judged her to be elderly and her tone was not the least bit acrimonious. But she was not happy with me. In my last column I referred to her favourite political party as the “nutty Greens.”
“I’m a Green supporter,” she said, “And I am definitely not nutty.”
I explained that it was a play-upon-words. Most Green supporters I assumed were vegetarians and therefore ate lots of nuts to counteract a lack of protein from an animal source. Hence, the nutty Greens. I told her in a past life I despised vegetarians. She understood my churlish attitude, but assured me she was carnivorous and though previously a National supporter, she had voted for Dr Russell Norman at the last election. I suggested this was unlikely; she was not in Dr Norman’s electorate; she had probably voted for Dr Sea Rotmann. On reflection, she agreed she had.
I then propounded a theory that it was no wonder Mr Hayes had garnered such a large majority given that the surnames of his two closest rivals were Ms Rotmann and Mr Bott.
She failed to see the funny side of this somewhat facetious comment.
“But why would you vote for the Greens?” I wanted to know, “Because,” she responded, “They care for the environment.”
“How is the environment going to look when it is filled with the putrid smoke from cannabis cigarettes once the Greens get their way?” I asked.
The question seemed to throw her. She was not aware that the Greens had a policy to decriminalise cannabis and argued with me that it was not so. I pointed her in the direction of the Green Party website, but she had neither a computer nor the skills to use one.
I said it seemed somewhat ironic that the Ministry of Health through its District Health Boards and many other health-conscious organisations are spending millions of dollars annually endeavouring to get people to give up smoking, even to the extent of potentially banning it altogether by the year 2025, while the Greens want to usher in a whole new coterie of addicts.
Research, I told her, has shown that cannabis is even more carcinogenic than tobacco.
I fear I might have added insult to injury in my next effort to curb her enthusiasm. The Greens, I proposed, probably got a 10% polling because 10% of New Zealander’s are potheads.
But you have to hand it to the Greens. They have been able to convince at least some sections of the electorate that the environment is in serious trouble and needs caring for.
In my view, just another one of H. L. Menken’s “endless series of imaginary hobgoblins.”
Writing in last week’s Wall Street Journal award-winning author and economist Matt Ridley said he is sick of hearing that we humans are “using up” the world resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the lands ability to support a greater population.
Ridley points out that we keep improving productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanisation, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upwards.
Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years worldwide. Ausubel also came to the startling conclusion that even with the generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to a greater demand for meat and other luxuries we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000 so long as we don’t grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.
About ten years ago it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen agricultural yields would plummet and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: plough up the rain forests to grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed.
They will run out one day, but just as the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones we are sure to find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they expire.
Ridley reckoned human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertiliser taken up in crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation. In places like the Nile delta wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing food.
I’m not sure my lady caller could be convinced to change tack. She did allow however that she had given her party vote to National at the last election.
It never fails to amaze me how people completely misunderstand the strategy around voting in an MMP environment.
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