Flawed features in saving the planet

I don’t really consider myself to be an environmentalist though from time to time I have endeavoured to reduce my carbon footprint, but with little actual success.

I have owned three hybrid cars, but eventually realised that the fuel savings were never going to overcome the extra cost of the technology. Disregarding this experience I then covered a large portion of the roof of our home with photovoltaic solar panels to generate electricity and substantially lower our power account. Given that I have passed the milestone of three score years and ten I should have realised that once again the technology was unlikely to produce a positive financial outcome until well after I had gone (hopefully) to a higher plane.

I thought about this the other day when I read about the resourcefulness involved in building wind towers to generate electricity. A two megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. It takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and so you end up using 150 tonnes of coal per turbine.

And so it requires enormous quantities of coal, the number one bogey in the environmentalists list of hobgoblins, to make “clean green” wind power.

Another problem is the wind itself. It’s a fluctuating stream of low-energy density. The modern world stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago for a very good reason: it’s totally unreliable.

Meanwhile out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution forged in Inner Mongolia by the mining of the rare-earth metals vital for the magnets in the turbines. This process apparently generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale which is why the phrase “clean energy” is preposterous.

And so well-prescribed efforts to create carbon-neutral gadgetry appear to be falling short of the gadget makers best intentions.

That leads us to the Paris climate treaty which New Zealand is a signatory to, but is falling short of meeting its promised reductions in carbon emissions.

Danish climate-change scientist Bjorn Lomborg reckons the whole process is flawed anyway. His computer modelling has found that if all the promises made by the U.S., China, the EU and the rest of the world were implemented, and then sustained to the end of the century, it would only reduce the rise in global temperature by 0.17 C in the year 2100.

“Current climate change promises will do little to stabilise the climate and their impact will be undetectable for years,” Lomborg says “and this invisible achievement would come at a staggering cost, somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion a year. Paying $100 trillion for no recognisable advantage is not a good deal.”

Lomborg wants Trump to can the Paris agreement, which he emphatically judges to be a feel-good gesture that distracts attention from aggressive research into low-emitting, cost-efficient technologies which is the only realistic way to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

My cogent advice for Mr Lomborg’s researchers however would be to look beyond wind towers, hybrid cars and solar panels.

I live in New Hampshire. We’re in favour of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea level rises? I’ve got a beachfront property. You tell us up there ‘By the end of the century New York City could be under water’ and we say, ‘your point is?’ - P. J. O’Rourke

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Is music sustenance for the soul?

It's probably due to my complete naivety, but as a teenager I was not aware of anyone in my age group or beyond ever contemplating or actually committing suicide. If I’m right, then I’m not sure what has happened in the interim, but I have a sneaking suspicion that music may play a crucial role.

I’m certain our generations euphonious offerings were more edifying compared to the fare that young people seem to seek solace in today.

In my dotage I listen to a radio station called “Magic” which plays the music of the fifties, sixties and seventies to an ever-increasing audience of baby boomers.

Back in “my day” Bill Haley wanted to dance all night, Elvis was enamored with his blue suede shoes and Cliff Richard’s girlfriend was a living doll. Cliff had lucky lips but was determined to remain a bachelor boy, Doris Day reckoned everybody loves a lover, and Jim Reeves crooned that he loved his lover most of all because she was “you.”

Meanwhile a chimpanzee and a monkey got married and had an abadaba honeymoon.

It wasn’t all a bed of roses. Marty Robins was dressed in a white sport coat and was sporting a pink carnation when his partner to the prom left him all alone in romance, Connie Francis was furious to find lipstick on her boyfriend’s collar and Dr Hook pleaded with Mrs Avery to let him talk on the phone to her daughter, Sylvia.

All in all, pretty tame stuff.

And then last week a modern day musician apparently took his own life. It seems Chris Cornell was universally admired. Fans were naturally grief-stricken and tributes poured in. The news media showed us many clips of his band Soundgarden and ran stories over a number of days. We were told that he had visited New Zealand on two or three occasions and had regaled us on how much he liked the place.

To the best of my knowledge I had never heard anything by Soundgarden; they wouldn’t have been on the Magic playlist, so I decided to expand my horizons and Googled the lyrics to evaluate their songs.

I will be offending Chris Cornell’s fans here and I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but the best word I can find to describe them is incomprehensible.

Better pens than mine are more definitive. The music genre is “grunge” and is described as being “typically dark, nihilistic, angst-filled and anguished. Using negative experiences or feelings; the main themes being alienation and depression, but with an ironic sneer, violent and often obscene, shorn of ideals and the impulse for political action.”

Typical topics of grunge lyrics are homelessness, suicide, rape, broken homes, drug addiction and self-loathing.

And so into the valley of death ride our young people; earphones plugged into a newly- minted device we call the smartphone, spewing out desperate themes into impressionable minds. These lyrics were said to have developed as part of the generation X malaise, reflecting that demographics feelings of disillusionment and uselessness.

But surely you’d have to ask: which came first, the music or the malaise?

“The rock music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men lie like dogs. There is also a negative side.” - Hunter S. Thompson

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Getting your priorities right

In 1986 I flew on my own from a remote airport in Amazonia to Miami in a recklessly-maintained aeroplane. I was keen to get to an English-speaking country after struggling conversation-wise in Portuguese-speaking Brazil where I had just spent six weeks on a sponsored study tour.

I was therefore bitterly disappointed to discover that most people I encountered in Miami spoke Spanish. Tens of thousands had fled Cuba after the revolution and had stuck to their culture and their language.

I suspect nothing will have changed much in the intervening 30 years except there will be more Spanish-speaking citizens all over America thanks to the porous Mexican border.

These people are rapidly absorbed into the American economy, often working for less pay than their American counterparts causing angst in areas like the “rust-belt” where angry voters were largely responsible for Donald Trump taking up residence in the White House

Mr Trump wants to build a wall to stem the tide. Previous administrations had already started this wall; to date around one-third has been completed. The remaining two-thirds however will encounter difficult terrain including mountain ranges and rivers and will cost a small fortune.

No, make that a large fortune.

I suspect the Australians have the same distaste for us as many Americans have for the “illegal aliens” who pour over their border. The Tasman Sea hasn’t stopped tens of thousands of kiwis fleeing to the lucky country seeking fame and fortune with the vast majority finding neither.

The Aussies are not happy and so there is retribution. First off, despite the Kiwis paying taxes like everybody else, they are denied welfare of any kind. And then last week Prime Minister Turnbull said no more subsidising of New Zealanders who study at their tertiary institutes.

To some extent we only have ourselves to blame. We gave them “Mr Asia” and Joh Bjelke-Petersen and are constantly thrashing their hapless rugby teams. Claiming dubious ownership of Phar Lap, Pavlovas and Russell Crowe will hardly have endeared us to the mainstream Australian and I’ll bet they think ill of us for having the temerity to rename Chinese gooseberries, kiwi fruit.

On a per-capita basis our ex-pats apparently commit more crimes than any other nationality in Australia and once sentences have been served they’re thrown in to a detention centre on some remote island surrounded by sharks and eventually deported back to the land from whence they had once fled.

Game, set and match to Mr Turnbull and the Ockers are laughing all the way to their barbecues.

Mild-mannered Kiwis take all this in their stride. In America the rent-a-protest crowd are constantly rioting in the streets, but no one here, with the possible exception of Labour’s Kelvin Davis, could give a tinkers cuss.

From Miami I flew to Los Angeles where the nervous man behind the airport counter told me that President Reagan had bombed Gaddafi’s compound in Libya and accidentally killed Gaddafi’s daughter, Hana. Gaddafi had threatened to retaliate with a terror attack on one of America’s major airports.

Suddenly recklessly maintained aeroplanes and foreign languages didn’t seem all that important.

“I like terra firma. The more firma, the less terra.” - George S. Kaufman

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Meat lovers of the world unite

Seven Sharp’s roving reporter Tim Wilson ventured out on to the Auckland streets last week offering passers-by a taste of a meat patty that wasn’t made with meat. The responses were mixed, but for those who farm animals for the table it looked ominous. There is even an international school of thought that believes within our lifetime eating meat will disappear altogether and a synthetic substitute will be accepted and may even be compulsory.

Worldwide the number of animals killed each year to satisfy our hunger pangs is about 60 billion chickens,1.5 billion pigs, a billion sheep and goats and 300 million cattle-beasts.

Our pastoral farmers may have to look for new ways to use their arable land; perhaps even now some are thinking of planting Manuka to satisfy the insatiable demands of beekeepers. We might need to encourage the workers in Fiji who cleared all the Manuka and Kanuka to come back and replant it.

And dairy farmers had better watch their P’s and Q’s as well. A Californian company called Perfect Day is marketing “milk” made from fermented yeast to which it adds plant-based sugars, fats and minerals.

The company swears it tastes like cow’s milk.

I can imagine the Greens will be pleading for Perfect Day to open a branch in New Zealand imagining our waterways will return to their once pristine condition.

So will vegetarianism have its day? It’s interesting to note that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian and when his Nazi party came into power in Germany in 1933 it passed and enforced unprecedented laws against cruelty to animals, while actively promoting vegetarianism, conservation and respect for nature.

This was the same regime that practiced unthinkable deeds of cruelty on humans.

So societal trends can ebb and flow over time.

Provocative British journalist Matt Ridley made this salient point in a recent blog. “The computer pioneer and mathematician Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted and chemically treated for his illegal (at the time) homosexuality. About a year later Vladimir Nabokov published a book about a middle-aged man’s unusual lust for a very young girl. He shot to fame, wealth and literacy celebrity. Today, paedophilia is even more of a crime and a sin than it was then, homosexuality not at all.”

His point was that one has evolved towards tolerance; the other towards intolerance. He approved of both trends, but wondered if they were inevitable or fortuitous.

There is an aggressive animal welfare lobby in this country concerned at how we treat livestock that are eventually going to be killed and eaten or consume the eggs they lay. There is a growing disapproval of factory farming and opposition to hunting and more emphasis of the ethical treatment of farm animals. Ridley even writes of an organisation in Britain called Crustacean Compassion who is campaigning to add lobsters and crabs to the list of species protected under the Animal Welfare Act 2006.

Meanwhile I was pleased to see that most of Auckland’s footpath tasters were unimpressed with the meatless patty.

I closed our butcher’s shop in 1993; terrific foresight, eh?

“I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.” - A. Whitney Brown

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