‘Smart Growth’ has always been a policy in search of justification.

It started out in the early seventies asZero Growth’; a means of pricing Blacks and Hispanics out of wealthy white enclaves in the US. It worked then, and still does, but was ruled “inappropriate” by the US Supreme Court.

Then it re-emerged as ‘Smart Growth’ which would save “productive” rural land from urban growth. But there is no such thing as “productive” land because only people make land productive. That didn’t work (and doesn’t work now).

Then it would save us from the oil shocks. The shocks went away.

Our current ‘Smart Growth’ salvationists claim they will now deliver us from global warming.

However, the recent Australian report, Consuming Australia, knocks the props out of the global warming argument by reporting that sprawling suburban households have much lower carbon footprints that those living in the centre of town.

And now a report by Chris Goodall, a UK Green Party Parliamentary candidate, and author of ‘How to Live a Low-Carbon Life’, has come up with the ultimate ‘climate change heresy’ – car-loving couch potatoes will help save the planet!

Goodall explains that “Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.”

Goodall finds that driving a typical UK car 5.0km adds about 1.0 kg of CO₂ to the atmosphere, based on Government figures. On the other hand, walking the same distance uses about 180 calories and would need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

Hence, he concludes “The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

I’ll say it’s “troubling”. All those Smart Growth planners demanding we walk everywhere, are hell-bent on destroying the planet! Someone should tell the ARC so they can throw out their destructive Growth Management plans for Auckland.

But don’t hold your breath. Central planners will always find some excuse to push the rest of us around.

Good News for NZ Farmers – our Pastures are Carbon Sinks!

In “Future Farming: A Return to Roots” the August issue of Scientific American reports that many of the problems of US agriculture – soil erosion, excessive water demands, and high energy inputs – arise because most of their grain crops are annuals, not perennials. Annual crop plants have short root systems and need to be grown anew from seeds each spring.

Corporate US agriculture’s grains and corn also provide most of the feed for their pigs, dairy herds and beef cattle.

But our New Zealand farmers feed their large animals almost entirely on the perennial grasses that thrive in our green pastures. The Americans call us "grass farmers".

This is great news for the rural sector. Our farmers, who used to be “the backbone of the country” are now continually abused for their assumed contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Our most successful exporters are assumed to be “destroying the planet”. The climate alarmists would love to close them all down.

But these US researchers are now telling us that our perennial pastures are major greenhouse sinks; the total of greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere by crop production inputs, minus carbon sequestered in soil, is negative for perennial crops.

The following table makes the comparison:

SOIL CARBON SEQUESTED (*Kilograms per hectare per year)

Annual crops: 0 to 450

Perennial crops: 320 to 1,100

GLOBAL WARMING POTENTIAL (Kilograms of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year)

Annual Crops: +140 to +1140

Perennial Crops: –1,050 to –200.

Because these are year-on-year gains, from stable perennial crops, the calculations are simple and easily verified, unlike forests which go through complex cycles from planting to harvest and beyond.

Every New Zealand farmer should buy this issue of Scientific American, read the whole story, and then send it on to their local MP.

In the meantime let’s cut down the pine forests, sow the land in pasture, and bring on the dairy herds to maintain the cycle.

We can use these pastoral sinks to fight the ‘Food Mile’ campaigners. Just plaster UK supermarkets with pastoral scenes captioned “Food from the world’s greenest greenhouse sinks!”

Then remind our tourists, viewing our green and verdant land, that these may be the most effective and productive green house sinks in the world.

Let’s take it to them.

Freeman Dyson Finally wins the Round.

The physicist, Freeman Dyson, who, in 1992, was one of the first to suggest biological carbon sequestration as a “no regrets” approach to soaking up surplus carbon dioxide, has finally seen his argument that “it's roots – not shoots” endorsed by these US researchers.

Dyson is prepared to advocate his “no regrets” policy of building up the top-soil, even though his skepticism regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming is well entrenched.

In his new book “Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe” Dyson writes “The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated”, and pours scorn on what he calls “the holy brotherhood of climate-model experts” and “the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models”.

He writes: “I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields and farms and forests.”

New Zealand is a land of fields of farms and forests, and our economy depends on them.

Once again Dyson argues that the planet’s biomass holds the key to carbon sequestration and pleads for more scientific research into its workings. “We do not know whether intelligent land management could increase the growth of the topsoil reservoir by four billion tons of carbon per year, the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All we can say for sure is that this is a theoretical possibility and ought to be seriously explored.”

If our government, of any hue, want to make a useful contribution to “climate” science, while serving our economic and social interests rather than destroying them, Freeman Dyson has shown the way – and he has been showing us the way for about 15 years. Shouldn't we start to take some notice?

But don’t hold your breath.

Like the advocates of Smart Growth, the climate alarmists have their own agendas.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of the 84 year old Dyson, his 1999 collection “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet – tools of Scientific Revolutions” is a great place to start. In these essays Dyson shows a much more open and imaginative mind – and not to mention a better informed one – than so many current “radicals” who believe we must all retreat to their Romantic notion of the past. Dyson’s key theme is that most of us want to live in a village – provided it’s a rich village – and technology, using the sun, the genome and the internet, is making that choice available to us all.

The planners’ attempts to reverse these trends are doomed and are destroying urban economies world-wide.

ENDS

1257