Saturday, March 30, 2024

PULPIT: Get busy on climate change now

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On October 5 our Government apparently joined the fast-trackers and ratified the Paris Agreement, promising to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.
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Well, they have given themselves 14 years to get back to somewhere near where we were in 1990.

Seems as though they need to get busy and come up with some real ideas on how to do it and demonstrate that just sometimes central government can lead from the front – not to mention taking the whole country with them.

But from what I’ve read in the various farming papers and the general media of late, it’s the nimbys and flat-earthers who are holding sway in a big way.

Good heavens, we hear that farmland values might drop because of new environmental regulations.

And one adviser went so far as to claim dairying was the highest use of pastoral farming.

Another article from one of the old brigade rubbished any idea of trying to use those new-fangled ideas such as natural capital or ecosystem services as being much too difficult and esoteric.

If we can’t clean up our waters in less than 80 years or think about land uses that don’t have half our soils eroding into them or even consider anything other than farming with chemicals – what would nature know after all – how on earth are we going to reduce those gases enough to achieve our minimal contribution to keeping climate change at bay in 16 years?

There are ways and we could do it but it’s going to require a whole lot more collective forward-thinking on the part of both the Government and the population, both urban and rural.

Take carbon for instance.

There are two huge misperceptions around on it.

The first is that only trees sequester carbon.

But we have a lot more area in pasture than trees and, treated right, pasture soils can sequester lots of carbon through making humus and most of it stays right there, forever.

The idea that our soils couldn’t make any more is a fallacy.

“Treated right, pasture soils can sequester lots of carbon through making humus and most of it stays right there, forever.”

We just need to make more humus and increase soil depth.

The second misperception is that nitrogen fertiliser helps sequester carbon in soil. It doesn’t.

What does happen is that when it is applied the soil creatures that crave carbon multiply like mad and chomp up any decaying matter before it gets to be humus and so any carbon just floats away on the air.

A gang at Illinois University has been writing about this since 2007 but nobody is listening to them either and soil depth is not growing here on conventional farms.

A third issue is that the Government sometime ago decided that science should be about making money and not just increasing our knowledge base. 

So, any research that does get done that dares to say the findings could help either farm techniques or positive action on climate change doesn’t get funded because any potential financial benefits are said to be too far away.

There is lip service to new ideas but when the question of where the necessary funds might come from, some research institute or statutory body steps in and either says “we can do that” but doesn’t or the old brigade rises up and says “too hard, too untried”.

So, the fact that nitrogen fertiliser alters the make-up of pasture plants, which then upsets cow tummies, which then makes them produce richly nitrogenous puddles evokes disbelief in those who know and who insist mitigation is the only answer.

Some people are going to be amazed how quickly 2030 will arrive and find that the nimbys and flat-earthers are still screaming that nobody is going to force them to make changes to what they do now.

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