by Catherine Delahunty
The news that mining industry spin is being uncritically adopted by officials advising the Minister of Energy and Mining is no surprise. A read of the Crown Minerals Bill shows that the Government is enthusiastically promoting and facilitating a range of minerals, oil, and gas exploration.
On the ground this Bill disempowers communities which may not support rural land and conservation land being mined. The Resource Management Act which acts as a barrier to unfettered mining development is also threatened with changes to speed up access to mining.
On Monday I visited a display of a new coal mine proposal on the Hauraki Plains near Mangatangi. The land is owned by Fonterra which the company wants to mine for coal to fuel their milk powder production plant. The display was full of pretty pictures and reassuring designs of the rehabilitation after 7 years of coal mining with a 30 hectare footprint. The local impact is really about dust, noise and industrialisation for the adjacent farming community. But no one was keen to talk with me about the depressing commitment to using a polluting fossil fuel which adds to climate change. It makes short term sense to for Fonterra to use their own coal, but I am disappointed in their lack of leadership and commitment to exploring clean alternatives for the future. I am also disappointed in that our laws aren’t adequate in protecting New Zealanders from the social impacts or long environmental effects, such as climate change, from new coal mines such as this one proposed by Fonterra.
Mining is a core focus of the Government’s economic strategy and given that mining policy is now industry driven, local impacts and global responsibility to our planet are not a priority.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Catherine Delahunty on Thu, October 11th, 2012
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Catherine, the mining industry is happy to face high standards, as you know. The point is that our regulatory environment presents plenty of room for improvement in efficiency – that is what is meant by promoting the industry. The Crown Minerals Bill, incidentally, is partly about keeping the cowboys out of NZ. We would be very happy with that. Fonterra’s problem is that coal or gas is one-fifth the price of industrial heat from any other source, and their product must compete against other countries who subsidise the production of dairy products, and then the export of their dairy products. It is only fair to task Fonterra with changing their heat source, if subsidies are removed off dairy production and export worldwide. These issues are never one-dimensional.
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Fonterra must compete internationally so Fonterra must burn coal.
Geddit, Catherine?
It’s sensible and reasonable (and climate change is not real)
Goddit?
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To Greenfly: I look forward to reading your proposal for replacing the $13 billion a year dairy export industry with something else. I have yet to read anything credible on this matter, and would welcome your thoughts.
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There is no possible conceivable way in which NZ can fill global demand.
Not even “at any price”.
The country will destroy itself if it attempts that absurd task.
Agreed?
The country ALSO cannot affort to NOT sell much of its farm produce overseas. Farming is the area we are in fact, best positioned to produce at low cost. Both low cost absolutely and low cost to the environment.
We CAN do that.
We aren’t.
We are instead responding to economic pressures placed on us by the rest of the planet and our own internal failure to create and sustain any other industry, and wrecking the rivers and the country, some ways permanently, in pursuit of those dollars, while creating an ever expanding debt burden AND environmental degradation for our children.
The balance is not, as you put it so absurdly, all or nothing. It is balance.
There is no balance currently, there is no realistic negotiation of any (your characterization is an example), there is no alternative industry being developed and there is no agreement that there should be. That is a problem that New Zealanders simply have.
They do not accept the notion that to do something more than farming they have to do something more than passively accepting the dictates of distance and markets. They seldom understand that they must do something in addition to farming OR accept great limitations on their lifestyles and sell off everything we own.
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(*sings: Ya can’t have one without the…other.)
You’re a shill for the coal industry – of course you’re going to plug for more burning of the stuff! Why can’t they burn wood (it’s sustainable, don’t you know)?
Because the decision makers in that industry have crap ethics, as do those in yours.
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Has Fonterra investigated the use of geothermal heat for their drying process? I imaging that most of their heat needs would be at temperatures near boiling point, so they could use lower grade heat than required for electricity generation. Solar heating may also be an option, possibly for pre-heating, although it would need some form of backup.
Trevor.
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What part of unpriced negative externality does Straterra Bernie Napp not understand?
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Hello everyone. Where do I start? I don’t have any good solutions, to be honest. There are nearly one trillion tonnes of easy-access coal worldwide, and they are going to burn, no matter what NZ does to save the world’s climate. To give one reason why this is. NZ has 4% of the lignite resource that the Australian State of Victoria has. Lucky for them. This State produces roughly the same amount of electricity that we do, except that it’s 90% dependent on fossil fuels. Why? Because they don’t have the hydro, geothermal, and wind capacity that we do. I suppose they could build nuclear power stations. Or they could collectively opt to live in the Dark Ages. Or voluntarily reduce their population to one-tenth of its current dimension. I’m certainly not advocating the destruction of the world’s climate. But I don’t think that living in some fantasy world in which the use of coal will magically disappear is helpful either. Think of countries that do not have water, wind, forests, tides. Solar on its own is not enough. I do know that Scion is working on biocoal, as a substitute for coal, certainly that’s going to be part of the answer. But will this cope with the 2500 billion tonnes of coal that are consumed every year worldwide? Speaking of externalities, if NZ acts and the rest of the world doesn’t, we as a nation will be the victim of an unpriced externality. NZ is not a closed system because we trade with the rest of the world. I studies first year economics, and have done a course on conservation economics at Stanford University.
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Greenfly, Touche!
Perhaps Bernie is standing with coal (and Mitt).
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What part of unpriced negative externality does Straterra Bernie Napp not understand?
In Napp’s defence, Like the PM, he’s a busy guy.
I mean, why would you waste time and expend cognitive capacity attempting to understand something that (a) wont make you any money (b) wont cost you anything?
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It is only fair to task Fonterra with changing their heat source, if subsidies are removed off dairy production and export worldwide. These issues are never one-dimensional.
How about we put an actual charge on the CO2 produced that resembles in some way the damage that it actually does… maybe $150/ton instead of $23 a ton, and then NOT bill the taxpayers for it but the people who do the emitting… AND put a tariff on every damned thing coming into this country, that represents the CO2 not paid for in its production.
That is a price we as a society have to pay, but it benefits us in the long run by making us independent and boosting our ability to make “stuff” ourselves. Subsidizing Fonterra’s carbon dioxide emissions does us no good whatsoever.
Yup… you WILL have a heckuva time selling product if you burn coal and feed GMO rubbish to the cows.
Much cheaper to burn photons, pull up geothermal heat or use biomass and feed the cows grass instead of GMO rubbish.
Not entirely cheap but cheaper in the long run than the coal.
Go to market with a pure AND carbon neutral product. Label it as such.
You have a moat… it is OUR ability to generate renewable energy and our GMO free reputation and policies. Use it and support it instead of complaining about it and destroying it.
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Bernie Napp said “there are nearly one trillion tonnes of easy-access coal worldwide, and they are going to burn”
That is obscene!
There has to be another way and we have to make it happen.
It is wrong to wreck the planet.
Mr Napp, You claim “ I’m certainly not advocating the destruction of the world’s climate”, sorry, but that’s crap. You are advocating for the continued use of coal in spite of the clear scientific evidence that burning it will destroy the climate and acidify the oceans.
God knows what they pay you, but I guess its enough to buy the pills you must need to sleep at night.
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So burning all the coal and wrecking the Earth’s climate is okay if we all doing it together.
Bravo Bernie Napp and PR shills Straterra for promoting a new desperate depth of (im)moral relativism!
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Mr Napp – you are dismissing Victoria’s renewable energy potential too quickly.
While Victoria doesn’t have the same class of wind resources that New Zealand does, it still lies near enough to the roaring forties to be able to use wind power for getting up to 20% of their electricity needs. They could install perhaps 2GW of wind farms at 30% capacity factor which could generate around 5TWh per year.
However their biggest renewable energy source is solar. They have the area to install as much solar power as they need, with solar photovoltaic helping to meet their day-time electricity peaks and solar thermal systems (with thermal storage) to meet their needs when the sun goes down and the wind isn’t enough. To start them on the solar thermal route, conventional hot water heating panels and trough collectors can be added to their existing coal fired power stations to preheat the water and reduce their coal usage.
And of course, Victoria is just one state. If there are not enough renewable energy sources in Victoria to meet its needs, it could import extra electricity from other states with spare resources, unlike New Zealand.
Trevor.
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I like the solar panels on dairy sheds idea. Solar panels are getting a lot cheaper. Am reminded of something. In 1905 there was a conference in New York to discuss the problem of horse manure clogging the streets of the world’s big cities. The conference gave up on the issue, concluding that nothing could be done. Within a few years, the problem disappeared, with the invention of the streetcar, initially, followed by petrol-driven vehicles. This is the sort of breakthrough the world could use to deal with the coal issue. Fracking of oil and gas-bearing shales is part of the answer, in the meantime, and is leading to reductions in emissions in the US, for instance. I say that, because these issues are more complex than often painted.
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Bernie
I presume we are agreed that businesses, which rely on civil society to operate, which includes the rule of law, morality and ethics of that society, are required to act ethically?
Assuming that, I dont understand how you then say:
“I’m certainly not advocating the destruction of the world’s climate. But I don’t think that living in some fantasy world in which the use of coal will magically disappear is helpful either.”
My disagreement with your approach is that you seem to rate the challenges and outcomes in a very odd way.
Is it going to be very hard to, for example, change the way we produce food, and do that without using coal? Of course. Fonterra choosing not to use coal and taking price hit for that is certainly important.
But surely it is entirely ‘fantastical’ to think that such a challenge is so hard that we (including businesses) can therefore take a fatalistic approach to the damage and loss of life that climate change will produce?
To use your terminology, isnt it ‘realistic’ to think that a marked, but by no means fatal, drop in our standard of living is preferable to the end of our current climate?
Arent you simply arguing that the political challenges of getting away from coal as quickly as possible are enormous, and then inviting us to consider them as if climate change had relatively ordinary, rather than extraordinary, and potentially catastrophic, consequences?
I think what people had to consider politically in World war II was pretty hard. My English father remembers their family car being towed away to ‘make spitfires’. I dont think we need to go nearly so far. So, shouldnt we accept that enormous political challenges face us but, 1) they arent as large as those faced by immediate previous generations, and, 2) what we lose if we dont face them is immeasurably more? Isnt that ‘reality’?
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Australia also has a huge geothermal field in its centre – enough to last centuries. Tim Flannery cites that as a major energy resource instead of coal or nuclear. He calculates that transmission distance is scarcely a factor, so large is the field.
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So Mr Napp, perhaps you can answer my question above – have Fonterra considered using geothermal heat for their drying processes instead of coal?
Trevor.
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At 9:33, Bernie Napp talks horseshit.
The man has no shame
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Bernie
Trading one emitter for another isn’t actually doing anyone any good in the long run. Fracking is only a short term answer, far shorter term than you seem to understand. The extractive industry as a whole is not going to do us a lot of good this century.
Have to differentiate fracking for oil vs fracking for gas just a bit.
The oil is a problem right now for several reasons. One is the fugitive emissions issue. That has to be managed by regulation, and the cost of the oil and gas rises as a result of having to handle it.
http://peakoil.com/enviroment/frackings-dark-side-gets-darker-the-problem-of-methane-waste/
This is less of a problem in a gas well as the product IS the gas and any fugitive release represents lost resource. Not really a different problem, just a different attitude.
The next is the rapid depletion of fracked resources. Oil wells in fracked strata deplete rapidly, more rapidly than the conventional oil did.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/15/1119969/-Drill-Baby-Drill-The-Fracking-Bubble-is-Bursting
The next is that it does NOT position us in any way, to deal with the long term problem which is that there is no more CHEAP oil, and there is soon not going to be any more CHEAP gas… and CHEAP coal has been an illusion caused primarily by the coal burning industry being allowed to dump its waste for free. The truth is that oil is too valuable to burn, and coal is more dangerous to our planet than nuclear energy, and gas is not the panacea we would wish as it also depletes rapidly, requiring many wells for little resource.
which leads us to the next problem:
These forms of energy have a much lower EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) than we’re used to… so much much more is required to get any to the consumer at the petrol pump.
Which doesn’t yet describe any of the environmental problems of the actual process. The amount of water required… in a world short of water. The additional risk to groundwater from improper disposal of the fracking fluid waste… that CAN be handled, but it raises the price and reduces the EROEI still further.
Fundamentally, the hype isn’t being bought here. We know the problem isn’t going to be solved by drilling more, drilling deeper or digging more resources out of the ground. Those are not and were NEVER sustainable answers. This is a community that takes sustainability as a virtue and so those answers were never going to be acceptable… and the problems are more obvious to us, because we know where they will show up.
TANSTAAFL – if we want to have energy and enough to power our society we have to work harder at reducing and altering our power requirement mix and improving our sustainable-renewable supplies. Which means more wind farms and fewer well fields…
Sorry Mr Napp… you can’d spin this one. Not here. I reckon it was good practice for you but you can only hope that you don’t run into one of us on the other side of a Q&A session. I for one, am not in a mood to take prisoners.
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The big problem with “Drill, Baby, Drill” is not the actual drilling. Rather it is what they are drilling for. We really need to get going and drill more wells to find and harness geothermal resources, both for electricity generation and direct heat use. Providing the resources are not over-exploited, they can be used for centuries, being replenished from even hotter areas further down, unlike the oil and gas wells which may only last a few years.
The problem may be a limited number of drilling rigs, so we need to start drilling the geothermal wells now before all the rigs get tied up chasing the last of the gas pockets.
Trevor.
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People who abuse others and hide behind pseudonyms have no arguments and no credibility.
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