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Opinion piece by Owen McShane
29 April 07
The
Species Hoax |
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During
late January the ex-Act MP, Gerry Eckhoff, was leading some
Otago farmers’ charge against DoC’s demands to enter their
properties to survey some “endangered” trees.
Farmers
remember when they last invited DoC researchers onto their
land, only to find the information was used to designate huge
areas of their farms as “significant natural areas” and
subject to all manner of RMA rules and controls.
This
time DoC’s claim a right to trespass to examine the
“endangered species” of trees such as Olearia Hectorii, Olearia Fibriata and Olearia Lineata.
In
their authoritative text, New
Zealand Native Plants, Cave and Pattison point out there
are about 135 species of Olearia in
New Zealand
. They note that different species thrive in different
locations. Species that thrive in Northland – where I live
– may well be scarce in
Central Otago
– where Gerry lives. That’s the whole point of different
species of the one genus – they have adapted to local
environments.
Sure
enough Olearia Lineata appears to be rare down South. If this worries DoC
staff they should visit the Forever
Native nursery, just along the road from my office, where
they can buy as many as they like. They can even buy them off
the web. If they don’t want to reach so far North they can
try the Taranaki Regional Council Nurseries. They can buy 3m
tall Olearia Hectori
from Matai Nurseries
in
Canterbury
.
It’s
difficult to see how any plant can be endangered, when you can
it from local nurseries.
We
are told almost every day that
New Zealand
is the “endangered species capital” of the world. But
it’s dead easy to win the endangered species Olympics if you
include every species which happens to be rare in some
location because the environment doesn’t suit. Dogs are not
an endangered species because
Chihuahua
don’t thrive on the Alaskan ice.
Should
we care? If DoC wants to list locally rare species as
endangered why should that bother Business? After all,
Business has its own problems – such as access to cheap
reliable electricity.
However,
if you care about your electricity supply I suggest you watch
the endangered species debate with more than passing interest.
Broadband
and the Snail
Take
the humble snail.
Snails
don’t move around much. If you find a snail which is running
around on legs, or flying on wings, or swimming with fins, you
can be reasonably sure it is not a snail.
Snails
find it hard to make new friends and meet new people. Hence,
if a group of snails spend a few thousand years in one valley
or forest glade they will interbreed and create yet another
variety of one of the 65,000 species of snail.
Because
they are a distinct variety their genetic code will be
slightly different – just as blonde humans have genes which
are slightly different to brunettes’. Such genetic
differences tempt our conservationists to label any local
“variety” as yet another new “species”. The researcher
gets a journal article and we are told we have yet another
“rare and endangered species”.
Snails
are slow which is why we call regular mail “snail mail”.
Being in business you like fast – not slow. The world is
moving quickly and your business needs to move quickly too.
You want high speed broadband.
Regular
dial up internet uses about one watt of electricity, and only
on demand.
Broadband
uses closer to twenty
watts of electricity – all the time.
So
if one million New Zealanders switch from dial up to broadband
New Zealand
’s demand for power will increase by about 20 megawatts.
Now
that’s not much. Trustpower’s new windfarm has a planned
capacity of 500 megawatts.
However,
the watts which drive your broadband connection are the lowest
entropy, cleanest, tidiest, most stable, convenient and
accessible form of energy there is. Getting that energy from
the furnace to the microprocessor, where it can drive those
quantum mechanical systems in your desktop computer, means
that the original furnace energy has to go through a multitude
of transformations. The second law of thermodynamics insists
that each and every one of those transformations sheds energy
to the environment. This is the “virtuous waste” of our
energy system. This waste has nothing to do with inefficiency
or bad management. It happens to be the way the universe
works.
If
you want to reduce entropy – or increase order – in
one part of a system, you have to increase entropy – or
increase disorder – in another. The power station’s
cooling tower is just as important as the furnace. If we want
electricity to come out of Huntly power station we have to
warm the
Waikato
River
, and the air above the chimneys. That’s the way the
universe works.
The
result is that delivering one watt of highly organised, low
entropy, reliable, clean and stable DC electricity to your
computer, someone, somewhere, has to be running some kind of
furnace at about two hundred watts.
So
the 20 megawatts needed by our million people on broadband
actually needs 2,000 megawatts of “furnace” energy. We can
now understand why the
US
uses more energy per head than anyone else. It’s not because
Americans drive round in gas-guzzlers. Oil use accounts for
only 40% of the
US
energy consumption. 60% of the
US
economy is powered by electricity and that percentage
increases all the time because electricity is the most orderly
form of energy, and low entropy power is what the modern
knowledge-based, intelligent-system driven and
communication-based economy needs.
We
fail to understand this at our peril.[1]
Yet,
Pete Hodgson, as Minister of Energy, declared that one of his
government’s goals was to decouple energy use from growth.
The only way to do that is to reduce our use of high speed
intelligent systems. Such a policy is not so much
“Luddite” as “Lethargic”.
The
“Lethargists” want us all to slow down – while the rest
of the world speeds up.
Energy
efficiency organizations, such as the EECA, are enthusiastic
Lethargists. For example, they believe we can seek redemption
by using long-life low-energy light bulbs. They fail to
realize that to the physicist a cellphone is a light-bulb –
and scores of thousands of them light up the whole
New Zealand
countryside every day. If our eyes could see microwave
radiation a rock concert would be a sea of cell-phone candles.
“Efficiency”
enthusiasts just don’t get it.
The
cheapest and most plentiful fuel to light up all those
furnaces is coal. If
New Zealand
wants to keep up with the modern world, rather than wallow in
lethargy, we had better start mining coal for ourselves and
building clean coal-fired power stations.
The
trouble is wherever we try to dig up some coal we’re bound
to find a rare variety of snail.
If
we let the lethargists persuade us that every variety of snail
is an endangered species we’re doomed to be stuck in the
slow lane.
The
good news is that Conservation Minister Chris Carter has just
allowed Solid Energy
to move a small population of snails away from the southern
end of its Stockton Mine. I come to praise Mr Carter; he has
reached a sensible decision in the national interest.
The
Ministry of Economic Development, and in particular the Crown
Minerals Department, does seem to be promoting access to our
natural resource wealth rather than letting DoC lock it all
up. We have to give Jim Anderton his due.
So
next time you hear some farmers complaining about DoC and
their “endangered species”, don’t ask for whom they
moan.
They
moan for thee.
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