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I went to a meeting about a month or two back
Nothing much unusual in that, I go to a lot of meetings.
This one was pretty fiery, with passionate, intelligent and vocal speakers on one side and government spin doctors on the other.
Nothing much unusual in that, a lot of the meetings I go to, with government spin doctors in attendance, end up that way.
This one could have been a meeting about the latest RUC increase being instigated without the slightest bit of consultation or prior warning, but it wasn’t.
In fact it was a meeting organised by the government spin-doctors to explain the governments position on them stealing the carbon credits off foresters and farmers with forestry blocks on their farms, and it’s fair to say the crowd weren’t happy about it.
Now this is not a topic that I know that much about yet, as I am neither a farmer nor a forester, but I will try and explain it as I see it and how it will eventually affect a whole lot of truckers.
The meeting was entitled “Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change – Options for the future” It was supposed to be a chance for the farmers and foresters to have a say on New Zealand’s future sustainable land management and climate change policies for the agriculture and forestry sectors. The reality was a choice between having your throat cut and a fence post through the chest. You see a whole lot of private investment has gone into new forests since 1994 when the Kyoto protocols were first enacted, on the understanding that a growing tree was the only way to effectively capture carbon and would earn valuable carbon credits, which could then be sold to offset the carbon production of other industry sectors, i.e. Road Transport.
And this is still true, however it will not be the tree owner that owns the carbon credits, but the government. Their reasoning seems to be that because they thought of it and signed the protocols the carbon credits are theirs. Now that’s logical.
But wait, there’s more. If you don’t like that and figure that it’s time to do something more profitable with your land and money, say converting it to a dairy farm, then you will be taxed $13,000 per hectare flat charge on land use change from forestry to another use. Boy no wonder they were pissed.
Now, lets try and put that into some sort of context for you truckers. Imagine if the government brought in a change to the act that said all trucks in New Zealand must be less than three years old, to take advantage of the new Euro 4 motors ability to produce less harmful emissions and if this was not in effect by July 07, you would be taxed out of existence. I think most of you would say something like “Bugger this for row of soldiers, I’ll sell up and move to Mars.
But wait, there’s more. With all those older trucks on the market they would be worthless and no one would want to buy them anyway, and then you would be taxed to death for wanting to do something else with your own money.
Of all the people that the world needs right now, it must be foresters, we must get in control of the carbon we are producing and they must be rewarded for their efforts. But what is happening due to the government’s position on this is that New Zealand is losing 47,000 hectares of forests per annum as foresters try to bail out before this becomes law. That’s a hell of a lot of truckloads of logs that won’t be carted in a few years time and an even bigger slab of carbon that won’t be sequestered.
But wait, there’s more, now here comes the real kicker.
To truly be carbon neutral as our grandchildren will demand we become, the transport industry will someday have to do something about the carbon dioxide we produce as an industry. It is estimated that a large petrol car doing an average of 14000 km per year emits 3.3 tonnes of greenhouse gases, if you conservatively said that a truck doing the miles we do would produce ten times this much, say 30 tonnes of greenhouse gases, and according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, one hectare of plantation Pinus Radiata absorbs an average of 18 tonnes of greenhouse gas per year. Then that means for every truck you own, your going to have to plant two hectares of forest to sequester the greenhouse gases you produce.
Now you to, can be a forester that is having his carbon credits ripped off to sell on the overseas market.
There will someday be a meeting entitled “Sustainable Land Transport Management and Climate Change – Options for the future”
They will hand out really flash and no doubt expensive plans of action to every one of you, who turn up, with all the right words in it like:
How you can help: have your say: tell us what you think: consultation: working together etc. The reality choice will be having your throat cut and a drive shaft through the chest.
The line “Nero fiddled, while Rome burnt” is rather relevant don’t you think.
But then, that is “Just an old Trucker’s” point of view.
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