Resource Thinking Simplistic – Monitor; ENVIRONMENT COMMISSIONER

By GORMAN, Paul

Government and local authority hang-ups over renewable and non- renewable resources worry New Zealand’s top independent environmental watchdog.

Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Jan Wright believes it is wrong to classify all renewable resources as “good” and non-renewables as “bad”.

Presenting Lincoln University’s 10th annual state of the nation’s environment address last night, Wright said the issue was one of her pet themes.

“The belief that it is always better to use renewable resources rather than non- renewable resources is an environmental sacred cow,” she said. “Renewable is ‘good’ and non-renewable is ‘bad’ – I think that is too simplistic. And I worry about it because of the increasing amount of policy and legislation that relies on classifying resources in this way.”

Things were rarely that straightforward. One example was that New Zealand’s modern environmental movement began with opposition to the raising of Lake Manapouri, a scheme to generate renewable electricity. Another was geothermal energy which is defined as renewable in the Resource Management Act.

“Yet the steam used to generate electricity from some geothermal fields can be very ‘fizzy’ – that is, it contains a great deal of carbon dioxide. So beware of simplistic thinking,” she said.

Prioritising environmental problems was a challenge. Environmental decision-makers had to understand two “powerful concepts of economic thinking” – trade-offs and opportunity cost.

“Many of us tend to feel that thinking like this about the environment is not kosher. I have done my time regarding economists as enemies of the environment,” Wright said.

“The fundamental problem addressed by economists is the allocation of scarce resources. And our resources for addressing environmental problems are scarce. Dollars are scarce, technical capability is scarce, political will is scarce.”

Wright proposed five criteria to help rank environmental problems:

Is the problem cumulative?

Is the problem reversible?

Is the size of the problem significant?

Is the size of the problem accelerating?

Is the problem approaching a point that tips the environment into another state?

Using those criteria, Wright ranked water quality “far above” air quality.

Kiwis should not delude themselves that “win-win” solutions were always possible.

“There is great debate going on . . . over the visual impact of wind turbines on iconic high- country landscapes,” she said. “How do we judge that local environmental impact against the need to reduce carbon dioxide from electricity generation?

“But consider the criterion of reversibility. Wind turbines can be dismantled and removed, but climate change is not reversible.”

——————–

(c) 2008 Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.