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Submission
August 2008
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Thank
you for this belated opportunity to speak. On Monday morning it so
happened I turned on National Radio for a few minutes after the 6 am
news while I dressed and just happened by a fluke to hear that these
hearings are starting. I
could recall no communication from the GWRC about my submission and so
yesterday rang to check when I would be speaking. I was told the GWRC
was no record of my submission, which fortunately I had copied off your
website to post to other interested parties.
See below. I am concerned other submitters will also be unaware
their exercise in democracy was in vain. I
would have liked to provide an illustrated Power Point, in particular,
promoting the urgent need to invest in light rail and the local
electrical grid. Instead I have been restricted to less than three hours
to pull these quick thoughts together. This is unfortunate as I am a
slow writer andI am aware that my original submission may well seem to
be the work of a lunatic. I will briefly attempt to persuade you
otherwise. Fact.
No person has ever circumvented the Conservation Principle of Energy
which states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed and is
subject to constant transformation. Fact.
Mineral oil/gas is an energy form. It is not energy, as our culture so
fatally claims. It is simply a form and thus very finite in quantity. Probable
Fact. The majority of the cheaply extracted mineral oil/gas reserves on
planet Earth have been destroyed this last century. The Cheap Mineral
Oil/Gas Age is over, even though a few hundred million people still
place negligible value on the resource. Fact. There is no such thing as “carbon neutrality” – our culture’s use of this symbol is an active denial of the Conservation Principle (i.e. a denial of change/stewardship.) Once mineral oil/gas reserves are burned or made into fertiliser or buried in rubbish tips and oceans they are gone, destroyed, no longer existing as a highly potent resource. They are not there for our children. It is insane to think their destruction could ever be a no neutral act. Fact.
At the advent of the Cheap Mineral Oil/Gas age in 1900 there were 1654
million human beings, the majority of which were rural based. At the end
of the Age, as of yesterday, there are an estimated 6,717 million human
beings, the majority of which are urban based. Probable
Fact. In 1900 almost 100% of the calories required to put a calorie of
food on the plate of a human came more or directly from solar sources.
In 2008 5 out of every six calories required to put a calorie of food on
the plate of a human came from fossil fuels – mineral oil/gas in
particular. Fact.
Under our current regime the absence of mineral oil/gas means 6 billion
people perish. All food, health, transport and civic systems implode in
inflation, war, famine and disease. Approximate
Fact. A 42-gallon barrel of mineral oil contains the equivalent of 25000
man-hours of labour in a highly transportable and storable form. A price
of $US40 a barrel values each of those man-hours of labour at O.16 cents
a man-hour of labour. Fact.
A price of $US1000 a barrel is a value of 4 cents a man-hour of labour. When
Government, industry and territorial authority planners were predicting
mineral oil would be $US35 in 2008 I was predicting it would be over
$US80 – thereby experiencing both the derision traditionally accorded
local idiots/lunatics and the general exclusion from our media (Till
recently SCOOP News was an exception.) The Cook Strait News did print
this letter February 2005. The Editor A year or two back I stood up at a meeting discussing regional transport investment priorities and suggested the exercise was pointless. The investment programme was based on the recent Government predictions that oil would be $19 a barrel in 2004. I predicted it would be over $40. Many thought me a nutter. I will now predict that without the sudden appearance of an extraordinary leader like US President Carter, oil will be close to $80 a barrel in 2008. Already lower income people are being hit by the inflation resulting from rising oil and gas prices. Their plight is set to worsen sharply. In this context, the trolley bus wires are gold. Sure they are not pretty. However note how incomparably elegant they are compared to ugly, noisy monstrosities like car-clogged Adelaide Road, Riddiford St, Taranaki St or Jervois Quay. Just know the wealth in those wires, folks! Dave McArthur As
you can see, these predictions were very accurate. Most New Zealanders
are now experiencing an effective inflation rate of 10% with high
interest rates, escalating debt and credit failure and wealth loss with
effective stagflation of middle-lower incomes. Mineral oil is over
$US100 a barrel. The
insight underpinning my predictions was and remains very simple –
brutally simple. Any society that confuses an energy form with energy
sets in play its inevitable and escalating collapse. NZ policy makers
severely undervalue mineral oil and promote addictive/wasteful uses of
it – as this document exemplifies. In fact we are world leaders in
promoting this addictive behaviour: Fact. Witness our pivotal international role since the early 1990s in promoting the carbon trading/market ethos as against tax/steward ethos Fact.
New Zealanders use over 30 barrels per 1000 people per day. The vast
majority of human beings use less than 5 barrels per 1000 people per
day. Fact.
NZ petrol and diesel retails at the very cheap rates, even by OECD
standards and the average motorist receives a probable Government
subsidy over $4 for every $1 they pay at the pump. Most of this subsidy is paid by non car-owners – in particular by our young people who inherit poorer education systems, student loans, lower quality housing and, in general, systems based on mineral oil at $US25 a barrel in a world whereas the real value is in the order of thousands of dollars a barrel. I am over 60 and have had a good life, whatever. It could well be that our young people will subsidise motorways such as is proposed in this document by living very short and miserable lives. My
current predictions? The
fact that the Wellington region, the Capital of New Zealand is even
contemplating such an uninformed and dangerous framework for planning
the region’s use of humanity’s carbon potential suggest the
unsustainable status quo in planning investment continues. If as few as
7% of the worlds population adopts our region’s policy of severely
undervaluing mineral oil at about $US35 a barrel, as this document does,
then I predict, by the time these car/truck infrastructures are
completed, billions of our fellow human beings will be experiencing
death by famine/disease. I predict the widespread destruction of the
wealth of the middle classes of the world through raging inflation
because of their addictive uses of mineral oil/gas. I predict an
unprecedented concentration of wealth through oil/gas revenue into the
hands of tiny minority. Remember,
regardless of whether we like it or not, the Principle of the
Conservation holds. Once our mineral oil/gas resource is destroyed, the
source of power for the wealthy elite disappears and they tend to react
in psychopathic ways. Historically, when these three events occur
simultaneously, we have the geopolitical formula for sudden and hideous
global war. The
Wellington region has an option and can provide a sustainable model to
the world. It requires one thing, just one thing, the thing that is
lacking in this document: honesty. The honesty to acknowledge mineral
oil/gas is finite and is an incredibly precious resource of very high
value. The honesty to expose the huge subsidies to car/truck owners. The
honesty to acknowledge that we each are stewards of the carbon
potential, the electrical potential, the solar potential, of the human
potential. Such
honesty reveals it is insane to invest another cent in cars and trucks
and it reveals an immense logic instructing us to immediately begin
constructing light rail systems, start conserving our urban solar
potential and begin renovating our failing electrical grids before it is
too late. Remember in times of warfare last century we were forced to
appreciate the immense value of mineral oil. Wellington policy makers
have forgotten those lessons at our peril. We can volunteer to become
mindful of the lessons again or we can put ourselves at extreme risk of
losing our minds altogether. We are, after all, Carbon Beings. Many
more suggestions can be found at www.bonusjoules.co.nz
of how the Wellington Region can provide a world model that reduces the
risk of imminent catastrophic war.
Initial Online Submission
Warning -All material needs editing and reviewing. My apologies for sudden changes in font. |
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