She presided over the largest imports of coal we have ever seen, into a country that is sitting on huge coal reserves.
Opinion by Tony Orman
Glowing praise for Arden’s environmental record?!
Jacinda Ardern has just been been appointed a trustee of the Prince of Wales’ prestigious environment award, “The Earthshot Prize” created by Prince William to fund projects that aim to save the planet.
Prince William was effusive and glowing about the former New Zealand Prime Minister’s “life-long commitment to supporting sustainable and environmental solutions”.
And the former prime minister said she was “humbled and excited to be working with the Earthshot team”.
Prince William said Ms Ardern’s and her experience would “bring a rich infusion of new thinking to our mission”. Chair of the board of trustees Christiana Figueres said she was “thrilled” to welcome Jacinda Ardern and had long been inspired by her “work as a catalysing force in the effort to combat climate change”.
But there are big question marks about Ardern’s record
Examination of her track record as Prime Minister don’t bear out the ecstatic enraptured description of Jacinda Ardern as an environmentalist.
Dan Wooton writing in the Australian Daily Mail said he feared “William has made his first mistake as Prince of Wales by aligning himself so closely with one of the world’s more divisive politicians.”
Wooton based his horror at Ardern’s “Earth Planet” appointment on her “brutally inhumane lockdown regime” around Covid describing the retired prime minister as “heartless.”
But I wish to leave Covid aside and focus on the relevance of Jacinda Ardern’s prestigious appointment to Prince William’s Earth Planet and her qualifications as an environmentalist.
There’s nothing in her academic qualifications – “Ardern attended the University of Waikato, graduating in 2001 with a Bachelor of Communication Studies in politics and public relations, a specialist three-year degree.”
So how did she fare environmentally in her six years as prime minister 2017 to 2023?
Not at all good — in fact badly.
Contradictions – coal, emissions trading, stock flatulence
Looking at some issues, naturally climate change is one to focus on, which significantly has usurped the original name of global warming.
Her climate change commitments are a full of contradictions and hypocrisy. As one critic has said “Her climate change commitments are a joke.” She closed down coal mining in New Zealand and “then presided over the largest imports of coal we have ever seen, into a country that is sitting on huge coal reserves.”
Ardern’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is illogical, rejecting any vegetation under five metres in height for carbon sequestering assessment, when several dozen New Zealand native tree species are five metres or less. Her administration absurdly rejects the undeniable fact that all trees that are above five metres in height had for several years or more as juveniles, been under five metres in height. This wacky thinking similarly rejects farmers’ pasture in sequestering values.
Then in the next breath, her government has lambasted farmers for stock flatulence.
The Government, presided over by Jacinda Ardern for six years, sees carbon credits as the solution, a sort of free market trading, wheeling and dealing whereby a major polluter can excuse its gross pollution by planting a monoculture of trees elsewhere. How one country or corporate company paying another for the right to continue polluting is supposed to save Planet Earth, escapes me.
Carbon Trading
The approach of the Ardern governments to the theoretical threat of climate change has been to open investment doors to foreign carbon trading “farming” speculators of the corporate kind. Let me make it clear, I’m not anti-forestry. I think integrated, coordinated farm-forestry is excellent. But Jacinda Ardern’s carbon farming is futile, farcical and environmentally foolish.
Any farmer wishing to integrate trees on farms is commendable and deserves incentives. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and that’s good for both climate and environment to plant forests in the right place.
The problem is, if unchecked, uncoordinated carbon farming, gives rise to vast monocultures of trees that will probably never be harvested and used for timber.
As Beef+Lamb New Zealand says “the NZ Government is economically incentivising wholesale land use change from pastoral-based farming into exotic trees – because the increasing price of carbon credits is distorting what land is worth and productive farmland is being sold, often to overseas buyers, for the future planting of trees – mainly exotic species such as pinus radiata.”
The Government carbon farming scheme is a mess. It has failed to set any target to reduce absolute emissions from fossil fuel use, and has not set any limits on how much offsetting of emissions can happen through the ETS to meet our climate change targets and therefore on how much land should be converted to forestry to create carbon credits for sale.
I see no benefit from carbon trading.
I once asked a professional forester his opinion of carbon trading. He described it as “a rort” on the country economically. It is worsened by the move by the Ardern administrations to ease any controls on foreign investment – or should it be intrusion – by carbon farming speculators from overseas. As my forester friend described, the economic angle with profits flowing offshore to foreign investor head offices and shareholders, is a rort economically.
It is also a rort environmentally.
Drying up rivers
As a long-time fly fisherman, I know one or two trout streams. I went to fish one last autumn and to my astonishment found the stream bed bone-dry, whereas the stream once flowed all year round even in dry, drought summers.
The reason was a monoculture of pines. Now pines have an unquenchable thirst for water and as they grow they thirst for more and more water. The thirst is insatiable. And this stream’s catchment was largely planted in a monoculture of pines in this case for production forestry.
But Ardern has presided over a mania for pine monocultures of the carbon farming type that threaten to overwhelm whole valleys as overseas speculators are welcomed and flood in.
Highly productive beef and sheep farms have succumbed to market values as they are converted to the mania of carbon farming.
Anti-Environment – doing nothing about cleaning up rivers
Pine forests are of dubious environmental value. They induce acidification of soil and run-off with a loss of bio-diversity. Freshwater aquatic biodiversity is reduced as acid water means lower aquatic invertebrate populations, which means a loss of sporting fish species like trout and indigenous fish species.
The ill-effects cut deeper into the social fabric of rural New Zealand. Converting productive farmland to pine plantations for carbon credits means depopulation as farmers leave. Farm employment drops or disappears and further depopulation occurs in small towns as there is less demand for local contractors, businesses, schools and services essential for farming.
In August 2017 leading up to that year’s election, Jacinda Ardern pledged Labour would lead a nationwide effort to restore deteriorated rivers and lakes to a clean, swimmable state. By early 2020 little or nothing had been done. Greenpeace challenged PM Ardern with “It’s time for the Prime Minister to make good on her (2017) promises to clean up our rivers.”
In 2020 Jacinda Ardern renewed her promise to clean up rivers. Months later the ABC reported “New Zealand’s clean, green image hides a dirty truth. Polluted by intensive dairy farming, its waterways are some of the most degraded in the world.”
Then it asked “will the Ardern government clean it up?” To be fair, the origin of the state of rivers was nothing to do Jacinda Ardern-led governments. However Labour has not stopped the degradation of waterways.
Key Grilled
The deterioration started well before 2017.
In 2011 Prime Minister John Key and New Zealand’s environmental record were put under the spotlight in an interview on the BBC programme Hardtalk as BBC journalist Stephen Sackur grilled him about whether New Zealand really is as clean and green as the country’s tourism campaign claimed. Sackur cited Mike Joy, a leading environmental scientist at Massey University, who had said “we are delusional about how green and clean we are”.
Mike Joy made the comment while pointing out that many New Zealand species were facing extinction and more than half the countries lakes and low-land rivers were polluted. Key denied it but Sackur pointed out that Mike Joy was a scientist and would have based his comments on research.
Nevertheless in 2017 and then again in 2020 prior to elections, Jacinda Ardern promised to clean up the deteriorated rivers. Her government failed both times.
Dangerous Nitrate Levels
During the Ardern years, more emerged on the environmental state of New Zealand’s rivers. The NZ Federation of Freshwater Anglers, a rivers and trout and salmon advocacy group, carried out nitrate testing which revealed excessive levels of the chemical mainly due to corporate dairying.
The high nitrate levels are toxic to aquatic life but also to human health with the Canterbury — South Canterbury people revealed as having bowel cancer levels among the highest in the world. A Danish study of 2.7 million people revealed a strong, undeniable link between high nitrate levels in drinking water and bowel cancer.
But the Ardern years have been compliant in other environmental failings. Native birds have suffered from widespread government use of indiscriminate toxins like 1080 spread by air over public lands. Native bird numbers have suffered with some species such as the native kea parrot plummeting downwards to endangered status.
Corporate Domination
Sea fisheries dominated by a free market quota approach has resulted in corporations dominating the fishing industry with the government’s fisheries ministry seemingly sanctioning commercial methods. Bottom trawling and dredging has been allowed to continue damaging seabed environments and upsetting saltwater ecosystems.
Lax foreign ownership controls have allowed corporates to ease in and gain control such as Chinese acquisition of vertically integrated dairying from farm to processing to supply.
Counter Productive Law
Then there were other issues like Jacinda Ardern’s panicked law following the 2019 mosque shooting by an Australian terrorist. The rushed law targeted the lawful firearm owning public and left the gangs and criminals better armed. New Zealand is a land of outdoor pursuits, among it hunting. But under an inept Department of Conservation, surely a misnomer in title, animals such as the world rare Himalayan tahr are slaughtered by government programs. Game management is virtually unknown.
Therefore is it any wonder that many New Zealanders are puzzled and some aghast at Jacinda Ardern’s appointment as a trustee to Prince William’s Planet Earth concept? It seems Prince William’s researchers failed to do their homework.
Tony Orman is an angler, hunter, a conservationist and a swinging voter who was involved in “Save Manapouri” battle around 1970 and has been a forthright environmental advocate ever since.