Govt funding playing of whale songs to heal trees!

I am copying this Kiwiblog post of September 10, 2024 by David Farrar

It is unbelievable that the National Coalition Government is still allowing this atrocious behavior by government bureaucrats.

Kiwiblog posted:

I wish this was made up, but it isn’t.

Jerry Coyne writes:

The government of New Zealand continues to throw away money by funding ludicrous projects involved indigenous “ways of knowing” (in this case Mātauranga Māori, or “MM”). … One of the projects involves trying to stem the death of kauri trees (Agathis australis), the iconic tree of New Zealand.  Kauri deforestation, due to logging by Europeans and also burning buy Māori, is now exacerbated by “Kauri dieback,” the death of trees after infection by a funguslike organism. This has resulted in the closure of forests (the infection may be spread by humans carrying soil on their feet), but so far nothing has really been effective in curing the disease or stopping its spread. But a new government-funded project based on Māori traditions involves trying to stop the disease by, yes, playing whale songs to the trees and dousing them with whale oil.  

The taxpayer funded project explains:

Māori whakapapa describes how the kauri and tohorā (sperm whale) are brothers, but they were separated when the tohorā chose the ocean over the forest. In this research area we looked at how this connection could possibly help save the kauri from kauri dieback disease.

They’re not fucking brothers. One is a tree. The other is a whale.

They are not the same species, the same genus, the same family, the same order, the same class, the same phylum or even the same kingdom!

Coyne points out:

Note that the video begins with the statement that there are “forms of knowledge” other than science, and that indigenous knowledge gets no respect because the “colonization process” has “tried to remove our knowledge” and outlawed it.  In my view, this is pure, ludicrous science-dissing. The whale nonsense begins at about 2:50 with the claim that “the whale once traversed the face of the earth” (yes, on land, too!) and that there is a “sibling relationship” between whales and kauri trees. This is what happens when “traditional wisdom” is used instead of modern science (which, by the way, discovered the organism causing the tree infection). Well, who knows—the tattooed Måori man might be right: whale oil and whale bone might cure the trees, as he claimed it has. But I’m not betting on it.  How about a double-blind control test rather than legends and anecdotes?

Any entity that funds anti-science instead of science should lose all government funding in my view.

Councils should focus on climate change adaptation not mitigation

This is a really poignant blog by Eric Crampton. I totally agree that (especially) storm effect is a huge issue for our Regional Council and we need to concentrate on flood and storm adaption mechanisms and let Central Government look to any mitigation methodologies for climate change.

Source: Kiwiblog, July 24, 2024

Eric Crampton writes:

Policy problems should be dealt with by the level and part of government best placed to deal with them. Good public policy should recognise subsidiarity. Local problems should be dealt with locally. But not all problems are local. A council issuing its own currency to address perceived failures in national-level monetary policy would not be a great idea. Council-level policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions are about as sensible as councils trying to take on monetary policy or building up their own armed forces. It isn’t that monetary policy and national defence aren’t critically important. It’s rather that those concerns are best handled by central government.

Yes importance doesn’t mean it is appropriate for local government.

Last week, Act Party MP Mark Cameron lodged a member’s bill prohibiting regional councils from considering greenhouse gas emissions from consented activities when deciding on resource consents. Unfortunately, and hopefully unintentionally, Act’s press release claimed the Bill would “prohibit regional councils from considering climate change as a factor in their plans”. Blocking councils from planning for increased flooding and for rising sea levels would be pretty stupid. That kind of land use planning is core council business.

Climate change adaptation is very much a role for local government.

Different parts of the country have very different opportunities for mitigating emissions and for sequestering carbon. When New Zealand reaches net zero, parts of the country will remain net emitters and other parts of the country will have net removals. It is impossible to tell, in 2024, which greenhouse gas emissions in 2060 will remain difficult to reduce. It is also impossible to tell which path technology may take for removing emissions from the atmosphere: trees may be surpassed by other options. Hitting the net zero target at a national level will be hard enough to do cost-effectively. Trying to do it within each region misses out on opportunities where abatement is cheaper in some places than in others. The only sensible way of bridging those differences would be allowing emissions trading between regions – and that’s what the existing Emissions Trading Scheme already does.

Yep use the ETS to reduce emissions nationally.

Productivity is New Zealand's achillies heel

NZ Economy

Technically, NZ is out of recession. The economy grew 0.2% in the first quarter of 2024, but growth is so soft that many are still feeling the sting of a sluggish economy. This has shown with retail card spending in May declining by 1.1%, making it the 4th consecutive month of decline.

House prices have also dropped, and pessimism reigns supreme in NZ at present. Both business and consumer confidence is dire as we live in an elevated inflation and interest rate environment. The NZ economy is currently in worse economic conditions than during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

We are not growing as fast as other countries because our Reserve Bank does not want us to grow. Governor Adrian Orr not only didn’t try to avert a recession but actually induced a recession to curb aggregate spending in the economy.

New Zealand’s economic woes lead directly back to the huge and wasteful spending by the Labour Government. The new Coalition Government has a huge job in reversing that wasteful spending, without fuelling a further deterioration of economic growth.

NEW ZEALAND GDP Growth Rate 

GDP per Capita – NZ remains a laggard

According to 2024 International Monetary Fund data, NZ (at US$47,000) is ranked 27th, behind the average of advanced economies (US$52,000) and well behind our close neighbour Australia – ranked13th at US$63,000).

The highest five countries include:

1  Luxembourg   US$140,000            

2  Ireland             US$118,000             

3  Switzerland    US$110,000

4 Norway US$102,000

5 Singapore US$92,000

Note: All of the top five, bar Luxembourg, have similar populations to New Zealand. 

The big concern is that our per Capita GDP rate has dropped significantly more than our GDP – and what’s even more concerning is that even when we grow, we don’t seem to be better off.

According to new analysis by The Economist, NZ ranks 22nd in the world for gross domestic product per person, measured in US dollars. But as the publication acknowledges, sorting countries into rich and poor can be difficult.

Measures such as GDP are affected by population size (more people generally mean more output). And adjusting for population alone is not enough. Dollar income per person does not account for differences in prices between countries (a Big Mac, for example, will set you back more in some places than in others, even after converting into dollars). Nor does it account for productivity (overall output per hour worked).

To get a fuller picture, The Economist ranks countries by three measures: dollar income per person, income adjusted for local prices (known as purchasing-power parity) and income per hour worked.

And once the prices we pay and the hours we work are factored in, NZ barely sneaks into the top 50, lagging behind North America, Australia, the UK, almost all of Europe, Turkïye, the Arabian Peninsula and even the fast-growing South American oil state of Guyana. In the 38-member OECD, we rank 30th.