From the “this is bad but my ability to buy plastic shit from China will be curtailed if we stop this” category, Mike Joy writing for Radio New Zealand:

“While emissions of all pollutants inexorably rise and we waltz past tipping point after tipping point, we continue to talk and talk and set up working groups and commissions and expert panels. We commission reports - how this government loves a report! - and we monitor impacts, and we survey people. We do nothing real.”

He goes on:

“One quote from the 'ghastly future' paper struck a chord with me: "Humanity is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for boosting incomes in the short term". This sums up exactly what I see happening with freshwater in this country. We are continually kicking the can down the road.”

Yep.

Lest we accuse him of warm-fuzzy statements about saving the planet, here are some specifics:

“A perfect example of this can-kicking is Te Waihora (Lake Ellesmere) in Canterbury. Like most of our lowland lakes in intensive agricultural catchments, it is dying due to excess nutrient inputs.

“To save the lake from further deterioration, farming intensity in the catchment would have to be curtailed. The regional council Environment Canterbury (ECan) and Ministry for the Environment (MfE) did an analysis on the economics of two actions to reduce the pollution and try to save the lake.

“The options: reduce farming intensity in the catchment, (most nutrients come from dairy farming) or construct a wetland to take up the nutrients prior to reaching the lake. The analysis concluded that the cost to dairy farmers in lost revenue would be around $250 million yearly. The wetland option would have a one-off cost of $380m, much of which would go towards buying land and taking it out of dairy production.

“So guess what they decided to do? Nothing at all. They concluded that the economic impact of mitigation was too high either way, and so nothing would be done.

“In other words, let future generations deal with this issue. It's not like they'll be busy dealing with rising seas or disastrous new weather patterns, right? And in fact, when you run the numbers, we are effectively subsidising dairy farming in this catchment to the tune of $350m to $380m every year. We are not just bequeathing the death of Lake Ellesmere to the future. We're paying top dollar to have it killed.”

Well, if you put it that way.

Some numbers from what happens if you actually try to lower nitrate levels:

“Contrast this with the spending choices we've made around Lakes Taupō and Rotorua. To protect both these lakes, taxpayers are paying farmers in the lake catchments to take cows off the land. The price tag is around $90m for Taupō and $40m for Rotorua. For Rotorua the aim is to reduce nitrate flow into the lake by 100 tonnes, a nice round figure which makes it easy to see that we are paying $400 to prevent each kilogram of nitrate from reaching the lake.”

Keep that value in mind as we move on to the crazy conclusion:

“The total amount of nitrate leached to water from dairy farming in the 2017 year in Canterbury alone was above 30m kilos. If we paid to protect Canterbury waterways at the rates we paid in the two North Island lake examples, it would amount to a cost of $12 billion per year. Effectively, we are allowing dairy in Canterbury - just in Canterbury - to do $12b worth of free polluting every year. To put that into perspective a recent report said that the total dairy industry contributed $7.8b per year to the NZ economy.”

If that’s not an ecological Ponzi scheme, I’m a dairy cow.

[Cover photo: An Extinction Rebellion protest at Bathurst's coal mine in Canterbury last September.]