Legislation for Electric Cars

New Zealand may not be amongst the top countries in electric car technical innovation but that in no way stops us from introducing the best legislative framework to encourage the uptake of electric cars.

The benefits of a large uptake of electric cars in New Zealand are far too evident to need rehashing here.

There are a number of measures which can be taken. Most of them don't involve dipping into the public purse. Institute all of them and we will be the leaders in the world in electric car uptake just as Germany is the leader in the uptake of solar panels.

1. Wave GST (sales tax) on the purchase of electric cars. This will reduce the price of an electric car by a ninth.

2. Do not impose road taxes on electric cars. Here there is no need to do anything. Simply desist from doing anything. There will be no use of gasoline and hence no gas tax and of course no diesel road miles. Avoid the temptation at all costs of finding some innovative way of taxing electric cars. Remember this is in the interest of New Zealand as a whole. If you can't resist putting on a road tax, wave it for 20 years from the date of purchase of the vehicle.

3. Allow the use of KiwiSaver (pension) funds to purchase an electric car just as is done for a first home. Owning an electric car is the same as getting a pension, except the pension starts immediately at the date of purchase, not at 65. Note here that the Prius has come up with a solar roof retrofit that gives an added 20km per day in the sun. An electric car with all surfaces covered by electric panels would probably get 20 to 30km extra for a day in the sun. A driver doing reasonably low road miles would never have to fill up again. The saved money can either fuel the economy directly (by daily purchases of other products with the money which would have been spent on fuel) or go into savings which also power the economy through investment.

4. Ensure that there are absolutely no import taxes on electric cars. We don't produce our own electric cars so there is no industry to protect and once again, fight against the temptation to collect money for the government from electric cars. Remember that this replacing our fleet of fossil fuel users with electric vehicles is ver much in the interest of New Zealand as a whole.

5. Do some bargaining with the manufacturers of electric cars for good prices. Promise them all the government business if they will give good prices. Have all government employees who get cars as part of their package driving electrics and reticulate government parking lots with charging points where you plug in, swipe your credit card and fill up your batteries. (see Project Better Place).

6. When there is a fair penetration of electric cars in the national fleet, institute the system they have in Canada in many places where a special lane is set aside for cars with two or more people in the car but make it applicable to two or more people in an electric car.

7. As you take over the railways, set up a system whereby one can piggy back one's electric car on the train for a reasonable price like you do on the ferry, for long trips between towns. Put the cherry on the top and electrify the trains as well and we will really be on the way. Put wind turbines along the easment of the railways wherever technically feasible, especially on scenic routs used by overseas tourists. They will love it.
and finally

8. Hire the best, most innovative engineers available and start a car industry in New Zealand producing an affordable electric car called, of course, the Kiwi.

German FIT system - Brilliant

You have to admire the German government and its Tax Department. Not only do they not themselves support the introduction of small scale renewable energy in Germany, they manage to tax it 6 times. This may seem a little surprising to you considering how the German FIT (feed in tariff) system is always held up as an example of how to increase the uptake of small scale solar-electric systems. And, don't misunderstand me. It has been tremendously successful. The generation from small solar electric systems in Germany is now almost equivalent to five large coal powered generating units and increasing day by day. Lets have a closer look at how it works.

The German government is not involved in financing solar-electric systems. The money to pay the small generator for every kWh he produces is raised by the German Power companies by charging all its customers a little more for the power they buy. Here is the first level of taxation. German VAT (sales tax) is just under a fifth so an amount equal to a fifth of your power bill is added to it and goes to the German government Tooo clever!! Remember, the power company charges a little extra to all its customers so all its customers pay a little more Sales tax. It is only a little per customer but remember that in total it is equal to a fifth of the sale price of the power generated by 5 large coal powered generating stations.

Then the government insists on double metering. All the power that the small generator/customer produces goes through one metre and everything he uses trough the second metre. This seems at first glance to be very beneficial to the small generator. Since he receives approximately three times the rate for the power he produces than for the power he buys he is very pleased that all the power he produces is measured rather than the excess above what he produces so that he gets the maximum return. Are you ever suspicious when something seems too good to be true.

Since the small generator/customer is earning revenue and it is recorded in a company, it is visible to the tax office and this amount is added to the income of the small generator. He is than taxed on this revenue at his marginal income tax rate (that is on the rate for the last portion of his income) For a really well off German this is around 50%. In other words, if a high salaried German earns 200euro per month from his power generation, he gets to keep only 100euro.

Then the tax office looks at how much power he buys. Remember, this is all the power he uses. Not just the extra he needs to make up a shortfall in the amount he generates. Whatever you buy in Germany, including power, has sales tax attached to it and sales tax, as we said, in Germany it is just under a fifth. Suppose our same well off German buys 200euro of power. Once you have added VAT, he has to pay 240euro for it. The 40euro goes to the tax office. So far we are up to 3 taxations on the power produced. Now we come to the power company.

The power company earns money by selling power. The power it buys from the small generator. it sells on to its other customers. This increases its revenue and it pays tax on this added revenue at its marginal tax rate. It also pays sales tax on power it buys. (It doesn't actually pay sales tax but passes it on to all its customers. Same result). The power is taxed once more. We have now taxed the power produced by the small generator 5 times.

Of course, since it passes it's sales tax to its customer/generators, this increases the cost of power to all its customers even more than the amount it needed to pay the generator/customer and the government taxes this increase. Sales tax on sales tax.

As I said, you have to admire the system. At a time when the world is desperate to replace fossil fuel power generation with renewables, the German government has come up with a way to increase the uptake of renewable energy, have a sixtiple dipping system of taxing every kWh of renewable power produced and gain the gratitude of its citizens and the admiration of the world. Machiavelli would be all a twitter. Imagine how much less expensive it would be for the installer of small generation equipment if it wasn't taxed this way; how much more worthwhile it would be to install such a system

One wonders what all this extra revenue is used for. If the German government ear-marks it for installing wind turbines, making home solar equipment less expensive, subsidising house insulation etc. etc. the system would be justified in terms of the big picture of replacing fossil fuel generation by renewables. I wonder. That would be another story.

Can anyone in Germany give me an answer to a question. In Germany is there sales tax (VAT, GST) on solar electric equipment. I bet there is. That would be 7 revenue streams to the German government from small solar-electric.

American Wars and Wind power

It has often been opined that the real reason America gets involved in so many wars is to secure her energy imports. This always seemed a bit far fetched and I wondered how much extra energy America could have generated if she had used all the wealth expended on wars over the past decade or so to build wind turbines. The results are interesting but I have to depend on whatever information I can glean from the Internet. I'll put down the information I have found and where it comes from and show the calculations. If you have other figures, plug them in and see what you get. But first a word about units.

Two important concepts when you talk about electricity are power and energy. Think of a couple of lads who have to move a pile of bricks up from the ground to, say, the fifth floor. They walk up the stairs with the bricks. One of them is big and strong, the other small and weak. The more powerful chap can take the bricks 10 at a time and finishes the work in half a day. The smaller chap can only carry 5 bricks at a time and takes a full day to finish. When they both have finished, they have expended the same amount of energy (as measured by the weight of bricks times the height they have been moved to), but the big chap is more powerful. He has done the work faster. Power is a rate of expending energy (rate of doing work). In electricity the watt, kilowatt or megawatt is a measure of power. It is the rate at which you are expending energy. The Kilowatt hour is the measure of how much energy you have expended. If you expend energy at a rate of one kilowatt for one hour, you have used one kilowatt hour.

So what information do we have. From this web site, the electrical energy consumption of the United States in 2005 (latest I could find) was 3,816,000,000mWh/y (megawatt hours per year - a megawatt is a million watts). Incidentally, this was one of the few sites that used the correct units so perhaps its information is more trustworthy than some of the others.

From this web site, the cost to the Americans of the wars they have been engaged in since 2001(eight and a half years to August 2009) is $901,386,000,000US. Click on this site and watch the numbers go up.

From information from a friend in the wind turbine business, it costs about $2millionUS per megawatt of wind turbine generating capacity. Just a word here about what this means.

A wind turbine is rated for how much power it will generate when the wind speed is optimal (neither too much or too little). However, the wind does not blow all the time. Wind sites are monitored before a wind farm is constructed to find the capacity factor of the area. Below about 35%, a site is often rejected and a higher capacity factor is, of course, desirable. I will use the 35% figure since it is conservative for our example. What this means is that a one megawatt wind generator in a 35% site will be generating on average over the year just over a third of a megawatt or 350kilowatts of power. Over a year of 365 days of 24 hours this will produce 350 x 365 x 24 = 3066Mwh of electrical energy.

So how many megawatts of electrical generating capacity could we buy for the $901,386,000,000US of wealth that has been expended in the wars from 2001 to Aug. 2009. Dividing this figure by $2mUS per megawatt we get 450693Mw of generating capacity.

Since one megawatt of generating capacity in a 35% site will produce 3066mWh of electricity, 450,693 megawatts of generating capacity will generate 450,693 x 3066 = 1,381,824,738 mWh of electricity per year.

Since the electricity generation of the USA in 2005 was 3,816,000,000mWh/y, this is an extra 36% of the 2005 generation.

How much imported oil would this replace. How much better would the US balance of payments be. How many young lives would have been saved on both sides and would this have been enough to avoid the present economic melt down. How many terrorists would not have had a motivation to pursue their path of destruction. With the American example, how much further ahead would other countries be in their uptake of renewable energy. How much corruption and misery for their own people would have been avoided in the oil rich countries. If America is indeed fighting wars to secure her energy supplies, it is false economy. We should look at Ike's warning about the Industrio-military complex for the real motivation for all these wars the Americans loose.

Terra Preta - how does it work

Some of the following article on why Terra Preta works is speculation. Connecting some dots if you wish so take it with a grain of salt until someone does some definitive research on the subject.

Fairly recently fertile zones along the Amazon river were discovered. These are places which are rich in charred organic material and are fertile zones in an area of very poor soils. The depth of black soil is typically half a metre. In case this sounds strange to you; that the soils of the amazon jungle are poor, perhaps some explanation is in order.

You would think at first glance that the soils of the Amazon must be very rich to support such a large biomass of such rich flora and fauna; a veritable jungle. Apparently not so. If you cut down the jungle or burn a patch of it, you can plant some crops and if you are lucky you will get a couple of crops before you have to move to a new location. If you did the same thing in the forests of Eastern North America as the Europeans did when they arrived, you could plant crop after crop in the rich deep dark soil before you had to start to fertilize. So what is the explanation for the incredible quantity and richness of flora and fauna in the jungle. The explanation is partially in the ability of the trees and plants to recycle all the nutrients that fall on the soil. Animals and plants die, Animals defecate and urinate on the forest floor and with the high rainfall, humidity and temperature. all this material is mineralized (changed back into phosphates, nitrates and all the other ates) and is taken up by the roots of the growing flora. So why isn't there an accumulation of rich dark soil as there is in temperate zones. The answer apparently is in the relative temperatures of the two areas.

When the temperature of the soil is above 25degrees centigrade, in the presence of moisture, humus breaks down. Humus is the refractory material that is left in temperate soil when organic material breaks down. The humus is the part that doesn't break down. It is physically sticky and helps in the formation of the crumb structure (peds) of soil which allows paths for aeration and water penetration. It holds large quantities of water which plants can draw upon. Of great interest, it chealates (binds loosely) a variety of plant nutrients. If there is a source of nutrients coming from, for instance the breakdown of plants or animals, the humus will hold these nutrients in the upper layers of the soil and keep them from being washed into the subsoil. Humus is a little like the haemoglobin in our red blood cells. Haemoglobin can hold a lot of Oxygen but not very strongly. In the lungs where the Oxygen concentration is high, it absorbs oxygen and in the body where the oxygen partial pressure is low, it releases it. Humus does the same with water and nutrients. below 25 degrees, humus is very stable.

So now we come to Terra preta and why it works. Terra preta has been formed by generations of humans charring organic material and incorporating it into the soil. Along the Amazon, where these soils exist, the black layer is often about half a metre deep. Any of you who have done organic chemistry know how charcoal is used to remove odours and colours from liquids. Charcoal is very good at absorbing molecules on to its surface and releasing them. This is apparently the explanation for why all this char makes the soil so rich. It is not that it has much in the way of nutrients itself but it can hold nutrients just as humus does. If the farmers along the Amazon, for instance, net a bunch of fish and dig them into their terra preta, they will break down and the nutrients will be held by the soil instead of being leached out by the rain. And charcoal is very stable at high temperatures unlike humus. One wonders how they arrived at the idea. Perhaps they observed good growth of their yams or whatever in a place where there had been a fire that was put out by the rain. It could be that char also has some of the other properties of humus such as water retention or improvement of soil structure. Some careful work is necessary to tease out the finer details of how charcoal works in warm soils. In a way, char (charcoal) is the humus of the tropics.

Swine Flue - Keep it weak

There is just a chance that the actions being taken around the world to limit the spread of swine flue is keeping it from becoming lethal.

When the flue virus enters a new human host, it takes over the genetic replication mechanism of some of the host cells and uses them to produce more virus particles. In the mean time, the body begins to ramp up its immune system to produce antibodies to kill the virus. The virus has to spread to a new host before the host produces enough antibodies to kill it. Typically this takes about a week. The virus is therefore more successful (spreads to more hosts) if it spreads easily and if the host remains infectious for as long as possible. To remain infectious , the host has to remain alive.

Once a new virus has mutated to solve the problem of transfer from human to human, it begins to spread. The virus is not consciously motivated, of course. It may mutate into a deadlier form or not completely at random. However, its chance of mutating depends on how many virus particles there are. If only a few humans are infected, there are many fewer chances that one virus will mutate than if there are huge numbers of carriers. This is the first way in which limiting the spread of the virus will mitigate against it mutating to a more lethal form.

In a thin host population, any virus which becomes deadly will burn itself out. By killing it's host, it kills itself. If it is killing the host before it can infect at least one and a bit new hosts, then it will disappear and only more benign forms of the virus will carry on - namely those which allow the host to live long enough to infect more people. In our modern world, we are particularly vulnerable. We are very crowded which gives many opportunities for the virus to spread to new hosts and methods of transport give many opportunities for the establishment of new foci of infection. Air transport is the classic method, of spreading the virus all over the world in days and the more crowded we are, the more potential hosts are available. However, by isolating infected people it is as if we have a thinner population. The virus is denied the chance to infect a lot of people. Remember, that if the person can be kept isolated for a week or so, they will no longer be infectious. Then another factor comes into play.

If our new virus to which people have no immunity spreads slowly it is immunizing more and more people. As far as the virus is concerned, available hosts are becoming thinner and thinner on the ground. If a significant number of people have had the virus on the first time around, there is a degree of herd immunity. As far as the virus is concerned, available hosts more rare than on the first time through. Again it has to remain infectious as long as possible to survive which weighs against lethal forms. A virus can not kill slowly since if it takes too long, the body has already manufactured the cure. It is either kill quickly or not at all.

Here and there, though, a virus will arise by mutation that is deadly. It will kill its host quickly. If this occurs in a crowded population which takes no precautions, a huge number of people can become infected before the first person dies. If, however, we take extraordinary precautions when someone dies from the virus, regardless of what we think of their vulnerability, we will tend to wipe out the deadly form. Extraordinary measures, of course, consist of trying to contact all the contacts of the victim and getting them to isolate themselves for a week. Of course with modern medicine; with life support systems and antibiotics to protect against secondary infections, mortality for the isolated people is much less likely than it once was.

I think it is a reasonable hypothesis that the very measures we are taking to slow the spread of the virus are keeping it weak (in terms of its lethality) and that we should continue. The main danger is if we stop the various containment methods. A fast spreading virus, if it become lethal, can kill huge numbers but it can only become fast spreading if we let down our guard. We must also treat any death from the virus as if the virus has become deadly and take extraordinary measures to isolate all contacts of the deceased person. It is counterproductive to hypothesize that the person was particularly vulnerable and that was the cause of death. In this case better to err on the side of caution.

Ocean Recovery

In a recent New Scientist, (May 30, 2009 p8) it was suggested that the human induced demise of fish stocks, both fresh water and oceanic, began long before the modern era. Many lines of enquiry are quoted to support this contention. This may well be so and would paralell the destruction of populations of land animals as humans invaded each new area. Be that as it may, modern humans with their technology have finished off the job quite nicely and we are now in the situation in the oceans that Southern Africa was before the whites woke up to the fact that most of the animals of their forefathers were just about to go extinct. They took the appropriate measures and at least, in reserves which they set aside, the fauna of Africa recovered. (it is now on the way out again)

With respect to the oceans, lets consider the problem from a different perspective; to explore a different way of thinking. We have, at a conservative estimate, destroyed at least 70% of the fish resources of the world that existed at the start of the modern era and in the case of, for instance, the Grand Banks off Newfound Land, even though fishing has been banned for decades, the fish resources are not recovering. Lets look at the problem from the point of view of primary production; from the point of view of phytoplankton.

Ultimately, the productivity of 99.9%+ of biological systems on the world is based on photosynthesis. The ultimate limit to productivity depends on how much sun energy falls on the system. This is something which we can not increase (although some of our actions might just possibly decrease it) Ultimately the limit to primary production is sunshine. The more of this sunshine we can absorb by building simple mollecules into more complex mollecules throught he agency of life, the greater the productivity of a system.

There is a principle in the growth of individual animals and plants and in the productivity of ecological systems that says that growth/increase/primary productivity depends on the most limiting factor; that is to say the factor which is in shortest supply in comparison with the amount which would not limit growth. In an ocean system, water is not limited and sunshine is whatever nature provides so the main limiting factor is the availability of nutrients. And the potential for production is enormous.

Look at, for instance, the water off Peru in non-El Ninio years. In these years there is upwelling of nutrient rich waters from the deep ocean. We don't actually see primary production (phytoplankton) or even secondary production (zoo plankton) but only tertiary production which in Peru takes the form of Anchovies. The fisheries is humongous and provides much of the fish meal for the world from this one small patch of ocean. This fish meal is used in feed for most land based domestic animals and in the huge fish farming (feed lot) industry.

An interesting fact is that only 10% of the material goes from one tropic level to the next. A hundred kg of phytoplankton will make 10kg of zoo plankton and 10 kg of zoo plankton will make 1kg of anchovy. The primary production off Peru must therefore be about 100 times as large as the Anchovy production. Lesson:-- Potential primary production in the oceans is very very large.

So how does this relate to our subject. Lets do a thought exercise with a simple system consisting of phytoplankton, krill, penguin, leopard seal and killer whale. Each feeds on the layer below it. OK so the killer whales sometimes take penguins but lets keep it simple. We'll assume a moderate level of nutrient input from upwelling sea water. Oh and we will need a population of bacteria to recycle carcases and the poop of these various animals.

We start with the water full of nutrients and inoculate with phytoplankton. The phytoplankton starts to grow explosively and remember some algae can double every hour when the sun shines. Sunshine in the Antarctic summer is 24 hours a day. Raise 2 to the 24th power for one day and then add on a couple more days and pretty soon you have masses of algae. The nutrients are quickly used up including the small amount being added and the algae become senescent (old and dying). Primary production slows and dead algae begin to sink to the bottom. A small amount of mineralization by bacteria returns some nutrients to the system. Primary production ticks along at a much reduced level limited by the influx of new nutrients and some bacterial mineralization.

Incidentally, in systems such as coral reefs and tropical jungles the input of nutrients is very low and the whole, incredibly rich system only remains vibrant due to the very tight circulation of nutrients within the system. More on this later.

Drop in some krill. The krill start to eat the phytoplankton. Now remember that only 10% of the eaten phytoplankton becomes krill. The rest is pooped out into the water. This 90% is phytoplankton-nutrient. Even better, not all phytoplankton need completely mineralized nutrients (broken right down into phosphates nitrates and other 'ates') but can use higher molecules much as bacteria do. And you can depend on it that with all these more energetic molecules available there is a natural selection for species of algae that can utilize them. There is now a greater supply of nutrients entering the water so primary production can increase and use a greater percent of the incident sunshine. However, the krill also reach a population where they are in balance with the food supply. In fact, with such a simple system they are likely to overshoot and cause a boom and bust cycle. The krill breed. They make far more young than the system can support. They hatch out, overgraze the algae and they starve and the population crashes. The algae recovers from over grazing, reaches high concentrations and the krill begin to build again. Eventually the krill crash the algae and the cycle begins again. The system is only at full speed (using all the incident sunshine) for short periods in the cycle but for most of the time primary production is less than it could be. Add in some penguins.

The penguins eat krill and poop out nutrients. As with the krill, 90% of what they eat becomes available for the algae. By suppressing the population of krill they delay or might even stop the krill from crashing the system. Unlikely. The system is still too simple. Algae production increases once more. Penguins live longer than krill and boom and bust at a slower rate. Having a longer cycle also avoids resonance which can occur if the eater and the eaten have the same length cycle or a cycle which is a multiple of the other cycle. Note that if there is a standing crop of a million kg of krill, there is likely to be a tenth or less that this of penguins. Less and less biomass as you go up the ladder. The surprise here is that over the long term, there will be more biomass of krill than there was without the penguins and far more total biomass.

Add in the leopard seals which eat penguins and then the killer whales which eat the leopard seals. Each layer is smaller in terms of kilograms than the one before it, each layer poops out (cycles) nutrients for the use of the phytoplankton. Each layer improves stability. Each layer increases total primary production. If the nutrient cycling is very tight (not much exiting the system by, for instance, falling to the bottom and becoming buried), you can get an extremely rich environment such as esists in a tropical forest or a coral reef.

If on the other hand we have a system in which all the nutrients except what is returned by old age, is trapped in a given level, then primary productivity stagnates. It is like money in an economy. It only does its job if it is circulation. If money is put in a bank, it is invested and it continues to work. If it is put under a mattress, it stops enabling the system. The total biomass that can be supported in the system increases as you add an extra layer and by more than just the amount added by that layer. In other words, as you add the leopard seals, the total biomass of algae, krill and penguin increases. Of most importance, the total amount of sun energy which is being captured increases.

This might be the solution to such mysteries as why the grand banks are not recovering as expected. I can think of a few other contributors to that problem but as the cod are removed, which are a third or fourth level predator, nutrients are not being recycled nearly as quickly and primary production is reduced. One wonders what is the effect of the demise of the whales. Remember that some of them, after feeding in the rich arctic or Antarctic oceans, traverse less productive areas and even though they will soon cease to deficate, they will continue to urinate as they use up their stored energy. In the polar regions, they feed at the same level as the penguins and so recycle nutrients very quickly. What loss to total primary productivity is due to them no longer being extant. And similarily what was the contribution to their environment of the huge schools of tuna that once cruised the oceans.

Going back to our example, if we eliminated all the penguins, leopard seals and killer whales, we would look at the system and see a greatly reduced krill population. We would make our calculations and surmise that we could only support a relatively small population of penguins if we returned them to the system. We forget the lesson of the tropical jungles and the coral reefs. If a system can circulate its nutrients within itself, it can support a huge population on very small net inputs. As long as nutrients are recycled to the photo synthesizers, huge primary production can occur with huge biomass. The populations of lower levels in the chain may well depend on higher levels keeping nutrients in circulation.

This brings us to how much we can harvest. If we note that despite the best efforts of the phytoplankton, there is an excess of nutrients in the water, we may be able to mine the system to an extent. As we do, we are removing nutrients from the system like a farmer who takes a sheep or a cow off a field and sells it. We will reach a point where there are just enough nutrients to allow unlimited growth of the photosynthesizers. At that point we can only harvest whatever crop we are after at the rate that nutrients are being added from the outside to the system. In the case of our farmer, this is at the rate that he adds fertilizer back on to his field. In the case of the ocean, it is at the rate of replenishment by upwhelling. If we depleat the system so that photosynthesis is not running at the "sun limit" then we reduce the productivity of the system and hence the amount we can harves sustainably. In the long term, you can only harvest a system at the rate at which nutrients are being added to the system. Mining a system (taking more than the input) will eventually crash the system.

The demise of Lodge Pole pines in BC

Lodge pole pines, which clad much of the interior of BC, are disappearing. The villain in the piece is a fungus which is transmitted by a beetle. Fall colours in the Chilcotin The beetle and the fungus were always there but harsh winters once knocked the beetle back sufficiently to keep the damage at a tolerable level. If you read Three Against the Wilderness by Eric Collier, in the years from the 30's to the 50's, the temperature regularly fell to around 50 below or less; below the measuring ability of a mercury thermometer. With the demise of pines the woods are changing.

As the pines die, poplars are springing up. In a recent trip to BC in the fall, the woods, which formerly would have been dark green, were yellow with the changing leaves of the poplar trees, interspersed with the rusty red of dying pines. This must look like a horrible fungus to the people who make their living from the pine forests. One of two things can be done.

The people of BC can either try to find a way of getting rid of the beetle or at least keeping it under control or they can see what they can salvage from the situation. Getting rid of the beetle seems to be a very hard ask and if past experience with similar problems is any indication, will probably involve the spreading of vast quantities of insecticide over the woods. Not a pretty prospect. So before looking at possible solutions to the demise of the existing forests, what are the likely results of the take over by Poplars.

The poplars are probably only the pioneer species. In the fullness of time, other tree species will spread as well. No one can be sure what the natural succession will be but at the very least it will be 'interesting'.

Soils under evergreen trees are generally pretty sour and unfavorable to many herbs and shrubs. Pines even have the ability to kill off other plants. A pine extract developed in New Zealand is used in an organic herbicide. Soil under deciduous forests by contrast are rich and sweet due to the yearly production of leaf mulch and encourage a wide variety of under-story plants. These plants provide food for a wide variety of animals. The woods are likely to become much more ecologically diverse and much more productive.

With the spread of deciduous trees there will be food and building material for beavers. With the beavers come a whole range of benefits. The people of Williams Lake, right in the heart of the pine forests, know all about this. In the 30's Their own Eric Collier began to rebuild the beaver dams by hand in the head waters of Meldrum Creek and in the 40's obtained two pair of beaver which multiplied and took over the work. The benefits both to his area and for downstream farmers were huge.

Water flowed year round in the creeks instead of mainly in spring, Animals and plants returned, trout and salmon came back to the streams, forest fires greatly decreased and cattle had sweet water to drink instead of muddy bogs to get stuck in and die. What sort of industry could come out of such an environment.

Eco tourism. Much of the world depends on tourism to top up their GDP. With a hugely enriched environment, the interior of BC could greatly expand this part of their economy with horse trecks, photo tours hiking and so forth.

Hunting. It is likely with increased forage that ungulate populations (deer, moose etc.) will increase and with them the population of wolves, Mountain Lions and bears. Trophy hunting could play an increasing part in the economy of The Chilcotin.

Fishing. If the experience of Eric is anything to go on, the fishing will improve immeasurably when there is a large healthy population of beavers in the area. This also attracts tourism and provides recreation and food for the locals.

Maple Syrup. And how about an experimental planting of sugar maples. The weather should still be harsh enough in the Chilcotin to accommodate the life cycle of these trees. Perhaps Williams Lake could give Eastern Canada a run for their money.

Fur Trapping. Who knows if fur will ever become PC again. If so, beaver dams breed masses of muskrats which have beautiful fur. One warning, though. Leave the beavers alone. They are the goose that lays the golden egg.

Lumber. This may seem a strange suggestion since the lumber industry is disappearing. But how about investigating which trees could be planted that can be used for pulp and which other types of trees could be grown for lumber. It is long term investment but a farmer might plant a few hectares of oaks, black walnut or other prime timber, for instance, and keep them pruned as New Zealanders do with Pinus radiata to make clear wood. Oak will always command a high price and this could be a farmers retirement fund. There must be many other species of valuable trees that would prosper in the new climate of the interior of BC including varieties of nut trees. How about an experimental planting of every species of tree that could conceivably be of economic benefit in the area. Trees already planted in private gardens may already give an indication of which species prosper in the area.

There will be many other opportunities from this change that is occurring. The trick is to find them.