There is much talk in various countries of sorting out the economy post-C19. You might ask, why. What has changed since before the pandemic. Well hopefully there has been one change. It should be apparent now to the most blinkered person that world wide disasters can happen. You would think that with a species as smart as us and with our methods of remembering past occurrences that we wouldn't have to be taught this lesson yet again. After all, we still commemorate world war one and two and since WW2 there have been enough genocides and wars to keep the message front and center in our minds.
And going back further, we had the plague which wiped out tens of percentages of the population in each of a number of subsequent waves.
Just taking diseases, C19 was far from the worst that could happen. It was bad enough, to a large extent because of the delay period between infection and the appearance of symptoms of one to two weeks. Also it's mortality is moderately serious at about 5% of the people who contract the disease. Imagine a disease even more deadly that C19 but one that, like AIDS, doesn't show symptoms for, say, a year. In fact, a disease that didn't show symptoms even for a month would likely have got away from us all over the world instead of just in countries with poor governments and limping health systems like the USA and UK.
But here we have to make a wee mental leap. Scientists have been telling us for a number of years that they see in the ice record of the major ice sheets and in the sediment samples from the bottom of the sea, that climate can change rather rapidly*. They call these events tipping points. And they make pretty convincing cases for the likelihood that the way we are altering our atmosphere, with no sign of slowing down, that we could experience another tipping point. Why would that be so serious.
*A major reason that New Zealand and some other countries defeated C19 besides having good government and good health systems is that the leader of the country, Jacinda Ardern listened to the experts and acted on their advice. How many leaders of major countries are listening to the experts on Climate Change.
If we had evolved our present way of life in a different climate, it wouldn't have been a problem. We would have put our cities where the shore of the ocean met rivers at the existing higher or lower sea level. We would have developed cures for the new diseases and the new distribution of present diseases. We wouldn't have settled either in areas where the wet bulb temperature was above 33 degrees C or we would have build in such a way to neutralize the extreme temperatures. We also would have developed agriculture that fit in the existing climate zones.
But we haven't. We have developed our present way of life during the present climate regime and in a period of unprecedented climate stability. It may not seem so when you are the victim of a flood, drought, tornado or hurricane but just look at the climate from previous interglacial periods including the next one back, the Eemian. The Milankovitch cycles should already have us slowly sliding into the next glacial period but it is not happening. It would appear that we have had a strong influence on the world's climate since we started growing rice in ponds, clear felling or burning forests, using the plow and burning coal*. Our output of Carbon dioxide and other green house gasses has been just about enough to counter the effect of the Milankovitch cycle.
*Read the book Plows Plagues and Petroleum by
Now we are going too far.
So what Covid 19 should have taught us is that world spanning disasters are possible. We have another lesson. Look at the way New Zealand and to a lesser extent a few other countries handled C19 compared to the response of the UK and the USA. America in particular always blames someone else to explain the abysmal failures of their government. Their recent boogy man is Communism. They don't seem to realize that Communism or Capitalism or any other 'ism' is not the problem. The problem is the lack of democracy. The Republican party and now the Democratic party have done and are doing everything they can to erode democracy in their country, (if they ever had democracy) and they have succeeded.
Look at their abysmal response to this crisis. One of the messages of the neo-liberalism is that government isn't really necessary and we can get along just fine without it. Well America, how did that work out for you. Bernie Sanders in a recent speech in the Senate has called the present government the most 'do nothing' government in recent history. They are sitting there arguing about unimportant nonsense while Americans loose their jobs and can't feed their children.
At any rate, here in New Zealand, what could we do to improve out economy following C19. Hopefully we will take into consideration the possibility of future crises and not just make our decisions based on the immediate bottom line during times of plenty. Here are some things we weren't doing so well before the shut down. We didn't:
*Process our own fish. ditto
*Value add our own wood. The Christchurch earthquake would have been a golden opportunity to rebuild with engineered wood, giving us experience, expertise, a product to sell to other quake prone areas and a story to tell. We grow a lot of wood. Here is a conspiracy theory for you. With a tweak or two, you could apply the same scenario to milk processing, steel production, water bottling and a raft of other industrial sectors.
In the west we think in terms of quarterly (3month) reporting cycles or at the most in 3 to 5 year election cycles. In China, with their long history, they think in decades, centuries and even millennia.
China has huge surpluses of cash from their positive trade balance from the stuff they sell to America and other western countries. What do they do. They weaponize this money. They buy up our logs at a great price - so great that our own mills can not compete Our mills have closed in droves. Then China offers us, very generously, to build us a modern lumber mill. You can see where this is going.
*Bottle our own water. I wonder if the WTO and our trade agreements have something to do with this. If you read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, especially chapter 2, there is a clear exposition on the down sides of our much vaunted globalization, the WTO and trade agreements. It is forcing us to not buy locally or produce locally. We really must bring peripheral benefits into our calculations such as the number of secondary jobs created for each primary job and include externalities such as the cost of not cleaning up our own mountain of used tires.
*Sell our own land to our own people. Often the very people that buy our best and most beautiful land are the same ones who, overseas, have trashed their own environment and our shared atmosphere as well. Having seen how superior New Zeland is to their own countries they are looking for a bolt hole to run to when the going, back home, really gets tough. These are the last people we need in New Zealand.
*Build or own rail rolling stock. A BERL report calculated that we would have to be able to obtain our rail stock overseas for 38% of the local price for it to be worthwhile, considering all the spin offs for our economy of building them ourselves A later report said that in fact we paid 75% of the local cost and subsequently there were reports of many faults with the equipment. How many spin off industries would have resulted from having to upgrade our capacity in order to build modern rail stock.
*Produce our own steel reinforcing. Look at the junk we got from China and put into our buildings which are now less earthquake-proof than was planned for.
*Run our own Aluminum smelter. Our electrical energy mix is so ‘low carbon’ that in addition to being able to sell very high quality Aluminum, we could also sell it on the basis of it’s green credentials. Why do we allow an Ausi company to do this. Vertical integration guys. Take a leaf out of the Tesla play book.
Take care of our own waste. We have mountains of plastic, both clean and contaminated and up until recently we shipped it to Asian countries. They have now decided that they don't want any more western garbage. What must that have been costing us to collect and ship all this stuff to Asia.
Some of this plastic can be gainfully recycled but the rest is a problem. There is a solution. Plastic of every type whether it is clean or contaminated can be pyrolized and turned back into cooking gas, petrol (gasoline), diesel, air craft fuel and roading tar. When making the decision whether to set up a pyrolysis unit (clearly, within the property of an existing oil refinery where the output of the pyrolysis unit can be fed directly into the fractionation columns) we must take externalities into consideration. ie. What is the price of not taking care of this waste both economically and ecologically.
Better still, a whole range of other waste products can be pyrolized including used rubber tires, wood waste, paper, electronic equipment and in fact anything made of compounds of C and H. Different, valuable by products in addition to the ones mentioned come out of these different waste streams.
Before we think of new ways to run our economy, let's sort out the lacks in our former economy.
And going back further, we had the plague which wiped out tens of percentages of the population in each of a number of subsequent waves.
Just taking diseases, C19 was far from the worst that could happen. It was bad enough, to a large extent because of the delay period between infection and the appearance of symptoms of one to two weeks. Also it's mortality is moderately serious at about 5% of the people who contract the disease. Imagine a disease even more deadly that C19 but one that, like AIDS, doesn't show symptoms for, say, a year. In fact, a disease that didn't show symptoms even for a month would likely have got away from us all over the world instead of just in countries with poor governments and limping health systems like the USA and UK.
But here we have to make a wee mental leap. Scientists have been telling us for a number of years that they see in the ice record of the major ice sheets and in the sediment samples from the bottom of the sea, that climate can change rather rapidly*. They call these events tipping points. And they make pretty convincing cases for the likelihood that the way we are altering our atmosphere, with no sign of slowing down, that we could experience another tipping point. Why would that be so serious.
*A major reason that New Zealand and some other countries defeated C19 besides having good government and good health systems is that the leader of the country, Jacinda Ardern listened to the experts and acted on their advice. How many leaders of major countries are listening to the experts on Climate Change.
If we had evolved our present way of life in a different climate, it wouldn't have been a problem. We would have put our cities where the shore of the ocean met rivers at the existing higher or lower sea level. We would have developed cures for the new diseases and the new distribution of present diseases. We wouldn't have settled either in areas where the wet bulb temperature was above 33 degrees C or we would have build in such a way to neutralize the extreme temperatures. We also would have developed agriculture that fit in the existing climate zones.
But we haven't. We have developed our present way of life during the present climate regime and in a period of unprecedented climate stability. It may not seem so when you are the victim of a flood, drought, tornado or hurricane but just look at the climate from previous interglacial periods including the next one back, the Eemian. The Milankovitch cycles should already have us slowly sliding into the next glacial period but it is not happening. It would appear that we have had a strong influence on the world's climate since we started growing rice in ponds, clear felling or burning forests, using the plow and burning coal*. Our output of Carbon dioxide and other green house gasses has been just about enough to counter the effect of the Milankovitch cycle.
*Read the book Plows Plagues and Petroleum by
Now we are going too far.
So what Covid 19 should have taught us is that world spanning disasters are possible. We have another lesson. Look at the way New Zealand and to a lesser extent a few other countries handled C19 compared to the response of the UK and the USA. America in particular always blames someone else to explain the abysmal failures of their government. Their recent boogy man is Communism. They don't seem to realize that Communism or Capitalism or any other 'ism' is not the problem. The problem is the lack of democracy. The Republican party and now the Democratic party have done and are doing everything they can to erode democracy in their country, (if they ever had democracy) and they have succeeded.
Look at their abysmal response to this crisis. One of the messages of the neo-liberalism is that government isn't really necessary and we can get along just fine without it. Well America, how did that work out for you. Bernie Sanders in a recent speech in the Senate has called the present government the most 'do nothing' government in recent history. They are sitting there arguing about unimportant nonsense while Americans loose their jobs and can't feed their children.
At any rate, here in New Zealand, what could we do to improve out economy following C19. Hopefully we will take into consideration the possibility of future crises and not just make our decisions based on the immediate bottom line during times of plenty. Here are some things we weren't doing so well before the shut down. We didn't:
*Fish our own
waters.
https://mtkass.blogspot.com/2010/12/fisheries-policy-lets-change-tacks.html
https://mtkass.blogspot.com/2010/12/fisheries-policy-lets-change-tacks.html
*Process our own fish. ditto
*Value add our own wood. The Christchurch earthquake would have been a golden opportunity to rebuild with engineered wood, giving us experience, expertise, a product to sell to other quake prone areas and a story to tell. We grow a lot of wood. Here is a conspiracy theory for you. With a tweak or two, you could apply the same scenario to milk processing, steel production, water bottling and a raft of other industrial sectors.
In the west we think in terms of quarterly (3month) reporting cycles or at the most in 3 to 5 year election cycles. In China, with their long history, they think in decades, centuries and even millennia.
China has huge surpluses of cash from their positive trade balance from the stuff they sell to America and other western countries. What do they do. They weaponize this money. They buy up our logs at a great price - so great that our own mills can not compete Our mills have closed in droves. Then China offers us, very generously, to build us a modern lumber mill. You can see where this is going.
*Bottle our own water. I wonder if the WTO and our trade agreements have something to do with this. If you read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, especially chapter 2, there is a clear exposition on the down sides of our much vaunted globalization, the WTO and trade agreements. It is forcing us to not buy locally or produce locally. We really must bring peripheral benefits into our calculations such as the number of secondary jobs created for each primary job and include externalities such as the cost of not cleaning up our own mountain of used tires.
*Sell our own land to our own people. Often the very people that buy our best and most beautiful land are the same ones who, overseas, have trashed their own environment and our shared atmosphere as well. Having seen how superior New Zeland is to their own countries they are looking for a bolt hole to run to when the going, back home, really gets tough. These are the last people we need in New Zealand.
*Do our own
banking. It has been reported that the Ausi banks take about a
billion dollars out of our economy every 6 months. Are we nuts.
*Build or own rail rolling stock. A BERL report calculated that we would have to be able to obtain our rail stock overseas for 38% of the local price for it to be worthwhile, considering all the spin offs for our economy of building them ourselves A later report said that in fact we paid 75% of the local cost and subsequently there were reports of many faults with the equipment. How many spin off industries would have resulted from having to upgrade our capacity in order to build modern rail stock.
*Produce our own steel reinforcing. Look at the junk we got from China and put into our buildings which are now less earthquake-proof than was planned for.
*Run our own Aluminum smelter. Our electrical energy mix is so ‘low carbon’ that in addition to being able to sell very high quality Aluminum, we could also sell it on the basis of it’s green credentials. Why do we allow an Ausi company to do this. Vertical integration guys. Take a leaf out of the Tesla play book.
Take care of our own waste. We have mountains of plastic, both clean and contaminated and up until recently we shipped it to Asian countries. They have now decided that they don't want any more western garbage. What must that have been costing us to collect and ship all this stuff to Asia.
Some of this plastic can be gainfully recycled but the rest is a problem. There is a solution. Plastic of every type whether it is clean or contaminated can be pyrolized and turned back into cooking gas, petrol (gasoline), diesel, air craft fuel and roading tar. When making the decision whether to set up a pyrolysis unit (clearly, within the property of an existing oil refinery where the output of the pyrolysis unit can be fed directly into the fractionation columns) we must take externalities into consideration. ie. What is the price of not taking care of this waste both economically and ecologically.
Better still, a whole range of other waste products can be pyrolized including used rubber tires, wood waste, paper, electronic equipment and in fact anything made of compounds of C and H. Different, valuable by products in addition to the ones mentioned come out of these different waste streams.
Before we think of new ways to run our economy, let's sort out the lacks in our former economy.
