Not so easy being green

I’m becoming cynical about the number of articles and letters arguing that the green-technology economy is going to save the planet and therefore mankind.

I can recall seeing posters on our primary-school classroom walls in the late 1960s saying our population would reach three million within a few years and implying that this was not a good thing.

Now we have a population of more than five million and the problem is the infrastructure hasn’t grown accordingly. Housing, health, roading, etc, have suffered from decades of neglect.

I live in a rural environment and every time I visit a major city I see a struggle for resources, be that space, money, jobs, housing or time, while our ability to consume and the amount of consumables have grown substantially.

The West Coast, where I live, is possibly about to have an open-cast mine for rare-earth minerals used in the green technologies the world is now demanding.

This proposed mine could be operating 24/7 for the next 40-50 years. It will need huge amounts of water and energy, the 200 trucks per week delivering the material to Westport will have a 120km round trip, and the energy to ship the material overseas to further refine it will also be massive. Then there’s the damage to