Drew Hutton said very recently that the first political party to pick up food security of our strategic farmlands as an issue would win the next election.
Within days the LNP had picked up food security as a policy.
Campbell Newman is now making it official policy for his campaign to put food security before mining interests.
Good luck to him. We definitely need to be thinking seriously about this stuff.
Will he be able to make it work? A hard question.
The tension between coal seam gas mining and the security of our top food bowls and water aquifers is seemingly unresolvable.
Worldwide food security is rapidly developing as a top-level issue. So is water supply.
At the same time oil supply is now past peak.
Only very recently have governments been able to talk about what is happening with the global oil supply. Partially that is because they’ve had bad information to work with.
But it is also because there were no alternatives at all. No government wants to be the bearer of the ultimate bad news to the electorate. No party is prepared to say that the oil tap is turning off.
Now they don’t have to because very recently a method has been invented to fracture coal-seams underground and extract coal seam gas. All over the world this is unlocking drilling and fracking for coal seam gas.
Instead of talking about oil supply peaking governments are now able to talk about the New Age of Gas. They have some good news.
The inconvenient clash with the need to grow food to have water supplies and the rarity across the globe of good soils is unlikely to stem the tidal wave of coal seam gas (and open cut coal mines).
There are two types of greed driving the coal seam gas and open cut coal mining boom. Firstly there is the desperate greed for carbon energy supplies. Our whole global economy only exists because of carbon-based fuels and oil is past peak. This is literally a life and death game for most of our species. We will do anything I am betting to get at the energy resources. Even starve ourselves to death.
Next is the greed for money. I get daily email newsletters in my inbox from an investment adviser in Melbourne talking of thousand-fold profits from investing in some key players in the gas industry. I’m not questioning his advice. But the ethics are much more challenging.
People will literally sell their own children for money and fortunes will be made in gas. Australia looks to be sitting on an OPEC-sized gas fortune.
Yet gas isn’t oil. And gas still has very sizeable carbon emissions that disrupt climate. Our massive barely acknowledged dependency on oil will still have to be faced. How far gas will give us a reprieve how long gas will give us a reprieve remains to be seen.
These are mega-conflicts of interest: trading our need for food and water against carbon-energy and money.
Already the big foreign players are in the field grabbing all the licences to mine that they can get. And they’re also buying up our good food-growing lands.
Queensland’s economy might be suffering the effect of the floods and cyclones right now but the wealth under our soil is going to be the big story to come.
What do you think about it all?