The Hillary Symposium

From the programme: Rod Oram has more than 30 years’ experience as an international financial journalist. He has worked for various publications in Europe and North America, including the Financial Times of London. Rod and his family emigrated from the UK to New Zealand in 1997.

He is currently a columnist for the Sunday Star-Times and Good Magazine; a regular broadcaster on radio and television; and a frequent public speaker. Rod is an adjunct professor in the Business School at Unitec. And Penguin published in 2007 his book on the New Zealand economy, Reinventing Paradise.

Rod is going to discuss the two large sectors that have to be carbon positive if the region wants to become carbon positive.

He’s not going to attempt to summarise Jeremy’s provocation, but he wants to lead on from what Jeremy said. Rod’s going to add a further crisis: the question of agriculture.

Agriculture

What have we achieved in the agricultural supercentury? Over the last century, the world’s population increased by 259%, and we also managed to increse the per-capita harvest, but it came at an extraordinary cost — the energy subsidy. That’s the fertiliser, and most of that came from fossil fuels. So if they’re running out, how are we going to meet the food needs of the future? If we lose our fundamental driver of agricultural productivity, how will we double food production, which is what’s estimated we need over the next 40 years?

This is a crapshoot for New Zealand — we rank 2nd in greenhouse-gas-per-food-produced. We say we don’t have big industry in NZ, but we’ve got cows: they account for half our greenhouse emissions. We’ve got the best ruminant scientists in the world, and we’ve got this nascent team looking for a breakthrough. What’s amazing is that if we get the cows to eat healthier, and then to better convert that food into energy (milk), that would be amazing for both industry and for the planet.

For each litre of milk, we generate 980 grams of carbon dioxide of emissions. This season just passed we produced roughly 16 billion litres of milk, but at the moment we still treat those 15 tonnes of CO2 per year as a waste product, as a liability we’re trying to run away from. If in fact we found a way to get cows to eat better and digest better, we could turn the industry into a carbon positive industry, and this is an utterly brilliant business opportunity.

Tourism

The other sector he wants to touch on is tourism. We are the seventh most flying nation in the world, if you consider our tourists. Tourism is of course very important to us. What the World Economic Forum tells us is that even though we had the best tourism destinations in the world, we were not the best place for tourism as a business. We were in fact 19th last year, down from 15th in 2007. We have this astonishing disjoint between being one of the best tourism destinations in the world and not being sustainable at it.

The key issue for competitiveness in tourism is sustainability. What’s our opportunity with tourism? If we take one person on a return flight from London to Christchurch, that’s more than 5 tonnes of CO2. 2.4m tourists = 13.2m tonnes of CO2. He sees all this CO2 as NOT a waste product or liability — it is a BRILLIANT BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY if we can make travel healthier.

If we use biofuels in aviation, we would be drawing CO2 out of the air. It’s not inconceivable that tourism could be carbon positive.

How do we think about how we might move ideas and companies through this reconception of what business looks like? Experiment, build new business models, build an ecosystem or critical mass, and finally, the tipping point: the economic structure flips, driving transformation.

He cites a company turning flue gases from a steel mill into biofuels. On the Airbus 380, the fabric for the seats is edible and perfectly recyclable; it ultimately becomes compost. Formway is releasing a new range of furniture with a large component of bioplastic — it’s grown by recapturing CO2 in the air. This isn’t recycling; it’s upcycling. He has no doubt about our capacity to achieve carbon positivity.

He also refers to the point that ants have a greater biomass than humans, but unlike us have a positive impact on their ecosystem. It’s not that there are too many of us; it’s that we don’t manage ourselves well. We can look to nature for ideas. Biomimicry — ships in the shape of a nautilus shell, spidersilk stronger and lighter than steel but catalysed simply and efficiently at room temperature. Biomimicry in NZ: synthetic chorophyll can be used to generate electricity.

Provocations: do we believe that the upside is so great and the downside is so dire? How can we build grassroots support? What new business models do we need? What technologies can we poineer in New Zealand? And lastly, what is our unique contribution to the world?

April 26 was both Shakespeare’s birthday and World IP Day. Rod spoke on that day and quoted Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

If we lose our faith in human kind we’re doomed, but if we believe in the infinite ingenuity of humankind we can start a revolution. We now have a smaller proportion of world trade than we did 15 years ago, a smaller proportion of investment thatn 15 years ago. Our next revolution has to be around sustainability. It’s easy to fix up a collapsed banking system, but if the ecosystem collapses, there’s no reserve bank to bail you out.

We need radical changes in the way we do everything. Of all the OECD countries, we are the most dependent on our natural environment. Quite simply, our next revolution will be harder, deeper, and longer than the previous one, but hopefully not so traumatic, and ultimately more beneficial and more rewarding as we reinvent paradise.