In the Beacon last Friday, the chief commercial officer of Air Chathams, Duane Emeny, shared with the community that his company is considering withdrawing services from Whakatāne because of the unsustainability of the Whakatāne to Auckland route. He made the case that the council should increase its support for the airline.

Although I cannot talk about this at this time due to the confidential nature of discussions that we entered into with Air Chathams, I’m sure some of you can appreciate the council’s frustration at not being able to respond to some of the social media comments the article generated – but that is the necessary nature of local government considering commercially sensitive business in a public excluded forum.

The council is set to discuss Air Chathams’ request for further assistance in early May, at which time the public will become privy to the information the council will base its decision on. In the meantime, I have been doing some thinking about the general transport situation in New Zealand.

New Zealand has a population of 5.1 million distributed over an area of 270,000 square kilometres. That makes us a country with a relatively low population density. We rank 38^th least densely populated country on Earth with 20 people per square kilometre. Our entire country is less populated than metropolitan Sydney, which has a population of 5.557 million in an area of 12,369 km².

For comparison, Australia’s population density is ranked 6^th lowest with 35 people/km² and Singapore is ranked 240^th with 8,210 people/km². So, we are not very densely populated. Density doesn’t tell the whole story, however, because how people are distributed matters. About 1.716 million, or about 34 percent of our population, live in the Auckland metro area.  Although we call it the “super city”, it really isn’t such a large or densely populated city on a world scale.

With a dilute population comes the problem of getting around. If we all lived in the Auckland metro area (606 km²) then getting around would be a snap. An efficient public transport network of buses and trains would do the job nicely. We would use a fraction of the energy we currently use, there would be less air pollution and there would be no need for air transport.

Prior to returning to New Zealand, I lived for 10 years in the mega city of Buenos Aires in Argentina, which is a big country. About 16 million people live in the Buenos Aires metro area (3,885 km²). Buenos Aires has three times the population of Sydney in a third of the area. You have to ask why 40 percent of the Argentine population lives in such a small area when the country is so large. It comes down to efficiency and infrastructure.

As a relatively sparsely inhabited country, we rely heavily on planes, trains and automobiles (cars and trucks) to get around. Trucks and our road network are the main ways goods and materials get around the country. This includes imported goods and products that need to get to ports for export. Apart from food, we import most of the other stuff we need. By comparison we make relatively little use of trains for transporting goods and materials around and very limited use of planes.

Now I want the readers of this column to think very hard about what would happen if, all of a sudden, the oil got turned off to our country and trucks couldn’t run. Since almost all goods and materials are transported using diesel trucks, nothing would get to shops and supermarkets. In fact, bulk haulage by rail in New Zealand still requires diesel as we use mainly diesel-electric locomotives.

Most of us don’t grow our own food so being able to feed ourselves might get difficult or impossible without diesel. Many people would likely go hungry, maybe even starve. Since we don’t have a very large manufacturing base, we would have problems getting pharmaceuticals or medical supplies, steel or machinery, electronic equipment, you name it. I doubt we could keep our energy grid running reliably for long or our communications networks. The latter would have a serious effect on our banking system. You could stick AI where the sun doesn’t shine along with your mobile phone. We would be seriously screwed.

I would say that the result would be much worse than any natural disaster we have ever faced in our entire history.

We produce about 20 million barrels of oil per year and use 47 million barrels. Of the oil we produce, all of it now needs to go to Australia and Singapore for refinement into fuel only to be re-imported. And of course, I include diesel and aviation fuel.

There is another war going on in the Middle East, from which comes about 33 percent of the world’s oil. America is talking about bombing Iran out of existence. Just imagine what would happen if things in the Middle East blew up.

We don’t have to rely very much on our imagination since the oil shocks and carless days of the 70s gave us a bit of a taste. Those oil shocks were a result of Middle East wars. Today, things would be much worse because our lives have become very dependent on modern technology. The fact that we have had conflict in the Middle East my entire life is ultimately attributable to the dependence of modern civilization on cheap energy, in other words fossil fuels (oil, coal & gas). As I write, it is my opinion that the extermination of an entire people is being perpetrated because of oil. Even if war wasn’t threatening oil supply, ultimately the oil is going to run out. This is all very serious stuff people.

I think we need to start to consider how we would prepare for what might happen if the oil spigot got turned off.

Ultimately, that is what we want but not before we can affect a transition to clean energy.

But that is a story for another day. In the meantime, folk wanting to know more about this discussion please refer to the 2016 book by Alice J. Friedmann, ‘When trucks stop running – Energy and the Future of Transport’.