The most senior government official with responsibility for agriculture and greenhouse has confirmed the Carbon Coalition's predictions: agriculture will not escape the "cap" side of "cap and trade". We will be held to account for our emissions.
Agriculture is responsible for closer to 40% of Australia's emissions, not the 18% we have been led to believe, according to Dr David Ugalde, Director, Greenhouse and Agriculture, Australian Greenhouse Office. If ag-related emissions from transport and land use change are included, the total emissions footprint for agriculture climbs to between 35% and 38%, he told a DPI regional Greenhouse and Agriculture Forum at Dubbo yesterday (5 June).
Methane (CH4) makes up 13% of Australia's emissions on its own. This puts methane close to the total emissions of the transport industry. (Remember that fact.) Nitrogen emitted from fertiliser makes for another 5% of Australia's emissions. Add that figure to Methane and these two sources combined contribute more than Transport. (Remember that as well.)
But the Prime Minister's Task Force On Emissions Trading has decided to leave Agriculture out of any trading scheme because it is too difficult to measure. (Remember that.)(Sound familiar? That's the official reason we are given why soil carbon can't be traded.) But only for the first round. In the meantime,farmers will be encouraged to meet a Best Practice Benchmarking System which helps them either lower emission per unit of output or increase output per unit of emission. (Remember that, as well.)
The Benchmarking system will rely on self assessment. It is also structured to not affect productivity and profitability, with no increase in regulatory or financial burden. (Remember that, as well.)
Agriculture will continue to stay outside the trading system provided we are moving towards best practice.
Dr Ugalde also mentioned that, besides this system of emissions measurement, there were opportunities for offsets. (Here we sat up and paid attention.) But soils did not rate a mention when he spoke about sinks. However, he promised "research to improve our understanding of practical abatement opportunities."
It was this statement that prompted our question from the floor of the Forum: "The AGO has stated that 'Australian soils are not capable of sequestering significant amounts of carbon', a statement based on research done for the National Carbon Accounting System. Close inspection of Technical Reports 34 and 43 of the NCAS reveals the data sets are incomplete, focusing almost exclusively on conventional rather than regenerative land management techniques. Therefore, will the research to improve our understanding of practical abatement opportunities include studying the carbon sequestration capabilities of agricultural soils under regenerative land management techniques such as conservation farming, biological farming, holistic management, pasture cropping, etc.?"
Which prompted a non-commital answer, based around the assertion that Agriculture must go into this emissions trading system 'with eyes wide open'. In other words, the AGO has not been aware of regenerative farming and its soil carbon storage capacity because no one is. The research hasn't been done. Because no one has been prepared to stump up the money to do it.
Could the world community's secret weapon in the battle against global warming be disabled and unused because no one in authority cared enough to look?
Let's just revisit the brutal facts. Follow the logic:
FACT 1: The world's soils hold more CO2 naturally than all the CO2 in the atmosphere and all the CO2 held in the world's forests and vegetation on earth.
FACT 2: It would take 7 planets covered in forests to soak up the legacy load.
FACT 3: Soils actively farmed for carbon have the capacity (60% of the earth's landmass) to capture and store the entire legacy load.(There is no scientific proof that they can't.)
CONCLUSION: If you believe that climate change can destroy modern society as we know it, wouldn't you want to find out if soils can do what they claim they can do? Yet no government body we have approached wants to invest in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment