An Open Letter to the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong

Dear Minister,

The way the issue of soil carbon sequestration and Climate Change has been handled by yours and the previous Government's Administration raises important questions of public duty that will not disappear as time passes. They will demand to be answered as the full impact of Climate Change throws the spotlight on the lost opportunities that soil carbon has offered for more than 12 years.

You may wish to seek answers to these questions, if only to satisfy yourself that the claims we make are false. Because if they are not, the legacy of your time in office will be forever diminished.

The Questions:

Q. Why has the science of carbon measurement been fast-tracked in the case of forests and stalled, underfunded and delayed in the case of soil carbon?

Q. Why has a concerted campaign to depict soil carbon sequestration as either not possible in Australia or hardly worth the effort been conducted by bodies such as the former Australian Greenhouse Office and the Grains Research & Development Corporation? Why are senior officials in your own Department still quoting this discredited information?

Q. Why, if Climate Change is as urgent as each new scientific report about it indicates, has your Administration not given a high priority to interviewing land managers and scientists who claim soil carbon can be grown quickly to give them every possibility of providing you with a large scale sequestration opportunity?

Q. Why was it left to a Senate Standing Committee to recognise the true potential of soil carbon and raise the alarm that an opportunity for mitigation is in danger of being lost?

Q. Why do high profile academics and senior officials in your Department spend their time building arguments against the deployment of soil carbon instead of searching for ways to remove the barriers?

Q. Why are the opponents of the soil carbon solution allowed to claim that they have tested the ‘potential’ for Australian soils to sequester carbon when in fact they have no scientific evidence of anything other than that the researchers were unable to grow soil carbon using one or other technique?

Q. Why have scientists been unable to repeat the findings of farmers about soil carbon? Could it be that the “pot or plot” format makes it impossible to reproduce the broad ecological context that contributes to soil carbon sequestration?

Q. Why, if the gaps in the data sets in the first tranch of soil carbon studies in the National Carbon Accounting Scheme were known and advance planning done to fill them (as senior people in your Deparment imply), did AGO documents make major pronouncements on Australian soils’ potential for soil carbon before all the data was gathered? Could it be more likely that those constructing the samples were not aware that they were selecting only carbon-emitting land management approaches?

Q. Is the approach to data and sample integrity mentioned in the item above an example of the ‘sound science’ on which you base your decisions?

Q. Why do local authorities such as CMA’s insist that their staff use the term “Soil Health” and not “Soil Carbon”?

Q. Why have CMAs failed to engage the majority of land managers in NRM activities? Is it because they rely upon the ‘Extension, Education, and Encouragement” model that suits around 15% of farmers? Would the words “Enterprise and Earnings generate more Enthusiasm”?

Q. Why have the following facts not been prominently communicated to farmers and the wider community: Research published by the UN’s FAO reveals that methane emissions have plateaued since 1999 onwards while the number of additional ruminant animals jumped from 9million to 16million per year. This report severs the connection between cattle and sheep and methane levels.

Q. Why has the following fact not been communicated to the farming community, or is it Government strategy to have all its agencies dwell on ‘worst case scenarios’ to scare farmers into compliance? Professor Richard Eckard, who heads the Government’s research effort into farm emissions, estimates that methane will cost farmers less than $1 per cow in the first period of an ETS.

Q. Why has soil carbon farming, which has a capital start-up cost within a farmer’s reach (around $200/Ha compared to $3m for a wind turbine) been obstructed?

Q. Why have plantation forests that depopulate rural areas and destroy social infrastructure been favoured with tax arrangements while soil carbon, which will strengthen local communities, has been denied?

Q. Why have farmers been scared into abandoning their farms, selling out to the plantation forest operators or the big corporates? Have they been unsettled by a constant barrage of ‘worst case scenario’ presentations and PR emanating from Government agencies?

Q. Why is carbon measurement not an issue with forests because the variations between trees have statistical properties and are therefore considered manageable, whereas measurement is claimed to be a major barrier to soil carbon trading, even though the variances (flux) exhibited by soil C samples also have statistical properties and are therefore manageable?

Q. Why is the word ‘estimate’ used in every other sphere in the Climate Change world, but never applies to soil carbon?

Q. Why did the Green Paper introduce a new set of arguments against soil’s inclusion? Wheresas all the discussion during the consultation period focussed on the standard objections, ie. ‘difficult to measure’, hard to hold, additionality, etc., the Green Paper introduced the arguments of the danger of large emissions from drought (bare earth) and bush fire. And there was a passing reference to “changing land management” (ie. farmers reneging on their agreements). A fully-‘carbonised’ landscape has groundcover and so is cooler. A “Carbon farmer” is less likely to bare the soil because they know how important topsoil is. Such a landscape is also more perennialised, and so retains more water in the upper profiles. Emissions from fire are less likely to be as damaging as in conventional systems. And finally, growers who reneg on carbon contracts pay a penalty, as with any such contract.

Q. Why, instead of waiting for the perfect solution to soil C’s ‘problems’, and filling the last 8 years of Stern’s “Decade For Serious Action” with more trials, don’t you choose a baselining methodology and start farmers growing carbon simultaneously while the trials are conducted. If at the end of the allotted time, the farmers have grown no soil carbon, they don’t get paid. If they have, they do.

Q. Why is the discredited notion of Additionality still used to block soil carbon? (The International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), has stated that proving the intent of developers applying for the CDM "is an almost impossible task". Three quarters of the projects being approved by the CDM's executive board were already complete at the time of approval. It would seem clear that a project that is already built cannot need extra income in order to be built.)

Q. Why is it that those who visit or live on a carbon farm find no difficulty in believing in it, whereas those whose contact with rural reality is via reports find themselves compelled to recite a litany of soil carbon’s fatal weaknesses?
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If those of us who live in daily contact with agricultural soils are right, here is the dimension of the opportunity lost:

There is a ‘legacy load’ of GHG in the atmosphere that is sufficient, we believe, to carry us through the 2°C barrier into Climate Chaos. All the popular renewable energy candidates can’t do anything about it, even if they had reached critical mass, which none of them will for at least 20 years. Clean Coal can’t. This can only be removed by photosynthesis. We couldn’t plant enough trees in the time Stern gave us to do something serious about GHG. (Trees are net emitters for the first 5-10 years. Not all soils suit them. They are expensive to grow and plant. And they threaten to depopulate the bush. They suck the children out of bush schools, the patients out of the medical services, the family grocery spend out of local businesses, and the heart out of local communities.)

But soils are already deployed and are at critical mass. There are 450 million hectares in Australia and 5.5 billion on the Planet.

Here lies the opportunity, which, if you pass over it, you should be aware of the potential downside. If the farmers of the world can sequester 0.5tonne C/Ha/year, they will have captured more than 10 gigatonnes of CO2e. (More than the excess emitted by human activity.)

Half a tonne of C is at the lower levels of our expectations. Farmers on the sandy loamy soils in WA are managing to sequester 1-2tonnesC/Ha.

So the soil carbon solution, if we are right, can dramatically alter the balance of nature back towards safety. If this is to work, it must be started soon. We need 80%-85% engagement of land managers.

If we are right and you act on a soil carbon market without waiting for ‘sound science’, you appear far-sighted.

If we are wrong and we grow no soil carbon, you have lost nothing. We will withdraw and bother you no more.

The upside: 10 gigatonnes of CO2e removed, with Australia breaking the logjam for the rest of the world.

The downside: You gave us a shot at it and we were proved wrong.

It is a question of political will.

When there is a hole in the bottom of the boat and the water is rushing in, we don’t need a scholarly paper on the physics of water entering a boat through a hole in the bottom. We need to plug the hole.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Kiely
Convenor
Carbon Coalition