Garnaut plays it again, with additions

• Professor Ross Garnaut's review of his original report has confirmed that farmers are essential to the battle against Climate Change: "The natural processes of biosequestration must be central to any ambitious global effort to meet targets for limiting temperature increase, and are the only known channel for actually reducing concentrations after emissions targets have been exceeded." He complains about the sorry shortage of science: "Improvements to emissions estimation methods and mechanisms for monitoring permanence of sequestration remain critical requirements for further developing and realising mitigation strategies in rural Australia." Prof. Garnaut believes Australia should lead the way for the global community to bring sanity to the Kyoto Protocols: "Australia can define best practice on accounting approaches and emissions management by adopting domestic mitigation measures with broad coverage and full recognition of co-benefits." He points to the absurdity embedded in the principle of 'financial additionality' which holds that projects earning offsets cannot result in increased production or profit because it is assumed that a farmer would have made the change to chase the higher production and profit anyway. Grazing management that doesn't increase biomass? Only a scientist would believe that! We are wary of some of Professor G.'s suggestions, such as 'While offset schemes, and a carbon price, will provide incentives for increased biosequestration activities, they should be supported by other incentives and regulatory safeguards to help encourage co-benefits, such as for biodiversity.' Where did that come from? Carbon Farming, properly executed, increases biodiversity. (More to come)