When the draft texts were presented in Copenhagen last Friday with proposed emissions reductions of between 30-45%, you could almost feel the wave of panic juddering through the delegates of the Annex 1 countries.
Cut emissions in line with the science? That would be insane. We might actually have to take action to cut our industrial pollution.
Almost immediately, the ‘umbrella group’ led by Australia rolled out the sadly predictable ‘blame China’ strategy. ‘Wong’s message for Beijing: Heat on China,’ bellowed The Australian’s front-page headline.
The multitude of media officers on the Australian delegation must have been patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
But the front page story today in the Sydney Morning Herald must have had the delegation gnashing their teeth with rage. Gregg Borshmann and Guy Pearse had managed to wade their way through the horrendous complexity of Australia’s Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) policy and uncovered an Uluru-sized rort.
In short, Australia is trying to cook the books on LULUCF, masking increases in industrial pollution by hiding them in the likes of soil and forests.
The plan is to count the carbon that gets sequestered, but conveniently omit the emissions produced. And they produce a lot. In 2002-3, bushfires resulted in around 190 MT of emissions, equivalent to 27 average sized coal-fired power stations for a year. But this of course, wouldn’t count…
So they want the credits without the debits. The good stuff without the bad.
The scam is actually not that different from the one that negotiators pulled off in Kyoto which allowed Australia to get away with an 82% increase in greenhouse gases from 1990-2007 (30% increase if you exclude landuse).
It was such a success that other countries have got in on the act.
Australia is no longer alone in trying to swindle their way to meeting targets by changing the rules on LULUCF instead of cutting emissions.
The current range of tricks and cheats on the bargaining table could result in billions of tonnes of carbon emissions simply being wiped off the global inventory at the stroke of a pen. The US, for example, will be able to cheat its way out of a staggering 150% of its proposed emissions target[1] and Russia would be able to meet 70% without actually reducing a single tonne of emissions[2].
Unless this changes, accountancy fraud in LULUCF risks reducing the Copenhagen Treaty to a meaningless set of numbers.
[1] Based on the US’s 4% emissions reduction target
[2] Based on Russia’s 10% emissions reduction target
6 Comments
LULUCF was bound to surface eventually. It’s too good an acronym to go unnoticed.
For another lulu: Don’t Give Tazzy a Brazilian wins the placard comp for Walking Against Warming.
Wow – those bloody farmers – trying to “cook the books” by managing native vegetation and changing farm practices to lock carbon up in the soil. I don’t know it’s just bloody scandalous – I mean actually taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere at the rate of 55 tonnes per ha per annum might mean that all those catastrophic predictions might not come true. We might not have merchant banks making squillions out of the money go round. There may not be a “climate change” industry for Mr Hepburn to suckle at. It’s doesn’t bear thinking about
No disrespect, Farmer – and I mean that – but I suggest you go back and read what the article actually says. No one is casting aspersions at the farmers. The issue is with using the fact that farming is going to produce beneficial impacts anyway as an excuse not to insist that big coal play the game as well.
It’s like when I pay however-much-extra every month for 100% green energy, I’m not actually doing a thing to help out – that just counts as emissions that Origin Energy doesn’t have to cut, rather than allowing me to positively contribute.
I’m a big fan of 55 tonnes per ha per annum, if that is the figure – I’m not in a position to comment, never having examined that angle, but I’m prepared to take it on faith for the purpose of this discussion. It just fairly – or unfairly, for that matter – sucks, in a big way, that the aforementioned 55 tonnes per ha per annum is being used to excuse those who have done no work whatsoever to contribute to that figure from making the contribution that they simply must make, if our descendants are to have any chance of living on the sort of I for one would like to leave them.
Or, for that matter, any chance of having the luxury of debating the relative merits of varying accountancy practices, rather than debating the relative methods of varying survival strategies in a climate grown actively hostile to human life.
I’m not suggesting that farmers are trying to cook the books at all. I think it is important that we figure out how to provide incentives for farmers and other land managers to radically improve the sequestration of carbon in the landscape – it’ll be crucial for cutting global emissions.
However, depending on how you design the rules, it creates an opportunity for creative accounting that would make Australia’s emissions profile look much better than it actually is – and therefore delay the structural changes that we need to transform our economy away from fossil fuel dependence.
I hope that clarifies it.
To be honest a lot of farmers are frustrated by this whole debate as we are continuously being painted as bad guys in the climate change debate. We have animal activists like Paul McCartney quoting figures like 50% of global emmissions from livestock.
In reality however the emmissions case has been overstated (http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9336) and not offset against any ability to offset on farm which takes us back to basically neutral (http://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/27_15803.htm).
However in my opinion the reality is that farmers offer one of the greatest hopes of the world to fix this problem – this is a fact recognised by Tim Flannery but few else in this debate. Across the world farmers manage a massive % of the earths surface and in the case of Australia we manage a landscape that has very low carbon levels due to the age of our soils. As such we can buy the world the necessary years required to find more palatable solutions to the crisis we face.
Yet when this is floated the mainstream media (SMH and ABC et al) report this as an attempt to “cook the books”.
It’s all well and good to say I didn’t mean it that way ….but the reality is that we on the land are sick to death of the way the environmental movement treats us. Farmers set up and managed the most effective environmental repair organisation in Australia’s history (Landcare) and live and breath the landscape 365 days of the year yet are continuously painted as the bad guys in the environmental debate.
As for the whole rules and loophole thing – basically to me that is a heap of shiny bum BS – you want a job done – ie carbon locked up? Tell me how to do it, fairly compensate me for my time and then let me get at it. I’m up for 100,000 tonnes per annum (our rainfall and soil type mean I’ can’t crack the 55 tonnes/ha/annum on our farm) and I’m sure many others would be happy to help you polluting city folk out too. I might even forgive Kevin 07 for the million trees worth of carbon credits he stole from me in order to ratify Kyoto.
To jump up and down about “cooking the books” when the reality is that this is a REAL solution that is implementable NOW and the alternative is catastrophic either economically or environmentally seems to me like throwing all the babies in the world out with the bathwater.
I have no problem with farmers, what I find utterly sickening & counter productive is the deal with Forestry Tasmania who not only don’t want to have to account for any of the environmental damage they have created, but now,out of this are using the ETS as an impetus for further logging of what’s left of our old growth forests. This is all in complete opposition to the findings of Scientists. The first thing you do when you want to capture carbon is stop logging existing native forests, the argument about regrowth capturing more carbon is not only weak but has now been definitively disproved. This is possibly the most revealing example of how vested interest hasve hijacked the ETS to further the status quo by not only doing nothing about saving existing carbon sinks, but also to take the opposite position to what science has defined as best practice. If this doesn’t smack of back room political double deals then nothing does.