Hi Jennifer,
You may have read on the front page of Courier Mail on Saturday the article about Queensland’s First Carbon Farmer, Peter Allen.
Here is the link:
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,20797,21794589-952,00.html?from=public_rss
The project was the first avoided deforestation project of its kind in Australia and one of the biggest in the world.
The project secured 12,000 hectares of vegetation which was eligible to be cleared under the Stat Governments 500,000 hectare clearing ballot process.
It was estimated (both ground truthed and reconciled with the AGO) that the project prevented 1,200,000 tonnes of C02 emission being released into the atmosphere.
The cut off date for clearing permits to be acted upon was the 31 December 2006 which brought an end to broad scale land clearing of remnant vegetation in Queensland
It is amazing to read some of the responses in the article and also on the blog entries linked to the project.
Instead of being supportive of a project to protect vegetation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions many people were critical of the project.
One response was:
“I thought Peter Beattie past a law a couple of years ago that said no established forest of natural growth could be bulldozed. This farmer appears to have pulled a good one to me, He's turned a few baron and unusable acres of scrub into a million bucks”
Another response:
‘How come the farmer, was in a position to destroy all those trees in the first place? There's no moral here, merely a financial decision! Such thinking has created the problem in the first place and that by a shear a 'twist of circumstances' makes the farmer look ethical.’
Green groups have come on board to say the voluntary market is open to exploitation, with no controls on who can sell carbon and no checks on the work carried out.
However, to eligible under the scheme vegetation had to be approved by the Australian Greenhouse Office under the Greenhouse Friendly initiative.
To secure the carbon, landholders had to agree to enter into ‘carbon rights’ agreements.
Briefly, the ‘carbon rights’ agreement consists of:
- A 120 year agreement not to clear the vegetation which binds to title for future owners;
- On-going grazing and management is allowed to reduce bush fires, weed outbreaks and feral animal infestations;
- The agreement areas are surveyed and added to the survey plan.
To account for fire and carbon loss a 20% buffer was added to area eligible to be sold for credits.
In the future, there are further ‘avoided deforestation’ projects planned for eligible vegetation in Queensland and Northern New South Wales.
This eligible vegetation must meet the requirements set down under the Kyoto Protocol definition of forest and enforced by the Australian Greenhouse Office.
Landholders are already skeptical of the merits of reduced land clearing after the way in which Premier Beattie and the Queensland State Government have enacted and enforced the Vegetation Management Act.
Now the job will be even harder to convince eligible landholders to enter into the project because of the criticism that the project may attract.
The Allen’s (who were interviewed for the article) did not want the media attention but where interested in the diversification of income potential in selling the rights to carbon held in their vegetation on their own land and also the opportunity to contribute something back to the environment.
However, the attitude from many (mostly urban) is that it should be an ‘ethical’ decision rather than financial.
People want the benefits but no one wants to pay for it. We (the farmers) cant win.
For more information on the project go to www.carbonpool.com.au .
Cheers,
Tom Marland
You need to avoid these long arguments with yourself, Luke, you may be assured of a win that way but you'll also go blind.
Spare us the smoke screen. If a forest was not there at a particular point in the past, but is there now, then it is clear to the slowest departmental boofhead that this is a "business as usual" that needs to be encouraged, not penalised.
There is no reason why a 1990 cutoff cannot remain in place as a default sequence that will apply unless a case can be made for a different cutoff.
But the problem is that this whole issue was developed in a slop of arrogant incompetence heavily seasoned with ideology. The Greens were hoping to apply a tax on the cutting of every and any tree and this has shaped everything else that has developed out of that flaw.
And now that the scale of this folly is becoming evident you can only respond with rage.
And frankly, it doesn't bother me in the slightest if wood carbon is taken right out of the picture. My primary interest is in the well being of all the other native forest owners who face gross discrimination under the "People's Ecological Dictatorship". After the way they have been treated there was never any way they would be so stupid as to plant more trees to benefit their persecutors.
The only forest owners to benefit from the carbon trading system in its current form are the plantation tax swindlers and their metropolitan clients, who ruin perfectly good farming land, deplete aquifers and communities, at the cost of the revenue base, and then mouth-off about how they saved the planet.
But the simple fact of the matter is that properly managed forestry, in an accounting system with integrity, is the one industry that can absorb and store some very serious volumes of carbon. And the fact that the Greens and the EUPCC have all the time in the world to indulge their perverted ideological whimsies, is a strong indication that the whole AGW issue is nothing more than a political beat up.
If it really was a serious problem they would not be p***f**ting about like they are.
Luke,
The only reason 1990 was chosen as the base date for calculations of emissions is that it was the only one that could be politically agreed upon.
Lets face it the majority of the Annex A countries under Kyoto had pretty well ceased their land clearing activities and 1990 was a date that most of them could live with. Australia argued that land clearing was still occurring here and managed to successfully negotiate an 8% increase on its 1990 baseline as a part of its Kyoto commitment.
What needs to be kept foremost in mind here is that once ratified the Kyoto target is binding on the country. That is it becomes the relevent governments debt not the individual.
The balancing act is then how to manage the Kyoto lability with good governance. New Zealand have adopted a path where the government has legslated thatt eh carbon stored inplantation forests belongs to the government and not the grower. Is this the sort of over the top action you would like to see implemented here?
Putting Kyoto aside there is nothing to stop a forest grower from selling their carbon regardless of the age of the forest. The current market is gearing up for emission trading and the general public has a heghtened awareness of what carbon sinks are and their role in climate change mitigation. Unlike politicians and green groups they are also generally less concerned about the detail of Kyoto and display a greater amount of common sense when making decisions.
Which means that is forest grower A has a regrowth forest on their property that they have managed for 40 years then the public will generally be wiling to pay for that sequestered carbon to remain sequestered. It will all come down to the marketing and how it is presented.
Gavin,
Regardless of whether forests were mainatained as multiple use forests or placed within the reserve system as a result of the RFA's none of Australia's native forests under public management are counted under the Kyoto accounting system. The carbon fluxes over that estate are considered to be neutral.
Where the limited amount of harvesting occurs the small amount of CO2 that is emitted is well and truly compensated for by the C that is stored in wood products and most importantly the C that is sequestered by the estate as a whole. As the estate is the gross management unit.
Similarly the emissions from bushfires are compensated for by the carbon sequestration of the estate as a whole. Have a look at the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2003 under the section on agriculture for savannah burning. The maps of the areas burnt make interesting reading and put the recent east coast fires into some sort of perspective.
Actually no - just leave the car yard. The product has been withdrawn from sale.
Oh gee AN aerial photo Ian - that's one ! Out of how many needed for how many properties globally. You haven't even begun to think what's required. How about the affadavits, certificates, and photographs for your tree stump, pile of sawdust, fence posts, newspaper collection, and timber under the house. And the inspectors to make sure it's still there. And a termite inspector as you don't have any organochlorines.
Actually let's allocate a special officer whose job it is to monitor Ian's carbon for the next 100 years. Maybe 3 generations of officers.
You don't believe in any of the underpinnings of AGW and carbon sequestration but you want the benefits.
You want rule of law but only if it suits you.
You have a million objections and details to consider but don't offer any method for either resolving the complexity or alternatively keeping track of all these little bits of carbon. And no solution to persuading other nation states to accept your logic except calling them Euro-spivnicks. Solutions offered by Ian = zero point zero.
Anyone who doesn't line up 100% with your ideology in 30 seconds is a spiv or scum.
"Institutionalised injustice" - gee we're not signed up to Kyoto and there is no institutionalised trading regime. You make it sound like you're a slave in the Deep South.
The solution and you've now convinced me to advocate it at every opportunity is to ditch carbon trading for trees.
P.S. Actually I think we should bill you for the clearing on your property as condition of title. Nobody forced anyone to buy the property and develop it. Or buy the property subsequently. Could have opened a grocery store instead. Isn't this the precision attributional logic you like. Or is it more capitalising gains and socialising losses.
"But" you'll say "that was so long ago and they didn't know then". "And everyone had such good hearts and worked so hard as honest citizens".
Oh so you want a date of exemption for past works where we'll draw a line. How about 1990?
Ian: We seem to be running up a gum tree in two places.
I guess all our “managed” forest such as it was way back in the late 90’s could hardly count as a Kyoto type carbon reserve since its value would be fluctuating i.e. production interests would dominate giving us a flawed reserve. The same scenario must apply to bits and pieces in left general agriculture.
As I recall most of our argument back in those heady 90’s was about getting state governments and their agencies to agree on something that could determine what was in and what was out of production. Each RFA had to come right down to the local level and include cut over rates for all significant species. Wood stored in stumps and private houses was not the issue then, neither were bits of paper.
As I see it; all potential fuel becomes another argument under Kyoto rules but of course we must accept AGW as the reason we go down this path before it makes any sense to even have the Kyoto protocol.
My conclusion: When international negotiations about carbon trading truly started our AGO under Andrews did accept AGW but governments did not; hence a few distortions along the way. One of the consequences is a very confused public debate over strategies.
Luke is attempting what, in marketing terms, is called a "withdrawal close". That is, "don't worry about the faults in this dud car, just buy it as it is the only one left". Standard spiv bollocks.
Luke also tries to exaggerate the complexity in ground truthing as some sort of criminal rationalisation for institutionalised injustice and inequity. But I have a 1942 aerial photo that was taken only a month before my father bought his neighbours property. It had been compulsorily cleared to the boundary as a condition of the grant of title.
That photo allows us to state, with absolute certainty, that every one of the 5,000 tonnes of carbon that is found there today, would not be there at all if we did not choose put it there.
That photo allows us to state, with absolute certainty, that if we had not acted as we did, there would be 18,300 additional tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere right now.
Yet, we now have a likely system of carbon management rewards and penalties that provides maximum benefit to "landholders (who) had to demonstrate that they were able and willing to clear the vegetation to be covered under the agreement".
It provides maximum reward to those who only refrained from removing a forest after they were offered a bucket of money. It provides no reward to all those farmers who, for half a century or more, were able to clear but were unwilling to do so. And it imposes maximum penalty on those who actually replaced a forest that they were unjustly compelled to remove.
So don't try and tell me that is not the work of some seriously sick perverts.
It will be interesting to see who now wins the land clearing battle .
The Greens may have allies in some big companies paying farmers not to clear and gain carbon credits , but the ethanol fuel industry will be looking to change land and water use from food production to ethanol production .
If farmers won't convert cleared land for this then the pressure will be on for someone to clear more land and find more water to grow crops that will keep the "gas" guzzlers going.
Gavin,
"On the other hand offsets can’t come from stumps in plantations can they? Kyoto would be a lame duck!"
Well this is an interesting point. If allowed to coppice over 50 to 60 years then the stumps in teh plantation would still have sequestered carbon over that period. It will depend on the management regime of the forest owner. However it is not implausible.
In native forests, research has indicated that tree stumps decay over many decades. It will be interesting to determine how long they take to decay in Eucalypt plantations. Kyoto may not be as lame as it may at first appear in this regard.
But I will await further research before I'd bet on it.
Luke,
you said
"Well AGO has conned you Peter. Try ground truthing their remote sensing. And see if NSW are really happy with their satellite interpretations. You may be shocked. Some people would like to argue with every parameter in every allometric equation but it won't happen."
Not conned, Just imformed. Sorry mate but as I used to be in the employ of the AGO, specifically to undertake project level carbon accounting I am in a position to pass judgement on the NCAS.
As for ground truthing the remote sensing, well since leaving the AGO I have had cause to. As it is a strategic level tool operating at a defined level of precision and resolution it passes well. If you are looking for a level of precision and resoplution that is beyond the reported scope of the NCAS then you will find fault, as indeed you would if you applied the same criteria to any model.
Indeed if you applied the same criteria to the GCM's you will find that they do not even come close to matching the criteria that the NCAS has adopted, nor do the GCM's match the NCAS with a single repostory of peer reviewed literature and technical papers that underpin the system.
Its chalk and cheese really, the NCAS has a stated level of precision and resolution that it operates under and provides the technical papers that underpin it in a single web site freely available to the public. The GCM's do not.
The NCAS determines emissions from land use change and informs the national greenhouse gas inventory (under the UNFCCC reporting framework) and Australia's Kyoto accounts (Kyoto accounting framework). You will need to take up any grievances concerning what, how and why it is calculated with the UN and the IPCC.
Peter’s comment on the AGO and their capacity to monitor carbon had me google again the AGO history under Andrews and their subsequent framework development for our greenhouse accounting system. The AGO Annual Report 1999/2000 reviews the process and gives all the names in management then. Some may recall my interest in its evolution.
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/ago/annual-report/1999-00/pubs/annualreport_2000.pdf
Luke: A later doc outlines a DYO carbon measurement kit with a how to do your own fallen tree (illustrated). See Greenhouse News V 4 issue 3. 2001 We had come a long way hey.
However Peter could be right in this respect as I know our people lead the way at least in this region if not the southern hemisphere with these simple ground tests for evaluating mega data. But stumps must be included as Ian says for a fuller picture where that land is in a new forest “reserve”.
On the other hand offsets can’t come from stumps in plantations can they? Kyoto would be a lame duck!
Back in 1999 Gwen Andrews spoke on energy at the AIE national Conference.
http://www.aie.org.au/material/NatConf99/nat-abst.htm#Andrews
Our energy efficiency is still not properly on the table downunder yet is it? Imo JH & Co lost a good executive.