Barnaby Drake

The system that nobody wants to understand.
WE HAVE politicians and business united in an effort to defraud the public into thinking they are concerned and are preparing to do something about global warming and reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere. There are many schemes, but all of them are deliberately defective and will achieve nothing, except a continuation of the global rise in temperature. They look at the symptoms and go into denial mode, generally pointing the finger elsewhere.

We are presented with a load of toothless tigers in the form of Accords and Agreements, but none of them solve any problems, except those of conscience for the perpetrators. It’s at every level; local, state, national, international and global. They hide behind trees and treaties, but shortly there will be nowhere to hide. Lip-service will not stop climate change.

Carbon Trading – just another opportunity to make lots of money on the Stock Exchange. All the nations scrabble for an allowance, hopefully above what they can use, and then they sell the balance to those who can’t meet their targets. The leaders in the under-developed countries benefit by money and the developed nations continue to pollute. Business as usual. The emissions do not reduce and more fossil fuel is converted to CO2 and put into the atmosphere. All that has happened is that money has changed hands and Governments on both sides of the fence slap themselves on the back and tell the public about what they are doing to save the planet and what a good boy am I, and the price of the goods goes up to offset the amount of money they have paid for their credits. Everybody is happy.

Carbon Credits. Those magical words, but as they stand, they are nothing but a great heap of spin. Grow trees and offset our carbon emissions against the amount of carbon dioxide they extract from the atmosphere. Sounds good, until you get down to looking at what is actually happening. Firstly, this is a massive tax-evasion scheme, and secondly, they are actually INCREASING the emissions by this process.

Grow more trees, but at the end of the short life cycle, they cut them all down and return the carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But, in the meantime they have offset them against the other emitters, like coal fired power stations, steel mills and concrete factories. These trees are almost wholly designed to support the pulp and paper process, also one of the largest polluting industries in the world, and the end product within three years ends up putting the original entrapped carbon back into the atmosphere. In many cases these plantations replace existing large trees and forests, the very things that we need to save. The whole thing is a charade. The world’s demand for paper is increasing, and the lie behind this system caters for it. It’s all about money, nothing to do with saving the world. It is a product of the big international wheelers-and-dealers who control the finances of the world and subsequently, the governments, who are the immediate beneficiaries of these schemes; not the people and the world at large. They are just pawns in the process. The Big Boys conduct their own scientific research to counteract any ‘inconvenient truths’, lobby governments, pay large sums into party funds and get away with the massacre of the atmosphere and the manipulation of the resources and ecology for their own benefit. For this they employ armies of spin doctors to convince you that the medicine that they are dishing out is really for your own good. But it is humbug, designed exclusively to make the rich very much richer, and damn the consequences and the globe.

Australia is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita in the world. We have a footprint of 22 tonnes of CO2 per person; 66 million tonnes per annum in total. China, despite the spotlight being on it and being the excuse why we should not reduce our emissions, comes in at a lowly 4 tonnes per person and India at 2 tonnes per person. But of course, the population in both these countries is huge – over a billion people in each. Between them that amounts to more than 6 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum.

As we are the largest exporter of coal to China, we can take some of the credit for their output as well.

So what are we doing about it? We waffle on about ‘clean coal’, which is really just dirty coal that has been spin-cleaned. We pin our hopes on future technology which is highly doubtful, risky, and may only be available in ten or more years time, but, and a big but, not for any of our existing power stations of other large polluters. New power stations will have to be built to sequester this carbon dioxide away under the ground. But where? One tonne of carbon creates 3.29 tonnes of carbon dioxide, so it won’t even fit in the hole it came out of, and if you dump it in the sea, you’ll make it so acid it will kill everything, and then we shall really be in trouble. But the talk and spin will allow our politicians to keep their jobs without actually doing anything about solving the problem.

So in the meantime, what should we be doing to counteract this huge volume of carbon dioxide we are creating? The only real carbon sink we have is the trees. The only way we currently have to collect this gas from the atmosphere is to grow more. But just how many trees do we have to grow to absorb our share of this CO2? To get rid of a total of 66 million tonnes for ourselves and one and a half billion tonnes for the coal that we export – per year! And not only that, we have to leave these trees standing, otherwise they no longer qualify as a carbon sink.

Lets be generous. A ten year old tree can weigh up to two tonnes. Only 25% of this is carbon, so we can count about half a tonne per tree after ten years. However, for each tonne of carbon in the tree, we have removed 3.29 tonnes of carbon dioxide. So, over ten years we have removed (3.29 x 2 x 25%) = 1.645 tonnes of CO2 per tree, or 0.1645 tonnes per year.
Now divide 1 500 066 000 tonnes of CO2 by 0.1645 and that will give you the number of trees we need plant per year to offset our carbon emissions. (My calculator ran out of digits! Somewhere in the region of 91 billion.)

The next problem is where? And, we will probably need to continue doing this for the next 90 years!

Considering that the majority of Australia is desert, and you can’t grow many trees on that, where do we put them, and where are the people going to be while all these fertile land areas are growing trees. It only leaves the desert. Now food. Where do we find room to grow that?

Maybe we could all go and live in Greenland!

Now we have seen what needs to be done, let’s look at what is actually being done. Not a very inspiring situation as far as Australia is concerned when the Prime Minister demonstrates his awareness of his obligations by donating $200 million to Indonesia to save their remaining forests from destruction, and with the other hand gives to Gunns and Tasmania a subsidy of $500 million to do just the opposite.

While the State and the nation is led by a bunch of Pied Pipers in the pay of industry, I foresee little chance of a solution and a continuing problem.

There is of course, one other real solution. If you want to reduce your emissions by 20%, leave the trees alone and mine 20% less coal.

One guess!

Barnaby Drake