Put up or shut up

NEIL SMITH
Yep, Eric B has to be a plant from Gunns or their fellow travellers. No way do I believe that TWS would have said anything like what he claims. They can clarify if they feel the need (which might just be useful, since Eric’s claptrap was obviously aimed at the more moronic sort of swinging voter, and might just work – not that many of them would read TT).
More importantly, those people proposing that carbon can first be absorbed from the atmosphere and then sequestered long-term in paper (while allowing yet another rotation of little trees on the same land) had better put up or shut up. Eric or whoever you are, point me at the properly peer-reviewed scientific papers, with all their assumptions clearly stated, that purport to demonstrate this.

I take it that you allow for (among other things): the fuel used by the harvesting, transport and pulping machinery, the proportion of paper that gets burnt, the amount that rots in landfill, the energy used in recycling any of it, the rotting and/or burning of root and branch debris, any further energy use in downstream processing etc etc. Maybe a fair proportion of any energy used in building new machinery to service the huge plantation expansion you seem to have in mind. Road repairs following heavy use by log trucks?

Mike Bolan says “The timber industry is pressing the government to allow the industry to ‘harvest’ the trees and count the ‘carbon stored in the paper’ as ‘locked up’ so that they can make money from pulping the trees after about 10 years growth.” The tragedy is that the sort of government we’ve got is actually likely to agree with such rubbish. Wink wink to the lobbyists. Justified by nothing more than the bare idea that paper contains carbon which has come from trees.

And this is without a thought about whether the plantation land could be better used for something else (like food) or whether the water use is excessive. Or whether we really need more paper. Or whether it might be more bomb-proof actually to reduce the emissions of CO2 rather than trust in taking it out of the atmosphere after the event.

Clearly our government will do anything to promote the interests of big business, including forestry, and insist on doing almost nothing to save the world from disastrous climate change. If the rest of the delegations going to Copenhagen this year are the same, we are certainly stuffed.

All we can hope for (and lobby towards) is that the rest of the world will laugh Australia out of the room when they attempt to run some of this arcane stuff. And then set decent binding genuine emissions reduction targets, with trade sanctions for the pariahs.

If anyone still wants to plant trees, it might eventually provide a small sequestration bonus (if they are left to grow), but plantation forestry is too dicky – or more probably an out-and-out scam – to be part of the main game.

This comment appears at the end of this article, HERE. Comment HERE