The latest updated paper from Ross Garnaut on the rural land use in curbing carbon emissions has undermined a key plank of the opposition’s “direct action” climate change strategy.
As the brawl over the government’s detail-lite carbon price announcement dominates parliament, Ross Garnaut has released the fourth of eight papers updating the work of his Climate Change Review undertaken in 2008, focussing on rural land use.
The opposition’s “direct action” climate change policy, hastily cobbled together over summer in 2009-10 after Tony Abbott seized the Liberal leadership, relies heavily on biosequestration to reach the bipartisan goal of a 5% reduction in emissions by 2020. The policy is to spend over $3b picking private sector projects to fund, and relies on “green carbon” biosequestration projects to yield up to 85m tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2020 at a cost of $8-10 per tonne. No independent experts have endorsed the Coalition’s costings for the program.
The new Garnaut Review paper discusses biosequestration in detail, re-examining issues first considered in 2008, and confirms that “there is large potential for reducing emissions and expanding biosequestration in rural Australia”, although “significant uncertainty remains around how much of the identified technical potential can be realised. For example, the practical limitations, such as the willingness of farmers to change land use practices over large areas, or the economic constraints on establishing timber plantations a long distance from processing facilities, are not taken into account in estimates of technical potential. It is not realistic to expect that all or even most of the technical potential will be realised.”
However, the Review paper confirms that realising the potential will require a carbon price. In relation to specific soil carbon benefits, the paper notes “any incentives for soil carbon sequestration will need eventually to be embodied in comprehensive emissions pricing to avoid suboptimal outcomes.” And one of the biggest potential sources of biosequestration, carbon forests, would only become economically viable as carbon prices rise. Based on CSIRO figures, it suggests a $20 per tonne price could yield a technical potential of 350m tonnes of CO2-e a year.
However, the paper also warns of problems with biosequestration. It recommends an insurance mechanism to address the issue of permanence – i.e., ensuring the carbon that is sequestered in soil or forests stays there. The paper suggests that ultimately a carbon price is necessary to address this issue as well, based on what the Government is proposing under its own biosequestration program, the “Carbon Farming Initiative.”:
Permanence is a critical issue. Unlike other emissions reductions, the abatement achieved through biosequestration can be reversed by events that are natural as well as by human action… Leakage occurs when an abatement activity results in emissions at another time or elsewhere. Leakage would be dealt with in the Carbon Farming Initiative by requiring reporting of increases in emissions that are directly attributable to a project and deducting that amount from credits issued. Some leakage will be unavoidable under an offsets scheme. This is a major reason why the use of offsets should be seen as transitional to full coverage. Accurate measurement of emissions and sequestration is essential to the integrity of an offsets scheme in the land sector. The proposed Carbon Farming Initiative would require offset projects to use estimation methods that are consistent over time. Independent auditing of reported abatement estimates would be required.
Biosequestration will also have costs, says Garnaut. “…there are also potential negative impacts from broad scale biosequestration. For example, there are concerns in the agricultural sector and broader community that a carbon price could make forest establishment financially more attractive on large areas of productive agricultural land, with flow-on effects for food security and rural communities and negative effects on water resources. There have also been concerns about the potential for adverse impacts on biodiversity through expansion of monoculture (single-species) forests and clearing of native vegetation for forest establishment.”
In the end, despite recommending some changes to the government’s Carbon Farming Initiative, Garnaut wants the transition of land use in a “comprehensive carbon pricing scheme” over the longer-term.
” As the brawl over the government’s detail-lite..”
Right now its a brawl about the Red Queen’s credibility, and Abbott is absolutely hammering her.
I love watching Anthony Albanese taking points of order, when Abbott is in full flight. You can see Labor just clinging to the ropes, literally.
Watch the faces of the two members sitting behind Gillard in Question Time. You can see their ‘unease’ writ large.
Every time the leader of the House pleads with the Speaker, Harry Jenkins, about that ‘big bully’ Abbott, I’m reminded of that headline about Oakeshott being a “big sook”.
Hell hath no fury like a female PM getting ‘whacked’.
Garnaut has precisely and accurately identified the critical role and natural opportunity for Australia: the carbon market can provide a financial instrument by which we are able to strengthen agricultural production, food security and reinstate biodiversity, whilst becoming a major contributor and global leader in reducing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Congratulations, Professor. Well presented.
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BHP Billiton CEO Marius Kloppers is on the public record as favouring ‘policies that price the external cost of carbon-based fuels.’ If this means supporting a carbon tax, I wonder if BHP will support the Government as vigorously as it opposed it over the super profits tax. In Thompson and Macklin’s “The Big Fella: the rise and rise of BHP Billiton”, Kloppers says (on p. 404), ‘The company’s policy [on climate change] is pretty clear — it goes out from the premise that the science is real, that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is an issue and must be stabilised, so we favour policies that price the external cost of carbon-based fuels.’
DAVID HOUGH, Wembley Downs.
Dr. Tim chanted on :”… the carbon market can provide a financial instrument by which we are able to strengthen agricultural production, food security and reinstate biodiversity…”
All of Europe has stopped the subsidy clowning for windmills and solar panels that helped pretend they mattered. Carbon marketeers like Germany and Denmark are importing Nuclear-Produced electricity from France.
Everyone by now knows Climatism is Lying for A Good Cause.
So argue the Good Cause for its own worth: make a case for back-to-nature and Collectivism, in the same way as religious morality can be argued for without the fantasies of Heaven and Hell.
….But we need a price.
Yep, there is the rub.
Once we have a Carbon Price, and once we know exactly what this will mean for Rural Australia, it will be very, very interesting to watch the national party struggle to cling to relevance, as their former constituents realise en masse that the Greens serve their interests far more readily than the Nats.