Carbon Credit Forests - the CO2.con
Cartoon: By Bill Leak.
By: Viv Forbes, Chairman,
CO2Australia boasts of planting three million carbon credit trees. This is "just the beginning" of a new bubble industry, the CO2.con.
This bubble is set to inflate rapidly. To offset just one day of Qantas operations, CO2 promoters must plant more than 200,000 trees in permanent forests covering 130 hectares. How much land is required to offset all Australian power stations, industry and transport?
Yes these trees will consume carbon dioxide. However CO2 levels today are well below what is ideal for plant growth. While they are growing strongly, these trees will suck the gas of life from the atmosphere, competing strongly with nearby crops and plant life for the traces of carbon dioxide remaining.
Then as the trees mature, growth stops. The aging forest just sits there, some trees growing, some dying and net carbon sequestration ceases. It becomes a sterile shrine to the green religion whose main impact on the biosphere is providing a haven for feral animals and noxious weeds.
Green spruikers claim that they only use land not suitable for anything else. Wrong! Every bit of Australia not covered by road, cities, parks or deserts can support crops, timber-getting or grazing animals. Carbon-credit forests gnaw away at this national land asset every year.
Moreover, CO2.con investors, like all speculators, want quick returns. Their quick return demands rapidly growing trees in arable country - deserts and salt pans are uneconomical. Thus the wheat/sheep belt is shrinking.
No one can demonstrate any climate or environmental benefit from the CO2.con.
Forcing consumers and taxpayers to fund this large scale permanent land sterilisation is clearly unsustainable. All Australians fund this destruction via increased prices for electricity, cement, steel, air tickets and rail fares, and reduced land for food production. The carbon tax will increase their burden.
Like all bubble industries, the CO2.con industry must end in tears, and the sooner it ends the better.
We too are planting trees where nature would not allow them to grow otherwise. In the old days, periodic prairie and grass fires would sweep over the foothills, killing off small conifer growth. After over a century of fire suppression, there are now forests growing where they shouldn't be.
ReplyDeleteIt ain't rocket science. Photos of the old gold mining camps show the foothills behind completely barren of trees and covered with grass and sagebrush. Now those same hills are covered with 100-year-old stands of Doug fir. But they cannot be harvested because they are "natural".
Meanwhile this conifer encroachment is erasing all the nice mountain meadows where the deer, elk and bighorns are supposed to feed.
Maybe we need a welfare food/hay stamp program for the deer and elk so we can leave the precious trees alone?
I thought of you the other night when the public broadcaster, the ABC ran a documentary intended to soften us up prior to their Q&A programme "Can I change your mind on global warming."
ReplyDeleteIt started with a segment on all those trees that are being killed in Colorado 'by climate change' and subsequently being attacked by insects. I recall that you mentioned that the insects were causing it.
THe ones mentioned that were happening here were just the normal grubs found in dead wood. These idiots will stop at nothing.
Now climate change killed the trees and the beetles just came along for the ride? EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
ReplyDeleteI'd have to wear my old hog boots to even get near these people.
Don't worry Bawb, they are not convincing anyone. The Bureau of Meteorology has actually asked the government climate guru, Tim Flannery to shut as he is doing more harm to their cause than the best of the sceptics.
ReplyDeleteThis is the idiot who talked the various state governments out of building dams because there was never going to be enough rain to fill them, just prior to the floods. They spent billions on desalination plants instead.
He also predicted 30 meter sea level rises but bought an waterfront property.