Over the last few weeks of the year, I travelled to 10 towns across four states to explain why Australia needs to dump net zero and focus instead on bringing down electricity prices for Australians. I travelled to Dubbo, Dunedoo, Wauchope, Taree, Inverell, Singleton, Toowoomba, Adelaide, Murray Bridge and Perth.
During my dump net zero roadshow, the Paris Agreement turned 10 years old. The Paris Agreement included a vague aspiration to a “net zero” like goal. Paris kickstarted the campaign, which culminated in most countries committing to net zero at the Glasgow climate conference in 2021.
Since the “world” signed up to net zero, annual global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 5 billion tonnes. This increase is more than 10 times what Australia emits in total every year. And, this data is only up to 2023 as there is a lag in reporting the data for most countries.
Australia has reduced its carbon emissions by 28 per cent since 2005, but this has done nothing to help the environment, given that other countries are increasing their emissions by so much. In truth, Australia’s reductions are not what they seem.
We have not reduced our emissions in energy use, for industrial purposes or agriculture. The only category of emissions that have gone down is what is called Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry – or LULUCF in the jargon of international carbon accounting.
What is LULUCF? The land use category involves the conversion of land to what is called forest. The idea is that the trees that grow help capture carbon dioxide and thus lower the temperature of the globe. It sounds nice in theory.
In reality, what happens is that rich investors, often financed by banks, buy up large tracts of farming land. They then kick off anything productive – cattle, crops and workers, and the land is left to go back to the wild. The result is not pristine forests but unmanaged scrub that becomes a hotel for pests and weeds to invade.
This does not save the planet, but it does destroy the local environment and farming economies. When the cattle leave, so do the jackeroos, the truck drivers and even the local shops and cafes are hurt because there are fewer people in town.
The only people that benefit are the investors and banks who resell these “carbon credits” to large corporate businesses who like to pretend they do good things. More than 90 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions reductions have come from this carbon credit scam.
ABARES (the Australian Government’s agricultural advisory body) estimates that converting 1 hectare of Australian farming land to carbon projects saves about 5 to 21 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
If you are flying somewhere this holiday season, you might see the box that you can tick when you book a flight. On Qantas its called their “Voluntary Carbon Program”.
If you are to fly business class with your spouse to London, you would generate about 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide. So to offset that amount using the ABARES figures above, you would need to take out around a hectare of land from farming production for a year.
This might make the rich among us feel good, but it does nothing for our environment or our economy. Australia has already lost 7.2 million hectares of land to this crazy process, which is more than the size of Tasmania.
This is just for starters. As the Federal Government’s carbon reduction program, the Safeguard Mechanism, kicks in, more Australian miners and manufacturers will be forced to buy up farming land to “save the planet”.
In Western Australia, I heard about how one of Australia’s largest gas companies, Woodside, has recently bought $200 million worth of good farming land to offset its carbon emissions. The CEO of WA Farmers, Trevor Whittington, estimates that this land could feed 100,000 people, and in his words, Woodside is “sterilising” good farming country.
The net zero agenda has completely lost the plot when we are reducing the ability to feed people in a futile attempt to control the temperature of the globe. It is time for the net zero era to be closed, and we just return to an era of common sense.
