-----with an Emissions Trading Scheme (an ETS) ----

---oil, coal and gas win, we loose---

 

CARROT AND STICK or CAP AND TRADE

Allan Yeomans. Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia .

up date...22 October 2009

It now seems perfectly obvious that for no extra costs we can have our affluent societies, our big cars, our air conditioning and our common old light globes and still eliminate global warming, and halt climate change. We simply change our methods of farming and we dump the fossil fuel industries. It's our choice, and it's urgent.

Over the years I have come to realize that inventing is the surprisingly difficult art of discovering the perfectly obvious. Back in the 1980s when I first proposed that increasing the fertility of world agricultural soils could remove all the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing global warming it was a good example of discovering the perfectly obvious. It's rewarding to see the spreading acceptance of the concept. Now is the time. And it has to happen.

Oil, coal and gas have been, for decades, fighting back against other energy sources. And they're not giving an inch. So now we have all these arguments about an emissions trading scheme, an ETS. We should note that the argument is all about how it should be implemented, and how it should be finessed, and when it should be installed. It is never about whether it will actually work.

So let's first remember what it is supposed to do. I guess we all, vaguely believe it's all about halting climate change. Or at least preventing climate change from getting a lot worse, or at the very least slowing the rate at which it is getting worse.

But maybe that is not what this ETS is all about?

Many of us are beginning to really appreciate what is at stake – and that's the horrendous destabilization of our entire Earth's climatic systems and the inevitable consequences.

If we want to reverse it and stop it then it's becoming perfectly obvious that a cap and trade system, an ETS simply won't work. It won't do what we want it to do.

On a couple of relatively small toxic chemical reduction schemes in the US, cap and trade seems to have worked. However, the relevant companies involved survived and prospered, and the discharge into the air of the particular and relevant toxic chemicals virtually ceased. This is sited as justification for the whole concept. But there's a difference. With carbon dioxide we can't have the companies survive and prosper. They have to go. And they know their very existence depends on the general population continuing to accept that the atmosphere is a safe dumping ground for all the carbon based gasses released when fossil fuels are burned. The survival of the fossil fuel industries depends on systematicly defusing the worries and concerns of the people.

The marketing gurus in the oil coal and gas industries are trying to ram down our throats a system that they themselves invented. It pacifies us while guaranteeing the long term prosperity of the fossil fuel industries and countries. It's called cap and trade and it's a three shells and a pea trick.

An emissions trading scheme has been in effect in the European Union for four years now and the fossil fuel people must be laughing all the way to the bank. Giant new gas and oil pipe lines are being built all over Eastern and Western Europe and business is booming, while we argue, debate and do nothing.

“The origins of the EU-ETS date back to 1992 when 180 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which had the stated goal to “stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations at ‘safe' levels”). Then “On January 1, 2005 the world's first large-scale greenhouse gas emissions trading program opened for business – the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) – covering installations across all 25 EU member states.” This is from the PEW CENTER on Global Climate Change. The PEW Center is a huge American Foundation.

In Europe more greenhouse gasses are entering the atmosphere now than did prior to the implementation of the EU-ETS. So who came out winning that round?

If an ETS actually worked for oil then it would have to work for cutting heroin and cocaine use. What's the difference? We would have drug barons getting legal “drug credits” or “permits”. That's provided they promised not to sell more drugs. But they get a sweetener - if somebody kicks the drug habit, and collects a credit then the drug barons can buy the credit and recruit a brand new addict. That's how cap and trade works.

If you, as a citizen in a town or city are beginning to feel guilty or responsible or even altruistic about global warming issues and wish, somehow, to contribute to its termination, or at least mitigation, then you become the "mark". You are the one the PR gurus must target. By skillfully utilizing those feelings you're coerced into buying these things called "carbon credits" or Certified Emission Reductions, CER.

One CER was nominated as one ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent. A carbon credit is deemed to be created when one ton of carbon dioxide is prevented from entering the atmosphere or has been removed from the atmosphere. And they are then on-sold to the oil/drug barons. Carbon credits and cap and trade, both have that delightful ring of environmental responsibility. And it all sounds fine, but it isn't. As is so common these days, (and more so with carbon pollution) the devil and the dirty tricks are all in the oil slippery details.

And this is how the set up works. It could be described as a scam!

Certifiable carbon credits can be claimed and created by the building and establishing of some of the only minor alternative to fossil fuel systems e.g. solar voltaic cells. Solar cells on a house qualify, but only if you install more solar cells than you could possibly need and the qualifying excess electricity is sold into the electricity grid. Sounds fine but when the excess home generating capacity is built and paid for, and the bureaucratic compliance requirements are fulfilled, it is unlikely that the tiny yearly income would finance a once-a-year family dinner.

Some geothermal, some hydro and some solar thermal systems, provided they are new, can qualify. Collecting methane gas being formed by rotting garbage in town landfills and waste dumps, and burning it to generate power, can qualify. Even the oil industry concedes that these ideas would have, at most a miniscule impact on fossil fuel sales. Whereas nuclear energy, a major alternative to fossil fuels would eliminate the production of huge quantities of greenhouse gasses by replacing fossil fuel power plants. Nuclear energy is specifically excluded as a Kyoto, and Kyoto update, approved source of carbon credits.

With an ETS the end result is governments get huge incomes, and they're carefully not described as “taxes”. They can then spend this money, our money, to buy votes and influence. The fossil carbon people have to collect the money but otherwise they are free to continue as usual.

So let's look at the realistic and genuine approach.---

  The CARROT and STICK approach to energy source replacement .

We collect money from the oil, coal and gas people and pay it to the producers of biofuels, along with all the producers of non-fossil carbon based energy. No carbon credits, no tickets, no tradeoffs, no exceptions and minimal bureaucratic administration.

First let's look at transport fuels . In a paddock, less than 200 kilometers square we could grow enough biofuels in Australia, to totally eliminate the importation of all petroleum fuels into the country. And as a bonus, balance of payments problems would vanish over night.

How do we make it happen?

The Carrot In Australia the States charge vehicle registration fees. So have any motor vehicle, certified by the manufacturer to run on blends of at least 25% ethanol, free of all vehicle registration fees. The same should also apply to all vehicles converted, by their owner to be biofuel compatibility. Remove all taxes and excises on biodiesel and ethanol. Pay to local national producers of ethanol and biodiesel a subsidy funded from petrol, diesel and LPG taxes and levies.

The Stick The fees for petroleum only vehicles we slowly raise. For governments, the total of all fees collected remains the same. Naturally over the life of the vehicle, registration on non biofuel compatible vehicles would continue to rise. If there is a revenue deficiency then slightly increase the petroleum fuel levies. With LPG, it should be noted that when processing and handling of both fuels are taken into account then LPG is actually a worse greenhouse gas polluter than petrol. For the LPG marketing people, that's just another “Inconvenient Truth”.

Governments have traditionally taxed the alcohol we drink. But there is no tax on mentholated spirit, which is about 10% water and at least 60% ethanol. The oil interests like the red tape that makes the production of biodiesel on the farm subject to constant harassment by federal alcohol tax investigators. Ethanol is a major component in biodiesel production. In Australia, these costs to a farmer are several thousand dollars a batch of biodiesel, even if it's just one single 200 litre drum. To get over that bureaucratic hurdle, ethanol for energy use should be blended by the distillery with a difficult to remove colour and be, from there on in, free of the federal police and tax investigators who monitor alcohol production.

There are other additional actions we could and probably should take involving minor modifications to tax deductibility regulations. But the above gets us going.

Second, let's consider pure industrial power , and our vast deposits of coal. Sometime in the not too distance future our societies will be powered by nuclear energy. The oil industry and those that sell natural gas and coal pay big money to postpone that inevitability.

Here in Australia, apart from our very dirty brown coal deposits, the coal is about as good as any coal, anywhere in the world. So until our international coal markets recognize the incredible irresponsibility of fueling their industries by burning coal, we should sell them ours. Around three quarters of the export income of Afghanistan comes from selling opium for illegal heroin production. If a market is created, then someone will supply that demand. But we, here in Australia should not remain “users”.

Australia is a perfect country for nuclear energy. We should start modifying our coal power stations to run on nuclear fuels; starting now. Go to my Chapter 10 “The Sabotaging of Nuclear Energy” in PRIORITY ONE and read about the clever, worldwide marketing creation of “the anti-nuclear movement”.

Carbon capture and storage -- don't be taken in by the ludicrous concept that claims it's practical to remove carbon dioxide from the exhaust gasses of a coal fired power station and safely bury those gasses permanently. The simple arithmetic shows that for every two existing power stations we would need to build a third one just to power the extraction and separation of the gasses from the first two. It gets worse. To compress the CO2 up to the extreme pressures needed to bury it, then to transport it to a yet-to-be-discovered safe burial site then pump it into the ground, also takes a huge amount of energy. Remember that for every tonne of coal we burn we produce near four tonnes of CO2 for burial.

Compare nuclear energy -- for one nuclear powered human life span we accumulate just one tiny egg cup full of nuclear waste for disposal. And that waste will wear out its nuclear radiation dangers, right back to the same as the original uranium ore, in around a hundred years. But with coal and natural gas waste the problem is one billion liters of carbon dioxide per person. An egg cup to a billion litres! That's just another “Inconvenient Truth” for the fossil fuel industries' PR people to massage. To change to nuclear energy is easy in a conventional electricity market. Currently a coal or gas fired power station is allowed to dump its waste into the air. These greenhouse gasses should cease being “free to air”. The tiny quantity of waste from a nuclear power stations should be dumped where it is relatively safe for a minimum of, say two hundred and fifty years, by which time the radiation levels are so reduced as to be more of a health benefit than a health risk.

  Oil, coal and gas caused our global warming problem, they can pay the price for fixing it. Up until fifty years ago they were needed. For the last fifty years they evolved to become the equivalent of another tobacco industry. They even use the same PR services. But the climate change disease is fast approaching the death toll from tobacco derived lung cancer. Worldwide, the financial costs already far exceed those related to tobacco use.

  The Stick All fossil fuel power stations should pay a levy or tax on energy sold, of say, one and a half cents per kilowatt hour.

The Carrot ...That money, - and I mean every penny of it - should be paid back direct to non fossil fuel electric power generating facilities. If they are a nuclear plant they get, say one and a half cents for every kilowatt they generate and such payments have to be guaranteed for a minimum of twenty five years. Otherwise the next fossil carbon compliant government cancels the contracts, and sends the fossil carbon free companies broke. So they won't even start. With non nuclear sustainable energy systems, such as hydro, solar and wind, etc. support them with a higher carrot, say five to fifteen cents per kilowatt hour, along with the same time guarantees.

AGRICULTURE CAN RETURN THE ATMOSPHERE TO NORMAL

For removing the accumulated excess carbon dioxide already in the air we need a federal policy to encourage farmers to sequestrate it into their soils. Fertile soil is soil containing large amounts of humic materials. Remove the organic matter and the soil becomes just decomposed rock. Humus and all the other forms of organic matter are carbon structures. That carbon was originally atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Increasing soil fertility thus is only possible by plants extracting carbon dioxide from the air and eventually becoming soil humus. It's that simple.

It has taken me over twenty years but now people are beginning to appreciate the perfectly obvious, that the only way to remove the excess CO2 from the air is by changing the way we farm.

Let's get something straight. Boral forests, tropical rain forests and all the rest of the established forests of the world, can't and don't absorb and store carbon. They're like garbage or trash bags already full to bursting with carbon compounds. Tropical jungles even smell the same. Making more garbage bags to fill more garbage dumps won't stop global warming. It's also madness to continue digging up vast quantities of geological carbon, (they are nature's landfills) and dumping the carbon into the air? We should leave it where it is. And we should recycle the stuff we've already mined.

The oil and agrochemical industries don't want agriculture included in an ETS because second to energy, agrochemicals are the biggest consumer of fossil carbon materials. So they have nurtured the farming community to resist such attempts. They're been sickenly successful for now farmers in both Australia and the US don't want agriculture included in any ETS or carbon sequestration concepts. This is disastrous, for only farmers can put an immediate halt on global warming with its climate change disease. It is our job to make it so financially worth their while, that they just can't refuse. So how do we make it happen?

The Carrot and Stick Approach on AGRICULTURE

First the stick ; we change tax laws just a little so that purchases of agrochemicals cease to be a tax deductable item in their balance sheets. If farmers want to use them, fine, they can, but their use is no longer seen as attractive. From our point of view, why should we tax payers subsidize the destruction of our nation's soils by calling agrochemical a “legitimate farm expense”? It's basic chemistry that all that humus destroyed by those chemicals converts into carbon dioxide and goes straight into the atmosphere. It is surprising but never-the-less true that destroying an acre of fertile soil generates about as much greenhouse gasses as driving a petrol powered car for your whole life, (for a hectare we need a petrol guzzling SUV) See my book PRIORITY ONE Together We Can beat Global Warming . It's free to read at www.yeomansplow.com.au .

Now the carrots , we want to increase the carbon content of our soils so we pay the farmers to do just that. We have the money from disallowing agrochemical tax claims. So it's a no-cost-to-taxpayer exercise. By contrast, with an ETS “we the people” are going to have to fork out for CO2 somewhere between $20 and $50 a tonne. The money would be collected from us by those same fossil fuel users and handed off to our governments to spend exactly how they wish. And there will be close to nil effect on neither fossil fuel consumption, nor greenhouse gas production. So instead we pay the farmer a hefty reward to improve his soil. We want him, (okay, or her) to do well. Because we need our farmers to fix this global warming problem. And only they can do it.

Forget this nominated range of $20 to $50 a tonne for CO2. We can pay our farmers a mere $10 a tonne for the CO2 they capture which they do by creating humus rich, productive, erosion resistant, healthy, fertile soil. As consumers we get food that tastes better, because it is better. And food prices will likely go down as the costs benefits of near chemical free agriculture phase in.

For thousands of years farmers have systematically improved the fertility of their soils. So fortunately it's not at all difficult to modify a farm management program to systematically increase the organic matter, and thus the carbon content of almost any of the soils we farm. A one percentage point increase in total soil organic matter in a soil is not rocket science. It's just another way of doing things. Over a few seasons it could net the farmer several hundreds of dollars a hectare.

Testing soil carbon levels is an efficient and cheap exercise, and this should be at the farmers cost. With a little trimming a farm could be certified organic, and there is a huge and expanding world market for organic food.

We shouldn't be so presumptuous to think we can show a wise and canny farmer the best way to treat his soil. There are thousands of farmers out there, they are the salt of the earth and they are not fools. If it's worth their while they'll have their soils jumping and sequestering carbon the way it best suits them, and all in quick time. And that can all happen while the conglomeration of the nation's state and federal research establishments are still debating how even the information should be documented. Delays suit the oil people so they foster delays. It doesn't suit us one little bit.

Another carrot for both us and the farmer is; we remove all restrictions on land clearing provided only that the soil on the new land must be improved so as to contain at least the same quantity of carbon as was in the trees and scrub before clearing. And conversely the farmer should be credited if the cleared vegetation is used to replace some fossil fuel based product. It would logically qualify if the vegetation was commercially sold. Then from there on in any further in increase in soil carbon levels should qualify for the carbon sequestration bonus.

There is one very critical imperative related to soil fertility enhancement. The process must never ever be used to create credits to allow either fossil fuel mining or fossil fuel use. The grim reality is that all the soils in the world that man farms or manages in any way, are tiny in comparison to the titanic quantities of fossil carbon materials buried in geological structures across the planet.

We can remove the excess greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere by creating fertile soil, but we can only play that card once

Thus we cannot throw the life boats overboard to keep the ship afloat. We cannot throw out the parachutes to lower the load on a crippled plane.

If our nation is ever burdened with the fossil carbon industries' cap and trade ploy, the critical imperative is that any ETS must never be allowed to destroy our one chance to eliminate global warming and the disease of climate change.

Allan Yeomans

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