carbon trading

On the ABC News radio this morning (9 Sept 2012) we heard that private coal companies are demanding compensation for carbon trading costs from the Victorian Government and apparently this is being taken seriously!

All the brown coal stations in Victoria belonged to the State electricity Commission of Victoria until 1994 when they were privatised by Jeff Kennett.
Now the current government is saying that it may have to compensate brown coal producers for their not being able to use it because it is too polluting and will be too costly under the carbon trading system.

Do we require further proof of how corrupt and unproductive privatisation is?
What gives when a government not only sells off our assets but then somehow agrees to retain liability for business risks?

You would have thought that the private corporations would have assumed responsibility for the debt.
They have profited from the privatisation over the years and are now crying poor and demanding compensation!
How about making the parliamentarians who agreed to selling off these assets personally financially responsible for any such compensation?

We've known of the dangers of coal since the 18th century. Our leaders should be held responsible for getting us into this mess.

CO2 Group's Chief CEO, Andrew Grant says that anthropogenic climate change science is quite simple really: "It's a function of increased population on the earth." Candobetter.net received the following as a press release today. We obviously like the idea of wildlife corridors connecting national parks. By the same token, nothing in the corporate or the government area can be taken at face value. Until the corridors are established; until we can see that more is not taken away by related interests somewhere else, we have to remain cautious. Nonetheless, on face value, this is cheering news. So is the Chief CEO of CO2 Group's attitude to human population growth and carbon emissions.

Asked by the Australian Financial Review interviewer, "What is your scientific understanding of human co2 emissions which are causing dangerous levels of global warming?", Andrew Grant, Chief CEO of the C02 Group, said:

"Well, it's really rather simple. It's a function of increased population on the earth and if you go back into look at population history for example it took from the beginning of time to 1880 for the earth to get its first billion people. Now we're at seven billion. Fundamentally what we have done is cut down 20 per cent of the world's forests and liberated that carbon into the atmosphere and then we've burnt fossil fuels at a rate where we've taken a large amount of carbon from fossil fuel reserves and put them into the atmosphere. So it's no more complex than that. As humans we have liberated more carbon at a rate quicker than the carbon cycle can handle. And it's not a good or a bad thing. There's no value based in this, but the simple reality of doing that is it changes global weather patterns. The debate really is not do we need to act? Even in Australia where it's very politicised, both parties say they support reducing emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. The debate is how."

CO2 Group Press Release on Commonwealth funding for reforestation of wildlife corridors

Melbourne 8 May 2012: CO2 Group is pleased to announce it has been successful in gaining funding for two projects of the Federal Government’s Biodiversity Fund. The grants, worth $3.8 million, will support two projects in Western Australia and New South Wales.

CO2 Group’s Chief Executive Officer, Andrew Grant said: “We are delighted to receive these grants, which we see as recognition of the quality of our work in the Australian market and our deep environmental expertise.

“Our projects will research, map, design and implement targeted biodiversity enhancements across Australia’s largest commercial forest carbon sink estate. We manage a 26,400 ha estate across 30 properties in Australia’s highly fragmented wheat-sheep belt, including sites within the south-west Western Australia biodiversity hotspot.

“The two projects will integrate biodiversity outcomes with large-scale commercial carbon plantings, creating a unique partnership between a for-profit commercial entity and the government. A partnership of this nature and scale has not been attempted outside the not-for-profit sector,” said Mr Grant.

In Western Australia, the CO2 Group project will take tangible steps toward the establishment of vital corridors between both Lake Magenta Nature Reserve and Fitzgerald National Park and Corackerup National Park and Fitzgerald National Park. These corridor links will contribute to the capacity of the reserves to continue to function and facilitate biodiversity conservation in face of uncertain climatic challenges ahead.

CO2 Group’s project in WA will contribute to the Fitz-Stirling Functional Landscape Plan, the Carnaby's black cockatoo Recovery Plan and also assist with the conservation of a range of other nationally and regionally significant conservation targets such as western whipbird, mallee fowl, tammar wallaby, western mouse, and black gloved wallaby.

In New South Wales, CO2 Group’s project adjoins conservation reserves in central NSW. The selected sites will contribute to consolidation of the regional conservation estate as well as enhancing connectivity between some reserves. The reserves that will benefit include Goonoo National Park, Goonoo State Conservation Area, Pillaga State Conservation Area and Pillaga West State Conservation Area. Conservation target species include the black glossy cockatoo, mallee fowl and sugar glider. Specific flora of conservation significance may contribute to the revegetation and restoration actions.

Another CO2 Group project site in NSW offers an opportunity to commence consolidation of a chain of remnant vegetation stands along a 100km section in the Upper Central West and Plains of NSW.

All of the projects supported by the Biodiversity Fund will help to revegetate, rehabilitate and restore more than 18 million hectares of the Australian landscape over the next six years.

CO2 Group has a history of being a leader in its field and was the first organisation to achieve accreditation for reforestation projects under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme and the Federal Government’s Carbon Farming Initiative. With 26,400 hectares under management across the country, plus 3500 hectares of native remnant vegetation, CO2 Group is the largest provider of dedicated carbon sink plantings in Australia. The company currently manages landmark commercial contracts for Qantas Airways, Eraring Energy, Macquarie Bank, Woodside Energy, INPEX Browse, Origin Energy, Newmont Mining and Wannon Water."

End of Press Release.

Candobetter.net Ed's comment:

Please comment on this article and tell us what you may have experienced about this group and its work. Obviously this kind of investment seems infinitely superior to land speculation in its usual form, which is to clear land, build infrastructure and housing, then invite loads of people into the country in order to drive up the price of the housing. We don't see the downside of this kind of investment, except where it impinges on property rights and common land of indigenous and other Australians. But we could be naive. Obviously we have a positive view of a CEO who seems to understand the importance of human population growth in the creation of pollution/atmospheric change. Marketing companies, such as the one that sent the press release on, also understand that ecological blogs like that kind of statement. The Primeminister got support against Kevin Rudd for that kind of statement. How sincere is it? We don't know.

Most objections to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Carbon Tax are founded on the apparent belief that it is possible for human society to continue its wasteful consumption of non-renewable natural resources and destruction of our natural environment without posing any risk to the life support system which exists in this tiny corner of a Universe, mostly barren of life.

However, compared to what can be done and what must be done if human civilisation is to hope to further endure for a period which even remotely approaches the 32,000 years since our ancestors left evidence of intelligence probably equaling our own in the in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave of the Ardèche department of southern France, the proposed Carbon Tax is a joke in extremely poor taste..

At best, the Carbon Tax is token gesture by Government and its corporate masters to be acting to protect our future. At worst, it is another paper economy scam that will allow wealth to be gouged from the rest of us by unproductive members of society whilst weighing us down with yet more more red tape.

This article was adapted from a #comment-159465">comment I made in response to A long time coming … an article by Professor John Quiggin written on 13 October. It has yet to draw a response there. If any visitors to candobetter.net decide that this article is more worthy of a response than visitors to johnquiggin.com have so far indicated, comments, whether critical or supportive, are most welcome.

I have sympathy with very few of those who are so stridently denouncing Julia Gillard's Carbon Tax.

True, the way she went about introducing it is questionable from the standpoint of democratic principles, but those who are against the Carbon Tax seem to want us to believe that Earth is not facing an environmental crisis which could well threaten threaten the life support system that sustains human life.

Without getting into the scientific argument, when the conditions which support life are so rare in the Universe and those which support the sort of complex life forms which exist on Earth are rarer still, it defies common sense to think we can materially change our planet as much as we have done in the last three centuries and continue to do so at an an even faster rate without putting at risk the very conditions which sustain life.

We have substantially altered the concentration of the Earth's atmosphere by having dug up and burnt much humankind's nonrenewable endowment of fossil fuels that took at least tens of millions of years of sunlight and terrestrial biological and geological to produce.

How anyone can know for a fact that these changes to Earth's protective atmospheric blanket won't cause runaway global warming is beyond me. Given that our very future and the future of our children and descendants is at stake, it is surely most imprudent to assume that we can continue to quarry and export coal iron and other non-renewable natural resources at the accelerating rate that the likes of Qld Premier Anna Bligh and our leading 'free market' economic ideologues would have us do.

My own problem with the Carbon Tax is that it is, at best, a small fraction of what needs to be done to make human civilization truly sustainable.

If the Carbon Tax were to be adopted, even if comprehensively at the international level, does anyone seriously imagine that it will somehow induce the market to reduce, to any worthwhile extent, activities that are now consuming non-renewable resources?

Just go to the rubbish tip and ask for how many more decades they believe we can continue to extract the resources necessary to manufacture all the artifacts -- thrown out hi-fis, computers, TVs, fridges, cars, furniture, toys, etc. --- and packaging that has ended up there?

How is this going to stop manufacturers continuing to manufacture and sell, at an enormous cost to our natural capital, so many artifacts that are designed to fail after only a few years and which become inoperable when parts and batteries are lost because they refuse to make these compatible with similar artifacts?

Does anyone imagine that we could go on the way we are for more than a hundred more years?

David Montgomery's "Dirt - the Erosion of Civilisations" of 2007 shows how past civilisations -- Mesopotamia, ancient Greek civilisations, Rome, the Chaco Anasazi of North America. etc., which did not dig up dug up coal, oil and metals still only lasted hundreds of years, so could not be considered sustainable.

If they had dug up and wasted coal, oil and metals and deforested at the same rate as 21st century human civilisation does they could not have even lasted that long.

Any Government which does not attempt to make human civilisation at least as sustainable as those past failed rural civilisations once were is not serious about sustainabilty.

Gillard's Carbon Tax is only a token pretence of an attempt to achieve sustainability and nothing more.

Any serious sustainability policy would comprise at least:

1. Reuse of food and drink containers rather than the phony recycling schemes that our council rates are wasted to pay for.
2. Inducements, possibly including laws, to force manufacturers to cease planned obsolescence and the deliberate manufacture of artifacts with incompatible parts, particularly cables and batteries. If cars and motorcycled built at the start of the 20th century can still be run today, why, with the improvements in science and technology can't cars be built to last centuries? Why can't cars and motorcycles be handed down to our children and grandchildren instead of being consigned to the tip or scrap metal?
3. Real town planning so that it is not necessary for so many to spend as much of their days and waste so much petroleum traveling to and from work, educational institutions and amenities.
4. Proper planned public transport so that we don't have to own our own car to commute. End the Taxi license plate speculation scam so that taxis can be affordable to ordinary people and taxi drivers can earn a livable income in a 40 hour week and not a 72 hour week.
5. Outlawing the destruction of native forests to manufacture paper.
6. Preservation of bio-diversity. Stop destroying forests and other natural habitats, which other species need for their survival.
7. End the population growth/mass immigration Ponzi scheme. It is a lie that Australia's prosperity needs more people. Any honest measure of people's wellbeing would show that our prosperity, on average, as well as our sustainability, decrease as we add more people. Only a small minority, including property speculators and landlords, gain through population growth and they gain at everyone else's expense.

20 March 2009

Emission Trading Scheme is the latest trading scam devised to extract money from the great unwashed. These are the poor shareholders, mortgaged mums and dads, small businesses and pensioners. All forced to survive on limited incomes.

ETS traders do not actually produce anything they just trade other people's nasties (pollution).

ETS traders do not actually produce anything they just trade other people's nasties (pollution). Traders make up a system to measure nasties such as carbon then trade them on to large industrial corporations. They do nothing to actually solve the pollution problem.

ETS comes on the tail of the failed World Trade Organisation. The WTO representatives feed hungry financial journalists with their propaganda in conferences all over the world. Buried in deep footnotes in complex reports, the media, with deadlines, failed to uncover the layers of jargon of true facts behind the rhetoric. Enron is a prime example and should have been a warning sign of what was to come.

Meanwhile short sellers shifted shares around and those on the inside the CEOs, raised their entitlements long before the bubble burst. They feasted up for years in conferences all over the world. What did all these conferences achieve? Take overs of sound businesses by conglomerates. Privatisation of essential services all over the world that not only became financial burdens to taxpayer but services declined. The privatisation of water is a prime example where many poor people were robbed of their livelihood.

What did all these conferences achieve? Take overs of sound businesses by conglomerates. Privatisation of essential services all over the world that not only became financial burdens to taxpayer but services declined. The privatisation of water is a prime example where many poor people were robbed of their livelihood.

The intelligent vox populi saw through the scam and protested worldwide. Governments and small shareholders believed in the temporary privatisation boom that offered good short term returns to their shares. "The ladder of opportunity" was good while it lasted but then the snake sent it all down.

Today workers are laid off, superannuation and taxpayers are propping up banks and businesses that have exploited them in the past. CEO's take their leave with their exorbitant payouts. They leave us with AGM reports that ensure the real story is buried in reams of footnotes that overwhelm any reader. This makes it almost impossible to trace the truth of the cause of this worldwide recession. Still the WTO won't die even though it is on life support.

What do we get in return? A government handout for a few that would be better invested in long term services and infrastructures that have been neglected by greedy businesses, bank and pathetic governments for decades.

I fear for the next generation. How long will it take them to climb the ladder of opportunity again?

Mary Jenkins

Secretary of STOP MA WA.

P O Box 1375 Bibra Lake 6569 WA