- Target:
- The Australian Greenhouse Office of the Australian Commonwealth Government
- Region:
- Australia
- Website:
- carboncoalitionoz.blogspot.com
The Carbon Coalition Against Global Warming is a farmers and citizens' movement campaigning to unleash the power of agricultural soils to capture and hold CO2 and hold the line while other emittance reduction technologies come on line.
FACTS:
1. If we stopped emitting CO2 today there is still enough in the atmosphere (the "Legacy Load") to disrupt weather patterns for many years to come, up to 1,000 years. (NASA, Britain's Chief Scientist, Australian Greenshouse Office.)
2. The only way to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere is photosyntheisis - not nuclear, clean coal, solar, wind, etc
3. It would take 7 planets covered with forests to soak up the CO2 Legacy Load.
4. Deep-rooted native perennial pastures and pasture-cropping can sequester more carbon per acre than an acre of forest.
5. Farmers manage 65% of the terrestrisal surface of the Earth.
6. A 1% increase in soil carbon in 30cm of topsoil soil can translate into
42 tonnes of soil carbon which equates to 154 tonnes of CO2.
7. Australia has 450m hectares of farming land.
8. Mankind emits 8GT CO2-e each year.
9. It would require Australian farmers to achieve a 1% increase in soil carbon on only a fraction of our soils to sequester the entire world's emissions per year.
10. Soils have a specific role to play. They can start acting immediately to soak up CO2, but they saturate with carbon in 20-25 years. IPCC agricultural economist Bruce McCarl of Texas AM University says soil sequestration can start immediately while other technologies take 10+ years in preparation. The world's leading soil carbon authority, Prof. R. Lal, says soils provide the worid with a bridge to the future when alternative technologies can take over.
The Stern Report gave us 10 years to make serious inroads into the Legacy Load of CO2. Only agricultural soils have the capacity, the economy, and the immediate availability to do the job and protect the future from cataclysm.
What will it take to get farmers to change their land management to stop emitting CO2, CH4 and N2O and start sequestering it in their soils? CARBON CREDITS.
We, the undersigned, call on the Australian Greenhouse Office of the Commonwealth Government to do the following:
1. to sanction the start of soil carbon trading based on soil carbon indicators while funding research to determine the exact amounts of carbon the farmers are able to capture and hold;
2. acknowledge that the 'difficulty of measuring soil carbon' and 'the cost of measurement, monitoring and verification will be too high' are both myths perpetrated by the denial/delay lobby;
3. subsidise to 100% the cost of soil carbon baselining for every grower in Australia so each property's soil carbon levels are known and the data used to populate carbon calculators;
4. speed up research into emissions from farms so that a full accounting can be made; and
5. mandate that all research methodologies be sanity checked by “carbon farmers”.
You can further help this campaign by sponsoring it
The Aussie Soils Suck CO2. Free The Trade in Soil Carbon Credits. petition to The Australian Greenhouse Office of the Australian Commonwealth Government was written by michael kiely and is in the category Environment at GoPetition.