Farmers sink carbon and improve soil
Thousands of farmers are joining a voluntary soil carbon movement adopting specialised cropping and pasture practices to improve yields and income, while measuring loads of carbon storage on their farms.
But the inquiry, looking into the impacts of climate change on agriculture, also heard the results have been largely shunned by the science fraternity because the carbon storage data does not fit into existing carbon models.
Dr Christine Jones, a scientist from Armidale in NSW, launched the Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme as an incentive for farmers to make land management changes for the sake of their own farm businesses and to help reduce greenhouse carbon levels.
Brown coal companies attempt emissions blackmail
FOR the Brumby Government, “clean coal” is the state’s saviour. Like a shining white knight, it comes riding in, rescuing the state’s vast brown coal riches from the carbon scrap heap. The message is that clean coal technology will save not only 1370 jobs in the Latrobe Valley, but Victoria’s electricity supply itself.
However, as the day of reckoning approaches – when companies will have to pay for the pollution they emit – experts and industry leaders are not quite so sure the story will end so well.
A few days ago, Richard McIndoe, whose company TRUenergy owns Yallourn, one of the state’s big four brown coal power stations, warned that without Federal Government help to soften the impact of an emissions trading scheme, “the generators will be effectively bankrupt and therefore not able to operate from December 31” this year, because the value of the assets would be so diminished.
World Bank blames biofuels for food prices
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
Poor farmland offers biofuel solution
Biofuels can be a sustainable part of the world’s energy future, especially if bioenergy agriculture is developed on currently abandoned or degraded agricultural lands, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University. Using these lands for energy crops, instead of converting existing croplands or clearing new land, avoids competition with food production and preserves carbon-storing forests needed to mitigate climate change. Sustainable bioenergy is likely to satisfy no more than 10% of the demand in the energy-intensive economies of North America, Europe and Asia. But for some developing countries, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, the potential exists to supply many times their current energy needs without compromising food supply or destroying forests.
Finding a new form for the corporation
Most debates about corporate responsibility narrowly define a stark choice between government regulation and free markets. A US-based organisation called Corporation 20/20 advocates a third path: system redesign. While the corporate responsibility and governance movements have achieved some notable progress, they argue that a more systemic, integrated transformation is both needed and plausible at this moment in history. The following article is an edited extract of a paper given at the ‘Summit on the future of the Corporation‘, hosted by Corporation 20/20 in Boston, November 2007.
How Do You Like the Collapse So Far?
Richard Heinberg on Global Public Media Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures. What do you get? Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it. Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, Continue Reading →