Tasmania’s largest farm and the carbon math that doesn’t add up

You can’t replace a few decades of fragile, reversible tree growth with carbon emissions. It took an almost incomprehensible amount of time for the Earth to lock down and be called an offset – it was business disguised as science, writes Wayne Hawkins.

Tasmania’s biggest farm is no longer a farm.

Hectic Lagoon and neighboring property Eastern Wyambi – 21,744 hectares of dairy, beef and agricultural land nearby Cape Portlandin the state’s far northeast Tasmanian Wildlife TrustA vehicle managed by Gresham HouseThe UK’s largest forestry asset manager.

Federal Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, signed the agreement In early July, supported by the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB).

The price tag was north of $100 million. Some of this money appeared later, came pre-committed from the government’s own Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) – before the sale is officially confirmed.

The plan will transform thousands of hectares of grazing and irrigated cultivation areas into pine plantations. Australian Carbon Credit Units under Emission Reduction Fund.

TasFarmers surveyed its members and found 99 percent opposed the sale. The Federal Treasurer described it as a challenging process. Locals waved their hands silently during the winter parliamentary recess, describing it as something closer to getting stitches.

Both sides argue about the process. I want to discuss the arithmetic because that’s where this deal really fails.

Clearly stated offset logic

The conversation, stripped of consultant language, is this: Plant enough trees in Rushy Lagoon and anywhere else in the country that a coal-fired power plant, a gas plant, or an industrial polluter will keep doing the same thing it’s doing.

The carbon that trees supposedly lock up cancels out the carbon that someone else releases into the air. One balances the other. The books are in balance.

But they aren’t, and the scale of the dissonance is so great that it seems almost absurd when you really look at it.

Coal, oil and natural gas took millions of years to form; organic materials were buried, compressed, and slowly cooked under geological pressure for periods of time that would dwarf human history. We pull it up and light it in seconds.

A tank of gasoline, a shipload of coal, a day’s production of a gas power plant (fuel that took millions of years to furnish the planet) were released into the atmosphere in one afternoon.

And the suggestion on the table is that a pine plantation grown for 25 to 35 years could offset this. He can’t.

No version of forest growth operates anywhere near the time scale on which fossil carbon is sequestered in the first place. Claiming otherwise is not science. An accounting number wearing a lab coat.

Trees do indeed absorb carbon; but slowly, over decades, and only if they survive, do not burn, are not recorded prematurely, and do not deteriorate during the next drought or bushfire season.

Meanwhile, the fossil emissions they supposedly cancel out represent millions of years of stored carbon and are instantly released into the atmosphere.

You can’t replace a few decades of fragile, reversible tree growth with carbon emissions. It took an almost incomprehensible amount of time for the world to lock in and call it a wash. This is not a balancing act. This is commerce disguised as science.

Then the trees are cut down

There’s another problem that the balancing yard quietly overlooks: Pine plantations are not conservation forests. These are a commercial crop grown for final harvest by a forest asset manager.

In around 25 to 35 years, the trees in Rushy Lagoon will come down. When they do this, much of the carbon they store is released back into the atmosphere by burning offcuts and cuttings or leaving them to rot in situ, and eventually as self-decaying or burning timber at the end of its working life.

So it was never a true one-for-one exchange. It was a rental. In exchange for a few decades of temporary storage that ends when the combine arrives, someone will continue to pollute today.

The emissions it was intended to cancel occurred immediately and permanently. Storage was always to be temporary and reversible. Calling this balancing assumes no one looks beyond the first harvest cycle.

Why is this more important on a working farm rather than on marginal land?

There is one version of balancing forestry that at least has a coherent logic: revegetating truly degraded land that is already devoid of any productivity.

Rushy Lagoon is not like that. like that world-class, irrigated, food-producing country — 1,170 hectares are under irrigation, supported by 12,500 megalitres of water rights, and until a few years ago, 4,000 dairy cows and thousands of head of beef cattle were employed.

Converting productive farmland into a plantation for carbon credits not only makes the shaky offset claim even shakier. It trades something we can measure and eat (actually produced, food that feeds people) for something we can only measure on a spreadsheet and sold to anyone who wants to continue polluting somewhere else.

This is said to be good for the climate. More accurately, it’s a good thing for the balance sheet of the buyer of the loans and for Gresham House’s Tasmanian portfolio.

Tasmania provides the trees. Someone else is keeping the emissions.

Who actually benefits?

This is the part that should worry Tasmanians, whatever they think about carbon policy in general. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation, funded by Australian taxpayers and tasked with reducing emissions, helped finance a foreign firm’s purchase of Australian food production land ahead of official government approval so the firm could sell carbon credits back into the Australian market.

In fact, we support the conversion of our own largest farm into a product that will keep someone else’s factory running.

Meanwhile, Rushy Lagoon’s real, physical output—the milk, the beef, the food security that a farm of this scale represents—is completely disappearing from the books.

It doesn’t count as a loss anywhere in carbon accounting because carbon accounting was never designed to count it.

What Tasmania should want

None of this means that forestry, vegetation, or true carbon farming are worthless. This means accounting needs to be honest about what it is actually trading for.

One tree planted in this decade is not a fair trade for a ton of carbon burned in this decade; The time frames alone make trading dishonest, before we even get to fire risk, loss of land use, or who stands to profit.

If Australia is to continue approving sales in this way, the least Tasmanians need to demand is direct answers to some simple questions: Whose emissions is this pine plantation actually zeroing out, when and how will we know the trees will still be standing when the bill is due?

So far no one in Canberra has been willing to show their work.