The big girls and boys are taking their gloves off in preparation for Copenhagen. Emissions reduction-leading Japan has thrown down the gauntlet to the US and China. They are the world`s 3 largest economies. And low and behold we hear the Acting US Ambassador to New Zealand appealing that “working together as partners, the US and New Zealand will help meet the challenge, and secure all our children’s futures”. It`s a rare moment when the US needs us so no doubt our own negotiators have their reciprical wish list in. At the top should be US support for our request to Copenhagen that timber extracted from plantations and used in housing and construction be credited as a valid carbon sink. Photo: Coconut trees fall into the sea as rising levels erode their bases, Tuvalu.
Pine trees are like giant self-expanding straws that we poke vertically into the ground and they merrily suck CO2 out of the atmosphere for 30 years. They literally suck it straight into their trunks which end up towering sky-wards as space-efficient storage vessels for that nasty carbon. Even Discovery Channel would be challenged to come up with a better engineering solution for global warming.
New Zealand has been planting trees on a large scale for a century already and is a world leader in the technology. “The planted forest technology for radiata pine is probably the most advanced of any potential tree species. The evolution and success of radiata pine in New Zealand has major implications and lessons for the rest of the world.” says long-time pine expert Winkie Sutton. For example, New Zealand’s plantation forests enable us to be one of the few OECD nations able to provide significant offsets for carbon emission increases.
The offset of our emissions increases was reconfirmed by satellite mapping of recent tree plantings. Climate Change Minister Nick Smith said “the Government has been cautious over New Zealand’s Kyoto balance and future targets because of the billion dollar plus variations each year in the estimates of forest areas. This satellite data is good news in that it accurately confirms the area of post-1989 forests as sufficient to offset New Zealand’s increase in emissions and meet our Kyoto obligations in the first commitment period from 2008-2012.”
But then there are the inevitable critics. Usually those who are jealous that they haven’t, or can’t, deploy New Zealand’s leading solutions to environmental management. For example “but many think this <afforestation carbon offset> is a bit of a cheat that is not sustainable in the long term – especially because much of our pine plantations are due for harvest around 2020.” Excuse me, when we harvest them, we can replant them. New Zealand foresters have been doing this in scale for a century already. Just because we’re leading, don’t accuse us of cheating.
Some people are concerned that planting trees is not a sustainable answer to climate change because, whilst we have a lot of land, it is finite. But for this same reason, growth in dairying, our main source of green house gas emissions, can’t continue indefinitely either. As long as we balance growth in agriculture with growth in forestry, and manage our population, we should be able to hold our carbon balance. And we have about one million hectares of erosion prone land available for new tree planting. Of course, by concurrently making emissions reductions through improved transport and energy use, we can be an active contributor to global net reductions in green house gases.
The critical issue here though is economic. Our economy is dependent on land-based industries. Our supply of land is a finite. Therefore our long-term economic growth has to be based on higher value products.
15 years ago my wife and I paid to have Kyoto-qualifying pine trees planted on about 10 hectares of hilly, marginal, unproductive, and largely naked farm land in back-country Hawkes Bay. This is our family’s contribution to New Zealand’s 556,000 hectares of Kyoto Forests – those newly planted since 1990. The 3,000 trees left on our 10 hectares after some thinning and tending have already sucked in and locked up about 5,000 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide. That will double over the remaining 15 years or so until we have them harvested, and replant so the whole thing goes around again for our kids and their families. Our family is well and truly in carbon credit. Is yours?
When we harvest, the extracted timber, which is 50% solid carbon (186), will be treated and used in building, furniture, etc – locking up what otherwise would have been atmospheric carbon for a long time. But this locking up in processed timber is yet to be formally recognised in global treaties. The New Zealand team to the Copenhagen negotiations in December 2009 has as an objective to obtain recognition for the long-term locking up of carbon in processed timber from plantations. Prime Minister Key says they will seek agreement for 70% of the carbon credits given to a mature stand of trees to be retained post-harvest in the timber (185). They will also seek changes to the LULUCF rules (Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry) to allow more flexibility in the felling and replanting of trees in different areas. We wish them good LUUUCK.
We’ll also collect several hundred thousand dollars for the wood from our plantation. That’s about 5% pa compounded return on our investment – as good as the long-run average for bank savings in New Zealand and well above that available on cash in most other countries. And we might even pick up some extra pocket money for carbon credits.
The good Acting US Ambassador notes the clean energy work of the US Navy Pacific. That`s nice. Could they also get rid of those very dirty nuclear weapons they might be carrying too? Obama has mumbled something about nuclear disarmament possibilities. But, despite getting the Nobel Peace Prize, we haven`t seen any action yet. All the pressure is on North Korea but charity starts at home Mr Obama. The iron curtain crumbled a generation ago so why does the US need to continue to carry all those nasty nukes anyway?
- Related posts on climate change
- THE CLIMATE CHANGE HOAX HOAX | Schwinn Mountain Bike
- Organic Farming Could Stop Global Climate Change | InfoFork.com
- Related posts on disarmament
- Brown Pelican Society of Louisiana » Pro-Life Leaders Shocked at …
Tags: 100% Pure New Zealand, clean & green, clean & green NZ, Clean and Green, clean and green New Zealand, climate change, Copenhagen, disarmament, Kaitiakitanga, nuclear free pacific
- Climate Change made the typhoons in the south pacific very destructive. Typhoon Ketsana made a lot of mess in Philippines and Vietnam
Thanks Dacnet. You’re not wrong – I live in Fiji and we are just preparing for the cyclone season. Still, the Pacific seems to be very cold this year – early snow in Japan and Beijing. Fiji has been surprisingly cool last few weeks. Discovery Channel tells us that the sun is in a “quiet phase” (few sunspots) and this has a noticible cooling effect on the Earth. I wonder if this might help to slow down global warming?