Integrity Standards Vs The Urgency

The Integrity Standards focus on making the transaction possible by making sure the consumer is confident that they are getting what they paid for. No confidence, no market, no abatement, no sequestration of CO2. The logic is undeniable. But it is only as simple as that when you focus only on the transaction.

Turn the telescope around and you see a world that needs as many farmers as possible sequestering as much carbon as possible in their soils and vegetation as quickly as possible. The reason? Because there is little chance that global warming can be held to a increase of less than 2°C without it. Some of the world’s leading scientists are saying that the rate at which clean energy infrastructure can be built compared to the rate at which global demand for energy will grow make it now impossible to meet the 2°C target without a big soil carbon component.

Scientists, including the world’s most famous Climate Change scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, agree that renewables will not be ready to supply the world’s energy demands for up to 50 years, if then. In Smart Solutions to Climate Change, Chris Green of McGill University and Isabel Galiana look at current rates of progress and conclude that by 2050 alternative energy sources will produce less than half the power needed to stabilise carbon emissions. By 2100, the gap would be even wider.

Some prominent Australian scientists point to soil carbon as the solution: “It will be next to impossible for Australia to achieve the scale of [emissions] reductions required in sufficient time to avoid dangerous climate change unless we also remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in vegetation and soils,” the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists told the recent Victorian Inquiry into Soil Carbon. Even the CSIRO agrees Dr Michael Battaglia, Theme Leader, Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, CSIRO told the inquiry: “What [soil carbon sequestration] actually gives us is time to make those adjustments [transition from burning coal].”

Emissions reductions won’t slow down the process of climate change because it is not tomorrow’s emissions that are causing the problem, they are your Grandfather’s emissions - the carbon released into the atmosphere 70 years ago - that are causing Global Warming. Luckily, we have the only process for extracting billions of tonnes of CO2 every year for 50 years, fully deployed and scaled up, ready to start: Photosynthesis, in the form of 5.5bn hectares of farmland around the globe. Scientists such as soil carbon authority Professor Rattan Lal estimate the process can remove 3billion tonnes of CO2 annually for 50 years. He testified before the US Senate that soil carbon can be a “bridge to the future” that “buys us time”.

James Hansen and Rattan Lal agree that the world’s farmers can draw down the CO2 equivalent of 50ppm and hold it for 50 years. With the globe racing towards 400ppm, hoping to stop it at 450ppm (to hold the increase to 2°C), soil sequestration is attractive and available and relatively cheap. It would forestall the need for deeper, faster cuts in the future and it would protect the economy from damage. So why is it not activated immediately? Because we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope.