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Some Thoughts on Emissions Trading Schemes

Kate of Hills and Plains Seedsavers recently made a post on this, and asked what I thought.

I must admit, I’m a little bit cautious and sceptical on these kinds of things. Last year Europe launched it’s emission trading scheme, and it was little more than a circus. Local governments were allowed to issue as many credits as they wanted, flooding the trading scheme, and all that happened was the politicians threw up their arms and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Yeah, right!

We’ve all just seen the big push into unsustainable biofuels take off all over the world. In Europe at least this is in part intended to let the auto manufacturers off the hook by reducing the fossil fuel portion of their CO2 emissions. Since biofuels generate more greenhouse gases than they save, this too is hardly credible.

There has been a lot of discussion here if airlines would have to participate in the trading scheme, and after a lot of public pressure it seems they will. Still to be determined is will it cover travel outside of Europe or foreign airlines, and will they be allowed ‘extra credits’ in order to accomodate their huge growth in recent years and foreign competition. It hardly seems like there will be any serious progress made here either.

I was reading through the 89 page Australian scheme discussion paper Kate linked to, and on page 35 I came across the following:

EU: Australia should explore the possibility of trading with the EU ETS. EU views on excluding forestry and agriculture from ETS may be a problem in the early stages especially given the potential arrangements with Australia’s regional neighbours.

The EU intends to exclude agriculture from it’s emissions trading scheme?! I don’t have enough information on how serious it would be to exclude forestry, but I almost don’t think a trading scheme would be worthwhile if it excluded agriculture. Agriculture is one of the largest, if not the single largest source of greenhouse gases in all of Europe!

Politically speaking, agriculture in Europe is like a rock. It’s immune to public and international pressure, makes most of it’s own decisions in secret, and if it intends to exclude itself from the ETS, it will get it’s way in the end. All the kings horses and all the kings men won’t change this reality.

In the US presidential campaign, all of the serious contenders have stated they will support an emissions trading scheme with the intention of reducing greenhouse gases to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. This seems pretty clear, but by 2050 several presidential administrations will have come and gone. If all the cuts in greenhouse gases are scheduled to be made in 2049, this won’t be very credible or helpful to the environment now! The proof will be in the implementation.

I think in general most nations of the world realize it’s a political reality that they have to participate in an ETS, and Australia is no exception. This 89 page discussion paper that’s been issued is full of potential loopholes, and in the end the effectiveness of any ETS will be in the fine print, and which industries obtain a full or partial exemption. I really have my doubts.

When certified organic foods began appearing in supermarkets, I frequently ran into very excited people asking me if I didn’t think it was great? If I offered even the slightest indication of a lack of enthusiasm, I was usually met with something along the lines of ‘You mean you’re against organic foods!’, and this is what I feel like here. I am not against emission reductions and I am not against ETSs, I just have my doubts on how effective they will be in the end.

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Dwindling Resources

Mike on Planb just made a really thought provoking and well written post on the problems South Africa is having with their power grid, and as a result everything that depends on electricity. This has certainly been in the news here, but the magnitude of the problem is much more clear in Mike’s post.

It’s worth mentioning Mike has been anticipating this for years, and has designed his house and farm so that as much as possible will keep functioning the event of a power outage.

The Internet connection is another story…

In many ways we should be looking at South Africa as an indication of the future we will all likely see. Shortages of food, water and energy are all looming on the horizon. It’s what’s being called the end of ‘The Goldilocks Era’. It can only help to be prepared the best we can, and of course growing a portion of our own food or supporting local agriculture is an important part of that.

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A Zoo for Our Seeds?

My memory tells me it was probably until the 1980s or so where environmentalists and scientists who were trying to preserve endangered animal species worked very hard to accommodate them into zoos. The logic being that the day would come where we could release them into the wild and they could reestablish themselves.

After quite a bit of soul searching, and the zoos were full of species that had no hope of ever being returned to the wild, came the understanding that many of these species were becoming extinct because of habitat loss and unless that was addressed there was no future for them. In fact by building these zoos we were actually doing the animals a disservice, because we were eliminating any justification for preserving their habitat and just locking them into a prison where they could never be freed.

I don’t know that I completely agree with it, but GRAIN takes an interesting point of view by suggesting we may be doing something similar with the construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Are we just building a giant cage for our genetic heritage, so we can just cast it aside and forget about it? Are we only taking away the arguments against polluting the world genepools with GM material and ensuring there are no remaining arguments for biodiversity? Are we locking up our seeds into a zoo from which there will never be any hope of ever leaving?

Our friends over at the Biodiversity Weblog don’t seem convinced.

It’s certainly something we need to watch and pay attention to.

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Record Weather

A number of records have been broken recently concerning extremes in weather. January this year (2008) was the second warmest on record, since they began keeping records in 1706. The warmest January on record was last year (2007).

Last year I started all my plants indoors at the usual time, and planted them out also on schedule. Had I know the weather was going to be so warm, I could have put them out two months earlier. This year I’m going to assume the weather is going to be warmer and not wait before putting some of my plants out.

Yesterday another record was broken. This record was for the highest barometric pressure ever recorded in February. This has meant for the last several days the weather has been sunny and very dry. Anyone who lives in a northern maritime climate will know this is not normal for February. This meant it was a good day for taking pictures.

Amsterdam Prinsengracht

This is the Prinsengracht canal near my house.

Garden Path

This is the view from my garden along the path leading up to it.

Common Kale

There’s not much growing in any of the gardens right now, with the exception of kale. Lots of the gardens have a few of these plants. I don’t know the name of the variety, but it’s what everyone calls ordinary kale. I never saw it before I moved to the Netherlands, but it’s everywhere here, and it tastes nice. I think it’s an F1 variety. This gardener’s plants aren’t doing well and are a little small. He also has red colored as well as green, which I’ve never seen before.

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Bird Flu in India

GRAIN just published a report on the recent bird flu outbreak in India.

In just three weeks after it was officially confirmed, 3.7 million birds had been killed. This comes out to an average of about 122 birds per minute for every minute of the day, day and night, seven days a week over this period. All this is made possible with modern technology like the super efficient AED-100, list price $600,000, which kills 10,000 birds per hour, by picking up the birds by their feet and dragging their heads through electrified water. This included not only birds on a few large factory poultry farms, but birds all over the region including small farm and backyard flocks. It was a devastating blow to the biodiversity of the area.

It seems like we don’t hear much about bird flu these days, but it’s still there and no less important than a few years ago. There are still many people dying each year from bird flu, and the risk is very real that soon there will be person to person transmission of the disease possibly causing a world wide pandemic.

Perhaps the reason we don’t hear much about it anymore is the politicians and large corporate interests profiting from the trade in factory farm birds knew the public wasn’t going to buy their stories anymore about the disease being caused by migratory birds and small flocks kept outdoors.

They knew if they kept telling this story, people would start pointing out that in fact what was happening was outbreaks in factory farms were infecting wild birds, in turn infecting small outdoor flocks. In fact, small outdoor flocks are the solution to the problem, not the cause. The small outdoor poultry holders don’t deserve to be the victims.

The reason there are outbreaks in factory poultry farms is the highly inbreed bird varieties used in these operations have a depressed immune system making them vulnerable to all sorts of infections. It was inevitable a virus like H5N1 bird flu would develop in the unsanitary and crowded conditions of modern factory farms. Bird varieties usually used in small outdoor flocks have normal immune systems.

It’s outrageous that large scale operations which are the source of the problem get massive government subsidies to cover their losses, as what happened with European poultry farmers during the last large outbreak in Europe, while small flock holders all over the world don’t get a penny and face legislation restricting their ability to continue raising birds.

The only option we have is to act as consumers and not buy factory farm poultry or poultry products! The definition of what is or isn’t factory farm is all but totally blurred now. It doesn’t matter if you buy ‘organic’, ‘free range’, ‘grass fed’, ‘grain fed’, ‘pasture raised’ or whatever else they call it. The legal definition of these terms has been so watered down as to not mean anything. It doesn’t matter if you buy these products in a supermarket or whole foods store. Any poultry product you buy will probably be a factory farm product, unless you have a personal knowledge of the farmer or unless you or a friend raised the birds yourself.