Here is a photo of the view from my tent on the edge of a cliff, looking across the ocean from the northern tip of Arnhem Land. It’s where I have been for a couple of weeks so now you can see why I haven’t done the last two editions of Real Dirt, Fast!
Apologies. But I was on assignment for the Sydney Morning Herald for a story to be published this Saturday. It will definitely be worth clicking on to Real Dirt over the weekend to check out the news of some huge new rock art discoveries.

The big story while I was away and uncontactable in the Northern Territory was Professor Garnaut’s double blackflip with a pike on climate change. A few months back he seemed like Xena, the climate change warrior, but as I returned from the Northern Territory he had turned into the little caboose that couldn’t.

I asked the head of the Climate Institute, John Connor, for his reaction to Garnaut’s announcement. This is what Connor had to say:

An ashen faced Professor Garnaut shocked climate pundits when he reluctantly concluded that it was “impossible at this stage” to achieve a global goal of stabilising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 part per million (ppm). He recommended that we purposefully strive for a 550ppm outcome and work towards the 450ppm outcome later. Ashen faced because Professor Garnaut is fully aware what this means, his Review highlights this will mean the death of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it and do significant damage to the economic base of the Murray Darling Basin.

 Elsewhere CSIRO and the CRC for Bushfires has shown this will mean a 300% increase in extreme fire weather days. We reckon Australia shouldn’t give up on the 450 and below goal because it is a prematurely pessimistic view of global negotiations and a very risky strategy. A trajectory towards 550ppm will be near impossible to bend back towards 450ppm much beyond 2015 – a tough ask after Copenhagen in 2009 is supposed to agree on post 2012 arrangements. And when you look at the fine print the Garnaut Review does recommend Australia “express its willingness” to work towards the 450ppm which would need about a 25% reduction off 1990 levels of pollution by 2020.

Climate Institute analysis says this target is achievable and affordable with at least half of the job coming at a net saving to the economy with efficiency dividends. The Government now has the hot potato, will it quit on the reef, quit on the global negotiations or go into those negotiations with at least 25 per cent reductions in their target range?

A couple of years back I wrote a story about what really happens when you sign up to offset your carbon emissions with one of those companies that promises to let you live guilt free. I went out and visited half a dozen sites where carbon offset trees had been planted and what I found was an absolute rock show.
People had subscribed to have trees planted on their behalf and then had gone on flying, driving and farting in peace while the company was taking years to actually get the trees in the ground.
I saw carbon offset ‘forests’ that had been destroyed by bushfire and not replaced, other areas that were being grazed and other areas still that had simply not grown. I came away convinced that if anyone is serious about offsetting their emissions then they need to go the effort of finding somewhere to plant trees, do it themselves and then make sure they actually grow. It just seems way too easy to me to pay someone some beer money and think that is enough.
And that’s why I wasn’t surprised this week to hear on the ABC a story about an attempt to impose some regulation on these companies. According to the report:

Jane Castle from the Total Environment Centre says some companies sell offsets but do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s like the wild west out there at the moment, there’s a gold rush in the market for carbon offsets and nobody from the Government has stepped in to regulate the market, there’s no standards,” she said.
She says the Federal Government should speed up its promise to introduce a national standard for carbon offsets to protect business and consumers from being duped.
“You may, for example, click on a website and think that you’re reducing your flight emissions with the click of a button, but what might actually be happening is that the company doesn’t plant the trees for another six months,” she said.
“So many companies actually create the impressions that the emissions are being offset immediately but actually it may not be for many years.”

Another story that broke while I was away was news that farmers don’t think that they should have to be involved in the emissions trading scheme. As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:
“The NFF believes that with the current level of knowledge, it is impossible to make a decision on an appropriate point of obligation for agriculture,” said the submission from the National Farmers Federation to the Commonwealth government.

Then some bright spark at the NFF came up with the genius idea that agriculture should be permanently excluded from an emissions trading scheme. Even more clever….let’s give the farmers their pollution permits for free!!!
Considering agriculture covers most of the continent and has been responsible for some pretty serious greenhouse gas emissions Real Dirt would like to suggest that it is time to accept that what all of this talk about carbon dioxide is about is actually reducing it. In other words we need to make it hard for people not doing the right thing by everybody’s air.