Tag: carbon

The Official statement by the Australian Government Net Zero Economy Authority means the same as the COP statements:

“Net zero means balancing the emissions we produce with those we remove from the atmosphere. It doesn’t mean eliminating all emissions, but making sure we don’t add more than we take away.”

Reference for the statement above and the diagrams below: https://www.netzero.gov.au/net-zero

Net Zero does not mean that all Green House Gas emissions are zero. Unfortunately, plans in Australia to reach Net Zero are very unbalanced and too simplistic. These plans put weight on emission reduction and sequestration technologies while neglecting the biosphere’s role.

The great diagrams shown below illustrate this more clearly. https://netzeroclimate.org/what-is-net-zero-2/

Is Australia The Lucky Country?

We are lucky in Australia as our land and its biota, our biodiversity, is assisting us to sequester and store a lot of carbon in our forests and savannah lands, both above and below ground level. I will go into this issue and other related issues in greater detail in future blogs.

Meanwhile, we continue to remove trees from our forests, drying out the soil, reducing nature’s ability to help, throwing more carbon into the atmosphere. The new approach to environmental protection currently under Murray Watt encourages destruction of natural systems to build renewables. What a waste! This means all the money spent is not achieving as much as it could be. Let’s put solar on car parks instead of good agricultural land. Let’s build windfarms on brown field sites. Let’s preserve forests rather than find we need to rehabilitate and replace those same forests.

We only have finite resources, money, and materials. We must rigorously evaluate the true cost of various strategies and policies while looking at the whole picture not just isolated pieces of the transition challenge.