I love fossil fuels. After food and sex they are just about the best thing that has happened to humanity in all our history. More than William Wilberforce of Abraham Lincoln, they helped us transcend the need for slavery, creating energy from machines to replace forced labour. This led to the libertarian regard for human rights and freedom that makes the times we live in more blessed than any other period in human history. We must never go back to the bad old days of not having cheap energy. But fossil fuel abuse is a transgenerational form of child abuse – we waste them now and our grandchildren pay the price in flooding, starvation and war.
Back in 1841 my great great grandpa Lars Doxtad, arrived from Norway and started chopping down trees in Wisconsin. Thousands of other pioneers like him cleared the massive forests of the Mississippi river system to create the American Midwest. 80% of the trees were gone by 1920. In 1927 came the great Mississippi Flood. Water levels were 27 feet above the flood line. Instead of replanting the trees, the Government dredged deeper channels and built levees, or raised banks, all along the Mississippi, to carry away flood waters infuture. In 1933 came the Dust Bowl. There were no trees to hold down the soil. When Lars Doxtad first put his plough to the soil, the level of soil carbon in the Midwest was 100 tonnes per hectare. Now it's 5. The other 95 tonnes of carbon as organic matter either washed down the river or blew into the air as carbon dioxide gas. Nearly half the increase in greenhouse gas levels since 1850 has came from deforestation and farming. This process of human ignorance, which began by cutting the trees in the upper Euphrates above Sumer and sparked the flood legend of Noah, just goes on an on. It happened in Egypt, Babylon, Mohenjo-daro, China, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Ukraine - with the same disastrous results. Can we avoid repeating the mistakes of our ancestors?
Farming can save the planet almost singlehandedly – of course we need to reduce fuel consumption, eliminate waste, eat less meat and insulate our buildings, but farming is the magic wand that can solve our climate problems at a stroke
Industrial farms are the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the history of farming. Although they only produce one third of the world’s food, they contribute most of the .
Rodale research shows that organic farms sequester 3.7 tonnes of CO2 per annum and industrial farms emit the same amount. That’s a difference of 7 tonnes – organic farmers support global greenhouse gas reductions almost equal to the emissions of industrial farms. Take it worldwide: if everyone farmed organically then we could take 7.2 Gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year, easily cancelling out the 5.5 Gigatonnes of increase in CO2 that is steadily making the planet more uninhabitable
Oh, yeah, I forgot - organic food is ‘too expensive.’ For F**k’s sake! Help me somebody! What is really, really expensive is having to deal with floods, droughts, massive crop failures, flooding of the world’s coastal cities and human extinction.
The solution is so easy it makes me want to weep. All we need is a carbon tax that prices carbon emissions at the future cost of dealing with climate change. That’s about £150 per tonne. Actually, we probably only need to tax it at £35 per tonne to get the behavior change that would solve our problems
What would a carbon tax do
Well, the price of meat would go up, particularly beef and dairy products (did you know that if you put all the world’s cows on one side of scale and all the rest of the non-human mammals on the other that the cows would weigh more?).
The price of organic food would go down. £35 per tonne would mean that an organic farmer would get £130 per hectare in carbon rebate and the industrial farmer would have to pay a carbon tax of £120 per hectare – that’s a £250 difference. It pretty much cancels out the phoney cost advantage of industrially produced food and in many cases organic food would cost less.
We’d end up with other benefits – reduced nitrate pollution of water supplies; fewer endocrine disrupting chemicals affecting us from the foetus till old age; more biodiversity – you know the drill.
A carbon tax would also encourage tree planting. You can cut a tree down in a few hours - it takes 20-50 years to grow a new tree. A carbon rebate for tree planting would pay the tree grower 10 tonnes or £350 a year, just for planting a new woodland.
Sheep farming emits 5 tonnes of CO2 per year per hectare, so sheep farmers would have to pay £175 in carbon tax – that’s a difference of £525. Few farmers would raise sheep and they’d all plant trees. What would happen if we planted trees on the higher ground? Well, trees soak up water when it rains. Their root systems stop soil from washing away into rivers and the sea. Duh.
There’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land and about 3.5 billion hectares of pasture. That’s 5 billion hectares. If we stopped trashing the soil and started farming organically and planted trees on pastureland we could sequester over 50 tonnes of CO2 every year. That would be overkill, though. The net increase in carbon dioxide that is causing global warming is only 4 tonnes per year. But it shows how easy it would be if we just taxed the emission of carbon and rewarded farmers and foresters who sequester it.
We stopped emitting lead 20 years ago because it was making everyone stupid and crazy. We stopped emitting hydrofluorocarbons because they were destroying the ozone layer. We stopped emitting sulphur dioxide because it was causing acid rain. This was done with regulation and taxes to encourage the alternatives.
The big climate talks are in Paris in November 2015. By then the EU, China, California, Quebec, New England, British Columbia, Washington state and Oregon will have a carbon tax. This means there will be genuine momentum to bring the rest of the world into the system, with no exceptions (Kyoto excluded agriculture and transport and let developing nations like China, India and Brazil off the hook). A carbon tax is the simplest way to change behavior. By paying a tax of £35 per tonne of CO2 now we can save a future cost of £150 per tonne emitted and protect our grandchildren from the consequences of climate change. That’s £4 of payback for every £1 we save now.
It’s time to forget adaptation. We have the power to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, we just need a carbon tax.
