Paying the price for carbon dioxide

Would you pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Putting a price on carbon makes people pay for carbon dioxide that they add to the atmosphere (ouch!) and rewards behaviour that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide (yes, please).

So why not just make people who emit carbon pay for that carbon dioxide and give the same amount of money, the ‘carbon price’, to people who take it out of the atmosphere?

A lot of people make money out of carbon emissions. Oil companies are the main subjects of hatred, but it is the rest of us who actually burn the fossil fuels that keep our homes warm, our cars on the road and planes in the air. The biggest beneficiary is the Government, which gets 53p per litre of petrol, plus another 10p of VAT. It’s like the situation with cigarettes: the Government knew for decades that fags were killing people but the tax per packet was a vitally important source of income, so it was challenging for the powers-that-be to crack down on smoking. Even palm oil, most of which gets mixed with diesel fuel, gets taxed at 53p per litre, but the food industry takes the flak when it’s in a biscuit. Palm oil has replaced hydrogenated fat, which is why heart disease rates are falling.

Organic versus non-organic

Organic farmers increase soil carbon every year: they compost green waste and crop residues; they add manure to the soils instead of chemical fertilizer; they do crop rotations that naturally boost soil nitrogen; they encourage a resilient soil microbiome that also increases soil carbon; they let the land go fallow so natural fertility is rebuilt, which means more soil carbon. An organic farm can capture and store about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Non-organic farmers use chemical fertilizers that wipe out the soil micobiome and cause nitrous oxide pollution that is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Intensive animal rearing of cattle and pigs leads to higher methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas. Herbicides and pesticides are made from fossil fuels and end up as more global warming. Farming is responsible for one third of our annual increase in greenhouse gas levels. Organic farming could cancel out that increase and bring greenhouse gas levels down by a similar amount and we could stop stressing about climate change.

Powerful stuff

So how can we encourage organic farming? How do you encourage anything? Money. Powerful stuff. Farmers love it.

The EU carbon price is just over £90 per tonne of CO2. An organic farmer can capture at least seven tonnes. If they got paid for it, that would be an extra income of £630 per hectare.

A non-organic farmer emits at least two tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year from fertilizer and soil organic matter breakdown. If they had to pay for that (a tax on fertilizers and pesticides) it would cost them at least £180 per hectare.

Every crop is different, but let’s take a look at barley. Let’s say that a barley farmer - whether organic or not - wants to make £1630 per hectare.

An organic farmer gets four tonnes of barley per hectare and can sell it at £250 per tonne; that’s £1000 per hectare. With a CO2 payment of £700 per hectare that adds up to £1700 per hectare gross income. Bingo!

A non-organic farmer gets a higher yield (thanks to chemicals) of six tonnes per hectare. At £250 per tonne that generates £1500 per hectare gross income. But the farmer must pay for two tonnes of CO2 emissions - £180 - so that brings it down to £1320. So to make as much as the organic farmer, the non-organic farmer would have to charge £305 per tonne for barley, an extra £55 per tonne. What brewer will pay a £55 a tonne premium for non-organic barley?

Much barley ends up in beer. If you’re down the pub and a pint of organic bitter is £3.30 and a pint of non-organic is £3.90 would you be prepared to pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Social prescribing comes of age

Social prescribing represents a steep learning curve for many doctors says Craig Sams, but it’s rocketing up the agenda

The setting: a GP surgery. Receptionist: “The doctor will see you now.” Doctor: “Hi, how are you getting on with your low-carb diet? Are you getting the regular exercise we agreed? Can we de-prescribe the Metformin? Let’s do a few tests to see whether you’re ready to come off the drugs. By the way, how are you getting on with your cookery classes? Let’s see if we can finally wave type 2 diabetes goodbye.”

Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry but ‘social prescribing’ is on a roll and there will be a lot more of it in the future. Professor Tony Avery, the NHS National Clinical Prescribing director has said the aim is to bring about a ‘culture change’. He sees social prescribing as transforming modern healthcare, saving money and improving people’s lives. Not only that, but adverse reactions to medication are estimated to cost NHS England over £2 billion a year (not to mention the impact on people’s lives and health). The number of disability claimants doubled from 2021 to 2022. 8.3 million Britons are now on antidepressants.

The College of Medicine’s Beyond Pills Campaign is pushing hard to stop the overprescribing of medicines. The college says that 1.1 billion medicines are prescribed unnecessarily. Its chair Michael Dixon (medical advisor to King Charles), has said ‘Medicine…is no longer affordable or sustainable. A new medical mindset is needed which goes to the heart of true healthcare.”

Back in the 1930s an experiment in social prescribing called the Peckham Experiment engaged with 950 local families to get them on the track to health. They had a gym, a swimming pool, cookery classes, a vegetable garden and workshops about health. Members would have a medical health check once a year and were monitored on a regular basis. The kids did better at school, marriages were more stable and women were empowered (knitting groups helped with this). Social and community activities were organised by the members and helped reduce isolation, loneliness and alienation, illness levels fell dramatically. William Beveridge who drafted the plan for the NHS, was impressed and envisaged similar health centres up and down the country. When the Government put his plan to the British Medical Association in 1948 they were not impressed and the Government was forced to back down and agree that all ‘health services’ would solely be via the GP’s surgery. The Peckham Experiment closed down two years later.

But social prescribing is finally rocketing up the agenda. There are now 15 Pain Cafes in Cornwall helping people manage pain without painkillers, relying instead on exercise and psychological support. Dependency on antidepressants has been shown to cause more harm than good (as anyone who watches Happy Valley already knows). Time to kick the diazepam.

Increasing awareness of the benefits of phytonutrients (the kind of stuff the health food industry has been emphasising for decades) is filtering through to the medical industry and impacting on social prescribing. It was the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus who famously said 500 years ago: “Prevention is better than cure.” With life expectancy rates going backwards, increasing rates of alcohol and drug-related deaths and hospitalisations, along with record levels of obesity, social prescribing is happening just in time. Will people be taking their prescriptions into the health food store? Or will the pharmacies try to capture this newly lucrative business?

The Bromley by Bow Centre in East London is pioneering the ‘new’ approach to health and wellbeing, and it is a model that is being emulated in more and more places.

Yes, the first reaction is ‘I told you so’ - but the fact is that these people are serious. At least so far.

How long will it be before doctors prescribe yoga and pilates classes or give out free prescriptions for herbal medicines and supplements? Will you get free cookery classes on the NHS?

There’s still a long way to go, but at least the direction of travel has finally changed. The Government has just allocated £50 million to support 42 Integrated Care Boards across the country to help doctors to ‘de-prescribe’ their patients and get them on the path to wellness without drugs. There will need to be proper support for the medical profession - they know it makes sense but it’s a steep learning curve for many doctors. They didn’t teach this kind of stuff at medical school.

Food and agriculture centre stage at COP28

Craig Sams journeys from the wealthy ancient Kingdom of Saba to modern-day Dubai as the UAE prepares to host the COP28 climate conference

About 1,500 years ago the descendants of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon lived very well indeed. Their kingdom of Saba was insanely rich because they were the suppliers of frankincense and of spices from the Orient. Caravans of camels plodded northwards to the Mediterranean markets with incense that perfumed churches and synagogues all over Europe and spices that enhanced European cuisine. The camel caravans would stock up with food and water before their journey and the Sabaeans had plenty of that too, they had built a huge dam that captured the water of the monsoon rains and used it all summer long to irrigate the fertile plains around the capital city of Marib. At that time it was the wonder of the ancient world. The Sabaeans and their neighbours all worshipped the sun, a ‘god’ that rose into the heavens every morning.

Solomon convinced Sheba to become Jewish and abandon sun worship and she persuaded her sun-worshipping neighbours to be Jewish too. Then the Sabaeans ditched Judaism and converted to Christianity. Other sun worshippers stuck with being Jewish and the different tribes fell out over whose invisible god was the real invisible god. While they squabbled, nobody performed routine maintenance on the Marib Dam. It collapsed, and suddenly agriculture was impossible. Different tribes headed off in different directions - some to Syria, some to the Gulf. The ones who went to Syria, called Ghassanids, did rather well growing wheat and working with Rome to protect its eastern borders. The ones who went to the Gulf resorted to herding sheep and goats and moving from oasis to oasis. In the 1840s, as part of their aim to conquer Egypt and Suez, the British armed Druze who massacred 10,000 Ghassanid Christians and the survivors fled to northern Lebanon and then many to America (including my grandparents). The Sabaean tribes herding sheep in the Gulf allied with the British and then discovered rich stocks of oil and gas. They built new cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi on the profits and did rather well. Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi used some of that money to rebuild the Marib Dam that had sustained his ancestors and it now irrigates the soils of the area. He also built the Abrahamic Family House where a mosque, a church and a synagogue are all in one grand building, bringing the argumentative religions of the Bible and the Koran under one friendly roof (Israeli tourism to the UAE has boomed in the last two years).

Dubai is hosting COP28 this November, the climate conference that is making halting progress towards getting the world’s climate under control. Dr Al-Jaber, the UAE minister for industry, has stated that food and agriculture will take centre stage in COP28’s carbon reduction programmes. Why not? The Earth’s soils are ten billion hectares. Each hectare, if managed with carbon in mind, can capture and retain about seven tonnes of CO2 every year, whether it’s farmland, pasture or forest. That’s 70 billion tonnes - twice the annual increase in CO2 emissions. Duh!

All we have to do is charge the way we farm, the way we graze animals and the way we manage forests. In other words, go organic, graze ‘regeneratively’ and manage woodland sustainably.

Dubai gets things done. Solar power converts sea water into drinking water. Buildings have car-charging points and low-energy construction to minimise their carbon footprint. Just this year they are spending $40 billion to get to net zero well before 2050. Their Sabaean ancestors goofed big time and had an environmental disaster that ruined their wealthy original homeland. They don’t want to make the same dumb mistakes again.

When we infected the Amazonian tribes with our diseases most of them died and the Amazon rain forest grew up. At the same time, the Plague killed off vast numbers of farmers in Europe and Asia, the trees moved in and sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere. We had the Little Ice Age as a result of those blasted trees taking over. Then we discovered steam engines and coal and oil and that saved us from freezing to death. We are humans. We have the brains and the power. The UAE and Dubai can get us on track at COP28. They learned their lesson the hard way 1,500 years ago. Now they can help us get back into balance.

COP26: The deal of the century for organic farming

COP 26 was, in my humble opinion, a resounding success.  2021 will go down in history alongside dates like 1066 and 1776 as years when the fate of the world was dramatically changed.

In 2008 I went with Dan Morrell (who traded the first ever carbon offset back in 1989) to the COP14 in Poznan, Poland.  Our mission was to ensure that soil sequestration of carbon was on the negotiating document that went to the next climate summit: COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009.   We succeeded! It was high fives all around. When locking up carbon in soil is rewarded in the race to net zero, farmers have another ‘crop’ that they can sell.  Instead of farming being 1/3 of our annual emissions it can (if it goes organic) stop its own emissions and capture enough carbon to easily outweigh emissions from energy, industry and transportation.  The Copenhagen COP13 was a failure and it wasn’t until the Paris COP 21 in 2015 that the importance of agriculture in saving us from climate disaster was recognised.  Article 6 of the Paris agreement set out the case for using forestry and farming to save the planet. The ‘4 per 1000’ part of that agreement declared that if farmers could increase soil carbon by 4 parts per 1000 that would be enough to offset ALL our other greenhouse gas emissions.  Organic farmers can do better: La Vialla, a 1500-hectare farm in Italy, has been measured by the University of Siena for more than 10 years.  They lock up 7 parts per 1000 on their farm of cereals, vines, pastures and woodland.  Organic farming is the answer to climate change.

People blame capitalism for the mess we’re in.  That’s not fair.  It is socialist policies like biofuel subsidies and subsidised chemical inputs that are a big part of the problem.  Our government subsidises the burning of trees (pelletised and imported from Arkansas and Latvia) at Drax power station in Yorkshire to the tune of £2.1 million a day and then we rant at Brazil for clearing forest in the Amazon.   We endure increased levels of lung disease from burning wood, too - wood smoke is dirtier than coal. The EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation requires member states to burn 10% of all motor fuel from renewable sources such as rapeseed, palm and soybean oil for biodiesel. Then people moan at the food industry for using palm oil (which replaces deadly hydrogenated fat).  Petrol is blended with ethanol from barley, wheat and sugar beet.  What a colossal waste of land while we lament the plight of the millions who go to bed hungry.  This is socialistic government policy, engineered by agribusiness lobbyists to subsidise industrial farming.  The deluded comparison of ‘renewable’ with ‘sustainable’ is used to cover up this deceit.  If ‘renewable’ fuel was really good for the environment then we’d be investing in whaling. Whale oil is renewable and it doesn’t compete with farmland for food production. But this is the thinking that you get when politicians pretend to be businessmen.

So can capitalism do it any better? There are more than 10 billion hectares of farmland, forest and pasture globally.  If it was all farmed to maximise carbon capture it could sequester at least 7 tonnes per hectare overall, for a total of 70 billion tonnes a year.  That would very quickly reverse the annual increase in greenhouse gas levels, currently running at 20 billion tonnes a year.

What’s in it for capitalism?  Well, somebody has to buy and sell the carbon crop. 70 billion tonnes a year at $50 per tonne is $ 3.5 trillion.  That’s the kind of money that gets Goldman Sachs and Cargill and hedge funds and other wheeler-dealers out of bed each morning.

Getting to net zero will make a lot of other people money: organic farmers, sustainable foresters, regenerative grazers.  In fact, when industrial farmers and intensive dairy and beef farmers have to pay for their emissions, there isn’t likely to be a farmer on the planet who won’t go organic. Organic food will be cheaper than high-carbon industrial food.

The whole carbon offset market has been beset by cases of fraud, cashing in carbon credits more than once and some dodgy calculations of carbon capture.  The Soil Association, the Sustainable Soils Alliance and similar bodies around the world are now agreeing strict protocols to validate carbon capture to ensure that investors and traders are getting what they’ve paid for.

COP 26 has achieved a major result.  With global agreement that ‘net zero’ is a universal target, there is hope for reversing climate change.  Thank you, Great Britain, for pulling off the deal of the century