Perhaps it should be seen as progress when political leaders who used to treat global warming as green propaganda now talk about solutions as if they knew all along something needed to be done about it.
In a recent Talking Point column, former Liberal leader and foreign minister Alexander Downer sought to raise the profile of hydrogen to generate clean electricity and help Australia achieve what he called its “heroic” zero emissions target by means of a project to recover hydrogen from natural reservoirs on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula and Kangaroo Island.
Such a project would have got short shrift in the federal Coalition of Downer’s time, but the outright climate denialism of those years seems to be absent in conservative ranks today. Also absent is any sign of contrition for years spent opposing effective policy to cut emissions, but I suppose we must be thankful for small mercies.
Closer to home, Tasmania’s minister for business, industry and resources, Eric Abetz, said a fortnight ago that “there is no doubt that harvesting and regrowing forests provide a carbon benefit” – a view, he said, backed by multiple international agencies including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
We’ve been down this road so many times it’s not funny. Many years ago I sat down with Eric Abetz to talk about “carbon benefit”, and my takeout from that meeting and from his subsequent career is that he doesn’t give a toss about the carbon cycle or emissions generally. He’s much more interested in stomping on environmentalists.
Logging native forests in Australia is most commonly done by slash-and-burn clear-felling (clear-cutting in the US). It’s the most “economic” way to do it if we mean by that word the lowest dollar cost of getting big logs out of the forest without accounting for damage done along the way to myriad species and ecosystems, the product of millions of years of evolution.
To nature-lovers – including forest scientists not financially dependent on logging – such damage hurts, and as we’ve seen they’re prepared to go to great lengths to see the carnage end. Their battle should be ours too. Global biodiversity loss – the ever-expanding destruction of wild nature – threatens the future of humanity, but it remains a matter of little or no concern to either of Tasmania’s major parties.
But even if making money was the only aim of forest policy, the way we harvest trees and grow new ones in Tasmania doesn’t bear too much scrutiny. Economist John Lawrence has studied the financial sustainability of Sustainable Timbers Tasmania (STT) over many years and found it doesn’t live up to its name.
Lawrence has found that the outcry over Victoria’s decision to end native forest logging – VicForests ceased to exist six weeks ago in the wake of that decision – showed “a wilful ignorance of the financial unsustainability of native forest harvesting in general and VicForests in particular.”
In a Mercury column a year ago (Talking Point, August 4 2023), Lawrence pointed out that SST’s claim of financial viability depended on not accounting for the Crown’s gift of native forests and overlooking the cost of access roads and replanting.
“If STT makes a profit, it’s just a paper profit, principally due to increases in the book value of its forest estate. Cash losses from forestry operations are a much more appropriate measure of financial sustainability. They rarely rate a mention,” wrote Lawrence.
The question remains: what does a revival of the native forest harvesting and regrowth regime do for our carbon footprint? Ask anyone from STT and they’ll speak of the rapid rate at which vigorously-growing saplings can take up atmospheric carbon dioxide. But this process only makes a difference some decades into a tree’s life, and we need to cut emissions now.
Australian clear-fell harvesting increases carbon emissions by at least 15 megatonnes a year, say Griffith University forest biologists Heather Keith and Brendan Mackey. That estimate looks conservative against the sharp drop in emissions from the hiatus in logging activity in Tasmania from 2012, when emissions went down by over 20 megatonnes a year.
So in the unlikely event that minister Abetz is really concerned about our carbon footprint, the last thing he should be doing is ramping up native forest logging. And if he does, he should be heeding Kettering boat-builder Ian Johnston, who describes himself as “a strong supporter of … a profitable, sustainable forestry industry”.
Johnston, a long-standing critic of clear-fell logging, pleaded for selective harvesting at a sustainable rate to secure the future for “healthy, diverse, ecologically vital, fire resistant, carbon rich” future production forests. How could anyone argue?