Legislative Council
8 July 1998
Matters of Importance:
TRADE IN CARBON EMISSIONS
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: I want to talk about the opportunities that trade in carbon might have for enhancing South Australia's environment. I read an article in the Greenhouse Issues May 1988 edition that stated that Costa Rica has set aside 530 000 hectares of forest as carbon sink. There is an international trade now in carbon and some industrial nations, as part of attacking the greenhouse issue, are allowing trade-offs. What is happening in Costa Rica is that companies in advanced nations have a right to give off carbon dioxide if they buy the right from somewhere else. They are buying this right by protecting forests in Costa Rica, where those forests would otherwise be cleared and release significant amounts of carbon dioxide. That is a brief outline of the situation.
Given what has been happening there, it appeared to me that South Australia could offer to be involved in this trade. In the South-East of the State we have significant areas that really need to be revegetated. We know that clearance has gone too far, to the extent that now we have significant salinisation of soils occurring, and we know that one way of controlling that is to replant part of the upper South-East. But of course that is a very expensive exercise. We are also aware that the South-East has lost a lot of its biodiversity - both plants and the animals that depend upon it. So, in an article in Inside Story, which is put out from the Democrat office here in the Parliament, I suggested that we should try to get involved in the carbon trade and try to establish new forests in the South-East and use carbon off-set moneys as a way of paying. Big dollars can be involved in this. Costa Rica expects to earn $20 million in a single year and some $300 million over the life of a project which, as I recall, was to run over about 15 to 20 years. So, significant moneys are being made available through this trade.
Whether or not Australia could become involved at that stage was theoretical, but only a couple of days after that article had been written I read an article on page 6 of The Australian of 1 July headed `Car Giant Grows a Green Thumb,' which announced that Japanese car giant Toyota will plant 5 000 hectares of fast growing eucalypts in Australia to use as pollution credits against its greenhouse emissions and woodchip exports for Japan's paper industry. A total of 500 hectares will be planted over 10 years in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. So, that article clearly showed that the potential for Australia to be involved in these pollution or carbon credits is very real and it is a matter that I will be raising with the Minister for Primary Industries and the Minister for the Environment here in South Australia, suggesting that we should try to grow forests of two types: first, forests for conservation purposes. As I said earlier, I believe that South Australia, particularly in the South-East, is very short of particular habitat types and we would be able to off-set the cost of planting and establish-ing those by the use of these credits. Secondly, we could do more of what Toyota is planning to do, which is planting more forests for woodchipping. Whilst those forests are cleared and theoretically the carbon dioxide is released, the fact is the trees are then replanted, so in the overall cycle if more area goes under trees there is the potential to take more carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.
I note, however, that I see all of this carbon credit trading as short term and in the long term we have to more seriously tackle the question, and that means the days of burning brown coal are numbered, to start off with, which is one of the reasons why Victorian electricity will never stay as cheap as the Government claims it will, because it is based largely upon burning the most inefficient of fuels, brown coal. Black coal will go the same way and we will gradually phase our way through gas as the last of the fossil fuels to be used before we move to the renewables.
See also Mike's News Release on this topic: 18 July 1998
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