The Issue of Carbon Dioxide

The Issue of Carbon Dioxide

During the halcyon days of forestry in New Zealand our tree nursery’s annual production was around eight million Radiata pine and six million Douglas fir seedlings. These numbers were static up until shortly after the closure of state-run forestry when private forestry companies and farmers were expected to fill the gap where state forestry left off. However the popularity of forestry as an investment quickly changed due solely to further political interference. First, the government changed the building rules, imposing mandatory chemical treatment for Douglas fir timber when used in house building. This made the longer growing rotation of the species to have no financial benefit over Radiata pine, so plantings of Douglas fir ceased overnight. Tree nurseries were left with unsaleable seedlings, redundant infrastructure and redundant workers. A few years later the government saw the light and reversed the rules for Douglas fir timber but the damage to the nursery industry was already done.

Around the same time, a new world theory was being expounded called ‘global warming’, these days edited to ‘climate change’. A theory that blamed carbon dioxide and created a new international commodity called, ‘carbon credits’. Tree growers found that the trees they were growing happened to be sequestering this carbon stuff as they grew, because wood is about fifty percent carbon. So this airy-fairy idea of carbon credits had the illusion of suddenly having a certain value. The UN began taxing participating counties according to the amount of carbon they released into the atmosphere by way of carbon dioxide. Now who in their right mind would sign up to voluntary taxes? Anyway, little old New Zealand with its farting and belching livestock did, so was up to pay an annual fortune as carbon tax! The government, scratching around for funds, announced they intended to nationalise, or a better word, rob, tree growers of their carbon credits! The immediate response was that everyone stopped planting trees. The result was tree nurseries couldn’t sell product and we were lucky if we sold one million seedlings per year. The outcome was that after nearly a decade of lean planting years, the government backed down, but the idea was carnage to the whole local forestry industry, and created a gap in our managed, rotational forest resource. Now, nearly three decades on, the government has decided to fund the planting of a billion trees to create jobs and carbon credits, but failing to fully understand that for successful forest establishment, proper planning and preparation is required.   

We all know government stuff-ups are nothing new and often lead populations in unwanted and uncalled-for directions, which is why the polls aren’t well-attended and why there’s mistrust of politicians and government institutions. I for one, mistrust the notion that carbon dioxide is the cause of climate change and further, I mistrust where the huge amounts of carbon-taxed money goes. There’s been a climate change summit recently where two hundred countries were represented. You can bet none of those free-lunch, bums-on-seats will be on mere labourer wages! Yet another expensive talk-fest shows how the UN has become a financial sink-hole. There’s little evidence of carbon tax monies being spent on third world ‘climate-effected communities’ or indeed for building one seawall. Maybe that’s because there isn’t a need.

While being no scientist, my forestry career dabbled in many sciences related to the business of converting unproductive land into managed and sustainable production forests; so I’m backed by a smattering of experience. Secondary school science taught me that the process of photosynthesis, utilizes carbon dioxide in a process essential for all vegetation. Also that the world’s vast fossil fuels originated as vegetation that was lush and larger than our present vegetation, because of abundant carbon dioxide that was in the then atmosphere. So if there is increasing carbon dioxide these days, why is there not more corresponding vegetation growth? Over my fifty-odd year career, I’ve see no sign of trees growing larger than in the recent past. Anyway, a little reminder for the anti-carbon dioxiders: if it wasn’t for carbon dioxide, how would we grow our plant-based foods – correction any food?

When I was a lad, a man down the road gassed himself with his car fumes. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I was warned over and over not to start a lawnmower or chainsaw in an enclosed area because of the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. So how come vehicles and machinery are suddenly giving off carbon dioxide?  An error at the start of an equation is enough to cause doubt about the rest put forward by human-caused climate change advocates. Animals produce carbon dioxide and in the past, maybe there weren’t so many humans, but imagine the lung capacity of a T-rex! Pre-human there were massive herds of wildlife! Worrying about our belching and farting livestock may be legitimate, but wait a tick – we’re paying carbon tax, but aren’t farts methane?  Anyway, our livestock hardly compare to the gases that the world’s insect population let off! And we have to remember, there’s a natural carbon dioxide cycle linked to the sea that’s been going on for as long as there’s been sea. How do climate change advocates propose mitigating that?

There have always been atmospheric pollutants, well we call them that, but they are process that made the atmosphere the way it is, and it happened to support life. These are the volcanic explosions. Think of the gases given off during that single event over eight months known as the Laki eruption and the resulting haze. Some eighty four cubic kilometres of lava bubbled up. That’s a big limp of rock! What about the awful fires in Portugal, California and Australia? They’re nothing new, vast amounts of material billowed into the atmosphere. How do governments viz the UN propose levying a carbon tax on wildfires? Those events produce more ‘pollutants’ that any number of motor vehicles.

I’m not denying climate change at all! Climate changes happen, always have and always will, it’s part of Earth’s lifecycle. But left-handed logic, (righties don’t quite understand it because there’s no science for it) left-handed logic suggest we look up at that big, golden globe in the sky! She has to be the driver of our climate, because just as the Earth has its cycles, so it logical that the sun has her cycles. She doesn’t belt out a constant radiation level year upon year, it is logical that the sun must vary, which in turn causes Earth’s climate to vary. How inconvenient! When the climate change faithful say the Earth temperature will rise one and a half degrees, how can so-called experts predict when the sun is going to vary? How would one percent of fifteen million degrees Celsius affect the temperature of our planet? Forecasters can’t accurately predict the weather more than a week out! To go back to the Laki episode, if you read Gilbert White’s diary, the eight months’ worth of gases caused significant northern hemisphere climate change, at least for a few years, the summers became much hotter and winters severely colder. There can be no prediction when the next eruption or rock from outer space will impact out climate, but such events will occur.

Here’s another bit of left-handed logic. What we’ve been told about continental drift doesn’t quite cut it for me. If the present shape of continents fit into each other so well, how do we rationalise natural coastal erosion over billions of years? My forestry geology lessons taught me that mountains erode forming alluvial plains over a similar same time span. Of course the plates move, some are forced under others to be recycled into magma, while other pressures cause mountains to rise up. Question:  Have you ever experienced your car’s front wheel being out of balance? And have you ever seen the tiny piece of lead that corrects it? Well to spin as fast and evenly as Earth does, the planet must be well balanced, so it’s logical that all the time it is self-balancing, which makes it logical that there must be a number of the tools in Earth’s toolbox, climate being but one of them, to keep equilibrium.  

So, carbon dioxide is being used to represent the dodgy man-made climate change theory, for the simple reason it’s measurable for the purpose of raising tax revenues. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt in my mind that humans have impacted on the world’s climate. Deforestation is the major impact! Forests manufacture cooler, moist-laden, oxygenated air. Forests contribute to the water cycle, they host fauna and other flora. They represent biodiversity. Yet worldwide, indigenous forests have been and are being harvested in a non-sustainable way over vast tracts of land. The worst examples are in the Amazon and Congo, but Russia, Indonesia and the USA are among the culprits too. Of course, especially in the case of the Congo and Amazon, harvesting trees generates much needed revenue, which is why carbon tax should be dumped and instead a levy should be put on indigenous timbers used in western upmarket buildings to discourage their use. Aid should be directed to the Congo, Amazon and the rest to restore forests and protect them, thus creating employment and internal taxes for the country concerned, while maintaining a climate equilibrium.

Important as our climate may be, our environment is more so, and yet as a species, we have been shitting our nest! A successful economy is reckoned to be a growing one where profits outweigh any consideration for quality of life or ethics. There’s a tie-up between automation, artificial intelligence and the evaporation of jobs. Yes, workers cost a lot and can be difficult to manage but is it not important that people have jobs? In the name of cost-efficiency, packaging plastics replaced biodegradable materials such as paper and natural fibres, but at an awful cost to the environment. The throw-away society leaves behind uncountable tonnes of waste that rich countries ship off to pollute poorer countries. The wealthy have the maxim: I can afford it, so I’ll have it. With no regard for the resources ‘it’ may consume.

I’m happy to swim against the tide, prattling on about environmental degradation and how flora in all its forms is one of the keys to our continued existence. We can’t rely on political acumen, politicians dance to tunes that get them re-elected, seldom transparent, yet most can see through them! Carbon dioxide isn’t our enemy, false prophets are. The most important renewable and sustainable resource we have available is forests and they need to be planted. Tomorrow is a good day to start.