Bushfires release huge carbon load
VICTORIA'S bushfires have released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - almost equal to Australia's industrial emission for an entire year.
Mark Adams, from the University of Sydney, said the emissions from bushfires were far beyond what could be contained through carbon capture and needed to be addressed in the next international agreement.
"Once you are starting to burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amounts of carbon," Professor Adams said.
In work for the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, he estimated the 2003 and 2006-07 bushfires could have put 20-30million tonnes of carbon (70-105 million tonnes of carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere.
"That is far, far more than we're ever going to be able to sequester from planting trees or promoting carbon capture," he said.
Friday, February 13, 2009
There Goes Our Kyoto Target
From The Australian:
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It makes the Danish government look a little foolish in their attempt to reduce CO2 emissions by taxing cow flatulence.
ReplyDelete:LOL:In our wonderful carbon reduction scheme they are talking about bringing agriculture into the tax programme, but nobody yet knows whether agriculture is a net producer or remover of CO2 in the atmosphere. The emissions trading scheme is supposed to only relate to big companies, but agriculture is dominated by family farms so if they do bring farming in that will discriminate against the whole industry.And then you have an event like last week's bushfires which produced more CO2 in a week than all of our industry in a year. What are they going to do about that- tax the wombats?
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