On this day, February 22, in the year 2000, Japan and Australia talked up a deal that would have allowed carbon offsets and carbon trading using New South Wales as a giant carbon sink.
Zinn, C. 2000. Japan in eco-credit deal with Australia. The Guardian, 22 February https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/feb/22/2 Australian forest authorities have been contracted to plant 40,500 hectares of trees (about 100,000 acres) on behalf of one of Japan’s largest power companies in a controversial scheme to fight global warming. The trees are meant to offset some of the greenhouse gas emissions generated in Tokyo. The Tokyo Electric Power Company signed the deal, which could cost up to £50m, with the New South Wales’s forestry division to grow hard and softwood plantations to capture carbon dioxide (CO2). But environmentalists question whether the project, scheduled to run for 10 years, will work. They claim the area is too small and that the forests must be maintained forever or the CO2 will go back into the atmosphere when the trees are processed.
The context is this. New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr had long been aware, and I mean long been aware of climate change as a problem – going all the way back to 1971 and a television appearance of Paul Ehrlich. He became premier of New South Wales in 1995. And there was a lot of interest in carbon trading and carbon sinks in the aftermath of the December 1997 meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Kyoto, Japan,
Japan, although energy efficient, was using a lot of coal from Australia. And so there was a certain symmetry in the deal, which did not ensue, because Australia just wasn’t going to ratify Kyoto. And without that, it couldn’t be “in” the sorts of deals.
Why this matters
We need to remember that there are all sorts of fancy footwork, elegant solutions, in inverted commas, that do not come to pass. And even if they had, they would probably have been a disaster for biodiversity and not tackled the real problem. No, the basic problem is, nobody wants to cut their emissions, if it’s gonna cost money, and dampen the great God, economic growth
What happened next
Kyoto finally became law (minus the USA and Australia) in 2005. 17 years later, we’ve retreated from any binding targets to a “pledge-and-review” farce called the Paris Agreement. We’re so screwed.