Paying the price for carbon dioxide

Would you pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Putting a price on carbon makes people pay for carbon dioxide that they add to the atmosphere (ouch!) and rewards behaviour that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide (yes, please).

So why not just make people who emit carbon pay for that carbon dioxide and give the same amount of money, the ‘carbon price’, to people who take it out of the atmosphere?

A lot of people make money out of carbon emissions. Oil companies are the main subjects of hatred, but it is the rest of us who actually burn the fossil fuels that keep our homes warm, our cars on the road and planes in the air. The biggest beneficiary is the Government, which gets 53p per litre of petrol, plus another 10p of VAT. It’s like the situation with cigarettes: the Government knew for decades that fags were killing people but the tax per packet was a vitally important source of income, so it was challenging for the powers-that-be to crack down on smoking. Even palm oil, most of which gets mixed with diesel fuel, gets taxed at 53p per litre, but the food industry takes the flak when it’s in a biscuit. Palm oil has replaced hydrogenated fat, which is why heart disease rates are falling.

Organic versus non-organic

Organic farmers increase soil carbon every year: they compost green waste and crop residues; they add manure to the soils instead of chemical fertilizer; they do crop rotations that naturally boost soil nitrogen; they encourage a resilient soil microbiome that also increases soil carbon; they let the land go fallow so natural fertility is rebuilt, which means more soil carbon. An organic farm can capture and store about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Non-organic farmers use chemical fertilizers that wipe out the soil micobiome and cause nitrous oxide pollution that is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Intensive animal rearing of cattle and pigs leads to higher methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas. Herbicides and pesticides are made from fossil fuels and end up as more global warming. Farming is responsible for one third of our annual increase in greenhouse gas levels. Organic farming could cancel out that increase and bring greenhouse gas levels down by a similar amount and we could stop stressing about climate change.

Powerful stuff

So how can we encourage organic farming? How do you encourage anything? Money. Powerful stuff. Farmers love it.

The EU carbon price is just over £90 per tonne of CO2. An organic farmer can capture at least seven tonnes. If they got paid for it, that would be an extra income of £630 per hectare.

A non-organic farmer emits at least two tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year from fertilizer and soil organic matter breakdown. If they had to pay for that (a tax on fertilizers and pesticides) it would cost them at least £180 per hectare.

Every crop is different, but let’s take a look at barley. Let’s say that a barley farmer - whether organic or not - wants to make £1630 per hectare.

An organic farmer gets four tonnes of barley per hectare and can sell it at £250 per tonne; that’s £1000 per hectare. With a CO2 payment of £700 per hectare that adds up to £1700 per hectare gross income. Bingo!

A non-organic farmer gets a higher yield (thanks to chemicals) of six tonnes per hectare. At £250 per tonne that generates £1500 per hectare gross income. But the farmer must pay for two tonnes of CO2 emissions - £180 - so that brings it down to £1320. So to make as much as the organic farmer, the non-organic farmer would have to charge £305 per tonne for barley, an extra £55 per tonne. What brewer will pay a £55 a tonne premium for non-organic barley?

Much barley ends up in beer. If you’re down the pub and a pint of organic bitter is £3.30 and a pint of non-organic is £3.90 would you be prepared to pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Brazil's price to protect Amazon is worth paying

Offset the climate mess ...or stop complaining

In September 1993 at Whole Earth Foods we ran a retail promotion called “Eat Organic - Save the Planet.’   This highlighted our increasingly organic range - organic ingredients were becoming widely available.   I recorded a rap. We sent the cassette out to all participating shops. One verse ran: 

 “The weather round the world is getting mighty strange,

As the Amazon rain forest turns into a cattle range

But still you keep on buyin’ all those products that they sell

Eatin’ burgers, drinking coffee, let the Indians go to hell.

Eat organic, save the planet.’

 26 years later everyone’s got their knickers in an almighty twist about the same thing and blame Brazil’s President Bolsonaro for the fires in the Amazon.  Bolsonaro snaps back that he blames the green NGOs.  He’s deluded if he thinks that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF are secretly lighting fires.  But if you asked me who was responsible for this tragedy I would blame the same culprits.

 The idea of carbon offsets has been anathema to these NGOs.  My inbox is full of their urgent requests for funding, promising to campaign against Amazon fires.  None have a credible strategy.  The only viable strategy is one they oppose: clean up the mess!

Back in 1854 Soho in London had a severe cholera outbreak.  A doctor called John Snow cured it by removing the pump handle from the pump at the public well.  People stopped dying.  After that London invested heavily in sewers to separate the liquids (and solids) that come out of your body from the liquids that go into your body.  It became a model for the world.  Otherwise we’d all be dying of cholera.  Nobody minded having to pay to remove the crap that was killing people.  If it was today, you’d have NGOs screaming at people to reduce the number and volume of their bowel movements. 

 Excrement is visible and smellable.  Our carbon dioxide excrement is invisible and odourless. But it is far more threatening to society than a cholera epidemic.  So why do we baulk at the cost of cleaning it up?  We have marvellous tools like trees, soils, pastures, the use of wood in buildings, biochar, peat bogs and salt marshes that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and very quickly and cheaply reduce greenhouse gas levels.  So why do the NGOs oppose it?  Here’s their policy, mostly set out around 2008. 

Greenpeace: “allowing forests to become a get out of jail free card for polluters would be extremely bad news for the fight against climate change.’

 Friends of the Earth: “Allowing rich countries to offset their carbon dioxide by buying up huge tracts of forest is riddled with problems and will do little to tackle climate change.”

WWF “We committed to only purchasing offsets from projects which have been certified by the Gold Standard.  The Gold Standard excludes forestry.  Buying forestry offsets does nothing to lessen society’s dependence on fossil fuels to generate its energy, something that is ultimately needed to address climate change”

We have wasted 10 years.  The rain forests burn and we lose 30 football fields of farmland every minute.

 We have to pay farmers and foresters to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  If the global carbon price was $50 tonne CO2 the cost to society would be minimal, about $10 per barrel of oil.   A  hectare of rain forest would be worth $500 a year.  That’s a heck of a lot more than anyone makes grazing cattle or growing soybeans.  Brazil has been cleaning up our shit for several decades now and we’ve never paid them a penny for it.  We make the CO2, they clean it up.  We refuse to pay them because a few worthy NGOs play right into the hands of the climate change deniers by opposing the market for offsets.  If we did pay for carbon removal we’d all be  eating organic food and have more trees.   We’d stop using peat.  We could still make progress on wind and solar but meantime we would have more biodiversity, purer water, healthier soils and cleaner air.  Would that be so terrible?  If you don’t want to pay to clean it up then don’t complain about the mess.