by frog
Gareth Renowden’s Hot Topic blog traces the increasingly bizarre claim from climate science deniers (sorry, doubters) that cows are carbon neutral. He begins noting an organisation called the “Carbon Sense Coalition” (the name says it all) is covering its own earlier pronouncement that that ‘cows are green’ because they store carbon:
Methane breaks down to CO2 and water after eight to 10 years, so the methane a cow emits does not add to the methane in the atmosphere, it simply replaces it. The methane becomes CO2, which becomes grass which the cow eats. It all goes around and around, so there should be no tax to pay.
The CSC’s comments get dutifully picked up by a range of New Zealand’s better known and funded doubters, including Muriel Newman, Chris De Freitas and frogblog’s own Owen McShane. Because nothing says ‘scientifically accurate’ better than massive repetition.
Renowden dispatches the pseudo science behind argument but then notes that the argument is unlikely to go away – which is just what we need now as we try to bring agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme:
Oh dear. Here’s one major flaw in the argument. The global warming potential (GWP) of methane is 25 (AR4) not 20. Doesn’t affect Robin’s numbers too badly. But that’s over a long timescale – 100 years. Unfortunately, if you look at the GWP of methane over shorter timescales, say 20 years, it’s actually 72. It’s a fearsomely efficient greenhouse gas. So Daisy’s half a kilo of daily methane is equivalent over her lifetime to the impact of 36kg of CO2. On policy relevant timescales, Daisy is in deficit to the tune of 11kgs a day. And that’s before you take into account the effect of her urine and manure. It doesn’t all magically go into the soil…
Meanwhile, I suspect that this argument is going to find a fertile furrow in certain sectors of the agricultural establishment. Anybody care to help me nip it in the bud? All arguments gratefully received…
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Wed, July 2nd, 2008
Tags: , agriculture, climate change, cows, dairy, emissions trading, ETS, Gareth Renowden, muriel newman, Owen McShane
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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“Methane breaks down to CO2 and water after eight to 10 years, so the methane a cow emits does not add to the methane in the atmosphere, it simply replaces it.” This is serious flat earth territory.
That’s like saying, if I have a leaky pipe, it doesn’t matter how fast it’s leaking, the water will still dry up. If it’s only dripping slowly you get a little wet patch and maybe some mould, but if its gushing like crazy, maybe you need to fix it before all you posessions float away.
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Anything we do in New Zealand will presumably have close to zero impact on global warming. Why should we damage our economy by doing anything at all about this ? It will achieve nothing and just see more of our citizens heading off to Australia.
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Stern recently upped his economics assesment of the required economics inputs to mitigate the significant ecomic risks of doing nothing, or on the longer scale, not enough. From 1 to 2% of GDP. This, despite its substantial increase of 100% over the earlier guestimate suggests that (a) Stern thinks the burden of risks are greater (b) the knowledge available to today is more accurate.
The politics of climate change meanwhile lurch on. The tensions that need resolving is not an absence of ‘climate denial’ rather how hard do we have to collectively dig to get out of this hole.
Russel Norman is right, that this has to be equitable for the necessary buy in to occur (RNZ Jun2) however both the interviewer nor Russel quantified that equity. Neither have ANY idea how we are going to get there. Which beggs the question, absent a path to the end game, why would ANYONE buy into the solution. Even at 2%GDP. ?
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BBQ Factory had the answer to cow flatulence in an advert a while ago, showing what could only be described as “carbon capture”
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Hi Blair – could you post a link to Sterns recent update? The UK Treasury website on the Stern review nor the Office of Climate Change have this information listed at present (or that I could find).
Thanks
WWHS
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WWHS: Guardian report here. It was a speech, not a new report as far as I can tell. The Stern publication referred to in the article is “Key elements of a global deal on climate change”, available from the LSE (PDF).
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Ta BOSH – will read and consider. Interesting area, whilst I disagree on his discounting analysis I think the review has merit providing an initial contribution into a wider economic discussion on economics of risk and cross border regulation (is it actually possible?) and what this may mean for future of the concept of national sovereignty.
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From my perspective, it’s Stern’s clear-eyed assessment in that paper of the sorts of targets required that make the most interesting reading. I have a post in planning on the whole question of how much to cut, by whom, and when, but it’s taking second place to paying work at the moment.
And posting here, obviously
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You know that USA place that hasn’t signed up to Kyoto?
“Utah this summer will become what experts say is the first state to institute a mandatory four-day work week for most state employees, joining local governments across the nation that are altering schedules to save money, energy and resources.
Gov. Jon Huntsman, a first-term Republican, says he’s making the change to reduce the state’s carbon footprint, increase energy efficiency, improve customer service and provide workers more flexibility. ”
I like how many Americans see a problem and, you know, just do something about it.
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bryan spondre,
maybe you should have a good read of the latest Metro magazine before you think about running off to Oz too
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“Anything we do in New Zealand will presumably have close to zero impact on global warming. Why should we damage our economy by doing anything at all about this ? It will achieve nothing and just see more of our citizens heading off to Australia.”
I love this argument. Likewise, if I rob one bank a year,it will make almost no difference to the bank’s profits or the amount of bank robberies occuring world wide. Therefore, why should I damage my personal finances by refraining from robbing banks?
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My argument is not that cows are carbon neutral or not.
My argument is that we actually have no idea of the different exchanges which take place between the different elements of the biosphere – something which Freeman Dyson has been saying for years.
We have no idea whether a pasture is a better carbon sink that forest and in particular we have no idea whether an organic farmed pasture is superiour to regular pasture or forest or whatever.
Some rough calculations of mine show that taking account the margin of error then the methane emitted by a cow has about the same GHG equivalent as the carbon dioxide it emits by simple respiration.
So why don’t we count the respiration as well rather than just the methane?
Think about it.
So if we are going to tax farmers ( inorganic or organic) for their emissions how do we calculate the tax when we have no idea of the basic chemistry?
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You may not know much about biosphere carbon exchanges, but that says more about your reading, and possible bias, than it does about the state of our knowledge.
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OK bucolic,
Give me the equation for the change in carbon dioxide sequestration when you replace a mature pine forest with a pasture growing annual crops, a pasture growing perennial pasture, and a native forest?
Also what are the average levels of NOx emissions on NZ farms compared to EU farms?
What increases sequestration the most and by how much- planting a pine forest or increasing the depth of top soil with organically farmed topsoil.
Want the Nobel Prize?
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If you want that info, I suggest you talk to AgResearch and NIWA. And DOC are doing a lot of work on carbon sequestration in native forests (I’ll know a lot more about that in a few weeks – I have to talk to the people involved).
I’m not pretending there aren’t uncertainties – of course there are – but they aren’t big enough to prevent us taking action.
We certainly do need an overview on LULUCF that the agricultural and forestry sectors can use for strategic planning, as well as a coherent set of adaptation strategies that can be used in the agricultural sector. There’s a lot of groundwork to be done.
But measuring methane and NOx. They’re doing that. Did you know you can measure the methane plume as it blows away from a dairy farm?
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I have to sympathise with Owen McShane’s posts here. I certainly don’t think we would find cows to be carbon-neutral. Pastures absorb carbon as CO2, which is eaten by cows, with some being turned into methane, which has a higher global warming potential than CO2. So it is likely that the gas produced is worse than the gas taken out of the atmosphere.
The issue is that we do NOT know the precise quantities of the gases, which Owen McShane is quite correct in pointing out. We do NOT know precisely how much carbon is taken from or emitted to the atmosphere when converting from forestry to pasture or vice versa. This research is currently being conducted but will take many years, because field trials (especially those involving trees) take a long time. It is possible that cows are not as bad for the atmosphere as is assumed in the current national inventory calculations, but we don’t actually know yet.
The research is NOT complete, and in fact is under major development at the moment. We know more each year, but I would be surprised if anyone could actually answer Owen McShane’s questions posed in his last post. (BucolicOldSirHenry – who do you mean by “our”?).
The biggest issue with including agriculture in an ETS, which I believe is the major reason Europe is not doing so, is precisely because we do not know enough about agricultural emissions & sequestration to do the calculations necessary for carbon trading. This is a fact, not just the ramblings of a few “deniers”/”heretics”.
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Well said, Mr Dennis!
I fear you’ll be labeled a “denialist” now, like the rest of us who dare to say “erm…hang on a minute….”.
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The main reason Europe hasn’t bothered to bring agriculture into their ETS (yet), is because for most of their member nations, it’s a tiny part of their overall emissions profile. They can do more to meet their targets by reducing emissions elsewhere (power, industry), so they do.
One of the principal reasons for excluding agriculture from the NZ ETS until 2013 was to allow everyone time to work out how to do it from an administrative perspective. Imagine how much harder that would be in, say, France…
But: we do know enough about agricultural emissions to be able to put in place policies that will help reduce them. A price signal in the market will encourage farmers to be carbon (and nitrogen) efficient. I do think, however, that we should be taking a strategic look at land use change as a response. Shifting from a high value but emissions-intensive crop to one that’s also high value but low emissions would make sense, and I’d like to see more emphasis there.
Of course, Owen’s growing truffles, so he’s half way there already.
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Yes SirHenry, we do know enough to be able to reduce emissions in some areas. If we were to put cropping land into pasture, and move to zero-tillage (spraying with herbicide then direct drilling instead of traditional ploughing) for crops we would reduce emissions. If we use nitrification inhibitors we can reduce N2O emissions. We can do some things.
But there are also large areas we don’t know. We don’t know exactly how much emissions we would reduce by doing the above things. We do know that they would be positive, but in order to use them in an ETS we need to know exactly how positive, which is very difficult to tell, as the results on different soils and in different climates can be quite different.
There are other things we could do but don’t know whether they are good or bad. We don’t know whether trees or pasture sequester more CO2 than each other. Although Kyoto assumes that it is bad to chop down trees and put the land in pasture, in fact this may not be the case. We need more research in this area before we can know which is best for CO2 emissions.
So you are partly right – there are things we can do to reduce CO2 emissions from agriculture. But we don’t know enough about them to have agriculture in an ETS, which Europe recognises. Europe is not ignoring agricultural emissions as you appear to assume. Rather they are introducing different regulations to reduce emissions from agriculture through the already established structure of the common agricultural policy (CAP). They are just using a different method, as an ETS is inappropriate in this case. Not that I’m promoting the CAP by the way, it has plenty of problems too, just pointing out what Europe is actually doing.
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Well, Mr D, about the only thing I’d markedly disagree with you on is your expression of uncertainty here:
I would be willing to bet that the standing carbon in a hectare of forest (including soils) exceeds the standing carbon in a hectare of pasture. Can we make pasture fix carbon? Probably – biochar, for instance, looks interesting. But you have to take into account the total emissions of the agricultural system being used on that hectare. If it’s pastoral agriculture, then we have to take animal emissions into account. Converting from forest to dairy is a lose-lose situation.
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http://www.maf.govt.nz/forestry/pfsi/carbon-sequestration-rates.htm
Maybe this can help.
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Of course you have to take into account the growing speed.
And the numbers for forest should be significantly higher
because most of the time the roots where not accounted for.
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BucolicOldSirHenry:
“Can we fix pasture fix carbon? Probably…”
It has been known for decades that the carbon content of soil increases under pasture, in other words carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere and fixed in soil. We know this for certain.
You may still be right that forestry fixes more, or you may be wrong. The point is that neither of us knows for certain. Not knowing for certain is ok in most circumstances. But it is not ok in an ETS, which requires the actual emissions and sequestration to be calculated. Our current level of knowledge is enough to allow us to reduce agricultural emissions, but not enough to do so in the context of an ETS.
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>> You may still be right that forestry fixes more, or you may be wrong. The point is that neither of us knows for certain.
From the link posted earlier (http://www.maf.govt.nz/forestry/pfsi/carbon-sequestration-rates.htm) :
Carbon Sequestration Rates
Forest 525 tCO2/ha (above the ground only)
Pasture 11 tCO2/ha
Radiata Pine 918 tCO2/ha (28 year old planted forest)
This is an overall average carbon sequestration rate for planted forest in New Zealand during a rapid growth phase
Planted Forests 18tCO2/ha/yr
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Thanks for providing the forestry numbers, PP. The difference between pasture ad forestry is huge, as I expected (but couldn’t remember).
Mr D, I intended you to infer the word “more” in that sentence: can we make pasture fix more carbon… Sorry for the imprecision.
It’s been known for ages that pasture improves fertility: that’s not quite the same thing as fixing carbon.
You are entirely wrong about the ETS. Unless of course you’re making the argument that we should attempt reductions by regulation, which would be even less popular with the farming lobby than an ETS!
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We definitely need to preserve our forest. it’s a big asset. it’s fix carbon without any care from us.
We can also achieve very good carbon sequestration increase if we change the way we grow crops and of course if we stop using petrol derivative as
fertilizer and pesticide.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/programs/CSEQ/terrestrial/westpost2002/westpost2002.html
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PP:
I wouldn’t rely on those numbers for this discussion for the following reasons:
- They do NOT give carbon sequestration rates (despite the title) but only carbon stored at a particular point in time.
- They do not include dead organic matter, ONLY LIVING MATERIAL. This is their major fault, living matter is only a small proportion of the carbon stored in the soil.
I hadn’t actually done the sums before, so I just had a quick look at it. I calculated the average total soil carbon content for three pastures under conventional management I happened to have the figures for, and got a value of 150 tonnes of carbon per hectare in the top metre, or 550 tonnes of CO2 per hectare. In other words, more than the above ground content of a typical forest according to the MAF figures. And these are just three soils I happened to have at hand, soil carbon content can be much higher than this.
When a pasture is put into forestry, a proportion of this carbon is lost to the atmosphere. More carbon is then returned to the soil as the trees grow. It may still be that there is more carbon in a forest than in a pasture, the point I am making is that you can argue either way, and in some situations there may be more in a pasture. I hope this helps clarify the figures. That MAF webpage is actually quite unhelpful, as the figures it quotes are inappropriate, cannot be directly compared to each other and liable to be confusing to someone who is not familiar with the science.
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BucolicOldSirHenry:
“It’s been known for ages that pasture improves fertility: that’s not quite the same thing as fixing carbon.”
The major effect of pasture on improving soil is to increase soil carbon. This carbon has come from the atmosphere. This IS fixing carbon.
“You are entirely wrong about the ETS.”
I thought I had provided some good arguments for my position, can you give a reason for this blunt statement?
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Presse-puree:
“We can also achieve very good carbon sequestration increase if we change the way we grow crops and of course if we stop using petrol derivative as
fertilizer and pesticide.”
You just contradicted yourself there. The link you provided talks about moving to no-till. This involves spraying with herbicide then direct drilling. It depends entirely on herbicide for weed control, unlike conventional tillage which uses tillage for weed control.
If we change to no-till, we must continue to use MORE petrol derivatives as herbicides. However, the total carbon emissions would be lower, and soil quality would be higher. I am a big fan of minimum tillage systems. But you can’t do it without pesticides.
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Quote Mr Dennis
>>>- They do NOT give carbon sequestration rates (despite the title) but only carbon stored at a particular point in time.
Quote Myself quoting maf.govt.nz
>>This is an overall average carbon sequestration rate for planted forest in New Zealand during a rapid growth phase
>>
>>Planted Forests 18tCO2/ha/yr
ok let’s have a look at what we have here :
from your data we have pasture
550 tCO2/Ha in 1 meter top soil
from maf.govt.nz
forest above the ground 525 tCO2/Ha
To that you have to add the roots plus the 1 meters top soil
and this number : Radiata Pine 918 tCO2/ha
Includes live biomass both above and below ground and the litter layer.
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Mr Dennis :
if you look at the full data :
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/programs/CSEQ/terrestrial/westpost2002/westpost2002fulldata.html
you can see that some of the field didn’t use any fertilizer
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And few of them are untreated
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And i am not advocating big monoculture as a model of sustainable agriculture. But a more labour intensive local agriculture which
use less or no petrochemicals.
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The main point seems to be missed over the methane issue is that while it’s /much/ worse in the short term, it’s not cumulative in the long term.
One million more cows now is hard on the environment for more reasons than just greenhouse gasses, but in a hundred years time those cows will have done very little more harm than they do in the first few years, and taking their descendants off would begin to completely reverse the effects, while the coal and oil burnt will have added up to 100 times their yearly effect and don’t naturally reverse on any sort of reasonable timescale. Charges have to reflect that. Do they in the new regulation?
Tax per head of cattle (and half per calf, or whatever), tax per tonne of fossil CO2. One-off cost to convert to dairy (they need consent for water and waste anyway) and a one-off payment to convert away from it (when they sign away their previous consent). Continuous costs on oil-based fertilisers and fuels.
Other animals could be dealt with proportionately.
Landfills could likewise pay a high one-off consent cost related to the estimated average tonne/day of methane they produce, getting some or all of it back when they close, prove a reduced input, or set up methane capture and burn. Any fossil product that enters should have already been paid for.
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Presse-puree:
“forest above the ground 525 tCO2/Ha
To that you have to add the roots plus the 1 meters top soil”
Absolutely. However the C in soil under forestry is lower than in pasture soil, and pasture soil can have much higher C than my figures there, that was just three soils I happen to be working with at the moment. I know full well that the figures I presented would still be lower than forestry. The point was that they are much closer than would be initially assumed if reading the completely irrelevant figure of 11t/ha you presented, and in some situations land in pasture may contain more C than in forestry. Soils are highly variable.
In fact, one of my 3 soils actually had close to 900 tonnes of CO2 equivalent fixed under pasture, I just presented an average. The point of my post was not to “beat” your figures or anything, it was to explain the science and illustrate through one small example why there is a debate to be had.
If you want to understand the issues, read my previous post more carefully.
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Good point on short term versus long term effects tussock.
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Presse-puree:
“you can see that some of the field didn’t use any fertilizer”
Please read my post again. I didn’t talk about fertiliser at all. My point was about herbicide, and herbicides are absolutely essential in no-till systems, which cannot be farmed organically as a result. I am simply pointing this out as I get the picture you aren’t from a farming background and am trying to help you understand how farming works, as you are obviously interested in it.
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Mr. Dennis,
There are actually developments in agriculture that marry the Organic and No-till farming management systems together through the use of a roller crimper that creates a cover of mulch to suppress weeds.
Notable examples of this are the Rochdale Institute’s no organic no-till system and Masanobu Fukuoka “natural farming”
Also in regards to pasture farming have you heard of the work of Allan Savory from South Africa. Hes developed an livestock management system that he claims is far more sustainable that the conventional system thats based on his observations of wildlife in South Africa and applied to management of livestock.
http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n7/What_is/what_is_07.html
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