Doesn’t it strike you as strange that the born-again Scott Morrison – by now, presumably, deeply ashamed of his public fondling of a lump of coal during his unregenerate days – is being held back from signing up to the target of net zero carbon emissions by that fierce defender of farmers and rural Australia, the National Party?
Farmers are, if you’ll forgive the expression, at the coal face of the damage climate change is doing and will keep doing to Australia. They’ll also be among the chief beneficiaries of successful international action to stop further increase in global warming.
By now there’d be few farmers who didn’t understand that. Certainly, all the main farming lobby groups, from the National Farmers Federation down, have endorsed the net zero target and want to get on with it.
So what’s the National Party’s problem? Just that it sees itself as champion of two regional industries, agriculture and mining. Trouble is, the miners have always seen their interests as lying in fending off action to reduce the use of fossil fuels for as long as possible.
The Nats’ allegiance to mining gets stronger as you move north, and reaches its peak in Queensland. And it’s not hard to guess which of the two industries has the deeper pockets when it comes to generous support for the party cause.
But not to worry. The Nats’ method of operation within the Coalition has long been to blackmail the Libs into shifting more money from the city to the bush. It doesn’t have to be well spent as long as there’s more of it. And all the nudging and winking coming from the chief national Nat, Barnaby Joyce, suggest the Nats (or most of them) will surrender their principled position as long as the price is right.
One part of the price could be to exempt agriculture from any effort to reduce its own emissions. But a recent report from the Grattan Institute says that would be a mistake for two reasons. Agriculture accounts for 15 per cent of our total emissions, so we won’t make it to net zero if it isn’t pulling its weight like other industries.
But also, now the big countries are serious about climate change and are requiring their own industries to shape up, they’ll be using a carbon tariff to punish exporters from those countries that aren’t doing likewise. Any excuse to protect their own farmers from our more-efficient operators would not go unused.
So let’s start at the beginning. Farmers are disproportionately affected by climate change, including by higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and increasing drought, bushfires and floods.
As Grattan’s James Ha reminds us, federal government research says changes in rainfall have cut farm profits by 23 per cent compared to what could have been achieved in pre-2000 conditions.
Cropping farmers have done worst, but if global warming reaches 3 degrees, livestock in northern Australia are expected to suffer heat stress almost daily. As the climate continues to change, the value of some farming land may fall considerably and some properties may become increasingly expensive to insure.
Agriculture’s emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen somewhat in recent years, but this is a result of the drought. As herd size is rebuilt, emissions will increase – until the next big drought.
About three-quarters of agriculture’s emissions come from cattle and sheep. Most of this is our 24 million cattle and 64 million sheep burping methane (which causes a lot more warming than carbon dioxide), and then the nitrous oxide (also worse than CO2) that comes from their poo.
Then come emissions from the use of diesel to fuel most farm equipment, emissions from the use of chemical fertilisers and lime, and emissions from plant matter left after harvest.
All this makes farm emissions difficult to reduce. There are vaccines and dietary supplements to reduce methane belching, but they are not yet well developed and are hard to use on wide-ranging animals.
Farm equipment has not yet been adapted to use electric motors. Even so, there are practices that could be changed to manage farms more efficiently and with fewer emissions.
State agriculture departments have spent much over many years teaching farmers how to bring their practices up to date, and they need to spend a lot more teaching farmers how to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions.
Similarly, the CSIRO has spent taxpayers’ money on advancing farm technology over many decades. We should be investing in technological solutions to limit methane emissions. Where farmers need to buy expensive new equipment, the government could help them with “income-contingent” loans similar to HECS loans to uni students.
Farmers will gain directly from emission-reducing practices that also increase their productivity. They’ll be enormously better off from whatever the global effort does to limit further warming.
And, remembering the “net” in net zero, they’ll benefit greatly from doing things that allow them to sell “carbon credits” to firms in other industries – so long as it’s not just another National Party boondoggle.
