One of the new elements in the Garnaut Review’s final report is an analysis of “Transforming rural land use” in chapter 22. It’s a tour of some of the ways in which agricultural and forestry practices might change to increase the amount of carbon sequestered in our forests, woodlands, and our soil. It’s one of the most positive chapters in the entire report; changing the way Australia uses its land offers some enormous opportunities to absorb carbon at relatively low cost.
There’s a lot of possibilities in there; I’ll just pick one. As our vegetarian friends regularly remind us – Andrew Bartlett has pointed the issue out again – one of Australia’s biggest contributors to our greenhouse emissions is the methane-laden burping of our cattle and sheep. One solution would be to join Bartlett and make a mass switch to vegetarianism, or at the very least eat less meat. Or figure out how to stop ruminants producing methane, which is a nice idea but has proved to be rather difficult in practice (and may well involve genetic engineering). Alternatively, we could switch to pork or chicken, the production of which releases far less CO2. But for the truly committed carnivore, nothing replaces the taste of a nice red steak. So, if we can’t stop cows burping, farting, and poohing methane, what do we do?


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