Campbell’s trees blown away by coal

QUEENSLAND’S new opposition leader Campbell Newman thinks that a carbon price is a “very bad idea” and told reporters yesterday that he had a better way to deal with climate change.

Something altogether more practical.

I have a positive, proactive way of dealing with this. I’m into tree planting. I planted 1.38 million trees in Brisbane.

Now that’s a lot of trees, and I’m a big fan of trees. We do need more of them.

But how much carbon dioxide does that suck from the atmosphere? I asked one of the country’s leading providers of tree planting offsets for a “ballpark” figure on this.

I was told that it depends on which variety of tree you plant, but that 1.38 million trees would offset about 370,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and this would take the trees 20 years to achieve. Is that a lot? An average 18,500 tonnes a year?

If you take a formula offered recently by Guy Pearse, author and research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, Queensland’s coal industry exports about 100 tonnes of CO2 every seven seconds.

Or in other words, the annual emissions saved from Campbell Newman’s 1.38 million trees gets cancelled out by the State’s own coal exports every 21 minutes. [awkward silence]

Author: Graham

Graham Readfearn is a Brisbane-based journalist. Go to the About page in the top navigation for more information.