Carbon footprint notion fallacious

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In April, a Bill entitled ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme’ was submitted to the Australian Senate.

A number of Australians are violently opposed to this Bill – and I agree with them. The Bill is aimed at a cap-n-tax system, which aims to, essentially, punish companies that produce ‘too much’ carbon dioxide.

What is crazy is that they define carbon dioxide as a ‘pollutant’, so every human being walking around is breathing out pollution, and plants need pollution to grow.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is a totally natural, and essential, part of the earth’s atmosphere. What also irritates me is the term ‘carbon’, which has come into general use in the world’s media. One sees statements such as ‘carbon pollution’ or ‘carbon emissions’. Carbon is coal, charcoal or, for that matter, diamonds, which are pure carbon, but in a neat, crystalline form. It is not ‘carbon’ that ends up in the atmosphere, but carbon dioxide, and there is a vast difference between the two.

Table salt, which you sprinkle on your fish and chips, is sodium chloride, the chemical designation of which is NaCl, but, if you eat too much salt, nobody refers to ‘excess intake of sodium metal’ or ‘chlorine pollution’.

When chemical elements combine, they lose their own chemical identity and become something totally different, so the term ‘carbon footprint’ is actually silly. No self-respecting scientist would ever have proposed that term to refer to carbon dioxide gas.

Back to Australia – the chairperson of a group called the Carbon Sense Coalition is Viv Forbes, and he appeared before the Australian Standing Committee on Climate Change to oppose the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill. He pointed out that the Bill was misnamed and that it had nothing to do with carbon, or with pollution.

He said: “The cap-n-tax scheme is all about capping and taxing the produc- tion of carbon dioxide, a life-preserving plant food which has always been in the earth’s atmosphere, generally at concen- trations far above the trace amounts present today. It is not a pollutant.”

He continued: “This Bill is not sup- ported by independent scientific advice that proves that the production of carbon dioxide drives global temperature. Judging from the number of scientists prepared to go public with their opinions, there are more prominent scientists opposing this idea than are supporting it.”

He pointed out that if people in the Asian region wanted to do something about excess carbon dioxide, then they should just look at all the carbon dioxide being produced by the open cooking fires of India and other countries in the region. He said that there is a well-known ‘Asian Brown Cloud’ of soot, ash, and, of course, associated carbon dioxide emitted from wood, dung and charcoal fires.

In many parts of Africa, the same is true. Nobody is calculating the carbon footprint of the thousands of open cooking fires of Asia and Africa. As Forbes pointed out, the best way to reduce this carbon footprint would be to supply all those people with electricity.

I have not tried any formal calculation myself, but my instinct tells me that there would be a great reduction in the carbon footprint if a fossil-fuel power station were built to supply these people with electricity and, therefore, replace their open cooking fires.

The immediate factor that springs to mind is that fossil-fuel power stations are built to burn the coal or oil efficiently, whereas the open fires are highly ineffi- cient. They not only produce many soot and ash particles, which rise up into the air (the soot being a genuine ‘carbon footprint’, since it is unburnt carbon particles), but the fires also produce much more burning (and, therefore, carbon dioxide) than is actually required for cooking.

A cooking fire is started well before dinner time and is kept going, whether or not a pot is on the fire. One cannot just switch the fire on and off like an elec- tric stove. So, instead of being told to cut back on the construction of fossil- fuel power stations, developing-world countries should be encouraged to go all out to get rid of open cooking fires by supplying all those poor people with efficient electricity.

Further, the poor folks get the wood by cutting down natural forest trees. They do not plant large plantations to supply their wood, as the large paper-producing companies do.

I have seen wood-fuel merchants on the side of the road in Zambia. They have piles of wood logs, bigger than a motor- car, sometimes three or four piles, on sale to anyone who wants to stop and buy. There are also many of these merchants along a road who just cut down the closest tree.

So we should develop a slogan: ‘Save a tree – supply electricity’. All strength to Forbes and his folks for trying to get the Australian government to see sense.
Edited by: Martin Zhuwakinyu