Lake King Wheat Farming, WA. Credit: Don Pugh.

By Rich Bowden:

The Australian Government has been accused of cheating on its carbon emissions accounting at the Copenhagen climate summit by covering up large emissions from agriculture and forestry.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his team stand accused of selectively counting some agricultural activities such as more farm plantations to mitigate the country’s emissions yet ignoring bushfires and logging which account for a high percentage of the country’s carbon emissions. (See Down and Dirty: Farm Soil Will Offset Emissions in Australia’s Carbon Cut Scheme).

The Sydney Morning Herald reports explains that:

The changes are highly contentious in Copenhagen, as developing nations recognise the potential for countries such as Canada, the US and Australia to offset industrial pollution against carbon sequestration in rural landscapes. Put simply, because these countries have hundreds of millions of hectares of land, very small increases in soil carbon could generate huge reductions in their net emissions.

But they have been accused of cooking the books on their emissions and there are huge divisions between developed and developing countries over how emissions from agriculture, grazing, grasslands and forestry will be counted in any new Copenhagen climate deal.

Australia’s insistence on the one hand that other countries must include land clearing has led to accusations of cheating from other nations at the climate summit.

The French ambassador for climate change Brice Lalonde told the ABC’s AM program the Australian Government was tantamount to deception.

“…some countries have specific problems or they want to cover up the fact that they are cutting a lot of wood,” he said. “They suddenly are ready to cheat and instead of counting exactly what they are doing, they would like to invent some, I don’t know, reference level which they will never reach.”

Lalonde said it was hypocritical to demand that developing countries account for all CO2 emissions when countries like Australia attempted to avoid doing so.

“I mean it is covering up huge amounts of emissions and you can’t ask on one side developing countries for which it is difficult, to be very serious, to account every tonne of CO2, every tree and we, on our side, not do the same – impossible. That would be terrible,” he said.

Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had been “…revealed and reviled as leader of  a carbon cheat strategy.”

Greens leader Sen. Bob Brown. Credit mugley/flickr

“The Prime Minister advocates counting carbon sequestrated by farm and forestry strategies, like plantations, while not counting high emissions aspects like bushfires (increasing due to climate change) and clearfell logging,” he said in a statement.

“This leads to carbon cheating so that full carbon accounting is avoided and the totals manipulated to ignore reality.”

“France, Switzerland and developing countries are becoming very vocal in criticising the Rudd approach, while Canada, New Zealand and the US are favouring the carbon cheat strategy as it’s in their interests to,” said Senator Brown.

Tags: australia cheats, carbon emission, CO2 sequestration, COP15, copenhagen summit