The Billion Dollar Fraud. (Article submitted to British Press.)
In the Styx valley, the sounds of chainsaws sing loud. This is shortly followed by the slow creaking, followed by a roar and then the final thunder as another 250 foot tree crashes to the ground. Higher than Nelson’s column, this giant is then sawn up and dispatched to the local mills to be chipped into tiny fragments for export to Japan, there to be turned into pulp to feed the paper-hungry demands of the world for newsprint and toilet rolls.
Shortly after, the site will be fire-bombed with napalm from helicopters, and burnt to a cinder, all wildlife will be shot, ready for the planting of the new monoculture seedlings of the fast growing eucalypt nitens. This is business as usual in Tasmania.
In June, 11 000 people marched through the streets of Launceston in Tasmania to protest against a new proposed Pulp Mill that is being fast-tracked through planning stages and is to built at the end of the beautiful Tamar Valley. It has bypassed and been excused every environmental issue and is set to devastate the island. With the price of chips falling, the largest timber company in the world has decided to get into the pulp making process itself to maintain its profits.
But it is not just the building of a mill that has upset the residents. This mill is designed to be the largest in the world, and Tasmania is one of the smallest island states in the world. For the next twenty years, it has been given unrestricted access to all the remaining unprotected Old Growth Forest that is still there, including all the tallest trees in the southern hemisphere. They will then be clearfelled and the land turned over to fast-growing monoculture pulp-wood plantations to ensure the future supply of timber for this mill, in turn to be felled after a mere thirteen years.
Protests and demonstrations by the local inhabitants are totally ignored and opinions are ridden over rough-shod by the openly corrupt State Government, where both political parties receive massive donations into their party funds from this timber company and are now mere puppets of the timber giant, Gunns. There is also a great deal of fear among the inhabitants as well, for Gunns is well-known for its punitive litigation against those who oppose its will, going so far as to sue demonstrators, MPs and environmentalists for millions of dollars. Gunns and the Managed Investment Service (MIS) companies now virtually own the State and run it to such an extent that they now influence and largely write the local laws for their own benefit, to the total detriment of every inhabitant.
Strong words, but true.
Australia depends for its financial survival on the export of minerals such as coal and iron ore and its steel industries. It is also one of the top polluting nations in the world per capita with its industries relying on the heavily carbon dioxide producing coal-fired power stations. It is also heavily competitive against its neighbours in Asia, and it is for these reasons that Australia did not sign the Kyoto Agreement. Instead, it devised a system of ‘carbon credits’ and engaged in a process of creating ‘Carbon Sinks’. This is done ostensibly by increasing the number of trees which absorb and lock away carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by retaining it in their biomass. To this end, the Federal government now encourages plantations by giving 100% tax-break incentives for companies to grow trees, and this is the basis of a fraud.
It is a fraud against the people. It is a fraud against the tax office. It is a fraud against the nation and it is a fraud against the whole world!
It is a MULTI BILLION DOLLAR FRAUD designed to renege on its global obligations and financially benefit a few large private corporations, many of which are large contributors to political funds of all parties.
And for this, the pristine island of Tasmania, with the last remaining cool-temperate forests in the world has been sacrificed. A small price to pay to be able to keep the international scrutiny away from its activities, except, of course, unless you are a Tasmanian. By being granted tax-free investments, the huge MIS Companies can cash in on selling investments in the form of timber ‘crops’ to companies who have surplus money and want to avoid giving it to the government. What they don’t tell these investors is, that with their money, they will also buy the land where they plant these so-called ‘crops’, but that is not part of the deal. That they keep for themselves, thus reducing costs and increasing profits on the next round of crop sales. With this investment money, they are now starting to buy up all available farm land and convert it to plantations. By redrafting the Protection of Agricultural Land (PAL) Act in their favour, they have in fact, destroyed it and removed it from true agriculture by turning it over to monoculture plantations, basically forever. After plantations have been established, the land is depleted to such an extent that it will never be suitable for agriculture again.
But where is this fraud?
It lies in the fact that every time they plant a small sapling, they are given a carbon credit, but when they destroy a forest, this is not mentioned. Every year they plant 13 million saplings but to offset this, including wastage, they cut down and process 5 million tons of timber. (40% wastage is destroyed on the ground.) Once the pulp mill comes on line this will more than double to 10.5 million tons. The annual planting rate is the weight of the saplings plus one years growth - 10 000 tons at the most, and this will be harvested long before it reaches the biomass that it is replacing. So we end up with a situation where the annual consumption currently exceeds the new growth by a huge margin, and when they eventually turn over to purely plantation sourced woodchips, the input quantity will eventually match the supply, but there will be NO carbon sink. It will merely be a thirteen year rotational crop – and despite the spin doctor’s comments, a crop that will prove an absolute disaster to Tasmania.
The biomass of an old growth forest and the real carbon sink will never be achieved again, and the action of these forests in reducing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will have gone, plus the fact that the soil, due to the constant burns, will give up the embedded carbon dioxide, and the air will be polluted to the tune of four and a half million tons of CO2 per annum from the forestry burns. (1 atom of carbon produces 3.28 times its weight of CO2 when combine with 2 atoms of oxygen.) And this is counted as carbon credits!
Meanwhile, the timber companies and their investors make huge tax-free profits, and Australia has given itself carbon credits for something that does not exist. This them allows the great polluting industries in the north to continue as usual and not only have the people of Tasmania and Australia been conned, but also the whole world who allows this to happen. Nothing has been offset or reduced and the dangers of climate change are not addressed in the slightest. All that has happened is that the politicians have sacrificed the real assets of the country to maintain this fiction, and in doing so, have jeopardised the world’s future so that they can live comfortably now and stay in power.
It is a sham and a fraud, and meanwhile, the fat cats grow fatter while the country is destroyed and the sound of the chainsaws in the forests go unabated.
Barnaby Drake.
