How to Create Carbon Credits – Kill a Camel.
By Viv Forbes
The people who brought us pink-bats and cash-for-clunkers have a new scheme – we can earn carbon credits by shooting wild camels, humanely of course.
Surely it would be far easier to shoot tame cattle? There are big mobs near all of our northern ports, going nowhere.
And if greens have their way and stop all live exports, we can earn heaps more by shooting millions of sheep and goats, humanely of course.
What about those mobs of kangaroos? They burn carbon fuel and emit dreaded carbon dioxide. Why should they be spared when the future of the planet is at stake?
One small problem – what do we do with all those carcasses? Left alone they will release all the carbon sequestered within their bodies within a couple of weeks, thus incurring massive carbon debits.
And who counts the dead camels? To prevent carbon cull fraud the economy will boom with jobs for regulators, inspectors, auditors and prosecutors.
And of course, we must not burn diesel, av-gas or gun powder to do the slaughter, so the hunting must be done from horses using bows and arrows.
And if killing camels earns carbon credits, why can’t cattle, sheep and goat abattoirs also earn them?
(Just think of the ball the camel killers could have among the 200 million sacred cows in India.)
First they came for camels, and I did nothing.
Then they came for cattle, and I did nothing.
Then they came for me.
Further Comment:
Wild camels are a valuable resource for those with eyes not blinded by the smog of global warming dogma. Here is a comment we made two years ago when this silly suggestion first surfaced:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/camel-cull.pdf
And here is a comment by Paddy McHugh who actually knows something about camels:
http://www.paddymchugh.com/pdfs/Camel%20Cull%20a%20Blind%20Mans%20solution…pdf
Does anyone believe that riflemen in helicopters will kill every camel cleanly and painlessly? Yet our whole live export industry is threatened for a few misdeeds. Here is the most likely final product from the carbon credit harvesters:
Here is the final product from the live camel harvesters:
Think this is all a hoax? Then check this out:
Yep, our bureaucrats have put together a 62 page proposal to issue carbon credits for killing feral camels. They note that there is not much use in killing an old camel so the cullers will be required to declare the age of each camel killed, so that that the Government auditors can determine how much pollution will be saved. To help this complex calculation the government is researching the average life expectancy for feral camels.
The document is full of endless dribble, including how the cullers discount the credits they will get by the amount of pollution that is created by the culling.
Here is a sample:
“There are two options for measuring fuel consumption for EVc,j,y as detailed below. Option 1 is preferred.
Option 1) Recording of all fuel purchased or pumped for use in these vehicles during the management activities.
Option 2) Recording of all ground vehicle and fuel types and odometer readings before and after management activities.
For Option 2 the amount of fuel consumed is calculated by taking the fuel consumption rating of the vehicle as a litres per kilometre figure and multiplying this by the kilometres of travel undertaken as part of the management activity, then divided by 1000 to convert to kiloLitres, as per the equation below:
Where:
| GDgv,c,j,y | = | Ground distance travelled by vehicle gv using fuel type j in undertaking the management activities c in year y |
| LPKgv,j | = | Litres of fuel type j combusted per kilometre for vehicle gv” |
(Thanks to Helen Dyer for this explanation of the calculations.)
A print-ready copy of this issue of “Carbon Sense” with all pictures can be downloaded from:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/camel-cull-credits.pdf
Steve says:
June 11, 2011 at 10:35 pm
These people are parodies of themselves. Has someone been slipping hallucinogens in their Foster’s?
I’m not sure on that Steve. Best check with Paul Hogan previously of Foster beer [and Winfield cigarette] fame.
Fortunately our tax payer funded scientists at the Uni New South Wales (UNSW), Australia have turned to rap (lyrics included) to explain their work.
http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/i-am-climate-scientist
source: ABC1 Hungry Beast
or the Institute of Higher Learning site: centre’s http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/
Not clear whether they study inland environments though.
We in Australia hope that this is some kind of joke, but I, for one, am becoming anxious. We have a government that is a coalition between Greens and the left-of-centre Labor Party which is using a massive increase in taxation (from $200 billion p.a. in 2006-07 to $365 billion this year) to finance a series of extreme environmental policies, knowing that it doesn’t have to face the Australian electorate until November 2013. The intention is to force through policies that a large majority of Australians oppose, the strategy being that a future government will not be able to repeal all or most of them. There is no circuit-breaker in the Australian Constitution to prevent this happening. The Greens who are running the agenda have less than 12% of the popular vote, which will be around 6% at the next election given recent polling. More than Greens in other jurisdictions, the Australian version are extreme human-haters and would appear not to care if they have virtually zero public support while they’re able to use more than two more years’ incumbency before their numbers are annihilated. Canada’s repudiation of this extremism will be repeated Down Under, but the question is: how much damage will be done in the meantime?
pat says:
June 11, 2011 at 10:19 pm
The government will spend $52 million on a viability study,
Nice work if your pals can give it to you.
Wake up Australians, you are being robbed.
Sign me up. I wonder how many I would have to shoot just to offset my plane ride down there????
I’m kidding… This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. I was checking my calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.
The fact that something as absurd as this makes it into an official government document tells you everything you need to know.
Galactic stupidity.
It is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a blind climate commissioner than it is for the Australian Government to enter the kingdom of the sane and rational.
Culling an intrusive nonnative species may be entirely justifiable. But using anything as insipid and nonsensical as their biological methane and/or CO2 emissions as justification is ludicrous. Attempting a ‘carbon balance calculation’ and issuing ‘carbon credits’ based on a calculated balance is sheer insanity.
Please see Fig. 2-1:
http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/education/methane/intro/cycle.html
If they were really serious about this stuff, they’d go after a few larger targets than the occasional wild camel. I didn’t even know Aus had any wild camels!!
A skilled shooter with the right equipment from a helicopter flown by an experienced pilot can gaurantee a head shot 99% of the time. Any one who went throught the BTEC eradication campaign in NT WA and Qld (900,000 + each of cattle and buffalo) and later the donkey eradication program (NT 400,000 donkey) are a testament to this.
jcrabb says: June 11, 2011 at 10:38 pm
“Surely it would be far easier to shoot tame cattle? There are big mobs near all of our northern ports, going nowhere.”
LOL, I think the people that own them might be a little annoyed.
A little annoyed? That is why northern Australia is seeking to improve its energy sources through the cheapest possible schema (used to be rent seeking) so the vast north (and population) has networked and reliable electricity. And presumably improved industries and production generally and also to provide a reality for some of the grossest examples of unemployment, ill-education and ill-health situated in the remote Aboriginal communities. Bit like the opportunities the eastern sea-board cities of Australia have.
Stunning is cheaper and more humane than expending cartridges, the latter used in the early days of the northern cattle/buffalo industry. Though industry in this case may be a misnomer to many cattlemen (women) these days. Read the Mudjinberri debacle of abattoirs in northern Australia http://www.hrnicholls.com.au/archives/vol1/vol1-4.php
‘In one year in the 1930s, two professional shooters on the run shot 4,000 brumbies as they came to water, for a bounty of 2s (shillings) and 2s 6d (pence) per pair of ears’ . Between 1945-7 8,000 brumbies were shot along the Cooper …’
The Wild Dogs Act was passed in 1912 (Sth Australia) authorising the ratings of land to supply funds for the scalp bonus. The bonus varied over the years bewteen 4s and 12s 6d and it was hoped that it would provide an incentive for hunters and trappers’ p199-202 Pastoral Plagues, Drought or Deluge: Man in the Cooper’s Creek region
We will see many schemes like this being posted in the Aussie MSM, they must think we’re all stupid! The Australian govn’t are on an all out bribe fest. It is now trying to bribe pensioners with an at least AU$500 boost in income to offset the carbon tax. Pensioners, especially state funded pensionsers, literally live in poverty and I can’t believe a modern day Australian govn’t would stoop to such blatant vote buying bribes all the while saying they will look after pensioners. Gillard, pensioners are not dumb, cash poor, but not dumb.
I once read there are millions of feral pigs running about in eastern Oz and they are rooting up the countryside. This is not good for water retention by soil. They should start shooting the pigs and feeding the dead pigs to the sharks.
If this scheme comes to pass, Psychic Larry predicts that the camel hunters will game the system. How? One strategy would be to shoot only male camels. The remaining male camels would rise to the occasion, and the reproductive rate would remain essentially unchanged. Camel-shooting could become an ecologically sustainable industry.
I’m assuming that the hunters can sex the camels before shooting them. If this assumption is not correct, the hunters could shoot the camels with tranquilizer darts, sex them, kill the males, and then give the females any appropriate on-the-spot veterinary care, before setting them free.
In the intermediate term, there will be a selective advantage for Australian camels that are: smaller, faster, more suspicious of humans, and that have coat coloration, which does a better job of blending in with the surroundings. In the long term, speciation will occur. Then Aussie camels will be declared to be endangered, and camel-hunting will be outlawed.
Trying to patent the idea of killing animals to stop the emission of greenhouse gases – so-called (but unproven) damage to atmosphere – is about as logical and reasonable as trying to patent the idea of killing animals because they are a waste of oxygen. I have a long, and growing, list of animals I consider to be a waste of oxygen…
Helen Armstrong says: June 12, 2011 at 12:55 am
Thanks Helen, I only observed the end of the BTEC and also dingo eradication program. Your comment on skilled shooters and equipment used for these programs in feral and diseased animals is spot on.
Thanks again.
This must be real, mustn’t it? You really couldn’t make it up.
It’s the bacteria in the animals stomach that produces the methane, not the animals them selves.
When grass or other plants (that are not eaten by camels or cows) die, they are eaten by earth bacteria which produces methane.
Shoot the bacteria!
I have mixed feelings on this one.
If this is being done mainly for the carbon idiocy, then I agree with those above.
On the flip side, camels are a non-native invasive species that now number over a million and double every decade. That may well be a legitimate reason to reduce their numbers.
If the latter is the case, then I’m all for the focus on carbon credits, because of the old rule that states “when your enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt him.”
Look at it this way; if it’s a sensible and needed cull, better by far to let the carbon credit nonsense take the brunt of public outcry over it. That has to hurt its popularity amongst a large segment of its core supporters.
“The document is full of endless dribble”. I think you mean “drivel”; but I’m sure it’s a load of p*ss, so “dribble” will do.
So even a wild animal is not carbon neutral? This world is going crazy
Like all good socialists, the warmistas just gotta kill something. First it’s birds, then bats, then camels. Feral pigs up next and then anything else that breathes out CO2. Climate skeptics are w–a-a-a-y up there on the list.
All the vegetation eaten by Camels or any other large herbivore would produce and release far more methane if it were simply left to decompose than if it were consumed by such animals.
It is the decomposing plants that produce the methane not the animal. When vegetation is digested the methane is simply releases faster. But the amount released is not increased but decreased because the animal converts most of the plant material into calorific energy. If left to rot it would still end up in the atmosphere. Only more so.
Quote:
Methanogenesis
Methanogenesis or biomethanation is the formation of methane by microbes known as methanogens. Organisms capable of producing methane have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria. The production of methane is an important and widespread form of microbial metabolism. In most environments, it is the final step in the decomposition of biomass.
Recently, some experiments have suggested that leaf tissues of living plants emit methane.[1] Other research has indicated that the plants are not actually generating methane; they are just absorbing methane from the soil and then emitting it through their leaf tissues.[2] There may still be some unknown mechanism by which plants produce methane, but that is by no means certain.
So killing all the Camels on the planet will not decrease the amount of methane going into the atmosphere by one single molecule.
The exact opposite is the case. Large plant eating animals reduce the amount of methane going into the atmosphere by converting billions and billions of tons of methane producing plant material into calorific energy.
I thought it was only NewZealander’s that were gullible enough to fall for such a contemptuous scam. They actually have a fart tax on livestock.
Totally potty. It must be the beer they drink.
@Tom Harley says: June 11, 2011 at 10:17 pm
Culling wild horses?
Dang! That’s getting too close for comfort…..
It really does demonstrate the insanity of carbon fever. This one must rank right alongside the EPA declaring Carbon Dioxide, the very base of life on Earth, a dangerous pollutant. It’s becoming a complete fantasy world where awards are given for those creating the most insane scheme for getting rid of taxpayer money. You Australians need to get yourselves a money hole and do the job properly.
As many in Australia have pointed out recently, even if Australia closed tomorrow, using IPCC worst case scenarios the temperature reductions would be unmeasurable. Now Camels are a tiny fraction of Australian GHG output so how does one calculate a tiny fraction of an unmeasurable quantity?
Watching Camels shredded by helicopter gunships in the name of Gaia will probably do more to expose green thinking than quietly killing UK grannies though.