Branded carbon criminals

Sir — In recent years, much has been written about crime in rural Ireland and theft from vulnerable farmers. However, there is theft going on, and it’s almost unnoticed.

In fact, what is going on is grand larceny and is proposed by the State. The present Government proposes to rob the farmers of Ireland of their carbon credit rights and use them to massage the figures for other sectors like industry, aviation, transport, data centres and so on.

This is how it works; Farmers produce food. In turn, this creates CO2. As Prof Fitzgerald (of the Climate Change Advisory Council), and Prof Frank Mitloehner (of Davis University, California) argued last week, this CO2 is cyclical. Farmers have lots of grassland, trees, scrub, hedges and forestry. These sequester CO2 created by food production. You deduct one from the other and you get a net carbon footprint. At least that’s what you would expect. The reality is quite different.

I’ve just got off the phone to a highly placed agricultural official. I was asking if, and when, I could put up a sign at my entrance stating that we are a carbon neutral farm (because we have so much grassland, trees and forestry on the farm, we sequester more CO2 than we produce).

I was told that the present Government proposes to pick a year (possibly 2015) and any sequestration capacity in place before that date belongs to the nation. Farmers will only get credit for anything they do after that date.

So we will be classified as carbon criminals — even though we are carbon neutral.

It’s time for farmers to wake up and put a stop to this larceny. In the coming years, farmers will be putting more sequestration capacity in place — but the capacity that is already in place also belongs to them and could be their most valuable asset. The political party that acknowledges farmers’ right of ownership of their sequestration capacity will get my vote.

John Hourigan,

Murroe, Co Limerick