One key line from it was that of the parodied shipping minister Bob Collins who said the solution was reached by simply towing the tanker ‘outside of the environment’.
BD: “Into another environment?”
JC: “No, no, it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment.”
BD: “No, but from one environment to another environment?”
JC: “No, it’s been towed out of the environment, it’s not in the environment.”
And so it went on, splitting sides around the nation at exactly 6.55 on a Friday night more than three decades ago.
If we could resurrect Clarke, he would surely resurrect that sketch in lampooning Victoria’s ban on native forest logging.
Designed to reduce Victoria’s carbon emissions and to support biodiversity, the ban does the opposite on both fronts.
The facts are simply put:
Timber harvested for construction and furniture locks away a lot of carbon, and replanting forests where that timber once stood makes the cycle carbon negative.
Which is a positive.
Plantation forests don’t cut it: the land will earn a farmer much more as pasture.
Carbon absorption in terms of a tree’s size and age is dependent on many factors, and recent research has challenged the long-held belief that old Australian forests absorb more CO₂ than growing ones.
Such division on evidence of carbon capture is also matched by biodiversity claims.
Large bushfires are essential to natural selection, and if you don’t challenge the gene pool of a species, you weaken it and invite extinction.
Logging mimics the impact of bushfires by opening a section of forest and forcing animals to either flee or fail — that’s how natural selection works — and by triggering the evolved succession of a forest where nitrate-producing wattle trees dominate before the gum trees take off.
This long-evolved delay gives time for soil nitrogen to build up and also explains why wattle trees don’t live much past eight years in a domestic garden.
Claims that rogue forestry workers logged land steeper than 30 degrees, which increases surface run-off and can risk polluting Melbourne’s drinking catchment, were investigated by the forestry watchdog Office of the Conservation Regulator in 2021.
The ‘crime’ had occurred in only two out of 365 coupes.
The ABC then muddied the waters by misrepresenting the OCR findings in April, 2021, resulting in ACMA ruling that our national broadcaster had breached its own code of conduct for accuracy.
Which didn’t help the cause.
However, the global consequence of Victoria’s logging ban is a different matter which beggars belief and transports us all to the vaudeville land where the fronts fall off oil tankers which are then towed ‘out of the environment’.
Victoria now imports hardwood from Brazil.
Brazil, where according to a 2023 publication in Nature, up to 68 per cent of timber is logged illegally, now provides a quarter of our hardwood, along with Indonesia and Malaysia.
Oh, and Tasmania.
You couldn’t make this up.
The Andrews Government assumed it could tow the carbon emission problem ‘out of the environment’, or else the latte-sipping ‘no flies on my back’ subset of the left have not thought this one through.
Victoria’s logging ban is adding to global carbon emissions.
There are a lot of dots to join here, but on such an issue, they warrant it.
Dan is commended to have held back a plague, even if the Mansfield earthquake-summoning was just showing off; but to dictate to the air directly above us and think that climate change will skirt around our state is a stretch.
The controlled felling and replacing of one tree in every 1600 is small change compared to bushfires roaring through or us wondering what the carnage is like in Brazil as we sleep at night, having done our bit.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the body to whom every environmentalist defers — said in its fourth assessment on climate change that a managed forestry industry much like the one Victoria has just jettisoned constitutes the largest sustained mitigation benefit at our disposal.
