Carbon Tax Hyperbolic worries and Reality Part Two

Well the Carbon Tax has been in for a few days now, and well not much has happened...yet. Here is part two of this series that examines the hyperbolic worries of the Carbon Tax, and how the world is actually heading towards these often weird scenarios;



2. Trees and Plants become reputable investments.

The worry:
To reduce the amount of Carbon we send up into the white moving beard of God, we can utilise Mother Nature’s great air filter; plants. Plants effectively eat CO2, or the evil carbon and burp our breathable oxygen, that all living creatures including us breathe. Makes you wonder why we killed them for allowing us to breath. Yeah, our bad.

With this magical ability identified, the big pollutants could use plants- especially trees to soak up loads of their CO2, reducing their output and their relative tax cost. However to accompany this change in business investments, would be the increased security to guard the plants. Plants will become such an investment of increasing importance to these companies, that there will be whole new companies crawling out of the woodwork, just so you can invest in plants. Consider it, they are a long term investment, which could theoretically save the company a nice chunk of money that does not need to be taxed. So it is safe to assume a stable investment that will keep growing in value. All of these characteristics point towards super funds. To accompany this will be an increase in research and development into genetically altered super CO2 eating plants. In short you heard it hear first- invest in plants.

How reality is almost there:
In the October 2010 issues of BioScience researchers from Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory outlined the various avenues for altering the CO2 conversion that plants undertake to pull the CO2 out of the air, release Oxygen back for us to breath, and place the Carbon into the soil, which will hopefully be left long enough to form a form that is more human useful.

Photosynthesis, or how plants turn CO2 into sugars that the plant used to feed itself and grow depends upon the plants ability to absorb light for growth and suck up CO2, so research is being undertaken to improve these processes, and therefore the associated soil carbon process explained previously. This research would also have the real world benefit of having crops which grow quicker, which could help with the starving populations of developing countries. By incremental improvements in these areas the scientists believe that a significant impact on the Global Carbon could be achievable within the next 50 years.

There are already companies where you can invest in trees and agriculture (or argribusiness) for instance the Macquarie (as in the Macquarie Bank) Forestry Investment, which gives investors the opportunity to invest in Australian plantation forests. True, its not quite the same thing, with the trees being cut down after reaching maturity (approximately 10years), with a minimum investment of $10,340 for 2011. Humans always need wood for paper and furniture, so there is usually an increase on initial capital invested and agribusiness has historically had little correlation with the stock market, a reassuring sign after the GFC. So yes, you can in fact invest in plants, sort of.


Missed Part One? You can catch up here;
http://dalesnewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/carbon-tax-hyperbolic-worries-and.html

Dale Stam