This just in: At a carbon conference, carbon trading "expert" (who heads a carbon finance company) pushes expanded carbon trading

Ag carbon trading needs to start now: Newcombe

Australian agriculture can’t afford to sit around and wait until 2013 for government to decide how it fits into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), a global expert in carbon trading said last week.

In Australia for the CarbonExpo 2008 conference on the Gold Coast, Dr Ken Newcombe told Rural Press that the farm sector needs to quickly shape itself into a carbon offsets provider selling offsets products to industries regulated under the CPRS.

Dr Newcombe considers it logistically unlikely that Australian agriculture will ever become a “covered” sector under the CPRS, but it has a big incentive to be in the carbon business—the sooner the better.

“Government’s not going to insist that you have to reduce your energy use on the farm,” said Dr Newcombe, who heads his own carbon finance company, C-Quest Capital, based in the United States capital Washington DC.
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“It seems to me that your interests are best served by saying to government, ‘Give us the opportunity of getting revenue from carbon finance to drive us towards a more energy efficient agriculture right now’.”

“The processes that make farmers more energy-efficient have knock-on benefits for production anyway.”

Dr Newcombe, who grew up on a South Australian dairy farm, led the development of the world’s first carbon fund for the World Bank, which now has US$1 billion invested in carbon offset projects.

He was later a vice-chairman of Climate Change Capital in London, and before starting his own business was a managing director of Goldman Sachs in its Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Division in New York.