Gunns: getting the facts straight ...

This is despite Ensis and CSIRO addressing both odour management and the issues of dioxin and ECF bleaching (PDF 72KB) that provide evidence to dispute and counter his personal views.

While there is absolutely no way of knowing just how many submissions came from the Tamar Valley, it appears the vast majority of the standard emails were from the Sydney-based activist web site.

The Wilderness Society is meant to protect wilderness and lately has campaigned on old growth forests. Yet the developer has stated that no old growth logs will be used as feedstock for the mill, and as 97.5 per cent of high quality wilderness is reserved in Tasmania there is no impact on the Tasmanian World Heritage Wilderness Area.

The Sydney-based Get Up organisation also ran a petition on global warming for APEC: almost a 100,000 people have signed up, over four times as many as the anti-pulp mill form email.

Just how many of these people concerned about climate change would have signed if they knew the pulp mill would save 1.1 to 1.3 million tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) each year?

By reducing shipping and using renewable biomass for its main power source, the proposed, environmentally friendly mill will save more GHG than emitted each year by the entire ACT including the nation’s capital, Canberra.

The mill will initially remove more GHG that the Federal Minister for Environment’s light bulb replacement project, which, hailed as an environmental world first, will remove only 800,000 tonnes per annum of GHG in the first four years.

The pulp mill is a GHG significant saving for Tasmania. The Australian Greenhouse Office reported (PDF 3.34MB) that by thinking globally but acting locally, the Tasmanian Government, together with the forestry and farming sectors, has been able to reduce GHG emissions by 23 per cent for the state from the Kyoto base year of 14.3 Mt CO2e in 1990 to 10.99 Mt CO2e in 2005.

This includes a massive 55 per cent reduction attributable to land use change by increasing afforestation and reducing land clearing despite exporting woodchips that will now be diverted to the pulp mill if approved.

With so many form emails based on such wrong information, the genuine concerns of Tasmanians are being swamped. People in Tasmania want to know just what the impact will be on the marine environment.

Already the Commonwealth (PDF 39KB)has advised that overseas experience demonstrates that conversion from elemental chlorine to ECF pulp mills, as is the proposed Bell Bay mill, with non-measurable dioxin effluents “has resulted in dramatically reduced levels of dioxins and furans in sediment and biota, rather than producing environmental or health problems caused by dioxins”.

This graph of Canadian mills (PDF 794KB) confirms this report.