Professor Andrew Macintosh’s brave decision to go public with the fact that up to 80% of carbon credits issued in Australia have little or no integrity has confirmed another colossal Coalition rort — one of extraordinary scale. This is a major story not just about environmental integrity processes but pork-barrelling and rorting.
With $1 billion already wasted and billions more in the pipeline, the Clean Energy Regulator has been overseeing the Coalition’s Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), with advice from the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, which ANU’s Macintosh has chaired.
The ERF began life as Greg Hunt’s delusional “soil magic” program (Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor crafted that inspired description), devised as a fig leaf for Tony Abbott’s rejection of a carbon price, all the way back in 2010 — despite the Coalition explicitly rejecting the idea of such a fund. After being dramatically cut back by sceptical Coalition colleagues, the program eventually became the ERF, with a much smaller budget than the $10 billion initially mooted by Abbott and Hunt.
The stated intention was to “purchase” carbon abatement sequestration efforts, mainly by farmers — despite the lack of any hard science that “sequestered” carbon would remain in the ground beyond the next bushfire or drought. When Scott Morrison supplanted Malcolm Turnbull, he dusted off the scheme again because, like Abbott, he otherwise had no climate policy.
The problem with the ERF was that it was always a rort and a scam. An industry of ticket-clipping middlemen and women arose to exploit the credits. More crucially, as Crikey pointed out as far back as 2015, the credits were usually handed out for projects that farmers and companies would have undertaken anyway (the problem is called one of “additionality”, which Crikey first explained in 2011). It was in effect free money handed to farmers and corporations, who didn’t have to do anything beyond business as usual, provided they filled out the forms the right way.
Digging up the truth
Now Macintosh has confirmed that it’s a scam — there’s little evidence that, where carbon has been sequestered, it will stay that way. “Payments are being made to people to not chop down forests that were never going to be chopped down, to grow forests that are already there, to grow forests in places that will never sustain permanent forests,” Macintosh told Stephen Long at the ABC.
He estimates that “somewhere in the order of 70 to 80% of the credits that have been issued are markedly low in integrity”.
That’s 70 to 80% of billions of dollars — most of which has flowed to the government’s friends in the agricultural and corporate sector.
It could well be the biggest pork-barrel of this entire government. And, as Macintosh points out, it just makes our actual abatement task much harder. It’s a double scandal — one of rorted government funds, and one of making implementation of climate policy even harder.
The government has now expanded the ERF to carbon capture and storage (CCS). At least we can now say that the mythical properties of CCS will no longer be a marked reduction from the poor standards of the existing ERF.
As for Macintosh, he was replaced as chair of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee by David Byers. He’s a former CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia, and until July last year he was CEO of a carbon capture and storage company.
Greg Hunt will leave politics at the coming election. But the stench from this decades-long policy garbage will linger long after that — along with the mythical emissions that were never abated.
This should be the lead story in every Oz newspaper/website & TV/radio news service. Let’s see if it supplants the overdone Kitching saga – what are the chances?
Yes, holding the government to account for the cynical wasting of 7 or 8 hundred million dollars, or beating up the attention seeking claims of those wishing to make trouble for the Labor leadership? Well, I know which way News Corpse will go, but hopefully some of the other media players will behave with more integrity.
Forget the Graun – it’s gone, utterly cowed.
Now the equivalent of its UK parent’s slavering obsequience of bLIAR Blindess, for which undead Thing it still carries a torch.
It was on the ABC’s 730 report.
And The Drum.
I would love to get paid for not doing the things I was never going to do!
Wayne, this is the Liberal Party trade mark. Make a whole range of promises only to have the head muppet break them.
You would never trust this lot on anything.
That’s what scumo is all about.
Another Liberal Rort. Another job for ICAC. Another wing on the new prison for Liberal rorters Definite stench here.
David Parker, the Chair of the Clean Energy Regulator, was interviewed on ABC RN Breakfast after Andrew Macintosh talked about his concerns. (Both interviews available on the web site.) Parker rejected everything MacIntosh had to say against the scheme and explained it is just far too sophisticated for lesser mortals to grasp how wonderful and effective it really is.
Angus Taylor, on the other hand, is right across it, I’m sure. So that’s all right, nothing to see here.
And the clincher was that the/a/which? Law prohibitted the sequestration credit sites being made public.
Is that in fear that, as with antiGM tactics, outraged fossil fools will go out and raze them?
The Coalition have never had a policy to mitigate Global Heating. Their priority has always been to protect fossil fuel profits. These days the Morrison Government has decided that outright denial is no longer credible so they are now throwing money at token efforts which do no affect their fossil fuel mates.
The plan seems to be fool voters into thinking that we are doing something – Government ads seem to be propagating the lie “we got this” on Global Heating – while misrepresenting emission reduction statistics and taking credit for any reductions that have actually taken place, many owing to Covid, in spite of their inaction.
The Federal Government even presented their plan to protect our fossil fuel industry to the Glasgow COP26 last year as a greenhouse gas emission reduction plan, to international ridicule, confident that their media allies would give them cover. While they couldn’t fool the global community, they are hoping that they can fool enough of the punters.
I wonder how many soil-carbon schemes went up in the 2019 bushfires? Or how much carbon-rich topsoil has been washed into the rivers and oceans by the recent floods? Mother Nature makes a mockery of these facile, short term schemes, designed to funnel public money to private interests, environment be damned.
Yes, and the massive amount of carbon released by bushfires, is not included in the accounting of our carbon emissions. Which makes some sort of sense, as it’s claimed that the emissions will be reabsorbed by forest regeneration. But it makes less sense, if those forests are being burnt more regularly. And it makes even less sense, if there’s carbon credits being allocated for not cutting down bushland, that is later burnt to a crisp.