This is part one in a series. For the full series, go here.
Tony Abbott has been out of politics for four years, and out of office for eight years, but his denialist hand still controls Australian climate policy from beyond the political grave. He will guarantee Australia will not reach Labor’s mandated target of a 43% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 — because Labor will let him.
That 43% target requires that Labor’s safeguard mechanism passed by Parliament earlier this year, which covers 200-plus of our largest carbon emitters, deliver a cut in CO2 emissions of 46 million tonnes a year to 100 million tonnes a year from that group by 2029-30.
Many of the facilities covered by the mechanism — coal mines, gas plants, cement factories, steelworks — are simply not capable of reducing their emissions that much, if at all. They’ll instead rely heavily on purchasing Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) as offsets to their excessive emissions. The government has factored in that 9 million tonnes, or around 20% of the total safeguard mechanism reduction, will be delivered through ACCUs.
There are currently more than 120 million ACCUs in circulation, supposedly representing carbon that has not been emitted that otherwise would have been, or carbon that has been stored. One of the biggest single sources of ACCUs is human-induced regeneration vegetation projects established under the Abbott government’s emissions reduction fund (ERF) — around 37 million ACCUs.
The ERF began life amid Abbott’s 2009 takeover of the Liberal Party and his opposition to the carbon pricing scheme that John Howard had supported and Malcolm Turnbull, as leader, had agreed to with the Rudd government. It was a back-of-the-envelope program designed to do two things: pretend Abbott — who called climate science “absolute crap” — had a climate policy, and funnel taxpayer money to National Party constituents. It would do so by offering taxpayer money for energy efficiency and carbon sequestration projects. Nearly all of the carbon sequestration projects involve preserving or re-growing woody trees, on farming properties — human-induced regeneration.
All of the ACCUs generated by the ERF have a central problem: additionality. ACCUs can only be genuine offsets if they represent a departure from business as usual. A business becoming more energy efficient because it reduces costs, or a farmer not clearing a paddock because they had no intention of using it (the second biggest source of ACCUs is “avoided deforestation”), isn’t additional. But the additionality requirements in the ERF are minimal — they rely on assurances from project proponents, and subjective assessments of counterfactual scenarios involving land use.
There’s another problem with “additionality” — offsets simply mean the maintenance of existing, too-high levels of carbon emissions. While policymakers have the primary job of stopping carbon emissions from rising further, the best even a worthwhile offset can do is perpetuate the status quo that is driving rapid global heating. For climate action, the true value of carbon sequestration lies in never being used as an offset for higher emissions, but in reducing total emissions.
Vegetation-based ACCUs have another problem: they don’t last long enough. Carbon dioxide emissions last a very long time in the atmosphere: around 40% last a century, and a fifth last more than 10,000 years. But ACCUs derived from carbon sequestration only need to last 100 years. In fact, you can earn ACCUs for sequestration lasting just 20 years, if you accept a 20% discount. If trees generating 20-year ACCUs die or are burnt out after the end of that period, releasing the stored carbon back into the atmosphere, any offsetting benefit is lost, without any obligation on the project owner to replace it.
These problems around carbon sequestration are well-known and have been rehearsed before. They were known when Abbott announced his “Direct Action” scheme over a decade ago. Nothing has emerged since then to enhance the credibility of the ERF and carbon sequestration, or the idea of carbon offsets. But they’re important as background to the more fundamental problems around using trees to store carbon: the science simply doesn’t support it, and there’s no independent verification that any sequestration is occurring across projects that have generated 37 million ACCUs.
In a new series, of which this article is the first instalment, Crikey is taking a deep dive into what is not merely a deeply flawed Abbott-era program, but a crucial element of the current government’s quest to achieve a 43% “reduction” in emissions — even if 9 million tonnes a year are “offsets” that may not last until 2050, don’t represent any departure from what would have happened anyway, and which don’t stand up to scientific consensus.
It turns out that a substantial proportion of ACCUs really are a con, one inflicted on us by Tony Abbott, that continues to pollute our climate policy to this day.
Next week: why the science of re-vegetation doesn’t add up for carbon credits.
Correction: This article has been updated to remove a reference linking Human-Induced Regeneration to “soil carbon”, which is entirely separate from carbon sequestration via HIR.
The carbon credits scam is another iteration of the template used by the government over and over again to stuff tax-payer money into its mates’ pockets. When the article refers to carbon credits as ‘expensive’ it just means somebody is getting a lot of money.
The basic idea is to find some area of policy where the government is under pressure to act although it does not really give a damn. Always remember, there are no problems, only opportunities! So it sets up some meretricious operation that purports to address the problem, to be run at enormous cost by some private companies, who will in due course reward the ministers and their party with kickbacks from the fantastic profits being made. The actions being taken will usually either do nothing to address the actual problems or else, better still, make them worse and so give an excuse for pouring even more cash into the bottomless pit. There are many examples, such as all the contracts handed out for incarcerating and tormenting refugees, or the companies that ‘help’ the long-term unemployed find jobs. Carbon credits is just one more, but it has the added benefit of making Abbott’s spray about climate science being ‘crap’ come true, by putting crap pseudo-science into action for fun and profit.
Carbon credits are the environmental equivalent of fad diets.
Just about all of the diet scientists agree that the only successful way to reduce body weight over the long term is to eat less and exercise more. No-one wants to hear that advice though, so the public is ever on the lookout for some kind of magic bullet solution that enables them to keep on overeating and being sedentary. And, of course, there is an endless supply of snake oil salesmen around to provide that solution … for a price.
It is the same for our carbon ‘diet’. The only long-term solution to excessive carbon emissions is to reduce carbon emissions. Full stop. End of argument.
Fossil fuels have to go completely, just as soon as we can manage it. They are the biggest source, so if we can get rid of them we will have gone a long way towards solving the problem.
We can’t do without concrete completely, but we can minimise its use where possible, and use low-carbon concrete when we can.
Same with steel, although it would help if we can move to ‘green’ steel as far as possible, too.
The more we can do all this, the less reliant on carbon credits we become.
Clear, lucid reasonings. Insight.
Having been a consultant in tree planting projects (timber, essential oils, furniture, building, etc) for decades, I can vouch that generally speaking, trees for cultivation and carbon sequestration is not financially viable in Australia. That’s why only government plantings over long rotations are established. Fast-growing gum trees like blue gums can be grown on short rotations (20 years) but only on quality soils with reliable and sufficient rainfall. Land that meets those requirements is too expensive so plantings are un-affordable.
Carbon credit projects like those used by airlines, fossil fuel industry, etc are being grown on poor soils in remote areas with inadequate and unreliable rainfall. Trees that might survive those conditions have a rotation of 50 years. The value and volume of stored carbon does not warrant the cost of maintaining the plantation. The risk of long-term plantations is no longer assessable as fires, plantation collapse due to declining rainfall and other climatic factors, pests and diseases cannot be modelled with such uncertainty.
It’s a total scam and the governments know… but there is no way to hold them accountable in our political system.
Great response, can we sent it to all politicians and media editors?
YES PLEASE CHRIS
Did ‘Honest John’ Howard support it ….. or did Honest John ‘say’ he supported it?
It might have worked well on paper (…. from ….) : but apparently ‘no one’ (that counted) could see the loop-holes for the trees?
Carbon credits where it’s due?
“Doing something :- paying someone not to do something that they weren’t going to do anyway”?
Were they ever any more than smoke and side-show mirrors – with tickets issued at just about any (‘incurious’) media outlet?
Oh they saw the loop-holes. That’s why they adopted the policy.
Probably paid one of the “Big Four” a motza to come up with the design……………
Abbott, the suppository of dismal ignorance, appears to have gotten away with a lying con job, no doubt for position, money, career survival. How can this excruciating dud keep on stinking up the nation’s declining reputation?
And soapbox credalin still worshipping the dud government of Tony A ( good government starts tomorrow, Abbott 2014)
Good government tomorrow is just as good a promise as jam tomorrow.
Does any one still watch SAD tv?
Think so. There talking points crop up unbidden in otherwise sensible conversations. I’m always suspicious.
The Brits now have partial ownership of him via Koch linked think tank in London & his trade role as a foreign agent:
‘Director of Climate Science Denial Group Tony Abbott Reappointed as Board of Trade Adviser. Government keeps the ex-Australian leader on the high profile advisory body despite previous calls to sack him over anti-green ties.’
https://www.desmog.com/2023/09/20/director-climate-science-denial-group-global-warming-policy-foundation-tony-abbott-reappointed-board-of-trade-adviser/