Three-quarters of projects awarded lucrative carbon credits by the government yielded no environmental benefit, according to Professor Andrew Macintosh, one of Australia’s foremost experts on environmental law and policy and the director of research at the Australian National University law school.
“People are … getting credits for growing trees that are already there,” he says.
Macintosh is calling for the agency that administers the ERF, the Clean Energy Regulator , to be broken up.
Macintosh’s criticism is to be taken seriously.
Most relevantly to this story, though, he was chair of a body called the emissions reduction assurance committee from 2013 to the start of 2020.
It has recently become apparent, he says, that the resistance has gone “beyond a simple cover-up to what I suggest is more an overt distortion of the scheme to facilitate the issuance of credits for abatement that are either not real or not additional”.
Central to Macintosh’s analysis is the functioning of Australian carbon credit units, or ACCUs, issued by the government through the ERF.
The first is “avoided deforestation”, which simply means not cutting down trees.
The idea was that where land had been cleared, landholders could destock it, and the native forests would grow.
It was driven by a desire to placate farmers, and it was always expected the overwhelming majority of permits would be unused.
Collectively, they have been awarded credits worth almost a quarter of a billion dollars for not cutting down vegetation that, in the great majority of cases, would not have been cut down anyway.
According to Macintosh, the method was designed to encourage farms to stop clearing and to remove livestock from cleared land so it could regrow.
The contention of the proponents, aggregators and government is that livestock had inhibited the growth of vegetation, and “by removing them it would allow the trees to grow back”.
During dry times, the cover of native mulga trees – the predominant species in most of the project areas – declined and when the rains came it increased.
However, it also found wide variations in outcomes, with some projects resulting in greater cover, and others less.
They also have received some 20 million ACCUs, about 70 per cent of the total number of credits issued under the landfill gas method.
Macintosh does not dispute that these projects are making real savings in greenhouse emissions, which is a good thing.
In 2018, the integrity committee formally advised government that these projects should not receive any more credits beyond the current round.
Given that difference, Oliver Yates, the former head of the government’s renewable energy agency, ARENA, calculated a transfer of $3.5 billion into private hands.
Taylor’s intervention saw the market price of ACCUs plunge by almost half.
As noted in that story, the chair of the Climate Change Authority, Grant King, also is chair of Australia’s largest aggregator, a company called Green Collar, which operates biosequestration projects – that is, avoided deforestation and regeneration projects – over nearly 15 million hectares, primarily in association with family farmers.
“The Clean Energy Regulator needs to be broken up,” Macintosh says.
A report by The Australia Institute, released to The Saturday Paper this week, echoes Macintosh’s critique of the CER.
While critical of that particular development, the report is more concerned with the process by which the decision to approve CCS as a method of emissions abatement was reached.
Publicly, the CER undertook to engage with a wide variety of parties, independent scientists and researchers.
The institute was one of a number of civil society organisations excluded.
The current chair, David Byers, is a former senior executive at the Minerals Council of Australia, BHP and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.
Before the 2019 election, he produced allegedly independent costings of Labor’s climate policies, work later revealed to have been done in consultation with Angus Taylor’s office.
A third member is Margaret Thomson, chief executive of the Cement Industry Federation.
It is pointing out, however, that these are the people charged with ensuring the integrity of the government’s key program to combat climate change.
In the short term, the economic fallout from coronavirus has taken about a third of our revenue.