Australia’s carbon offset scheme costs a lot and captures almost no carbon but provides a fig leaf for continuing emissions. Technology-based Carbon Dioxide Removal is still a distant dream. Distributed energy resources can be the Swiss Army knife of the electricity system.

Australia’s carbon offset scheme exposed as a scam

Over the last decade the Australian government’s national carbon offset scheme has encouraged the development of projects to help us reduce our net carbon emissions. In simple terms, the government issues a credit to a project proponent for each tonne of CO2 that would be in the atmosphere had it not been for the project. The proponent can then sell the credit to a CO2 polluter who has exceeded their limit on pollutions or even back to the government – one credit currently sells for $30-35. The government’s Clean Energy Regulator expects to issue at least 20 million credits in 2024.

The most popular type of project involves converting a relatively bare patch of agricultural land into a permanent, evenly-aged forest of native trees using only natural regeneration – i.e., no artificial seeding or planting. This might be facilitated by reducing grazing pressure from stock and feral animals, stopping native plant clearing and managing non-native plants. The technical name for this activity is Human-Induced Regeneration or HIR. (I should note that no new HIR projects have been accepted since October 2023 but the existing ones continue to operate.)

Real success of offset projects such as this is, of course, completely contingent on projects being given credits only for real, additional and permanent increases in the carbon stored in the soil and vegetation in the project area.

Andrew Macintosh and colleagues have studied 182 HIR projects in Australia (largely in WA, NSW and Queensland) to examine their success in establishing forest and woody cover where there was previously none. This is intended to determine the amount of CO2 that has been drawn out of the atmosphere and stored in the vegetation and soil.

The results are truly disgraceful but not at all surprising to anyone who has been following the carbon offset story:

• There was only a small increase in forest cover (3.6%) and a negligible increase in combined sparse woody and forest cover (0.8%) across the 3.4 million hectares covered by the 182 projects (equivalent to about 40% of Tasmania). Trends in forest and woody cover in the credited areas largely mirrored fluctuations in comparison areas, suggesting that the changes were largely not additional to what would have occurred anyway, presumably because they reflect rainfall variability rather than responses to project activities.
• Despite this, 27 million carbon credits were issued to the projects during 2013-22. In fact, 23 million credits were issued to projects where woody cover declined or was largely stagnant.
• Making matters worse, the Australian Government has spent about $300 million purchasing credits from the projects and is contractually committed to purchase a further $1.2 billion.

Issuing low integrity credits can lead to worse climate outcomes because offsets are a permission to pollute. When the credited abatement is not real, additional and permanent, offsets can enable an increase in emissions from a polluter with no offsetting emission reduction elsewhere.

According to the authors, the root cause of the integrity issues with the projects is that many credited areas have been in areas where native vegetation has not previously been comprehensively cleared, where the capacity to permanently increase forest carbon stocks is generally likely to be small, and in arid areas where it is difficult to separate the impacts of project activities from rainfall-induced changes.

MacIntosh and colleagues are very critical of the lack of transparency in the scheme. Proponents have not been required to publish any offset or audit reports and if they do any voluntary measurement of biomass changes, they are not required to publish any information about that either.

These results suggest that the scheme is a sham and that many of the projects are scams. Unfortunately, there is little likelihood that this evidence will lead to any substantive changes. The CO2 emitters are very happy to buy credits to let them keep polluting – the cost is just a business expense. Those selling the credits are very happy to keep making money for doing nothing. The pollies of both major parties are happy to use the myth that the scheme works to claim that they are doing something.

Macintosh and two colleagues published a scathing, non-technical version of their paper in a recent edition of The Saturday Paper, while cartoonist David Pope lampooned offsets with reference to net zero murders...

Carbon Dioxide Removal – will it scale up in time?

Climate scientists and politicians are agreed that if we are to limit global warming to 1.5 or even 2oC at the end of this century, it will be necessary at some point to remove large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere, not only by increasing the coverage of trees, mangroves, kelp, grasslands etc. to increase photosynthesis, but also by using technology to draw CO2 directly out of the air, i.e., Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

There is a variety of CDR methods available at present and they are already being used commercially so that greenhouse gas emitters can buy carbon credits to offset their emissions (offsetting is very popular!). However, the scale of removal must increase dramatically to have any effect on the 1.75 trillion tonnes of CO2 that we have pumped into the atmosphere in the last 250 years (and that’s excluding emissions from land use change).

So, a few snapshots of CDR in 2023 to give you a sense for where we are at and the magnitude of the challenge.

The tonnage of CO2 removal purchased by companies to offset their own emissions is increasing rapidly and reached 4.5 million tonnes (Mt). The big increase between 2022 and 2023 was mainly due to Microsoft purchasing 2.67 Mt to be delivered over 11 years from Ørsted who will use Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) to do the work.

SEE MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/environment-expert-calls-australias-carbon-offset-scheme-a-scam/