Independent senator David Pocock has promised to vote in favour of Labor’s emissions reduction target,but questioned the integrity of the carbon credit scheme the government plans to use to reach it. Labor’s bill could be legislated as early as Thursday.
Independent senator David Pocock,right,says he’ll provide the vote needed to enshrine Anthony Albanese’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target in legislation.
To reach the target of 43 per cent reductions on 2005 levels by 2030,Labor will allow big industrial polluters to buy carbon credits from the $4.5 billion Emissions Reduction Fund instead of reducing their emissions. Pocock said it was vital the fund could be trusted to provide genuine reductions to greenhouse gas emissions.
“You can’t say the 43 per cent target has integrity if we’re creating questionable,or flat out junk credits,” he said.
The fund pays private projects to generate carbon credits,either by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere in vegetation,for example by growing trees,or by reducing their greenhouse footprint by switching to lower emissions technology,such as changing gas boilers to electric heat pumps.
Other companies can then buy those carbon credits instead of directly reducing their emissions.
The Emissions Reduction Fund has been dogged by controversy after a whistleblower,ANU Professor Andrew Macintosh who helped design and administer the scheme,claimed it across a range of projects.
Macintosh said his analysis had revealed “grave concerns about the integrity of the scheme” including projects where landholders were paid for carbon credits generated by protecting trees that,based on historical rates of land clearing,were very unlikely to have been cut down anyway.
Climate Change and Energy Minister has the fund.
Demand for carbon offsets is expected to spike under Labor’s climate policy,which includes a plan to force the 215 biggest industrial polluters to reduce their pollution levels by tightening emissions caps under the so-called.
The government forecast the safeguard mechanism would deliver around 30 per cent of the emissions reduction it needs to reach its 43 per cent target by 2030. Analysis by the Carbon Market Institute shows about three-quarters of that would come from carbon credits and the remainder from direct emissions reductions.
The federal government has issued a safeguard mechanism consultation paper and plans to release draft reforms by the end of November,a month before the Chubb review is set to be published,sparking warnings from climate advocates that fake carbon credits could be baked into Labor’s climate policy.
“The legislation will be out[for consultation] before the Chubb review even reports back. We’re putting the cart before the horse here,we need to get integrity right in the market and currently,it’s completely off the mark,” said Australia Institute climate and energy director Richie Merzian.
He said big polluting companies pressured former governments to reduce the impact of previous climate policies,such as the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the Gillard government’s carbon price.
The Albanese Government's climate bill has sailed through the lower house with the support of the independents and Greens.
“These companies are going to do it again,even if the majority of them have their own net zero commitments and the government needs to ensure it has the right settings in place before industry has a chance to water it all down.”
Clean Energy Council chief executive Kane Thornton represents renewables investors and developers that the government is relying on to fund the hundreds of billions of dollars of energy generation and transmission lines to decarbonise the economy.
He said offset schemes must have “high levels of integrity” to boost investor confidence by demonstrating that the carbon market is “genuinely reducing the country’s emissions”.
“For every unit of offset that gets used,that’s potentially one less unit of renewable energy being generated or some other form of direct action to actually reduce emissions in the first place,” Thornton said.
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