(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

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.