Climate Change Authority loves carbon sequestration. Now there’s a surprise

Labor’s goal of a self-justifying scheme of climate inaction took another step forward yesterday with the release of two reports by the “independent” Climate Change Authority (CCA).

The focuses respectively were the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) scheme — the basis for Australia’s carbon accounting — and our carbon credits scheme. The latter, the CCA found, is “fundamentally well designed, with robust governance, compliance and enforcement structures”, in the words of Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

The government needs the review to say that so its flagship safeguard mechanism can function the way it is intended: by not requiring major carbon emitters to significantly curb their emissions. Only a carbon offsets trading system can square that circle — even if tens of millions of Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) are demonstrably worthless.

Labor has already commissioned one review — a panel led by Professor Ian Chubb — that found ACCUs derived from human-induced regeneration (HIR) are legitimate, despite most available science suggesting they offer little in the way of genuine additional carbon drawdown and storage.

The new review of the broader ACCU scheme is also important for guaranteeing that Australia’s biggest industrial emitters don’t need to reduce their emissions — and a growing ACCU production and trading industry can prosper despite fundamental doubts that emissions are actually being offset.

The Chubb review was marred by perceptions of conflicts of interests on the part of its members. The CCA has a much more significant problem in that regard.

Grant King was appointed chair of the CCA by the Morrison government. King is the former long-time head of fossil-fuel giant Origin Energy, and was chair of the Business Council of Australia from 2016-19 during which it professed support for climate action but strongly opposed real climate action, including calling Labor’s abatement targets “economy-wrecking”. He was also chair of carbon-offset developer GreenCollar.

Appointed at the same time as King was Susie Smith, the head of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network — an industry lobby group dedicated to stymieing climate action — and a former executive for leading fossil-fuel culprit Santos.

Another Morrison-era appointee, Mark Lewis, is a director of a company that runs HIR projects and runs companies that provide carbon project services. The Australia Institute has been assiduous in identifying and calling to account the conflicts of interest that mark the CCA.

King and Lewis recused themselves entirely from the ACCU review. Smith had to recuse herself from the NGER review. King and Smith led a Morrison-commissioned review of the emissions reduction fund in 2020 that recommended it be expanded to include carbon capture and storage (CCS), despite extensive evidence that CCS doesn’t work and is primarily a ploy by the fossil-fuel industry to delay real climate action.

There’s an interesting echo of King and Smith’s support for CCS in the ACCU review, despite King’s enforced absence from it. The review calls for the ACCU scheme to be extended to include artificially generated sequestration.

“At present, engineered removal methods are ineligible for the ACCU scheme, as the [relevant act] only includes sequestration via living biomass, soil or dead organic matter,” the review says. But “opportunities to increase nature-based sequestration are limited, as nature-based technologies compete for land and water to varying degrees and become saturated over time”.

No mention of the essentially problematic nature of tens of millions of ACCUs from HIR, but the review does acknowledge that biological sequestration “is a relatively vulnerable form of storage”.

The review wants the government to embrace Australia’s non-biological “sequestration potential” via the ACCU scheme (will we soon start hearing that Australia can be a “sequestration superpower”?). It calls for funding for research into reducing the massive cost of non-biological sequestration.

“Engineered removal technologies such as direct air capture and mineral carbonation will need to be scaled up by orders of magnitude to limit warming to the Paris Agreement objectives, but it will take substantial investment,” the review finds.

Indeed, the CCA under King and Smith has done a lot of work on sequestration. Not at the request of the Morrison or Albanese governments but at its own initiative, commissioning the CSIRO to report on it.

Only problem is, sequestration is just another word for CCS — and it doesn’t work other than as an injection tool to produce more fossil fuels from nearly depleted fields or as a justification to delay climate action.

A long list of sequestration projects around the world have either failed outright or massively underperformed. Direct air capture, which is enjoying a boomlet with investment from fossil-fuel giants and the Biden administration in the US, is massively energy intensive and absurdly expensive, costing around $1,000 a tonne of sequestered carbon (some estimates go as high as $2,750 a tonne). Unsurprisingly, some of the captured carbon will be used to produce more fossil fuels.

And remember that sequestration — assuming the CO2 remains in the ground — when used as an offset, as the CCA proposes, simply maintains the atmospheric carbon status quo, which is already leading to catastrophic global heating. But then the point is really to maintain the economic status quo, in which large polluters — such as the ones CCA members used to help run — get to continue with business as usual as the planet cooks.