New South Wales has barred coal and gas projects from buying the carbon credits that will bankroll the Great Koala National Park, with the state lodging the 176,000-hectare reserve as the first project under the new carbon method. That is according to an ACCUs policy the Minns Government issued with its application to the Clean Energy Regulator, which promises the credits will be offered instead to NSW manufacturers to help them cut emissions and hold jobs.
Selling those units was always the funding model, with credits earned under the Improved Native Forest Management method bought by the Commonwealth and by heavy polluters compelled to surrender them under the Safeguard Mechanism. The park cannot be created unless the registration succeeds, and any credit revenue is pledged to its upkeep.
“It’s getting hard to find good greenwash these days,” Richard Denniss, co-CEO of the Australia Institute, wrote in a Thursday column for the Australian Financial Review, arguing the ban concedes that burning more coal and gas cannot be cancelled out by paying to leave trees standing. The column renews his push to end native forestry subsidies and $16 billion a year in fossil fuel supports, a month after he warned the method would let coal and gas greenwash lucrative projects.
Even the ban’s reach is in doubt, with the institute warning in a statement that nothing in federal law stops a buyer from reselling the park’s credits to coal miners or gas producers. A pledge without enforcement detail, it argues, amounts to a state intervening in federal climate policy.
“Trading forests for more coal mines and gas projects is obviously rank,” Bob Brown, the former Greens leader whose foundation opposes native forest harvesting, said of the announcement, warning the credits stay open to big industrial emitters, including the Port Kembla steelworks and the Tomago aluminium smelter.
It comes as Canberra moved last week to abolish Climate Active, the scheme that let companies claim carbon neutrality by buying offsets. Fourteen months earlier, EnergyAustralia settled a landmark greenwashing case brought by Parents for Climate, conceding that “offsets do not prevent or undo the harms caused by burning fossil fuels” and apologising to more than 400,000 Go Neutral customers.
Misgivings already shadow the method itself, with a five-page letter from the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee recording it could not be confident the draft met the scheme’s integrity standards without further amendments. Separate research puts the long-run leakage from ended native harvesting at 81.3 per cent, more than double the 40 per cent of credits the method’s checks can strip.
The Senate decides the method’s fate on 18 August, when a disallowance motion lodged by NSW Nationals Senator Ross Cadell comes to a vote. By then, the first project in its pipeline will bar the buyers who purchase, on the institute’s count, two of every three carbon credits sold in Australia.
