Rubbish tips get do-nothing climate subsidies worth millions: experts
The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has allowed rubbish tips to receive millions in dollars for cutting carbon emissions that would have happened anyway, according to two professors.
In an attack on the integrity of Australia’s carbon-credit scheme, Andrew Macintosh and Don Butler said the department knew that it had made it too easy for tips to receive Australian Carbon Credit Units.
The Melbourne Regional Landfill site in the district of Ravenhall. Joe Armao
The academics also complained that critics like themselves have been excluded from meetings to find ways to fix problems in the $500 million-a-year issuance of carbon credits, which are sold to big emitters such as Qantas.
“For the record, we believe the department’s approach to consultation, where it excludes expert voices it does not wish to hear, is both unprofessional and undemocratic,” they said in a letter.
The department denied it had shut out Professor Macintosh, who has become one the most trenchant critics of Australia’s carbon credit system, including payments to farmers under what will be called the Integrated Farm & Land Management method, which the government is working on to replace existing programs.
“The department has met with ANU researchers, including Professor Macintosh, on multiple occasions, most recently on 30 November, to help inform development of the proposed IFLM method,” it said in an email.
But Professor Macintosh insisted he was being punished for his criticism. “They have excluded us (and particularly me) from expert meetings with our peers, and from group meetings,” he said in an email. “The reason is we are the only ones willing to call it bluntly.”
Tips, also known as landfill projects, are the latest part of the government’s carbon strategy to come under attack. They receive around $150 million a year in Australian Carbon Credit Units, or ACCUs, in return for capturing methane, or using it to generate power. Tips are the second-largest recipients of all ACCUs.
The big landfills receive, on average, ACCUs for three-quarters to 100 per cent of the methane they capture, according to professors Macintosh and Butler. But they should only get ACCUs for half of the abatement because other state and federal laws force them to capture the methane anyway, the academics said.
The generous allowances mean tips have received hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing to stop global warming, they said.
In January, an independent review of Australia’s carbon-capture policies reported no major problems.
Professor Macintosh, a former chairman of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, has accused the review of ignoring or missing “fraud” in the carbon credit scheme.
“Like robo-debt, the scheme is badly designed, unethical, and destined to fail, albeit for different reasons,” professors Macintosh and Butler wrote last month.
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