<
https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/environment/2023/07/10/alan-kohler-australia-burns/>
"July 5 was a big day. As well as being the planet’s hottest day ever, it was
when the Bureau of Meteorology put the chance of an El Nino at 70 per cent this
year, so it’s going to get worse, soon, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance
estimated that it will cost the world US$196 trillion to achieve net zero by
2050.
As you contemplate that trio of troubles, you might want to make yourself even
more miserable with a website called the Carbon Integrity Explorer, as I’ve
been doing.
It lets you examine in detail the regeneration projects in Australia that are
behind the Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) issued by the Clean Energy
Regulator (CER). These native forest regeneration projects are the largest
project in the scheme, accounting for around 30 per cent of all ACCUs issued to
date.
Buying ACCUs allows companies to offset their carbon emissions to meet emission
reduction obligations under the Labor government’s new carbon pricing scheme
without reducing their emissions.
I spent an absorbing, increasingly dismal few hours over the weekend clicking
on random abatement projects, trying to find any in which the tree cover had
materially increased, and is therefore responsible for removing some carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of these projects were registered in 2015-16
but a large proportion of them claim they started in 2010-2012, so plenty of
time for trees to have grown.
I found one, and only one, on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. It’s
called the Arbon-Tooligie Human Induced Regeneration project, and covers 7863
hectares, which is very small. Tree cover has increased, and 148,397 ACCUs have
been issued to its promoters, currently worth $29.75 apiece, or a total of
about $4.5 million.
For every other project I clicked on, the tree cover had either decreased, or
the increase was “negligible”. Yet they had all also been issued with ACCUs,
hundreds of thousands of them, worth millions of dollars.
A group of academics at Australian National University led by Professor Andrew
Macintosh has gone through all the projects on the Carbon Integrity Explorer so
you and I don’t have to."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
