Hello I’m from the Australien Government
You know how when you book a flight you can pay a little extra money to offset your emissions?
Well, now imagine that your money was actually being spent on strippers and coke
Except the strippers are our mates, and the coke is gas
Congratulations.
You’re ready to learn about our Australian Carbon Credit Units
Let’s take a look
You see, when landholders take steps to avoid carbon emissions, by planting trees or not
clearing land, we reward them with a carbon credit
For each ton of carbon avoided, they get one ACCU
That landholder can now sell that ACCU to some gas company, so they can stick a ton
of carbon into the atmosphere and say they’re “carbon neutral”
Or they can sell that ACCU back to us so we can say “net zero by 2050”.
Either way, everyone’s happy
Australien Government
There’s just one tiny problem
We may have been handing out millions of ACCUs for bullshit like:
paying lanholders to grow trees that are already there
Not clearing land they were never going to clear
And growing forests where forests can never grow
coz as you can see on this map, most of them are in the middle of the fucking desert.
Because of this, 70 to 80% of our ACCUs are “low integrity”
which is another way of saying they’ll offset approximately…
Fuck all
FUCKOFFSETS
Fuckoffsets are great for our mates coz the shitter our carbon credits are, the cheaper
they are
and that means more of them can be bought to offset new gas projects
and keep making the ching-ging
Which is a shame, coz carbon credits could play an important role in offsetting emissions
that are hard to avoid
But to truly work, carbon credits require Transparency, Integrity and Rigorous Accounting
And you know we care about Transparency when we put Angus in charge of this gig
the guy who gave us forged documents
fake social media profiles
and a Cayman Island registered company we bought water off at double the going price
without tender
And to ensure the Integrity bit we have an Assurance Committee, chaired by a leading
expert
Well it was until the expert started asking too many questions, so Angus replaced him
with this fossil fuel lobbyist
And alongside him, to ensure the “rigorous accounting” part
we also hired the guy whose dodgy modelling we used to bring you bullshit fear-campaigns
and those Kyoto carryover credits
We even hired the former CEO of Origin to review our carbon credits
Cool and normal
What’s next, you might ask - let gas companies earn ACCUs too?
Why, that’s exactly what we’re doing with Santos
which will be earning credits for capturing its own emissions with CCS
Except as we’ve seen, CCS captures fuck all
FUCKOFFSETS
We’re making it so easy to earn ACCUs, pretty soon we’ll run out of space to plant trees
that are already there
That’s why we’re exporting this shitshow to the whole Indo-Pacific
with help from Woodside - you know, the pricks who robbed Timor-Leste of its resources
Fiji and PNG have already signed up for the next kick in the face
Carbon Colonialism
where we pay poor nations who’ve begged us to stop digging up fossil fuels to help
us dig up even more fossil fuels
So to sum up: you pay for the carbon credits
we make them as shit as possible so our mates can buy them for peanuts to “offset” their
emissions
So more gas basins get drilled
Emissions keep rising
Our neighbours get screwed again
And your town gets flooded again
But hey!
Net zero by 2050
What’s that, Labor will fix this rort if it wins the election?
Aww sweetheart, Labor’s relying on carbon credits to meet a fifth of its own emission
reduction target
So, unless it calls for a full inquiry into this shit-buffet
the next government will not only inherit it from us, but also keep feeding it to you
Australien Government
Authorised by the Department for Regulatory State Capture