Carbon Offsets are ineffective. Scotland needs to audit our schemes

Australia’s third largest domestic carbon polluter EnergyAustralia has apologised and admitted that its scheme where customers could buy carbon credits to offset the emissions caused by their energy use would not have “prevented or undone” the damage caused by those carbon emissions.

The group was subject to a legal challenge alleging that they had misled and deceived their customers by selling credits under their “Go Neutral” program where the revenues raised were to be invested in projects such as tree planting and in buying carbon credits from a geothermal plant in Indonesia.

With regards to the tree planting initiatives in particular, the group admitted that “Storing carbon in plants is not equivalent to keeping it stored in fossil fuels (by not burning those fossil fuels in the first place).”

This should be taken as an extremely significant ruling here in Scotland where so much of the Government’s “Net Zero” policies are based around and contingent on using tree planting and peat restoration to sell carbon offset schemes and carbon credits rather than using them simply to restore degraded natural environments.

Indeed, it was recently stated in a report funded by the Scottish Government about land ownership in Scotland that the sale of estates - a major factor in the inequality of land ownership in Scotland - is being increasingly valued in terms of how many carbon credits can be harvested from the land instead of previous valuations based around the number of birds or deer that could be shot on it.

Scotland is not just a “wild west” for the exploitation of our land and its use as a greenwashing vehicle for polluters, it is active state policy to encourage these practices with the Government pushing ideas like the Natural Capital Market Framework that seeks to privatise and monetise Scotland’s “geology, soil, air, water, plants and animals”.

The Scottish Government must halt this push for the privatisation of Scottish nature in the name of greenwashing schemes that carbon polluters are now admitting do not do the job they are being sold to us to do. They must also launch an immediate public investigation and audit of all carbon offset policies and schemes already active in Scotland to halt any of them that will not meet their stated goals.

Common Weal has published a comprehensive blueprint for a Green New Deal that would actually result in Scotland halting and reversing the damage our activities have caused to the planet. You can read it here.