Australia's Green Failure

 Prof Andrew Macintosh, who spent years working on Australia's carbon credit policies as the head of the government’s emissions reduction assurance committee, this week described the system as a fraud that was hurting the environment and had wasted more than $1bn in taxpayer funding. 

He is an Australian National University environment law professor who has been appointed to several senior roles by the Coalition, including as a royal commissioner examining Australia’s natural disaster response after the Black Summer bushfires.

He said all the major methods approved by the government to create carbon credits had “serious integrity issues, either in their design or the way they are being administered”. They included projects for regrowing native forests in cleared areas, projects to protect existing trees so they were not cleared and projects at landfill sites to capture and use methane emissions.

Macintosh said problems with the system included a lack of transparency. He called on the regulator to release data not currently in the public domain that it relied on to say the system was working, and said there should be an independent inquiry into the failures of the system with the power to compel people to give evidence.

Labor promises review of Australia’s carbon credit system after allegations it is ‘largely a sham’ | Climate crisis | The Guardian