Despite years of increased public awareness around the scam that is carbon offsetting, there are still many, many surprises to be had. One of the most recent has been the jarring concept of ‘koala offsets’. The idea behind this, as shown in Australia Institute research, is that the act of protecting koala habitat in New South Wales allows the generation of one ‘carbon offset’, a certificate that can be bought by a polluter to claim they’ve undone their emissions.
To most people it’s clearly absurd. As TAI research shows, “Australians overwhelmingly (82%) say that governments have an obligation to protect koala habitats (3% think governments have this obligation only if they are paid to do so)”.
Dodgy offsets exist in many ways, in many different corners of Australia’s various climate policies. After the dissolution of the shockingly dodgy ‘Climate Active’ voluntary scheme, dodgy offsets have shifted into mandatory regulations, deep in Australia’s biggest climate policy. And we’re constantly finding new surprises.
A Titanic carbon offset scam
If you aren’t familiar with the Prelude Floating LNG ship, here’s a summary: it’s big. It is, Naru Research analyst Tim Baxter told me, the single largest floating object on the planet. It’s about 10x the size of the Titanic.
The sheer bulk of this thing is important, because I think it’s the single most significant technological testament to the mind-blowing absurdity of fossil fuels. Instead of the elegant simplicity of capturing sun and wind, fossil fuels require obscene mega-projects that themselves consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to run; ridden with risk and a million single points of failure.
That alone is bad enough. But in an interview with Tim about his fascinating report, I learned how he combined ship tracking data to uncover tens of millions of dollars worth of ill-earned dodgy offset credits at Shell’s ‘Prelude’ floating LNG facility.
In short, a series of damned-near-catastrophic and dangerous failures during the site’s startup process meant it was offline for long stretches. The project’s ‘emissions intensity’ is measured by dividing whatever was emitted over whatever was produced during that period. If there are shutdowns and failures, you will have high operational emissions for very little product: a high emissions ‘intensity’.
Under Australia’s Safeguard Mechanism, which we’ve been critiquing in a series here at The Australia Institute, facilities see their emissions target set relative to their own ‘emissions intensity’. In this site’s case, that intensity was measured when the site was undergoing a series of massive failures, resulting in an absurdly high emissions intensity target; well above their normal operation, and the emissions intensity of anyone else.