The British Columbia government's controversial carbon offsetter, the Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT), is being shut down as part of the government's core review.
According to a press release, the PCT will be shuttered and any of its ongoing commitments handled by the Ministry of Environment.
"The Pacific Carbon Trust was established in 2008 to help develop a carbon-offset business sector," a government press release states.
"With that goal accomplished, the trust will be transitioned into government to achieve approximately $5.6 million in savings annually by 2015-16, while maintaining government's commitment to climate leadership and a carbon-neutral public sector."
As detailed in a series of Business in Vancouver stories, the PCT was controversial for several reasons. For one, it took millions from cash-strapped school boards, hospital districts and municipalities and gave it to large corporations for carbon reduction projects – some of them questionable.
Worse, it refused to reveal how it was spending public money, until it was forced to do so by BIV through an appeal through the Information and Privacy Commissioner.
Some of the projects it funded had been in the works even before the PCT came into existence, which meant that they failed the critical "additionality" test: the provision that carbon offsets should only be purchased to finance projects that might not otherwise go ahead, due to financial or technical constraints.
For example, in 2007, International Forest Products (TSX:IFP) started construction on a new $100 million sawmill at Adams Lake that included a $22 million fuel conversion project that the company had approved in March 2006, two years before the PCT was launched.
Noted climate scientist Mark Jaccard, who helped draft some of B.C.'s climate action policies, criticized the PCT, not just because it took money from school boards and gave it to big corporations, but because – in his opinion – any reduction of GHG emissions would be impossible to verify.
The PCT was also controversial because of its secrecy. Despite taking in more than $20 million from public bodies, it refused to reveal how much was going to companies like Interfor, TimberWest, and Encana.
After the year-long effort by BIV to obtain the information under the freedom of information request, the PCT released information to BIV that showed TimberWest had received $5.6 million to save old-growth timber that the company had told shareholders it did not plan to harvest.
The documents also revealed that the Nature Conservancy of Canada received $4.5 million in PCT carbon credits – again for preserving trees that were not likely to be logged anyway – and that Interfor received $613,890 for a fuel-switch project that had been completed for economic, not environmental, reasons.
In one of his last audits, former auditor general John Doyle confirmed what many critics had been saying about the PCT – that it was funding projects that failed to meet the government's own additionality test.
Doyle also concluded that – despite claims to the contrary – the government had failed in its primary objective to make the public sector carbon neutral.
