Someone call the climate cops: New NDP boss no longer carbon neutral

Stop press! Light appearing on the hazy carbon-trading horizon – courtesy of Adrian Dix.

Could this really be the new New Democratic Party?

The NDP leader was in fine form Earth Day when he vowed to pull the plug on the provincial government’s Pacific Carbon Trust charade.

Refreshing stuff from Dix, who in his election platform promise to expand the province’s carbon tax to cover more emissions skirted a critical issue in the increasingly comic carbon debate: is all this carbon tax and offset sleight of hand doing anything for the environment, let alone changing the weather?

But the NDP leader was not the only one missing that point. It’s all but universally accepted, at least in media circles, that using hard-earned taxpayer dollars to underwrite the wholesale trade in a phantom product with no real marketplace value is a good thing – even if both buyer and seller have a vested interest in inflating the environmental value of the other’s carbon initiatives.

So why question it or bring it up?

Well, for one thing, Europe’s carbon market, the largest in the world, was left largely in the lurch recently after the European Parliament vetoed a plan to rescue the EU’s climate change policy.

And, for another, the recent uproar over Auditor General John Doyle’s report into the validity of B.C.’s trade in carbon offsets via the Pacific Carbon Trust delivered a host of revelations but few followup answers.

It’s one thing to consider Doyle’s conclusion that the use of carbon offsets in B.C. to achieve the government’s carbon-neutrality claims was pretty much consistent with the PCT’s operation: an arcane taxpayer-funded traffic in hot air.

It’s another to consider this statement from his report:

“Of all the reports I have issued, never has one been targeted in such an overt manner by vested interests, nor has an audited organization ever broken my confidence, as did the senior managers at PCT by disclosing confidential information to carbon market developers and brokers. … I cannot sufficiently express my surprise and disappointment that a public sector entity, with a fiduciary duty to the people of British Columbia, chose to expend its time and energy in this manner, rather than addressing the concerns raised in the audit – and that they did so with the knowledge of their governing board.”

That should be disturbing on many levels for British Columbians.

Since the release of the report, Doyle has been packing his bags for a new posting in Australia and a quartet of people from the auditor general’s office were dismissed in the wake of the carbon offsets audit.

But what of the PCT? As the Earth Day promise from Dix underscores, an organization with leadership taken to task by a B.C. auditor general as outlined above surely needs some adjustments in the executive suite.

But in the carbon game, complexity and abstruse number work trump common sense every time. Even those who believe that reducing manmade carbon emissions is key to wresting climate change from the forces of nature question the PCT approach.

As reported in “Carbon trading: A multibillion-dollar boondoggle?”(BIV issue 1225; April 16-22), energy economist Mark Jaccard in a 2011 report concluded the CO2 reductions from projects funded with PCT offsets are “at best, guesswork and that the system in place is prone to ‘free-riders’ – companies being subsidized for initiatives they would have undertaken anyway.”

Elsewhere in the world, carbon-trading markets have been incubators for all manner of taxpayer-funded chicanery.

Most trusting members of the lumpenproletariat would want to believe that someone somewhere has crunched the numbers correctly to figure out how much forest is needed to absorb the carbon or other GHGs being generated from, say, a cement plant or pulp mill.

Sadly, that appears to be wishful thinking at best.

Much scrutiny is being applied to the math when it comes to more tax, less tax, expanded tax on the carbon front, but far too little is being applied to figuring out exactly who is creating how much carbon, how much is being offset by what, how much of either is having an impact on climate change and environmental quality and how much effect the wholesale trade in a trace gas in our atmosphere is having on economic growth.

Figuring out those numbers needs to be a priority for the next provincial government.