Honest Government Ad: Carbon credits and offsets – “Imagine that your money was actually being spent on strippers and coke!”
10 April 2022 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien Government.
You know how when you book a flight you can pay a little extra money to offset your emissions?
Well, now imagine that your money was actually being spent on strippers and coke!
Except the strippers are our mates, and the coke is gas.
Congratulations! You’re ready to learn about our Australian Carbon Credit Units.
Let’s take a look.
You see, when landholders take steps to avoid carbon emissions, by planting trees or not clearing land, we reward them with a carbon credit.
For each ton of carbon avoided, they get one ACCU.
That landholder can now sell that ACCU to some gas company, so they can stick a ton of carbon into the atmosphere and say they’re “carbon neutral”.
Or they can sell that ACCU back to us so we can say “net zero by 2050”.
Either way, everyone’s happy.
There’s just one tiny problem.
We may have been handing out millions of ACCUs for bullshit like:
- Paying landholders to grow trees that are already there.
- Not clearing land they were never going to clear.
- And growing forests where forests can never grow.
Coz as you can see on this map, most of them are in the middle of the fucking desert.
Because of this, 70 to 80% of our ACCUs are “low integrity”, which is another way of saying they’ll offset approximately…Fuck all!
FUCKOFFSETS!
Fuckoffsets are great for our mates, coz the shitter our carbon credits are, the cheaper they are.
And that means more of them can be bought to offset new gas projects and keep making the ching-ching.
Which is a shame, coz carbon credits could play an important role in offsetting emissions that are hard to avoid
But to truly work, carbon credits require Transparency, Integrity, and Rigorous Accounting.
And you know we care about Transparency when we put Angus in charge of this gig – the guy who gave us forged documents, fake social media profiles, and a Cayman Island registered company we bought water off at double the going price without tender.
And to ensure the Integrity bit we have an Assurance Committee, chaired by a leading expert.
Well, it was until the expert started asking too many questions, so Angus replaced him with this fossil fuel lobbyist.
And alongside him, to ensure the “rigorous accounting” part, we also hired the guy whose dodgy modelling we used to bring you bullshit fear-campaigns, and those Kyoto carryover credits.
We even hired the former CEO of Origin to review our carbon credits.
Cool and normal!
What’s next, you might ask – let gas companies earn ACCUs too?
Why, that’s exactly what we’re doing with Santos, which will be earning credits for capturing its own emissions with CCS.
Except as we’ve seen, CCS captures fuck all.
FUCKOFFSETS!
We’re making it so easy to earn ACCUs, pretty soon we’ll run out of space to plant trees that are already there.
That’s why we’re exporting this shitshow to the whole Indo-Pacific with help from Woodside – you know, the pricks who robbed Timor-Leste of its resources.
Fiji and PNG have already signed up for the next kick in the face.
Carbon Colonialism!
Where we pay poor nations who’ve begged us to stop digging up fossil fuels to help us dig up even more fossil fuels.
So to sum up: you pay for the carbon credits, we make them as shit as possible so our mates can buy them for peanuts to “offset” their emissions, so more gas basins get drilled.
Emissions keep rising.
Our neighbours get screwed again.
And your town gets flooded again
But hey, net zero by 2050!
What’s that, Labor will fix this rort if it wins the election?
Aww sweetheart, Labor’s relying on carbon credits to meet a fifth of its own emission reduction target.
So, unless it calls for a full inquiry into this shit-buffet, the next government will not only inherit it from us, but also keep feeding it to you.
Authorised by the Department for Regulatory State Capture.
