FLETCHER: Carney leads us into dark woods of carbon offsets

Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984It’s becoming difficult to find a path through Mark Carney’s latest vision of climate sustainability as he climbs towards the prime minister’s office.Like his Liberal leadership rival Chrystia Freeland, like B.C. Premier David Eby, he’s suddenly okay with axing the carbon tax. The “consumer carbon tax,” as it is now described, has served its purpose up to now, Carney assures us. It’s too divisive.This is the policy that was until a few months ago at the centre of his being as a United Nations climate banker. Carney’s only complaint up to then was that Canada’s carbon tax was still far too low.Carney quit his many other jobs just as his global net-zero banking network began to implode. U.S. banks realized their government has a term for them getting together to decide what they will finance and what they won’t. The term is “collusion.”The deficit-plagued federal and B.C. governments currently depend heavily on carbon tax revenues, which now amount to 17.6 cents per litre of gasoline. There are current examples of people paying twice as much in carbon tax as the low cost of natural gas that heats their homes. (Fun fact: plant-based ethanol and biodiesel fuels are also subject to the same carbon tax.)Carney has dropped a few pebbles along his path to politics. He’d increase the carbon tax on “big polluters,” suggesting that average folks don’t buy much steel, so no worries for them. This makes as much sense as saying the carbon tax on fuel doesn’t affect food prices, despite all those tractors and trucks involved in getting food to grocery stores.He’d use the revenue from “big polluters” to finance incentives for people to buy things like home insulation and electric vehicles. Provincial and federal governments have, of course, been doing this for years. The federal grant program for EV purchase recently run out of money. Carney would “recapitalize” that, somehow making “big polluter” car manufacturers pay for the thousands in subsidies to people who buy their cars.His latest pebble, dropped in a weekend CBC interview, builds on his idea to establish a “consumer carbon credit market” for big businesses with high emissions. His federal government would act as a regulator for carbon offsets, an industry with a history of scams and scandals.With Carney as the Liberal Party’s unofficial advisor, Canada has just begun establishing a “greenhouse gas offset credit system.” This allows foresters, farmers, municipalities and others to generate credits they can sell by reducing their emissions or preserving trees.There are numerous examples of this type of system being gamed in recent years, in the U.S. and here in Canada. For example, here’s what happened when B.C. pioneered not only the first consumer carbon tax but carbon offsets in 2008.From 2008 to 2010, B.C.’s newly established Pacific Carbon Trust bought 450,000 tonnes of carbon offset from a forest preserve called Darkwoods, near Kootenay Lake. The trust was financed by forcing universities, school districts, health authorities and other government agencies to pay $25 per tonne for their heating and other fuel use.Independent valuations of the carbon offsets were based on how much carbon would be preserved by not clear-cut logging this 55,000-hectare forest.Here’s the problem, former B.C. auditor general John Doyle pointed out. Darkwoods, once the wilderness hunting estate of a German nobleman, had been purchased in 2006 by the Nature Conservancy of Canada, with $25 million of federal taxpayers’ money. The millions squeezed from B.C. hospital and school budgets went to pay again to preserve a forest that was already owned by a charity and legally protected from logging.More disturbing was the backlash to Doyle’s report. The B.C. Liberal government tried to block its release, and I was one of many recipients of a months-long letter-writing campaign attempting to discredit the audit. I got one letter from an important-sounding expert in the U.S. suggesting that this shady Doyle character was the one who should be investigated.Doyle brought the receipts that showed in this case, the province gave away $6 million for nothing.Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984. tomfletcherbc@gmail.com X:@tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Carney leads us into dark woods of carbon offsets

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