During budget 2013 deliberations, the Village of Burns Lake had to decide whether to purchase $9600 worth of carbon credits from a fund like the Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT) in order to offset its corporate municipal carbon emissions, or to earmark the money for later use on a specific carbon reduction project within the municipality.
It is a cash-penalty approach to carbon neutrality in which emitters pay a per-tonne cash price for ‘credit’ with a broker who then uses the money to finance carbon reduction efforts elsewhere.
Council decided to keep the money in house. One of the reasons cited for council’s decision was that a cheque written to PCT is taxpayer money that would never find its way back into the community.
A report released today by the Office of the Auditor General of British Columbia into the province’s carbon neutral government program suggests that the Village of Burns Lake was not alone in its concerns for how and where carbon-offset dollars are spent.
B.C.'s carbon neutral government initiative has been controversial since it was launched as part of former premier Gordon Campbell's climate change program in 2008. Provincial and local governments, health authorities and school districts were required to buy carbon offset credits equal to the greenhouse gas emissions from their buildings and vehicles, with the money invested in carbon-reducing projects.
According to the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation, B.C. universities paid $4.46 million into the PCT in 2011. B.C.'s 60 school districts paid a total of $5.36 million the same year, and the province's six health authorities paid $5.79 million.
In his report, Auditor General John Doyle concluded that two carbon capture projects that were the largest beneficiaries of B.C.'s multi-million-dollar carbon neutral program did not provide credible carbon offsets for emissions from government operations.
The report looked into the carbon offsets purchased during 2010. It found that at least seventy per cent of those purchases ‘were not credible’ in the context of carbon emission reduction.
Doyle’s negative assessment of the credibility of the entire program included the troubling findings that some of the companies that received money from the fund, received money for projects they would have done anyway.
"In industry terms, these projects would be known as 'free riders'," said Doyle. "Together, they received $6 million in revenue for something that would have happened anyway."
The province, which caused some consternation earlier in the week by delaying the release of the report despite widespread leaks to some media and members of the legislative assembly, categorically rejected Doyle’s conclusions.
Environment Minister Terry Lake said the government ‘fundamentally rejects’ Doyle's conclusions, and stands by eight outside experts who were called on to validate the carbon offset investments.
“We’ve got an auditor without a similar level of expertise [to the outside experts] passing judgment on these offsets that were in fact verified by these third party independent auditors. You’ve got one organization, in this case the office of the auditor general saying one thing, and eight others with expertise in the field saying something else,” said Lake. “I leave it to you and to the public to judge who can best tell whether these offsets are credible.”
With files from Tom Fletcher