Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is creating Canada’s first carbon offset market to help big industry in its quest to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon offset credits will be created when an entity such as a municipality, a farmer or a company reduces its own emissions more than they have to.
The proposed regulations say one credit would be created for every tonne of emissions reduced, but the credits have to be registered and independently verified before they can be sold.
Companies that are paying the federal carbon price can buy those credits to reduce the amount of carbon price they have to pay.
Big industrial emitters can already buy and sell carbon credits created by other companies covered by the federal carbon pricing system, but carbon offset markets will expand the credit system beyond that group of companies.
The first carbon offset market will be for credits produced by municipalities that capture methane from their landfills, with future markets to be created for cutting emissions from farmland, forests and from reducing or eliminating fluorinated refrigerants in advanced refrigeration systems.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 7, 2022.
The Canadian Press
Comments
Alternate headline:
Feds create first greenwashing market to help big industry pretend to cut emissions
Carbon offsets are a scheme under which climate underperformers can elect to pay a penalty to climate overperformers ... with no difference at all in the underperformers' emissions.
There are two possibilities: either once the "carbon credit" is sold, the seller in perpetuity loses any right to "count" the emissions covered by it. And the purchaser has a perpetual free ride to the extent of the purchased "credits."
OR they count just for a single year's totals ... and the over-performer can recycle the benefit of its excess performance over and over again until its reductions hit the wall, and it eventually becomes an underperformer, as everyone struggles to reach absolute zero. Because net zero is just baloney: see "perpetual free ride" above ...
The thing about those perpetual free rides is that it's just a pay-to-pollute scheme as long as the freeriders are paying dollars instead of cleaning up their acts: just part of the cost of doing business.
As long as media is buying into the sleight-of-hand world of "offsets," then the excess of emissions reductions claimed over emissions *actually* reduced, the smoke & mirrors charlatans can clap themselves on the back and behave as though it's someone else's emissions that are doing the damage.
It's a bit like the one-hand-clapping scenario, or a tree falling with-or-without-sound, depending on whether or not someone's tere to hear. A better analogy, though, would be a Winter Bean Camp Bunkhouse, with everyone wearing noseplugs ... produced by the Carbon-Credit Company.
A more appropriate headline might have been "Carbon Offset Market to offer Big Industry Way Out of Emissions Cuts."
And what happens when the "Offset Market" is all tapped out ...