Experts criticise Australia's most popular carbon offset scheme | 7.30 

I was "employed" to plant 7 million trees to "offset carbon" on property in the west australian wheatbelt area. It was an absolute shitshow. The pay rate was great but honestly I have doubts even 20% of the tree stock survived with how badly prepared and organised everything was.... not to mention severe lack of rainfall in general in those parts. It's a rort

Time for a royal commission into this crap?

Carbon credits seem well intentioned, but when you have big corporations eager to pay big money to absolve their carbon footprint… it’s bound to become a rort

Who "independently "audits" this program? Another consultancy corporation?

This is the biggest con job ever locking up millions of hectares and destroying communties with no jobs

Let me guess...🤔 The auditing was done by the big 4 auditors (KPMG, PWC..etc) who also audit and advise the big corporations that buy the carbon credits....🙄

One of the biggest scams in Aus. Overlay the projects shown in this map with a map displaying the highest amount of carbon in the soil and you can see that these areas are the worst places in Aus to "farm carbon". Please go and film these spots again during a drought and we will see just how ineffective these "carbon farms" are. Also seeing a 4x4 with carbon friendly on the side makes you think 🤔 oh well just offset it, she'll be right!! Loony!

How much can I earn if I don't mow my backyard grass?

There is a massive omission in this piece. Projects using the impugned Human Induced Regeneration methodology will no longer be able to be registered from 30 September. It boggles the mind that the journalist did not know this/chose not to include this.

This is such great journalism on a massively important issue. Thank you for covering this!!

Wouldn't 600,000 credits at $36 each be $21.6mil not $10mil?

There are so many carbon rorts in Australia right now it's hard to keep up with them all, it's become a industry for the polluters to keep on polluting. Australia likes to look like it's doing something while it's actually doing nothing.

Abc enabled comments?!

The number of rorts in Australia right now is so high that I can hardly keep up.

Australia should have gone with the Rudd emissions reduction plan rather than caving and going ahead with this rort.

It's all pointless when Co2 levels are rising faster than they ever have before.

With 17 new coal and gas projects just approved, better keep planting trees fella's

Good journalism right here

I wouldn't mind getting paid $36/tonne of stored carbon for no work 😅

One bush fire, and that's all back in the atmosphere.

This happened on kangaroo island and poorly maintained Forrest for carbon credit made a large contribution to fuel of the bush fires.

Reducing the usage of carbon is the only solution carbon offset schemes are always going to attract gold diggers. Can't be regulated.

Looks a bit dry. Get fires there?

We need to do more about climate change now.

More like scam lol

Here is a crazy idea....reduce emissons...

Wow no chance of corruption when this was set up😂😂

One fire.

You only need one of two things to happen. You can either offset emissions through carbon projects or you can reduce emissions via changing behaviour. This is done through a carbon price which has been kept low for emitters! Why are emitters that exceed their caps have two years to offset their emissions? Both levers are being used to manipulate price and ‘appear’ to be reducing national emissions. This is a greenwashing government.

Plantation wood is a much better carbon offset. Besides, places like this are in fact carbon negative because it will eventually just burn and or die in a drought, and we lose the food resource as well further impoverishing the nations economic diversity.

I support planting trees....but what about further regulating emissions as well? Doesn't this scheme just allow polluters to feel good about themselves? What am i missing?

As an Australian living in Europe, it's embarrassing trying to explain Australia's lack of action on climate change, especially when it is one of the first to suffer the consequences... And it seems the best we manage is 'green-washing.'

Were the auditors one of the big 4 ? Perhaps the same consultants that advised on the legislation as well 😅

carbon pollution is a myth.

Has anyone got some suggestions for this problem? Like key performance indicators, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. Could create a betting market on the results to get more people involved. I would also argue there is more than 1 way to regenerate land and store carbon, rather than fencing it off and not touching it. 1 way might even involve grazing holistically to develop microbiology and soil activity that stores carbon and also include small landholders to participate.

People that have expensive cars disobey road rules all the time (fines so what) carbon credits same thing nothing is being fixed by this

Unfortunately; the fossil fuels industry has shifted far more weight of accountable corrections, onto increasingly pressured people and systems that have less and less time to adapt. Likewise, since global warming is equally increasing to global "boiling"; the process of tree carbon capture must accelerate to bringing carbon to ground faster. This can be done in farming wood instead of the more carbon penalizing cement process in building, along with geopolymers; but this kind of system needs proximity to transporting said wood to residential areas, which requires complimentary sustainable transport. At root; the US is more responsible for these increasingly arduous problems, dating back to when Nixon mothballed the Thorium Reactor program at Oak Ridge, in favor of pursuing the far more fossil fuel-based Plutonium bomb initiative. They even massively distorted a grease contamination in a heat exchanger, into a critical corrosion problem in the nuclear core, easily deceiving the general public into accepting the scrapping of the project. This is one of the main reasons why Thorium Reactor tech has been so difficult to reproduce worldwide, such as India's 3 stage program with cost overruns that could easily have been scaled, if the US and the Nixon Administration didn't cave into greed and abuse of power. Standard error correction via scientific method would've accelerated worldwide proliferation of this baseload energy, and most of these cascading effects would be moot.

Pure Fantasy.

And then wildfire will burn all those regenerated trees and put the carbon right back into the atmosphere. Australia is the world's second largest exporter of coal.

Such a rort

Climate friendly the only thing i see them doing is burning diesel 😂😂

The big winners will be the feral goats. No cattle to compete with, no farmers to keep them under control and plenty to eat. What a rort.