The government is “taking advice” on cancelling so-called ‘dodgy’ carbon credits.
The credits were mainly purchased by power and oil companies to cover the country’s future obligations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Climate change minister Paula Bennett, asked on TVNZ’s Q&A programme last weekend if she would cancel any of the 122.2 tonnes of credits, said that she was “not ruling it out, but it’s not my focus right now.”
A spokeswoman for the ministry, who had just attended the signing of the global climate change accord, said the “taking advice on this but won’t be making any decisions in the next few weeks.”
The Green Party is supporting cancellation of an estimated 122.2 million tonnes of Emissions Reduction Units, the residual overhang from a total of 495 million tonnes of carbon ERUs bought by New Zealand companies with obligations under the country’s emissions trading scheme.
Most of those ERUs were sourced from former Soviet bloc countries, where the collapse and assisted closure of inefficient heavy industry produced windfall carbon emissions gains and became, according to a report for the Morgan Foundation, a breeding ground for falsified carbon credits created by organised crime gangs.
ERUs were largely responsible for collapsing the price of carbon in New Zealand to near zero at times in 2011 and 2012, rendering the scheme meaningless as a spur to carbon reduction behaviour and making a mockery of the $25 a tonne upper limit imposed by the government to ensure adjustment to the ETS wasn’t too economically challenging.
