Greens and environmental supporters split over forest carbon credit scheme

Greens leader and Senator Larissa Waters is officially making her party’s position clear that it would be voting with the Labor government on Thursday afternoon to allow a new method of generating carbon credits by protecting public native forest earmarked for logging.

The decision has split the party with three Greens senators, Tasmania’s Nick McKim and Vanessa Bleyer, and Western Australia’s Jordon Steele-John crossing the floor to support the disallowance motion raised by the Nationals, to protect forestry industries.

The Greens and environment advocates who want the Great Koala National Park in the mid north coast of NSW to be established to protect a 476,000-hectare reserve, including 176,000 hectares are newly protected areas, have been divided on how it should occur.

The Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method was proposed by the NSW government and introduced by Albanese government.

Waters said her party would support the plan after getting key concessions from Labor, which include the nation’s first fully enforceable ban on fossil fuel companies from using Labor’s flagship safeguard mechanism. The mechanism requires 200 large emitters to cut emissions by more than 5 per cent each year or purchase and surrender carbon credits or Safeguard Mechanism credits (SMCs) to offset their emissions.

Waters also said the party still does not support “Labor’s system of accounting tricks” and would launch a new campaign to advocate wiping out 40 per cent of carbon credits in the market over the next few years. She said it would make it significantly more expensive to purchase offsets rather than reduce its pollution.

However, the Australia Institute’s co-chief executive Dr Richard Denniss said supporting the policy now will make “the task of stopping Australia’s expansion of coal and gas” “harder”.

“In voting with Labor, the Greens have shown they now support putting publicly owned forests into the ‘carbon marketplace’ and have tied the protection of trees and koalas to the expansion of gas and coal.

“Native forests are one of nature’s best carbon storage units – they truly are the lungs of the planet. The climate science makes clear that we need to protect these forests and stop expanding fossil fuels. Allowing fossil fuel pollution to increase because a forest wasn’t logged might take pressure off politicians, but it won’t take pressure off our climate,” Denniss added.

“If Australia only saves forests so that polluters can increase their fossil fuel use, the science says there is no benefit to our planet.

“There is no way to sugarcoat it; the parliament’s decision today is a setback. The unconditional protection of our native forests is one of the cheapest, easiest and most urgent things we can do to limit the effects of climate change.” 

In a statement from the three Greens senators, McKim, Bleyer and Steele-John said they would vote according to their consciences, and “people of good heart and clear mind can, and have, come to a different position on this issue”.

“We want Greens members and supporters to know that we do not support the relentless commodification of nature and will not be part of making it easier and cheaper for big carbon polluters to keep emitting as [this method] does.”

McKim and Bleyer also accused Labor of “holding koalas hostage and threatening to drive them towards extinction unless they can profit from their habitat”.

“We simply don’t accept that forests need to be monetised in order to save them,” the two said.

The AFR said that modelling by Reputex, which designed the mechanism for Labor in 2022, had found the cost of credits to companies in the scheme will need to increase fivefold to align with the government’s Paris climate agreement targets.

Other groups supporting the disallow vote include the Bob Brown Foundation, and the Wilderness Society, while supporters of the credits include former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, environmental scientist Tim Flannery and activist group Greenpeace.