Labor will make substantial changes to a committee responsible for ensuring the integrity of the national carbon credit system after overseeing the departure of three members appointed by the Coalition, including the chair.
A spokesperson for the climate change minister, Chris Bowen, confirmed he had accepted the resignation of three members of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee.
Two of the departing members – the former mining executive David Byers and the economist Dr Brian Fisher – were asked to resign. A third, Margie Thomson, the chief executive of the Cement Industry Federation, chose to leave for family reasons.
Carbon credits are bought by governments and businesses as an alternative to making emissions cuts. The committee’s role is to assess whether methods used to earn carbon credits meet offset integrity standards – effectively, that they represent real and new cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would not have happened anyway.
Byers, who was the committee chair, and Fisher were appointed by the Coalition in December 2020. Climate scientists and campaigners questioned Byers’ appointment given his previous links to fossil fuel industries and his then role as head of the CO2CRC, an industry and government-funded carbon capture and storage research body. Some said they were surprised by Fisher’s appointment given his climate analysis work had been politically divisive.
Byers told Guardian Australia on Friday he “wasn’t looking to resign” but had been requested to step down. “I had no interest in being part of a role where a premium is being put on politics rather than my performance in my role as chair,” he said.
Fisher declined to comment.
The minister’s spokesperson said: “The minister can confirm he has received and accepted resignations from three members of the [committee]. The minister looks forward to appointing new committee members in due course.”
Byers’ resignation letter, dated 8 July, said from his perspective there was “no objective performance, conflict of interest or other reason for me to resign as chair”, but he understood the minister believed his industry background meant he may have conflicts of interest when assessing some methods to create carbon credits.
“This is not so. Along with all other [committee] members, I have at all times declared and managed any potential conflicts of interest appropriately,” he said.
He concluded there that there was “no point staying in a job where my efforts are not valued, my professional background is apparently an ongoing source of suspicion and politics is evidently more important than performance”.
External experts have called for a complete overhaul of the carbon credit scheme administered by the government and the Clean Energy Regulator. Prof Andrew Macintosh – Byers’ predecessor as chair of the committee – has published several papers arguing that most carbon credits do not represent real or new emissions cuts. The regulator and committee have rejected this, saying they had undertaken considerable work to test Macintosh’s assertions and found no evidence to support them.
Bowen has appointed the former chief scientist and senior academic, Prof Ian Chubb, to head a six-month review of the scheme.
Fisher, a former head of the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, released modelling before the 2019 election that suggested Labor’s climate policies would reduce gross national product over the next decade by hundreds of billions of dollars, lead to lower real wages and employment and substantially increase the cost of electricity.
The Coalition government cited the analysis while accusing Labor of planning to put a “wrecking ball” through the economy. In a piece for Guardian Australia, Frank Jotzo, a climate economist and professor at ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, said Fisher’s modelling was based on ridiculous and outdated assumptions and ignored opportunities for cheap cuts.
At the time, Fisher said he rejected criticism of his work and he had been invited to join the committee based on his role as an author of three assessment reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said he believed debate over climate action had become too polarised, but noted his 2019 analysis was based on government emissions projections that had since been superseded.
Byers is a former senior executive at the Minerals Council of Australia, BHP and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, and ran the CO2CRC until August 2021. He said he stood aside from some discussions as committee chair to manage any potential conflicts of interest while in the CO2CRC role.
The Chubb review of the carbon credit scheme fulfils a commitment made by Labor last year. Bowen promised a “short, but thorough” review after research from the Australian Conservation Foundation and progressive thinktank the Australia Institute estimated 20% of credits did not represent real cuts and were essentially “junk”.
Macintosh, an Australian National University environmental law professor, reinforced that conclusion in a series of papers published with colleagues this year. The criticisms were strongly rejected by the regulator, which has overarching responsibility for designing and regulating methods to create carbon credit methods, and the industry body the Carbon Market Institute.
