Raising Hell: Issue 56: The Sauce Of Suspicion

The Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee is one of those cogs in the machinery of government with a name so dull so it’s hard not to fall asleep before you finish saying it out aloud. Ordinarily it is one of those institutions most people don’t really want to hear about in the news — the whole concept of taxes is about paying someone else to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on this sort of stuff.

This quality — a body so boring most people wouldn’t think twice about the detail — is the kind that makes it catnip to bad faith actors looking to takeover the machinery of government for one reason or another — so it should surprise no one that this institution has been responsible for overseeing a carbon credits scheme once described Australian National University Professor Andrew Macintosh as “largely a sham”.

Carbon credits are a get-out-of-jail free accounting scheme for business and governments that want to seem like they’re taking climate change seriously but haven’t lowered their own emissions. The basic idea is each credit represents one-tonne of carbon dioxide stopped from going into the atmosphere or physically sucked from the sky. A business responsible for 10 tonnes of CO2 pollution can buy 10 carbon credits that someone else has managed to eliminate and, on paper at least, they’re not contributing to creating more natural disasters like… well… this:

The Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee (ERAC) is meant to be a kind of corporate cop overseeing this process so those buying can have confidence they are actually getting something for their money. Catch is, they largely haven’t.

Carbon credit schemes tend to attract grifters and dodgy accountants in a way that is deserving of a pithy essay at some point, but its ERAC’s strategic position overseeing the whole show that has made it a good working demonstration of state capture. ERAC was not the only institution where ex-fossil fuel executives and lobbyists were inserted, but it raised a few eye brows when in December 2020 the former Morrison government appointed a petroleum engineer, a lobbyists from the oil, gas and cement industries to its board. Among them was David Byers, a former executive at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA), Minerals Council of Australia and BHP who ran a carbon capture and storage out and Dr Brian Fisher, the Coalition’s favourite economist whose bad faith modelling is part of the reason why nothing serious has been done about climate change.

Fast forward to last fortnight and the committee most people had never heard of was in the news as Labor sought to clean house. Both Byers and Fisher were asked to step down from the committee, which they did, but not before Byers making a stink on the way out the door. Fisher may have declined to comment publicly about his exit in keeping with the usual protocol of the public service, but Byers appears to have made his exit known to any reporter who would listen. In a portion of his resignation letter quoted by the ABC, for instance, he described himself as the victim of a political witchhunt.

"I have concluded there is 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,” Byers wrote.

Byers repeated a similar story when contacted by Guardian Australia. He said: “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.”

The spectacle of a man whose resume includes both ExxonMobil and BHP complaining about being cancelled remains deeply funny. Beyond this, a five minute speed-run of his work at the head of APPEA between 2011 and 2015 sums up why people might regard him suspicion. Upon taking the job in 2011, Byers’ first task between attacking the Renewable Energy Target was to go to war with the Australian Workers Union who were calling for a gas reservation policy on the east coast. In 2014 Byers argued “the Australian gas industry’s contribution to global emissions reduction should not be hindered by regulations that focus on its local emissions” saying the body “looks forward to working with the Department of Environment to develop a potential model that would be suitable for the oil and gas industry”. Later that year he welcomed the repeal of the carbon tax in 2014, saying it would ensure a “prosperous and vibrant natural gas industry”. By the time he left APPEA in 2015 to take a position lobbying for BHP, Byers was described by the industry association’s chair as “an extremely effective advocate for our industry” and was thanked for “his dedication”.

In other words, it wouldn’t be surprising if Byers bathed in liquid methane — exactly the kind of guy you want chairing a committee responsible for ensuring the integrity of a CO2 abatement scheme.

More broadly though the presence of these figures on a body associated with the broader effort to combat climate change is a symptom of a much larger problem. In what would amount to a “no shit” moment for most people, a report by The Grattan Institute released on Sunday warned that life in Australia is all about who you know. At a federal level, half those appointed to the Productivity Commission have a political connection to the Coalition along with 22 percent of appointments to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — the body which defines the limits of government power. Similar rates were found among appointees to other government boards including Australia Post and NBN Co.

It is the sort of headline that would only shock the naïve. No less than John Howard set the precedent when he gutted the public service before taking office and then stacked its ranks with his loyalists. The problem now is that with climate change there is a wholly different set of stakes at play in the sense that continuing to allow our institutions to be captured by the fossil fuel industry will get us all killed.

For the Fortnight: July 6 to July 19

Reporting In

Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …

• “What the oil and gas industry tells itself” (The Monthly, July 2022).
• ‘‘‘Cultural genocide’: Australian state putting industry before heritage, Indigenous women tell UN” (The Guardian Australia, 6 July 2022).
• “EV incentives focused on urban centres leave rural Australians stranded with fossil fuels” (The Guardian Australia, 8 July 2022).
• Australia could see a solar cell ‘renaissance’ if global supply chain is diversified (The Guardian Australia, 8 July 2022).

You Hate To See It

A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…

• Crash And Burn

  Gwyneth Paltrow has spent her July putting out fires: in January the movie star turned lifestyle entrepreneur zoomed into an event with 5000 women where she urged them to “break into the male-dominated world of crypto”. Six month on the bottom has fallen out of the cryptocurrency markets and any aspiring girlboss urged by Paltrow to break the crypto-patriarchy has probably lost their life savings — not that Paltrow has time to really grapple with the moral implications of this as she faces another explosive crisis. Two employees at a Goop store on Long Island were killed when they tried to add rubbing alcohol to candles in order to melt marshmellows for s’mores. The two men had seen the technique on social media.

• Coup Stolen Valor

  If you had accused the US government of hopscotching the globe to overthrow democratically elected governments, you’d be written off as a conspiracy theorist — or worse — a communist. But then this is 2022 where former White House official John Bolton explained to an interviewer how, of course, he’s organised a coup here and there — but never within the national boundaries of the US. And then of course Bolton was immediately called out by a former CIA agent for never actually helped organise a coup in his life.

  Tapper: I don’t know if I agree with you with all due respect. One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup
  Bolton: I disagree with that as somebody who has helped plan coups, not here but other places…

  — Acyn (@Acyn) 8:28 PM ∙ Jul 12, 2022

• Hear No Evil

  To Australia now where the new Labor government has rolled out a new system app for funneling the unemployed through a meet-grinder of Workforce Australia — a $7.1b dollar, privatized industry of “providers” whose job it is to “case manage” those looking for work under a system known as “mutual obligations”. The transition went about as well as anticipated for a project led by Boston Consulting Group thanks in part to a refusal by the party of the working classes to intervene after they were lobbied hard by the National Employment Services Association. The industry body warned the system would collapse if mutual obligations were ended as it would cut off the flow of government money they depended on, but then this was also a lie with an internal industry report explaining to members that “performance results do not appear to have had any impact on the tender results”. Among the big winners from are private equity firms, including US-based Madison Dearborn Partners and CVC Capital Partners which have raked in tens of millions of dollars over the last three years, and the Salvation Army which took in $190m.

• Money For Beer

  But don’t worry, Australians, rents have hit record highs across Australian capital cities with both house and unit prices up 12% in the last year! A unit in Sydney is going to set you back $525 a week in June, and $410 a week in Melbourne - with vacancy rates even lower in Adelaide and Hobart.

• Sins Of The Father

  Elon Musk may have nine children to three different women, but even he may not be the biggest failson of the Musk clan. Last week Musk’s 76-year-old father, Errol Musk, announced a new addition to the clan — a second child with his 34-year-old step-daughter, Jana Bezuidenhout who Errol had raised since she was four. The couple first got together when Bezuidenhout was 25 and when asked about the union, Errol told reporters the pregnancy “wasn’t planned’ but he was happy to “help the underpopulation crisis”. “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” he said. But then, given the hellscape we inhabit where the biggest corporations in the world have embraced eating dicks and knocking up their mascots to help sell you ice cream and fried chicken on social media, can we really pretend to be surprised?

  

  Image Source: SpaceX.

Failing Upward

Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…

• It’s very rare we here at Raising Hell’s elite satire unit take aim at a sitting prime minister, or at least one this early into the job. But then Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and federal Labor picked a strange hill to die on this fortnight when they decided to cut paid pandemic leave for workers infected with Covid-19, given, you know…

  "Do I go to work and make my colleagues sick, or do I stay at home and let my kids go hungry?"
  
  No one should have to make that choice – and paid pandemic leave would make sure they never have to. The Government should just do it.

  — Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) 7:40 AM ∙ Aug 1, 2020

  Yeah, sure, 6.37m people have died worldwide since the start of the pandemic — the majority of the 10,000-plus deaths in Australia having occurred in 2022 alone. And yeah, hospital systems across the nation are buckling under the additional pressure created by letting ‘er rip, and yeah, it might still be illegal for those infected with Covid-19 to leave the house, but the trillion-dollar debt needs to get balanced, amiright? And if we need to tighten the belt to deal with the national debt we can’t keep providing such indulgences as free RAT tests and paid pandemic leave. Of course we’re still going to pass stage three tax cuts which is effectively handing $180b to the richest Australians, and as the Prime Minister himself suggested, those people who come down with Covid-19 can just work from home. The good news it that it took about a week for the federal government to switch tack and announce they will maintain the payment, which sadly means the Australia public will not be treated to the spectacle of a forklift driver or an aged care worker attempting to remotely carry out their duties from the comfort of their living room.

Good Reads, Good Times

To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…

• Ketan Joshi has this explainer on the absurdity that is fossil fuel companies looking for applause because they power their oil rigs with solar panels.
• If you ever wanted to wonder how the Chinese saw the Europeans who turned up in the 18th century, your questions are now answered.

Before You Go (Go)…

• Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal or through encrypted message Wickr Me on my account: rorok1990. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
• And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!