The fight within the Greens that led senators to cross the floor last week over koala protection in a national park may have finally put a spotlight on a bigger issue – one at the heart of much of Australia’s promise to act on the climate crisis. It’s this: the country and its polluting industries are too reliant on carbon offsets. The more reliance is placed on them, the more they look like a house of cards.

Offsets can be a mind-deadening subject, but they matter. In Australia, they are known as Australian Carbon Credit Units. Each credit is said to represent one tonne of greenhouse gas that isn’t in the atmosphere and otherwise would have been. They are mostly generated from government-sanctioned projects that are meant to regenerate forests or capture and burn methane released from landfill sites.

These type of projects have plenty to recommend them. With global heating moving into increasingly dangerous territory, the world needs to retain and regenerate all the forests it can, and create new ones. It also needs to sharply reduce how much methane and carbon dioxide is poured into the atmosphere.

But we need to be realistic about what these carbon credits can and can’t do.

The world’s biggest miner decided it was cheaper to buy new polluting trucks and paid for carbon offsets

Australian carbon credits are treated as a like-for-like alternative for emissions cuts by fossil fuel producers, factories and other big polluting sites. Under the climate policy applied to big industrial facilities responsible for about a third of national pollution – the safeguard mechanism – there is no requirement that businesses make direct emissions cuts. They can just buy an unlimited number of offsets and claim them as their own reductions.

This flexibility........

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