Dan Bishton discovers it’s not so Easy Being Green, after all, as another green scheme bites the dust:
For two years I worked for Easy Being Green, a Sydney-based carbon trading firm that operated under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. As a team leader there, I spruiked, cajoled and charmed members of the public into taking home free boxes of energy-saving CFL globes ...
“100 per cent free,” I’d say — “All you have to do is sign this form.”
The form was a nomination form, which stated that the hapless coal-fired electricity consumer could have the bulbs for free, if they promised to use them — as long as Easy Being Green could keep the saved energy. Or to put it more accurately, claim a certificate representing a tonne of saved carbon, which could be sold on one of the world’s oldest carbon markets, the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme…
Ex-Greenpeace Chairman Paul Gilding led the company with galvanising speeches about harnessing market forces… Many of the initial employees were ex-Greenpeace members…
Life was grand at first… The price for a tonne of carbon was at its peak of $25, and the nomination forms were rolling in at an incredible pace… Trade of demand-side certificates (carbon credits) mushroomed to almost 9 million throughout 2006, many times the previous year’s total…
The scheme’s administrator was IPART, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal… (In 2006) IPART received the results from a Newspoll survey conducted on giveaway installation rates. Newspoll’s survey found that only four of every 10 bulbs found their way into light sockets — half the rate that the booming giveaway companies had been claiming credit for. Half-way through August, IPART made a shock announcement that slashed the installation discount factor accordingly to 0.4, halving the value of NGACs generated by giveaway programs....
The IPART announcement killed light bulb giveaways… Easy Being Green became insolvent and went into third-party administration in October 2007.
Carbon trading will give us countless more such stories, I’m afraid, only this time involving a lot more money transferred from you to them.
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This resonates with me. We have a couple of boxes of these things which I'm keeping as spares for bulbs already installed. The whole Carbon trading scheme will be found to be a mixture of naive optimism and outright fraud as opportunistic people set up carbon offset schemes that are never regulated or even inspected to see if they are real. At one stage recently I think it was the Russian Mafia that was running the majority of greenhouse reduction schemes in the EU beofre the price of carbon collapsed.
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