(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

“The safeguard mechanism requires Australia’s largest greenhouse gas emitters to keep their net emissions below an emissions limit [a baseline],” says Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s department.

But there’s a reason why even the Business Council thinks the safeguard mechanism in its current form is rubbish and needs to be significantly overhauled. And Labor agrees. It is willing to risk a scare campaign from Scott Morrison and his Liberal “moderates” in proposing to implement the BCA’s recommendations.

It’s because the mechanism does nothing but safeguard the right of big emitters to increase their emissions well above any “baseline”.

In 2017, Anglo-American committed to a baseline for its Capcoal coalmine in Queensland of 1.98 million tonnes of scope 1 (i.e. direct from production) emissions. In early 2019, it confessed to the Clean Energy Regulator in documents secured under freedom of information laws by the Australian Conservation Foundation that it had in fact produced 2.15 million tonnes in 2018. Worse, it was going to produce 2.2 million tonnes in 2019 and 2.19 million tonnes in 2020.

No problem, though — it asked the regulator to assess its emissions over three years, not one, and promised to hire a consulting firm to help it sell some carbon credits and maybe participate in a project funded by the government’s “soil magic” emissions reduction fund.

The application was late but the regulator kindly allowed it anyway and waved it through: Anglo-American could have three years to get its emissions down below the baseline by flogging some credits and finding some offsets.

But wouldn’t you know it, goshdarnit, come the end of the 2020 financial year and Anglo-American still found itself inconveniently 800,000-odd tonnes above it “safeguard” level — a “large blowout”, it admitted, but a one-off, it assured the Clean Energy Regulator. Help was once again at hand: the regulator extended the three-year reporting period to four years, into this year. Hey, there was a pandemic, after all. Although Anglo-American claimed elsewhere “we have exceeded baselines due to geological or operational issues, and in ensuring the safety of our people”.

Under Taylor’s “press here for an exemption” safeguard mechanism, there’s precisely zero safeguarding of anything other than the right of fossil fuel companies to pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they can.