Energy Minister Chris Bowen (Image: AAP/Rohan Thomson)

The government is attracting lots of good headlines for its Victorian “rewiring the nation” announcement today — a $750 million loan for an interconnector between NSW and Victoria, and an end to the stalemate over who will fund the Marinus Link across Bass Strait, $1.5 billion for renewable energy funding, including offshore wind.

On the vexing issue of the approval processes that dog electricity infrastructure projects, there’s only a promise of “coordination” between state and federal governments.

The funding is significant and welcome, and a sharp contrast with the previous government, in which a lazy energy minister only got out of bed to devise ways to keep coal-fired power stations going.

But in other core areas of energy policy, Australia continues to look a lot like it’s still in the Morrison years.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen early on tapped former chief scientist Ian Chubb to lead a review of the integrity of Australian carbon credit units. That review will report by December. Meanwhile, Bowen has cracked on with reforming the safeguard mechanism, which will form the heart of Labor’s domestic emissions reduction policy.

Australian carbon credit units are fundamental to that policy: polluters emitting CO2-equivalent levels above a descending baseline must either reduce those emissions or purchase them (the government has ruled out the purchase of international credits).

But the whole system is worthless if they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, and it’s become clearer over the past year that that is exactly the case.

The Morrison government debauched and devalued ACCUs and nobbled the so-called Clean Energy Regulator, a now wholly discredited body charged with running the ACCU market as well as operating the Coalition’s disastrous emissions reduction fund.

The Australia Institute, in its submission to the Chubb review, has bundled up several of its recent reports on ACCUs, the CER and other aspects of the Morrison era of climate denialism. In aggregate, the conclusions are stunning — the entire system of ACCUs and the operation of the ERF has been — to put it charitably — greenwashing of the highest order.

A particular case surrounds the always important issue of “additionality” of Australian carbon credit units — do they represent CO2 emissions that have actually been abated? The CER can provide no assurance of that — especially the 20% of ACCUs reliant on avoided deforestation.

Those credits work like this: if a landholder has a permit to bulldoze forest and doesn’t do so, they can get an ACCU. Except, how can you guarantee they wouldn’t have left that land uncleared anyway? (Never mind more complicated issues like how a drought or a flood or a bushfire might simply obliterate the trees anyway, liberating the carbon “stored” back into the atmosphere.) As the Australia Institute pointed out earlier this year, in allocating permits for avoided deforestation, the CER made some truly ridiculous assumptions — like that rates of land-clearing would in the absence of ACCUs surge between 750 and 12,000%.

The CER, already discredited by the revelations of Andrew Macintosh about the lack of integrity of ACCUs, hit back at the Australia Institute, claiming it misunderstood how ACCUs from avoided deforestation worked. Except, astonishingly, it was the CER that didn’t understand its own scheme — it claimed that the ACCUs were designed to cover a “permanence” period of up to 100 years, when its scheme design makes clear the ACCUs reflect the avoided deforestation over 15 years.

That’s before we get to the inclusion of another discredited carbon abatement method, carbon capture and storage, in the ERF by the Morrison government at the request of former fossil-fuel industry executive Grant King. As the Australia Institute points out, the entire design for the inclusion of CCS in the ERF was carried out by fossil-fuel companies in secret.

The extent to which the Chubb review is tackling these issues is unclear. The government continues to spruik CCS as a credible method despite all evidence against it; the CER continues to function, despite all the evidence against it. The Chubb review team also includes two business figures who make money from carbon credit trading markets, and the secretariat includes staff from the CER and designers of the avoided deforestation method.

The Chubb review might come good, find that large numbers of ACCUs are worthless, recommend far more stringent requirements for additional verification, and the replacement of the CER with a credible body. But anything less would leave a hopelessly discredited system in place — one in which business, government and politicians have a strong vested interest as method of greenwashing. There will be a lot of opposition to any serious fix of a badly broken ACCU system.

All of these relate to what are called “Scope 1”, or direct emissions. Much of Australia’s contribution to global emissions comes via our fossil-fuel exports. The government’s policies on enabling gas exports, and allowing fossil-fuel companies to pretend to offset them with CCS, is indistinguishable from the previous government. So too is its direct subsidisation of gas exports — including the $1.5 billion free infrastructure it is intending to build in Darwin — without any business case — for gas exports, and the inland rail (albeit under review) project which is designed for coal exports..

The continuing theme of this government on climate is miles better than its predecessor, but still far too invested in fossil fuels. Literally.