Industry giant GreenCollar attacks green activists as big business abandons carbon scheme

A major carbon player has joined dozens of corporates walking away from the federal government’s flagship carbon offsets scheme.

Green Collar co-founder James Schultz.

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Australia’s largest developer of carbon market projects, GreenCollar, has quit the federal government’s carbon emissions program and broken ranks with the industry to accuse green activists of hijacking the scheme as part of an anti-fossil fuels agenda.

GreenCollar, the country’s largest environmental markets investor, abandoned the government scheme, known as Climate Active, on May 5, marking one of the highest-profile corporates to shut the door on the offset program as the sector battles integrity accusations.

Pressure is now growing on the federal government to scrap the program after dozens of big businesses walked away. The rift over carbon credits, bought by polluters to offset their emissions, threatens to derail a key plank of Labor’s bid to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

The co-founder of Green­Collar, James Schultz, said the government program had become too risky for businesses, with activist groups tarring the carbon credit scheme as a greenwashing front for fossil fuel producers. “Climate Active has been ­attacked and attacked and ­attacked. Here is our best opportunity to actually change things around, and we’re blowing it up,” Mr Schultz said.

“The debate has been entirely captured by a group of organisations that want to paint everything through a lens of good and bad. Offsets supporting fossil fuel industry equals bad.”

GreenCollar, backed by Canada’s $400bn Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, develops carbon projects, including revegetation, soil carbon development and savannah burning, to reduce carbon levels on behalf of Australian companies and investments. The company has 300 projects and manages more than three million hectares of land across Australia.

Labor is already juggling a raft of contentious calls on the ­broader issue, with green groups telling new Environment Minister Murray Watt he has a mandate to block Woodside Energy’s $30bn North West Shelf gas plant extension in Western Australia.

The Climate Change Auth­ority is also weeks from finalising its advice on an upgraded 2035 emissions-­reduction target, which will be more aggressive than Labor’s current 2030 pledge to slash emissions by 43 per cent.

Parents for Climate, a registered charity, last week successfully argued that Energy­Australia’s promotion of its Go Neutral product gave consumers the impression they were meaningfully reducing emissions. In ­reality, the program relied on international carbon credits – some of which have been heavily criticised for questionable effectiveness in abating carbon pollution. EnergyAustralia settled the case and said there was legitimate public concern about the ­efficacy of these programs including Climate Active, a voluntary initiative encouraging business to measure and offset emissions.

Mr Schultz said the Climate Active scheme required reform, but he was worried it might be killed by blanket green activism that has eroded confidence in the carbon credit system.

“People are leaving not ­because they necessarily think it doesn’t work; they’re not leaving because they think projects are good or bad, they’re leaving ­because – and I say this as somebody from the green movement – this is one of the biggest own goals of the green movement ever,” Mr Schultz said. “Why people are leaving is that there’s no benefit to participating anymore. If all that you get is a court case from some not-for-profit that’s being funded to attack the fossil fuel industry … you’re not going to participate.

“It has been kind of hijacked by this offset good, offset bad argument, and until we can show that there is real value and benefit to participating organisations, why are they going to participate? Because you’re just taking reputational risk on to your balance sheet if you participate.”

Assistant Energy Minister Josh Wilson said the government recognised the industry wanted certainty on Climate Active reforms. “We recognise that Climate Active needs reform and that work is under way as a priority that will involve proper consultation,” a spokesman for Mr Wilson said.

“We have also reviewed and reformed the Australian carbon credit scheme to ensure that its credits have the highest level of integrity.”

In April, the Carbon Market Institute said corporate Australia was frustrated the federal government’s net-zero emissions program had not modernised and evolved to head off greenwashing claims.

GreenCollar developed some of the first projects under the Carbon Farming Initiative in 2011 and is now the largest provider of nature-based carbon abatement in Australia.

Mr Schultz said carbon markets remained the right mechanism to address climate change and urged a compromise to ensure hard work in the sector was not wasted.

“From our point of view, the reason these markets were put in place was to drive large scale finance back into the land sector, where we need trillions of dollars of investment to solve climate and conservation problems across our private land estate. And this is entirely absent from any discussion in Australia at the moment. And it’s … very, very disappointing.”

More than 100 companies had already left Climate Active in the past 18 months. The program offers certificates to those engaged in carbon abatement, and allows users to purchase carbon credits to offset their emissions with the aim of hitting net-zero targets.

The GreenCollar chief said a broadside against carbon credits was not going to mean the demise of fossil fuel producers.

“They’re interested in the conversation that says we want to get rid of offsets, because we think that’s going to allow the fossil fuel industry to persist. Well, carbon offsets is not what’s going to keep the fossil fuel industry alive,” he said.

“You’ll find no argument from me that we need to reduce reliance on coal and gas, but we can’t think about that in isolation from how are we going to mobilise finance to invest in the land sector.”

Mr Wilson has held a series of meetings with organisations such as the Carbon Market Institute, assuring the industry that there were no plans to dismantle Climate Active.

Originally published as Industry giant GreenCollar attacks green activists as big business abandons carbon scheme