Who’s the Real Cheat Here? Climate Cheats II: The Dozen Dirty Businesses – Gareth Morgan Foundation

Our first report Climate Cheats showed that NZ was the biggest user of fraudulent carbon credits from Ukraine and Russia

The Government responded saying that they didn’t purchase the credits, companies did. This is despite NZ being the only Emissions Trading Scheme in the world that allowed the use of these units from 2013-2015.

So we decided to look at which companies bought the most of these credits. The data isn’t perfect, but it gives some interesting results:

1. NZ Steel made big profits from buying fraudulent foreign units and selling or banking the (more valuable) free units they got from Government; essentially profiting from polluting.

2. The power and petrol companies, led by BP but including Z, Caltex and Genesis, were the biggest users of fraudulent units. They claim they did this to provide the best deal for their customers, but interestingly Mobil didn’t purchase any of these units and somehow remained competitive.

3. Some forestry companies also bought the units. Some of these may have been engaging in a rort similar to NZ Steel, but it is hard to tell which companies did this.

We want these businesses to join our call for the Government to ‘dump the junk’. At the very least Government should not carry forward any surplus units past 2020; the only reason we have these surplus units is because we traded in fraudulent foreign units in the past.

Without the Government stepping in to right the wrong, any company wishing to clear themselves of being implicit in greenwashing faces a potentially large liability.