Source : the age
Australia’s third-largest domestic polluter has apologised to customers who bought into its “Go Neutral” carbon offsets program, acknowledging the product would do nothing to address the impact of fossil fuels on climate change.
“Burning fossil fuels creates greenhouse gas emissions that are not prevented or undone by carbon offsets. This could have been made clearer to customers,” EnergyAustralia said in a public apology issued as part of a settlement with the charity, Parents for Climate.
EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn Power Station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.Credit: Bloomberg
The group took the energy retailer to the Federal Court alleging the company had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct.
More than 400,000 Australians signed up to EnergyAustralia’s “Go Neutral” program, which assured customers they were “doing good things for the environment”.
The program promised to “offset” the emissions produced by burning fossil fuels with a range of programs, including buying carbon credits from a geothermal development in Indonesia.
It now admits that offsets cannot undo or prevent the harm caused by polluting fossil fuels.
“Even with carbon offsetting, the emissions released from burning fossil fuels for a customer’s energy use still contribute to climate change,” the company said in a statement released on Sunday.
The company acknowledged that even when customers opted in to the “Go Neutral” product, their electricity or gas use was still sourced predominantly from fossil fuels.
“Today, EnergyAustralia acknowledges that carbon offsetting is not the most effective way to assist customers to reduce their emissions and apologises to any customer who felt that the way it marketed its Go Neutral products was unclear,” it said. “Storing carbon in plants is not equivalent to keeping it stored in fossil fuels (by not burning those fossil fuels in the first place).”
EnergyAustralia, formerly TRUenergy, sources its energy primarily from coal and owns the Yallourn and Mt Piper power stations. The company has 1.6 million customers and has committed to transitioning from coal by 2040 and reaching net zero by 2050.
In the statement, EnergyAustralia admitted there were “legitimate concerns about organisations using carbon-neutrality marketing claims based on the use of carbon offsets, which may cause some consumers to think there is no environmental impact from a product or service offered by a business”.
Carbon-offsetting has been a prominent part of Australia’s response to the climate crisis.
Under the Australian government’s voluntary certification register, Climate Active, companies joined to report their carbon emissions and the offsets they are buying, to then promote their “carbon-neutrality” to customers.
This masthead revealed in February that some of Australia’s biggest companies, including Australia Post, Canva, Telstra and PwC, have since quit the scheme over mounting integrity concerns.
More than 100 companies have now left the scheme in the past 2½ years, including the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the federal government’s $30 billion “green bank”.
EnergyAustralia will remain in the scheme but the company’s chief customer officer, Kate Gibson, said there were concerns about the value of the program.
“While EnergyAustralia participated in the Climate Active certified carbon offset program in good faith, today EnergyAustralia accepts that there is legitimate public concern about the efficacy of these programs,” she said.
“Carbon offsets should not be used to delay or diminish the important work that needs to be done to actively decarbonise. EnergyAustralia is now focused on more effective ways of helping its customers to directly reduce the emissions associated with their energy use.”
Parents for Climate chief executive Nic Seton said his members believed EnergyAustralia’s marketing of “Go Neutral” amounted to greenwashing. “Climate claims must be backed by real action – not marketing spin,” he said.
“EnergyAustralia’s statement makes clear that offsets should not be used as a licence to pollute. It is no longer tenable to market polluting products as ‘carbon-neutral’ and lead customers to believe that by signing up they are doing good for the planet.”
Nic Seton, the chief executive of Parents for Climate, which took the court action.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Equity Generation Lawyers principal lawyer David Hertzberg, representing Parents for Climate, said EnergyAustralia had acknowledged his client’s key argument that carbon offsets do not undo the harm to the climate of burning fossil fuels.
“Our client hopes that today’s clear statement from EnergyAustralia sets a new standard for corporate conduct around the use of offsets and climate claims,” he said.
“Companies need to seriously consider whether the environmental claims they make stack up – particularly, as this case shows, when claiming that their polluting products are ‘carbon-neutral’.”
