Australia’s big polluters rely on carbon offsets for climate credibility. But the system looks like a house of cards | Adam Morton

Credits are treated as a like-for-like swap for emissions, but carbon stored in nature is entirely different to burning millennia-old fossil fuels

The fight within the Greens that led senators to cross the floor last week over koala protection in a national park may have finally put a spotlight on a bigger issue – one at the heart of much of Australia’s promise to act on the climate crisis. It’s this: the country and its polluting industries are too reliant on carbon offsets. The more reliance is placed on them, the more they look like a house of cards.

Offsets can be a mind-deadening subject, but they matter. In Australia, they are known as Australian Carbon Credit Units. Each credit is said to represent one tonne of greenhouse gas that isn’t in the atmosphere and otherwise would have been. They are mostly generated from government-sanctioned projects that are meant to regenerate forests or capture and burn methane released from landfill sites.

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