Untouchables: Behind Keane & Labor’s great carbon credit grift

By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
NOT even the mainstream media, enamoured as they are with all things green and sustainable, could cover up the obvious conflict of interest of Climate Change Authority chairman Matt Keane taking up a job as director of strategic partnerships and regulatory affairs at Wollemi Capital, a private climate and environmental investment fund.

“In other words, Kean will advise the government on climate policy while also representing a company whose profits rely on these policy settings,” noted Nick Feik of Crikey News after the appointment last year.

Cairns News has emailed Wollemi Capital, asking them how this appointment is not a type of insider trading. Under Australian law it is a “white collar crime” that attracts severe criminal penalties, including imprisonment, fines and convictions.

“It is the practice of deriving a benefit or causing a loss as a result of using otherwise non-publicly available information to trade in stock exchange of buying or selling shares or other securities of listed companies,” notes Criminal Defence Lawyers Australia’s website.

We would be surprised if Wollemi Capital responds to our questions. Australia’s so-called Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen, pathetically quoted from the Climate Change Authority Act to defend the appointment, claiming “CCA members are required to have expertise in areas relevant to the authority’s important work.”

As pointed out by Crikey’s Nick Feik: “Bowen neglected to mention the other part of the Climate Change Authority Act, which states board members “must not engage in paid employment that conflicts or may conflict with the proper performance of their duties”.

The corrupt appointment didn’t go unnoticed by Senator Malcolm Roberts, who said last September: “Corruption and conflicts of interest are rife in government. Very few are as blatant as former Minister Matt Kean, who will be chairing the agency helping to set the price of carbon credits while getting paid by an investment company that makes money out of carbon credits!

“End the net-zero pipe dream and this will all go away,” Roberts told the Senate.

“Matt Kean is chair of the government agency that helps set the price of carbon credits while he works for a company that will make money out of carbon credits. It seems that Australia has the best politicians that money can buy.”

But do Bowen, or Keane or Albo or the oh so green, caring and sharing venture capitalists from Wollemi Capital worry about being accused of corrupt behaviour? Absolutely not. They are the untouchables, who can call on the finest QCs in the land at the drop of a hat should anyone dare charge them with an offence. It’s all plausibly deniable.

As for Wollemi Capital, it’s an exercise in green corporate grifting at its finest. As we know, the federal government hands out billions in subsidies to all things touted as “green and sustainable”, like the fraudulent wind farms scarring the landscape across the country.

Call it “green”, call it “sustainable”, call it “decarbonising” and the Wollemi crew with their banker connections will funnel the money to your “planet-saving” venture – for a nice, fat little fee of course. And Bowen and company will even throw in a few 10K here and there to facilitate the deal. After all, they are partners in saving the planet too.

Wollemi Capital’s investments include a carbon credit platform, so-called agtech startups that sequester carbon, and native forest regeneration projects that also attract carbon credits. Carbon credits are of course, the great scam behind the “transition to net zero”.

If your business invests in things “green and sustainable” – which could be something as useless as a fenced-off farm out west somewhere left to grow over and host feral pigs and dogs – you can earn carbon credits that can be traded on an open market.

Perhaps CCA member and ex-NSW Farmers Federation chief Fiona Simson could tell us why it’s such a virtuous thing for farmland to be left an unproductive feral animal and fire trap while earning carbon credits on the alleged tonnage of carbon emissions it saves?

But our woke wonderwoman Fiona, of course, has left local agri-politics and has gone global, and is now vice-president of the UN-affiliated World Farmers Organisation, based in Rome. The WFO is all for Agenda 2030, which would explain why Fiona thinks carbon credits are such a wonderful idea.

Keane and the CCA meanwhile, advise the government on managing emission targets in addition to every screwball scheme or business designed to achieve “carbon abatement”. Wollemi, of course, will profit from all the policy advice passed on by their boy Keane.

Another CCA board member with a conflict of interest is Patty Akopiantz, who is a co-founder of Assembly Climate Capital, another environmental investment fund that profits from the growth of carbon markets. Akopiantz is also a director and investor in SeaForest, an agricultural seaweed venture that bangs on about its green credentials.

SeaForest produces a seaweed supplement that reduces livestock burps, that constitute an infinitestimal almost unmeasurable amount of methane to the atmosphere. Nevertheless, it’s a fantastic virtue signal in the noble struggle against climate change.

Then we have CCA’s former chairman Grant King, a former gas company executive who concurrent with his CCA role chaired GreenCollar, one of the largest carbon-credits aggregator in Australia.

The current deputy CCA chairman Susie Smith, as a former manager at gas company Santos was also named as having potential interest conflict. But as chief executive of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, she is merely pushing the fossil-fuel industry into the UN-backed transition to net zero. 

Under the federal government’s emissions reduction legislation, the nation’s largest “polluters” (that is companies that consume large amounts of energy) are forced to gradually reduce emissions or buy carbon credits allegedly representing the equivalent amount of emission reduction.

More than two years ago, the left wing academic Professor Andrew McIntosh described the carbon market as “largely a sham” and that most approved carbon credits do not represent real or new cuts – if that mattered.

He and others are upset that Australia’s booming fossil fuel exports don’t need to be offset in addition to the fact that it’s cheaper for companies to buy carbon credits than to actually reduce their emissions. Woodside, for instance, has already bought all the credits they need to 2030, to avoid having to reduce real emissions.

Perhaps it’s a sham reflecting the sober realisation by the powers that be that they could seriously harm economies by forcing the hydrocarbon fuel sector that is essential for modern economies to function, to spend billions of dollars on cutting emissions, a cost that would simply be passed on to consumers.

So the alternative path is carbon credits, a new economic model that means nothing to the man in the street but creates all sorts of opportunities for environmental impact investment funds and others on the inside, who justify it all by reveling in their environmental virtue signalling.

As noted by the left-leaning Crikey: “This new investor class often comprises the very same people who sit on the boards of the government authorities, regulators and funding agencies that shape the investment terrain, as well as on the big environmental NGO boards.

“If this investor class has its way, the carbon markets will be flooded with mangrove, seaweed, soil, reef and even plastic credits. All of these are to mitigate the ongoing operations of the fossil fuel industry, something Labor is openly committed to. Mitigate? Let’s call it what it is: enable.”

Crikey goes on to complain that “After promising real climate action to the electorate, Labor’s main achievements have been to subsidise the expansion of the gas industry, continue to approve new fields and coal mine extensions, introduce a broken safeguard mechanism, fail to introduce climate triggers or any significant new environmental protection legislation, and maintain fossil fuel industry subsidies to the tune of $10 billion per year.”

Maybe Labor are not as stupid as we think, although Bowen has been doing his best to keep the Greens on side by push renewables with their grossly expensive connection network.