“A commitment from the government to back a disallowance motion on the 2022 Plantation Forestry method would be a strong signal they are committed to ensuring we walk the talk.
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“We simply can’t afford a low target and to be going forward with poor policy from the last parliament that puts questionable carbon credits into the system.”
Pocock has advice from Senate officials that a disallowance can be lodged before October 25 and the last date to move the disallowance motion would be November 30.
Pocock and Lambie are also concerned about a separate way of claiming ACCUs, known as the landfill gas generation method, because it could reward companies that change operations such as gas flaring.
The government gained a major victory in the House of Representatives last week by securing support from the Greens and most of the independent MPs on the crossbench to legislate the 43 per cent target in a law that says the government could increase but not decrease the target.
“I’m very, very confident it will pass the Senate. Very, very confident,” Bowen told the Nine Network on Sunday.
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“Australians would expect a government of grown-ups to get on with the job and talk to people of goodwill to make sure that we have a good, solid climate bill.”
Pocock has put his concerns on the agenda in his negotiations with the government to influence his vote on the climate change target after a meeting with Bowen last Wednesday failed to reach a settlement on the bill, which is likely to be decided in the upper house next month.
The ACCU regime is under intense scrutiny after the former head of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, Andrew Macintosh of the Australian National University, went public in March with concerns about fraud within the regime.
Writing in The Conversation Last month, Professor Macintosh and colleagues Megan Evans and Don Butler said their analysis showed there were credits in the system for emissions reductions that were not real.
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“Our analysis found credits have been issued for emissions reductions that were not real or additional, such as protecting forests that were never going to be cleared, growing trees that were already there, growing forests in places that will never sustain them permanently. [and] large landfills operating electricity generators that would have operated anyway,” they wrote.
Bowen has announced a review of the Emissions Reduction Fund by former chief scientist Ian Chubb but Pocock said the plantation rules needed to be stopped immediately to prevent the ACCUs from being issued in the first place.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.