The Department of Agriculture has been accused of deliberately muddying the waters around the ownership of carbon removals from farmland and forestry.
John Hourigan of the Carbon Removals Action Group (CRAG) said there was a “total absence of clarity” around the trading of carbon credits from farming.
And he claimed that comments made by the Department’s secretary general Brendan Gleeson to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture had added to the confusion.
The comments illustrated the Government’s “useful confusion” in relation to carbon credits and carbon farming, the CRAG chair said.
Gleeson told the Oireachtas committee that the “State does not claim it owns carbon credits and will not be trading carbon credits from forestry”.
Count reductions
However, he maintained that the Government needed to be able to “count carbon reductions” in the national inventory so that the State can accurately calculate changes to the country’s overall emission levels.
“Brendan Gleeson’s contribution on carbon trading at the joint Oireachtas committee continues the Government policy of keeping the waters muddy,” Hourigan maintained.
“Gleeson said farmers could trade their carbon credits. This must mean they own these carbon credits, as I don’t believe anyone can sell something they don’t own,” he pointed out.
Issue
However, the CRAG chair noted that at no point did Gleeson categorically say that farmers owned their carbon removals.
Hourigan also took issue with the fact that farmers are not allowed, under the current regime, to use carbon removals generated by their grassland, peatland and forestry to offset the farm’s overall emissions.
“So, the Government is telling farmers they can sell their carbon credits or removals to reduce someone else’s carbon footprint, but, because of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] inventory system - which our Government signed us up to - we can't use these removals against our own farm emissions,” he said.
The CRAG chair described this situation as “absolutely unfair and unacceptable”.
“It is Government policy that we [farmers] become net carbon neutral, but it is also Government policy to prevent any farmer becoming carbon neutral by insisting he or she cannot use their own removals,” Hourigan pointed out.
Meanwhile, at a recent Teagasc conference on carbon farming, Christian Holzleitner of the European Commission’s climate wing said it will be “perfectly possible” in the near future for farmers to sell carbon credits.
Ireland’s carbon farming working group is expected to publish a draft of the national carbon farming framework later in the summer. The framework will set out how carbon farming will work in practice.
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