Editor: The Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT) is a B.C. Crown corporation. It was enacted in 2008 as the Liberals committed to a carbon neutral government. It operates pursuant to the ministry of environment’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act and Emission Offsets Regulation.
PCT was conceived mainly on the ideological theory that CO2 is a bad greenhouse gas that supposedly contributes to global warming. If you cause so-called greenhouse gasses to be produced by your activity, (mainly through the use of fossil fuels) you pay an offsetting penalty.
This elaborate scheme has grown into an ever-increasing bureaucracy employing thousands of people directly and indirectly. They produce absolutely nothing tangible, just nebulous CO2 molecules translated into carbon credits to be compiled and traded.
PCT imposes huge costs on all public sector operations, some 163 services, institutions and organizations, by forcing them to pay the PCT $25/tonne for their GHG emissions annually. Over $50 million have been siphoned from public sector operating budgets in the last three years.
This includes all ministries, agencies, schools, colleges, universities, health care, child and family services, hospitals, Crown corporations, BC Hydro, municipalities, their buildings, fire departments and public works.
This public money is then re-circulated to private entities (like Encana and environmental organizations) supposedly to enable GHG emission reducing projects.
For example, Nature Conservancy (one of the biggest and wealthiest environmental tax-exempt organizations in the world), received $4.5 million of our tax dollars to help them buy a forest in the Kootenays that they already owned.
This money for Darkwoods forest was given on the basis of not harvesting the trees. thereby reducing GHG emissions.
With this logic, if I don’t mow my lawn or cut down my trees, could I qualify for carbon credits and government money too?
The PCT paid out $13 million in public funds to companies who have donated over $2.5 million to the Liberal party, according to Bob Simpson, MLA for Cariboo North.
If this isn’t a money laundering scheme of tax dollars into political donations, then I must be one of P.T. Barnum’s favourite dupes.
The Auditor General produced an audit report exposing PCT for what it is and is not. The government is not carbon neutral. The carbon offset projects are not credible.
PCT mounted a concerted attack on the auditor general’s office, in an attempt to discredit his audit before it was released.
In my opinion, PCT appears to be an incestuous exchange of favours and deception which has tentacles deep into the Liberal government.
It appears John Cummins knew this all along, as the BC Conservatives are the only party with a transparent mandate to eliminate the cynical carbon bureaucracy of fraud and corruption.
Roland Seguin,
Langley
