THE two North Shore school districts and Capilano University paid almost $228,000 in carbon offset costs last year, while the Vancouver Health Authority paid almost $1.8 million in offsets under a provincial scheme that Auditor General John Doyle has criticized as doing little to make the province carbon neutral.
Under provincial government legislation, all public sector organizations, including schools, universities and health authorities must measure their greenhouse gas emissions, work towards reducing those and buy carbon offsets through the Pacific Carbon Trust to make up for what they can't reduce.
Most of the government bodies that pay carbon offsets have tried to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by making sure renovations, construction and equipment upgrades take energy-efficiency into account, reducing natural gas and electricity consumption and switching to fuel-efficient vehicles.
School districts get that money back from the province. But in a report released this week, the auditor general sharply criticized the scheme, saying most of the projects financed by those offset purchases do little to improve the province's carbon footprint.
Doyle called into question two projects that accounted for most of the money handed out by the Pacific Carbon Trust, saying they overestimated their impacts in reducing greenhouse gases or would have gone ahead regardless of whether they received the offset money.
Offsets can only be credible, he wrote, if that money "is the tipping point in moving forward on a project. It must be an incentive, not a subsidy" for the reduction of greenhouse gases.
But neither of the two projects he examined "was able to demonstrate that the sale of offsets was needed for the project to be implemented," he wrote.
Doyle's report, released Wednesday, prompted calls from critics to either scrap or change the carbon offset program, which they said is taking money from public institutions without doing much to help the planet.
Jordan Bateman, B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, called on the province to scrap the requirement for the public sector to pay carbon offsets, saying trying to "jump start" greenhouse gas reductions "on the backs of schools and hospitals doesn't make sense."
"Do we really consider a hospital heating its buildings or sterilizing its tools to be a major polluter we need to tackle?"
Craig Keating, NDP candidate for North Vancouver-Lonsdale, said the report echoed "concerns have been raised for a long time about how (the offset program) is currently structured."
Keating stopped short of saying the program should be cancelled, but said, "We need to have a broader societal approach" to greenhouse gas emission targets.
He called for more oversight of the carbon trust, saying the program "needs to be fixed."
The province's environment ministry rejected Doyle's conclusions that the government hasn't met its objectives of becoming carbon neutral. Environment Minister Terry Lake said Doyle's report only focused on B.C.'s first year as carbon neutral and added the offset system is based on international standards, and vetted by experts.
Jane Thornthwaite, MLA for North Vancouver-Seymour, also defended the government's carbon offset program.
"It is working the way it is supposed to," she said. She said the auditor general didn't pay attention to experts who questioned his conclusions.
"The auditor general, like government, has to be held accountable," she said.
