Net-zero integrity

The UN's climate process has been corrupted by rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and creative accounting.

The Drax energy company boasts that it is the UK's largest source of renewable energy. Which is curious, since its key asset, Drax Power Station, is the most carbon-intensive generator in the country.

The story of Drax serves as a cautionary tale for Australia, as it grapples with the contradictions of net-zero.

However well-intentioned the UN's climate change initiative may have been, the process has been deeply corrupted by rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and creative accounting.

Nonsensical rules, such as the one that allows Drax's carbon footprint to disappear, are ruthlessly exploited by corporations marketing themselves as champions of a low-cost, green energy future.

Governments participate in this scam because every tonne of emissions saved is something to boast about, whether the savings are real or not. The climate-obsessed elite have no desire to start tugging at loose threads, perhaps out of the fear that the whole suit of clothes will unravel.

At the start of the century, Drax was the largest coal-fired power station in Europe, in dire need of a refit in which no one was willing to invest.

In 2006, the IPCC reaffirmed an earlier ruling that burning biofuel is carbon neutral. It was followed by a European Directive that bio-energy would be reclassified as renewable and therefore eligible for subsidies.

Drax changed its business model from an energy producer to a subsidy sponge. It converted its boiler to run on wood pellets and established a supply chain in the United States and Canada. Drax invested in string of processing plants where offcuts, low-grade timber and other organic matter were compressed and dried.

The pellets are trucked to North American ports, loaded onto bulk-carriers, shipped to ports in northern England and loaded onto trains (diesel-hauled, if you care to ask).

In his 2010 book, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, historian E.A. Wrigley concludes that the shift from a wood-burning organic economy to a