John Lazarus, Byron Bay
Buried in the attachments to last week’s Council Meeting was Council’s ‘Annual Greenhouse Emissions Inventory and Achieving Net Zero Emissions Target’, but it was all fake news.
Council now doesn’t count ‘scope 3’ emissions (which can account for 50 to 80 per cent of total construction emissions, including emissions from road works etc), and doesn’t count the emission increases from removing carbon capture forest.
Council’s stats do reveal, that despite a staff report ten years ago identifying major emission reductions through buying Green Energy electricity, that they haven’t, and they still buy coal/gas produced electricity.
Council’s emissions have been driving the death of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), and the deaths and destruction from the last fire season. And now Council has permanently ramped up its emissions by destroying the carbon capture forest for the Byron ‘bypass’.
Council is progressing major projects of a solar farm and a bio-energy plant, allegedly on the basis of reducing emissions. But neither project will achieve that as producing solar electricity doesn’t reduce emissions – the electricity buyer does [the potential green energy has to be bought by an energy provider to achieve the outcome of reducing emissions, the mere existence of the capacity to produce green energy is not enough]. And the bio-energy plant proposes to remove green waste and sewage sludge from composting, to produce methane gas.
Byron Council, the fake Greens, and other councillors are sabotaging our capacity to reduce our carbon emissions within the next ten years. Council’s Net Zero Emissions Target is propaganda.
