Greens don’t walk the walk

Thomas Cranmer reports:

In 2019 Green co-leader James Shaw defended his high international travel expenses, explaining it’s offset by planting trees and informing the public that the Green Party offsets all travel through tree-planting, something he said he’d “recommend people do”.

So earlier this week I asked the Green Party how much each Green MP had offset their air travel by way of tree-planting or other means for each of the years 2021, 2022 and 2023. The party’s response was to direct me to a parliamentary press release from 2020 which stated that Parliament would be installing solar PV on the roof of the historic Parliament House and that the savings made through this initiative would be used to offset MP’s travel.

However, the project was delayed and the panels were only finally installed in stages on the roof of Parliament House over the last six months of 2022!

So the reality is that the Greens were not offsetting their carbon emissions, despite insisting everyone else must move to be carbon neutral.