The BC Liberal Government, aided and abetted by the NDP opposition, continue to work to prop up the goofy Pacific Carbon Trust, a chronic tax-waster.

The PCT takes cash from government agencies—including schools, hospitals, and colleges—and spends it on carbon credits, so those agencies can be “carbon neutral,” as the government orders.

One problem: it’s just an elaborate corporate welfare scheme. That money flows to private companies like Encana, Interfor, Intrawest, Canfor, Lafarge, TimberWest, the Whistler Pan Pacific Mountainside, and the Whistler Westin, to pay for “carbon-reducing” projects.

We’ve done a lot on this, culminating with this piece. As first blogged here, 776,026 of the 783,816 tonnes of carbon dioxide credits purchased came from government agencies—your tax dollars. That’s 99% of the total work done. At the going rate of $25 a tonne, government agencies contribute $19.4 million to the PCT.  That number includes $4.4 million from school districts!

Even the environmentalists hate the PCT.

We say kill it, but government keeps trying to prop it up. The latest effort can be found in this Tyee article:

The government will look at how much public bodies pay for carbon offsets compared to what they actually cost as part of its review of the Pacific Carbon Trust, Environment Minister Terry Lake said in a recent interview.

"Over time, we want to make sure that whatever the public service is paying into it is kind of in balance with what they're buying those offsets for," said Lake.

Schools, health authorities and other public bodies are required by law to become carbon neutral by paying the Pacific Carbon Trust $25 for each tonne of greenhouse gasses they emit, regardless of what it costs the PCT to offset those emissions.

In 2010, that added up to $1.5 million for the University of British Columbia, $1.15 million for Vancouver Coastal Health and $663,998 for BC Housing. The Tyee published a full list in February.

While the PCT details on its website how many tonnes of offsets it buys from private companies that include Encana, Canfor, Timberwest and others, it does not say what it pays for them. Nor would a spokesperson for the agency provide that information, saying it can't for "competitive and contractual" reasons.

But the PCT appears to pay much less than $25 per tonne for the offsets it buys from the private sector to counter those public emissions.

So instead of wasting $19.4 million a year, government wants to waste $15 million. Ridiculous. Kill the Trust and move on.