Censored former Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) economist Clive Spash spoke in Melbourne on Tuesday to talk to climate activists about why he resigned from the CSIRO late last year.

But Spash has recently returned to Australia for the first time since his paper was publicly released in December after Senator Christine Milne raised the issue in federal parliament, prompting the government to make his work public.

Spash will talk to climate change activists at two public meetings at Melbourne University about the failures of carbon trading and alternative approaches that could actually deliver action on climate change.

Spash wrote his paper because he has met “many committed environmentalists who have their doubts about emissions trading but have lacked a way to articulate this or a document offering a dispassionate analysis of the critical issues. That is what I tried to offer in my work.”

“Anyone concerned about climate change needs to understand why carbon trading won’t work,” he says.

“Corporate interests have manipulated the design of carbon trading schemes to grab windfall profits. The problems with carbon trading run so deep, from the use of shonky offsets to difficulties in measuring emissions, that they cannot be designed away.”

His paper concludes that carbon trading is designed to “give the public appearance that action is being undertaken. The reality is that greenhouse gases are increasing and society is avoiding the need to address the problem.”

At the beginning of 2009 Clive Spash wrote a paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, that was critical of Australia’s carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) and argued redesign would not address the concerns raised.

The paper had been both internally and internationally peer reviewed, and was accepted for publication by New Political Economy, when CSIRO management first decided to prevent publication.