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The Oregon Department of Transportation is unaccountable for routine cost overruns on major highway projects.  Nothing it has done has acknowledged or solved this decades old problem, and giving it billions more will fuel further cost overruns.

ODOT’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) misleadingly claim that 97 percent of projects are completed under budget.

ODOT is careful to define overruns only as costs after contracts are awarded:  this conceals ODOT staff’s consistent pattern of low-balling cost estimates to get  projects approved.

ODOT also has a practice of “re-baselining” a project—retroactively altering the initial cost estimate to conceal cost increases.

ODOT’s project database omits every large project that has experienced a cost overrun.  The agency’s Transportation Project Tracker dashboard lists only six tiny projects as having experienced cost overruns.  For example, there’s no mention of the Abernathy Bridge which has gone from $248 million to $815 million.

In recent correspondence with concerned citizens, ODOT staff simply omitted initial cost estimates, covering up a 47 percent cost overrun on the Iowa Street I-5 Viaduct project.

Accountability is the latest buzzword from highway builders:  they claim that after decades of repeated cost-overruns, that somehow ODOT will suddenly become “accountable” and that this will rein in over-spending running in to the billions dollars.

If you rocked up to cast your ballot on polling day a few weeks ago, you may have noticed it was a bit quieter than it used to be. More and more Australians are forgoing their democracy sausage – and more importantly – voting before the final days of the election campaign. In fact, only 45% of Australians voted on election day, a record low that could be hampering Australians’ collective democracy.

Despite the shortest pre-poll period in living memory, with booths opening only 11 days out from the election (over a week later than in 2019), Australians set pre-poll records several times during the campaign.

Figure 1: Pre-poll votes in the days before Federal elections 

(Source: AEC)

But in the case of Climate Active, it’s the government itself running the scheme — and promoting it.

While claiming to crack down on greenwashing, the Australian government has been quietly enabling it for years.

I previously worked on the Climate Active program and understand the intent behind it.

But intent is no substitute for integrity.

And the scheme’s reliance on carbon offsets — combined with limited transparency, no assessment of real-world emissions trajectories, and endorsement of claims that may be impossible to prove — has turned it into a high-risk proposition.

Climate Active is not just misleading — it’s dangerous. It exposes businesses to legal risk, investors to financial risk, and consumers to outright deception. And now, with Energy Australia taken to court over its long-standing “carbon neutral” claims, the consequences are finally surfacing.

Here’s how the scheme works. Climate Active certifies organisations and products as “carbon neutral” if they offset their emissions using carbon credits — even if those emissions are increasing.

The offsets themselves are often of questionable quality and permanence. But once the box is ticked, the government puts its name behind the claim.

• Full time (Part Time negotiable), Fixed term for 3 years
• Work with a team of interdisciplinary researchers and doctoral students building a conceptual and empirical map of the emerging Climate Economy in Australia
• Academic Level A, Base Salary from $109,301 + 17% superannuation 

About the opportunity

The School of Social and Political Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the School of Geosciences in the Faculty of Science at The University of Sydney are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to work on a joint project: The Climate Economy: Emerging Strategies for Australia.

This project explores Australia’s emerging Climate Economy, investigating how climate change challenges conventional economic policy paradigms and redefines political economic concepts and practices. We want to understand how the pressures of climate change are reshaping governance, investment, and policy strategies in unexpected ways. Our approach highlights the hybrid nature of this new political economic configuration, where public and private actors are taking on new roles and producing new economic geographies, financial instruments are being reimagined, and economic and sociospatial outcomes must be measured in novel ways. By mapping and evaluating Australia’s Climate Economy, we aim to provide new frameworks for understanding and democratising the economic policies that will define a climate-changed future.