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I'm always suspicious about carbon offsets. From what I've seen buying flights for example, the price seems surprisingly low. Either being carbon neutral is not

I'm always suspicious about carbon offsets. From what I've seen buying flights for example, the price seems surprisingly low. Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. Does anyone have more expertise on this?

coldpie 6y ago
Pricing carbon emissions is tricky, obviously. A recent analysis put the cost of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 at between $34 and $124/tn[1], depending on when you start the pricing. I was surprised how low these prices are. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-focuses-on-results-you-want-not-impacts-you-dont/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-foc...
- jsmith99 6y ago
  Assuming only a small proportion of polluters are offsetting I would expect to pay towards the bottom end of the range. The more expensive offsets need only be considered once we approach net zero.
Gys 6y ago
I always think the carbon offset offering for flights are only for peace of mind. I still have this mental note to look into it. I suspect prices include Value added Tax (around 20% in Europe) and a margin for the airline company. So not much left for a third party. And then I wonder how that is invested as well...
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  I looked into it a while ago after having my chosen airline tell me it'd cost $2 to offset, which sounds suspiciously cheap, and while I can't remember the exact third-party site I went to a remember their offset calculation being at least 10x greater. I bet this is something that isn't regulated properly so we have Airlines straight up misleading customers about how much offsetting does cost.
hedgedoops2 6y ago
I guess the price is low because no-one is buying offsets. You'd expect the cheapest ways to offset emissions to be sold first.
ForHackernews 6y ago
Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions. For example, look at some of the projects here: https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissions https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissio... Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or cleaner-burning cooking gases. Prices are as low as 10-15 USD per tonne of CO2. If we ever make a serious attempt to decarbonize the entire economy, we will run out of cheap/easy options and be forced to make harder, more expensive tradeoffs.
- extropy 6y ago
  Not buying the access to clean water = less burning of hydrocarbon. The poor people by definition are resource strapped and will use any means of energy available, just for different purpose. On the cynical side: clean water -> less mortality -> more population -> more carbon use to sustain said population.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    clean water -> less mortality -> less population (as people stop having extra children) -> roughly the same amount of carbon.
    - zo1 6y ago
      Yeah, but there is an "initial surge" of lots of additional people before the mortality-rate signal lowers it (maybe 2-3 generations?) And then you're stuck with a lot of people that are now consumers and generating more carbon than if you just told them "No" in the first place and gave them a good quality of life improvement. We're watching that happen right now, we're many generations in and most of the 3rd world is not slowing down their population growth fast enough despite lowered mortality rates. Way I see it, any help or financial aid to 3rd world countries (with high birth rates) needs to be coupled with comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives that is overseen by independent 1st world entities such as the WHO with the intent on lowering mortality rates and birth rates. And if these countries' birth rates don't start following a downward trajectory after a short period, then stop giving fancy aid and switch to bare-bones humanitarian aid. Seems way better than "lending" them the money they need and then making them dependent on the 1st world in perpetuity.
gspr 6y ago
I once thought the same as you, so I did a quick estimation calculation. This is very back-of-the-envelope, so take it with a pinch of salt. The flight in question was a roughly 1500 km + 1500 km = 3000 km roundtrip. I remember the airline offered to make my flight CO₂-neutral for about €20 or so. ICAO's emissions calculator [1] put my total contributed CO₂ emissions at about 280 kg. An economically very very inefficient baseline for counteracting CO₂ emissions is just extracting it from the air and storing it [2]. This is hard and expensive because the concentrations are so low in the atmosphere in general (away from emissions sources), but even in that case, numbers from pilot projects come out at $94-$232/ton [3]. Taking the optimistic estimate, that would mean my emissions could be undone for as little as roughly $26. Things seem to work out in roughly the right ballpark. Of course the airline doesn't use direct air capture for this offsetting, but I looked into it and seem to recall the money going to sane projects. Another comment points out some of the much lower-hanging targets for emissions reductions out there, and they are of course much more effective per buck spent than direct air capture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438 [1] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/Pages/default.aspx https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture [3] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
Who told you going carbon neutral was economy killing? And if it is, why are all the world's governments commited to doing it? I think you can probably trace that information source back to someone who makes their money pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Because saying you're going to do it and actually doing it are different things? The former buys lots of votes, the latter not so much.
- jnsie 6y ago
  How many have actually done it though?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > And if it is, why are all the world's governments committed to doing it? Committed is not the same is doing. Everyone was more "committed" for Kyoto too.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Because it would most likely mean forcibly destroying petrol powered cars, which is pretty economy killing as well as vote killing. Consider: if you don't do that, you're emitting a lot of CO2. You could wait until everyone upgrades to electric cars but it takes several decades for the vehicle fleet to turn over, so even if everyone started buying nothing but electric now, it would take decades to phase out the old vehicles. And they're not all buying electric cars now. So on the kind of timescales that governments are making these "commitments" the only way to stop people driving petrol powered cars, given how useful they are, would be to seize and destroy them. As for why they're committing to it, well, they still think academic models are accurate for COVID and are acting as if that's true. Climatology is mostly a modelling based discipline. 2+2 = ...
  - tonfa 6y ago
    In bunch of countries phase out of ICE cars is planned for the 2030-2040 time frame.
perfunctory 6y ago
Yeah, it's like Shell was offering customers to pay one cent extra per liter of fuel to drive in a "CO2 neutral" way. If it really was that cheap to offset carbon emissions, we wouldn't have any climate problem by now, would we. https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-co2-neutral-refueling https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...
- zurfer 6y ago
  It seem's super cheap for planting trees. But it is not completely crazy. If I use the Lufthansa calculator to offset flights I roughly pay 20 Euro per 1000kg CO2 [1]. A litre of petrol produces roughly 2.3kg CO2. So roughly 450 litres produce 1000 kg CO2, meaning Shell can compensate CO2 for a quarter of the price of Lufthansa. It is suspicious, but with economies of scale it might be possible. [1]https://www.lufthansa.com/am/en/offset-flight https://www.lufthansa.com/am/en/offset-flight [2] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/transportation/fuel-efficient-technologies/autosmart_factsheet_6_e.pdf https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/...
hannob 6y ago
It's complicated. For one, yeah, those offsetting companies calculate very generously. E.g. I once looked a bit into this and they make arguments like "we don't consider construction of the airport, because it's already there". The calculations for the offsets are also often calculated very generously, e.g. they often use the same mechanisms as the so-called Clean Development mechanism (which is part of the european emission trading system), which is known to overcalculate savings enormously. The other thing is they offset things the cheapest way possible. That works as long as there are cheap ways to save carbon. It doesn't scale.
matthewmacleod 6y ago
To be blunt, carbon neutrality is indeed not economy-killing and you have been lied to by people who want you to believe that it is.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. I think the distinction you're overlooking is marginal price vs true price. It could easily be the case that reducing carbon on the margins is cheap. Going from 100% of current levels to 99% may involve giving up some very low value activity. Especially because in most of the world the cost of carbon emissions is zero to begin with. But going from 1% to 0% could be extraordinarily costly, because it involves the highest value usage of carbon. Another way to think about it is that carbon offsets may be very cheap, because so few people buy them. If the practice became more widespread, either because of social norms or government regulation, then the demand could easily push up the price to where it does become a significant cost.
ip26 6y ago
being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700. A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For this cohort, it simply doesn't matter what the math says.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  You're already taxed (potentially a lot) on fuel. Adding another tax that's harder to measure consumption for seems like a bad idea.
  - ip26 6y ago
    I'm not really stumping for the carbon tax here, it's mostly just a thought experiment on the relative significance of pricing carbon. I have to add though, while carbon taxes would have challenges to implement, adding a carbon tax to fuel specifically is not hard to measure at all! We know exactly how much carbon is in the fuel. A $40/ton carbon tax means +$0.36 per gallon of gasoline. P.S. The US federal fuel tax ($0.18) was last increased in 1993, and was not indexed to inflation.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    The fuel tax generally doesn't even cover the full cost of roads. It doesn't even start paying for carbon offsets.
- Forbo 6y ago
  What's really nutty is that if it were a tax and dividend system, the majority of households would actually end up with more money back in their pockets. That this hasn't already been implemented is absolutely maddening.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway894345 6y ago
The issue is that this price doesn't scale. Let's say that the current price of an offset is $5/ton-of-co2. Let's say that presently all offsets are being put toward replacing inefficient wood-burning stoves in third-world countries with much more efficient electric stoves, because it's the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions. Right now, only a very small amount of offsets are being purchased (relatively little carbon is being offset); however, if lots of offsets were to be purchased (lots of people trying to offset their emissions) then we would run out of wood-burning stoves to replace with electric stoves and people who sell offsets would have to finance a more expensive type of carbon-reducing project, increasing the per-ton cost of a carbon offset. As demand for offsets rise, that new more expensive project would run out as well, and we would have to move onto increasingly expensive projects and the price of offsets would continue to rise. In other words, if the whole world were trying to offset its carbon emissions, the price per offset would rise dramatically.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- namdnay 6y ago
  Ahhhh I thought the offsets were "standalone positives" , like planting trees. Indeed if an offset can be helping others reduce, it's definitely a lower cost (and less scalability, as you point out)
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Yeah, I had the same experience when I learned about this stuff. It's really interesting; the trick is quality assurance--making sure that the carbon offset you buy actually represents 1 ton of carbon being removed from the atmosphere, or more commonly 1 ton that would have been added to the atmosphere but won't be on account of your offset. As far as I can tell, the difficulty of QA is the only valid criticism of offsets.
- haxnewsben 6y ago
  The idea is though, once the low hanging fruit of cheap offsetting dries up, causing offsets to become more expensive, the more appealing the price of carbon neutral energy becomes. Say now the reason people still burn coal is because it's cheap and you can offset it cheaply, once offestting becomes more expensive, you may as well spend the same total amount, but buy green energy instead of coal+an offest.

coldpie 6y ago

Pricing carbon emissions is tricky, obviously. A recent analysis put the cost of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 at between $34 and $124/tn[1], depending on when you start the pricing. I was surprised how low these prices are. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-focuses-on-results-you-want-not-impacts-you-dont/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-foc...

jsmith99 6y ago
Assuming only a small proportion of polluters are offsetting I would expect to pay towards the bottom end of the range. The more expensive offsets need only be considered once we approach net zero.

Gys 6y ago

I always think the carbon offset offering for flights are only for peace of mind. I still have this mental note to look into it. I suspect prices include Value added Tax (around 20% in Europe) and a margin for the airline company. So not much left for a third party. And then I wonder how that is invested as well...

thundergolfer 6y ago
I looked into it a while ago after having my chosen airline tell me it'd cost $2 to offset, which sounds suspiciously cheap, and while I can't remember the exact third-party site I went to a remember their offset calculation being at least 10x greater. I bet this is something that isn't regulated properly so we have Airlines straight up misleading customers about how much offsetting does cost.

hedgedoops2 6y ago

I guess the price is low because no-one is buying offsets. You'd expect the cheapest ways to offset emissions to be sold first.

ForHackernews 6y ago

Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions. For example, look at some of the projects here: https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissions https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissio... Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or cleaner-burning cooking gases. Prices are as low as 10-15 USD per tonne of CO2. If we ever make a serious attempt to decarbonize the entire economy, we will run out of cheap/easy options and be forced to make harder, more expensive tradeoffs.

extropy 6y ago
Not buying the access to clean water = less burning of hydrocarbon. The poor people by definition are resource strapped and will use any means of energy available, just for different purpose. On the cynical side: clean water -> less mortality -> more population -> more carbon use to sustain said population.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  clean water -> less mortality -> less population (as people stop having extra children) -> roughly the same amount of carbon.
  - zo1 6y ago
    Yeah, but there is an "initial surge" of lots of additional people before the mortality-rate signal lowers it (maybe 2-3 generations?) And then you're stuck with a lot of people that are now consumers and generating more carbon than if you just told them "No" in the first place and gave them a good quality of life improvement. We're watching that happen right now, we're many generations in and most of the 3rd world is not slowing down their population growth fast enough despite lowered mortality rates. Way I see it, any help or financial aid to 3rd world countries (with high birth rates) needs to be coupled with comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives that is overseen by independent 1st world entities such as the WHO with the intent on lowering mortality rates and birth rates. And if these countries' birth rates don't start following a downward trajectory after a short period, then stop giving fancy aid and switch to bare-bones humanitarian aid. Seems way better than "lending" them the money they need and then making them dependent on the 1st world in perpetuity.

gspr 6y ago

I once thought the same as you, so I did a quick estimation calculation. This is very back-of-the-envelope, so take it with a pinch of salt. The flight in question was a roughly 1500 km + 1500 km = 3000 km roundtrip. I remember the airline offered to make my flight CO₂-neutral for about €20 or so. ICAO's emissions calculator [1] put my total contributed CO₂ emissions at about 280 kg. An economically very very inefficient baseline for counteracting CO₂ emissions is just extracting it from the air and storing it [2]. This is hard and expensive because the concentrations are so low in the atmosphere in general (away from emissions sources), but even in that case, numbers from pilot projects come out at $94-$232/ton [3]. Taking the optimistic estimate, that would mean my emissions could be undone for as little as roughly $26. Things seem to work out in roughly the right ballpark. Of course the airline doesn't use direct air capture for this offsetting, but I looked into it and seem to recall the money going to sane projects. Another comment points out some of the much lower-hanging targets for emissions reductions out there, and they are of course much more effective per buck spent than direct air capture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438 [1] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/Pages/default.aspx https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture [3] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

ZeroGravitas 6y ago

Who told you going carbon neutral was economy killing? And if it is, why are all the world's governments commited to doing it? I think you can probably trace that information source back to someone who makes their money pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

mlindner 6y ago
Because saying you're going to do it and actually doing it are different things? The former buys lots of votes, the latter not so much.
jnsie 6y ago
How many have actually done it though?
MattGaiser 6y ago
> And if it is, why are all the world's governments committed to doing it? Committed is not the same is doing. Everyone was more "committed" for Kyoto too.
thu2111 6y ago
Because it would most likely mean forcibly destroying petrol powered cars, which is pretty economy killing as well as vote killing. Consider: if you don't do that, you're emitting a lot of CO2. You could wait until everyone upgrades to electric cars but it takes several decades for the vehicle fleet to turn over, so even if everyone started buying nothing but electric now, it would take decades to phase out the old vehicles. And they're not all buying electric cars now. So on the kind of timescales that governments are making these "commitments" the only way to stop people driving petrol powered cars, given how useful they are, would be to seize and destroy them. As for why they're committing to it, well, they still think academic models are accurate for COVID and are acting as if that's true. Climatology is mostly a modelling based discipline. 2+2 = ...
- tonfa 6y ago
  In bunch of countries phase out of ICE cars is planned for the 2030-2040 time frame.

perfunctory 6y ago

Yeah, it's like Shell was offering customers to pay one cent extra per liter of fuel to drive in a "CO2 neutral" way. If it really was that cheap to offset carbon emissions, we wouldn't have any climate problem by now, would we. https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-co2-neutral-refueling https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...

zurfer 6y ago
It seem's super cheap for planting trees. But it is not completely crazy. If I use the Lufthansa calculator to offset flights I roughly pay 20 Euro per 1000kg CO2 [1]. A litre of petrol produces roughly 2.3kg CO2. So roughly 450 litres produce 1000 kg CO2, meaning Shell can compensate CO2 for a quarter of the price of Lufthansa. It is suspicious, but with economies of scale it might be possible. [1]https://www.lufthansa.com/am/en/offset-flight https://www.lufthansa.com/am/en/offset-flight [2] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/transportation/fuel-efficient-technologies/autosmart_factsheet_6_e.pdf https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/...

hannob 6y ago

It's complicated. For one, yeah, those offsetting companies calculate very generously. E.g. I once looked a bit into this and they make arguments like "we don't consider construction of the airport, because it's already there". The calculations for the offsets are also often calculated very generously, e.g. they often use the same mechanisms as the so-called Clean Development mechanism (which is part of the european emission trading system), which is known to overcalculate savings enormously. The other thing is they offset things the cheapest way possible. That works as long as there are cheap ways to save carbon. It doesn't scale.

matthewmacleod 6y ago

To be blunt, carbon neutrality is indeed not economy-killing and you have been lied to by people who want you to believe that it is.

dcolkitt 6y ago

> Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. I think the distinction you're overlooking is marginal price vs true price. It could easily be the case that reducing carbon on the margins is cheap. Going from 100% of current levels to 99% may involve giving up some very low value activity. Especially because in most of the world the cost of carbon emissions is zero to begin with. But going from 1% to 0% could be extraordinarily costly, because it involves the highest value usage of carbon. Another way to think about it is that carbon offsets may be very cheap, because so few people buy them. If the practice became more widespread, either because of social norms or government regulation, then the demand could easily push up the price to where it does become a significant cost.

ip26 6y ago

being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700. A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For this cohort, it simply doesn't matter what the math says.

robertlagrant 6y ago
You're already taxed (potentially a lot) on fuel. Adding another tax that's harder to measure consumption for seems like a bad idea.
- ip26 6y ago
  I'm not really stumping for the carbon tax here, it's mostly just a thought experiment on the relative significance of pricing carbon. I have to add though, while carbon taxes would have challenges to implement, adding a carbon tax to fuel specifically is not hard to measure at all! We know exactly how much carbon is in the fuel. A $40/ton carbon tax means +$0.36 per gallon of gasoline. P.S. The US federal fuel tax ($0.18) was last increased in 1993, and was not indexed to inflation.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  The fuel tax generally doesn't even cover the full cost of roads. It doesn't even start paying for carbon offsets.
Forbo 6y ago
What's really nutty is that if it were a tax and dividend system, the majority of households would actually end up with more money back in their pockets. That this hasn't already been implemented is absolutely maddening.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

throwaway894345 6y ago

The issue is that this price doesn't scale. Let's say that the current price of an offset is $5/ton-of-co2. Let's say that presently all offsets are being put toward replacing inefficient wood-burning stoves in third-world countries with much more efficient electric stoves, because it's the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions. Right now, only a very small amount of offsets are being purchased (relatively little carbon is being offset); however, if lots of offsets were to be purchased (lots of people trying to offset their emissions) then we would run out of wood-burning stoves to replace with electric stoves and people who sell offsets would have to finance a more expensive type of carbon-reducing project, increasing the per-ton cost of a carbon offset. As demand for offsets rise, that new more expensive project would run out as well, and we would have to move onto increasingly expensive projects and the price of offsets would continue to rise. In other words, if the whole world were trying to offset its carbon emissions, the price per offset would rise dramatically.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
namdnay 6y ago
Ahhhh I thought the offsets were "standalone positives" , like planting trees. Indeed if an offset can be helping others reduce, it's definitely a lower cost (and less scalability, as you point out)
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Yeah, I had the same experience when I learned about this stuff. It's really interesting; the trick is quality assurance--making sure that the carbon offset you buy actually represents 1 ton of carbon being removed from the atmosphere, or more commonly 1 ton that would have been added to the atmosphere but won't be on account of your offset. As far as I can tell, the difficulty of QA is the only valid criticism of offsets.
haxnewsben 6y ago
The idea is though, once the low hanging fruit of cheap offsetting dries up, causing offsets to become more expensive, the more appealing the price of carbon neutral energy becomes. Say now the reason people still burn coal is because it's cheap and you can offset it cheaply, once offestting becomes more expensive, you may as well spend the same total amount, but buy green energy instead of coal+an offest.