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i don't think this is a good solution for climate change. it doesn't make sense to offset a major polluter, so they can continue polluting.

goatlover 5y ago
It does make sense until renewable power, cleaner manufacturing tech and electric vehicles are able to replace the polluters. Would have been easier if more nuclear plants were ready to go.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  Neither growing forests nor any other approach I've heard is carbon-negative on a scale of more than a few decades. Maybe someone could usefully deploy the credits to fund the science necessary to know how to properly use them.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Humanity does not do large scale fundamental change in less than a few decades. We are actually changing very quickly. Now that solar is cheaper than coal, we are simply turning coal plants down, even on the middle of their lifetime. Transport electrification is basically bounded by supply, we are just not able to do it faster. The one thing that could be better is grid storage. It doesn't help that there is a patent minefield around battery chemistries, and it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. A government could intervene on both of those problems right now, but if they are left for markets, it will take another decade after we start working really hard on them (what is still quick, by the way, and it helps that we can solve basically half of the emissions on the previous paragraph alone).
    - toast0 5y ago
      > it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. There's certainly already wholesale price variability throughout the day, so buy at night, sell during the day arbitrage is at least conceptially valid, although real world ROI is going to depend on capital costs, full cycle efficiency, etc, and it doesn't seem like things are quite there outside of a few installations.
    - xyzzy21 5y ago
      Chemistry is pretty much DONE for batteries. The only advancements possible are fairly limited and have to do with nanostructure of electrodes and electrolytes which won't give more than 2x-5x. There are NO 10x, 100x, 1000x futures with batteries. If you want 10x-100x, the answer is hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear energy. Period. Otherwise you are living in a fantasy bubble disconnected from STEM and factual reality.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        Price and durability are pretty much open problems. Ion exchange materials are a completely open problem. Structure of electrodes and electrolytes on dissolved chemical batteries are an open problem. Substrate for the ion exchange element of molten chemical batteries is a completely open problem. There's nothing done in grid battery chemistry. The only thing people have ever optimized for is energy density by weight, and this is an almost completely irrelevant dimension for that application.
      - 71a54xd 5y ago
        Good thing Elon is funding the same anti-hydrogen lobbyists that the oil industry has employed for decades.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        > 10x-100x 10x what?
- greenie_beans 5y ago
  carbon offsets let businesses not invest in those things, nor invest in the r&d that would create those things. further kicking the can down the road.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    The have the carbon offsets go into funding r&d in cleaner tech.
    - greenie_beans 5y ago
      wait, what? the companies pay forest owners to offset carbon. so you're suggesting that forest owners fund the r&d with the money they make from selling offsets? that doesn't make much sense for a forest owner. they're already doing their part by providing a carbon sink. the responsibility is on the businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. and carbon offset credits don't incentivize the businesses to do that.
      - goatlover 5y ago
        No, the companies pay for the R&D as their carbon offset instead of the forest owners, if that's the concern. A fossil fuel company isn't going to reduce its carbon footprint as long as energy demands need to be met by fossil fuels.
        greenie_beans 5y ago
        yeah that would make more sense.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
It seems like a much better solution to think in terms of continuous material flows, rather than trying to stop all flows of a material humans consider waste.
gizmondo 5y ago
It would've made sense if it was a true offset, i.e. carbon capture in various forms. But "offsetting" carbon-positive activity with carbon-neutral is just bizarre. Where is my money for sitting on a couch instead of taking a plane to Australia?
- modriano 5y ago
  That would be hard to sell. Trees actually pull CO2 out of the air and lock it away in wood fibers. That produces an actual (albeit infinitesimal) reduction in the net atmospheric CO2. Choosing to not take a flight to Australia, on the other hand, is just deciding to produce CO2, just less. That makes it categorically different, as it can't negate any amount of CO2 production. Also, the supply of "not flying to Australia" is unbounded, and without scarcity, the price will naturally go to $0. If you only focus on potential fliers, that would have the perverse effect of incentivizing people to take actions intended to convince the regulators of this market that they were planning on flying to Australia, which would likely result in empty seats on flights to Australia and a net increase in the number of chartered flights to Australia.
  - notatoad 5y ago
    trees pull CO2 out of the air, so planting more trees is carbon-negative. but how is just allowing the trees that are already there to continue existing carbon-negative? it can't be less CO2 that the status quo if it's literally the status quo.
    - peteradio 5y ago
      Perhaps there are methods to maximize forest yield, it would probably be appropriate to bake that into the value I would think. I think forests that burn may leave behind char in the soil layers and on small time scales it would be insignificant but maybe it becomes significant over millennia?
  - gizmondo 5y ago
    In addition to mature forests being carbon neutral, not negative, the scheme in question has exactly the same problem you described - the supply of "not cutting trees" is huge if not unbounded, and it has very little to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. This is indulgence trading, in my opinion.
notatoad 5y ago
don't think of it as offsetting a polluter, think of it as charging a polluter. requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with alternatives that don't require offsetting.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  “assuming it's fairly priced, “ From what I know we are far away from that. It would need to be priced much higher to effect change.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
This also rubs me the wrong way and feels like something that can be gamed too easily. It also feels like something rich people can throw some money at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I remember an article about Paul Allen’s super yacht and the enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly added that he had offset this by planting a few trees somewhere… In my mind it would better we didn’t have 100m yachts ship around a few people for leisure.

goatlover 5y ago

It does make sense until renewable power, cleaner manufacturing tech and electric vehicles are able to replace the polluters. Would have been easier if more nuclear plants were ready to go.

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
Neither growing forests nor any other approach I've heard is carbon-negative on a scale of more than a few decades. Maybe someone could usefully deploy the credits to fund the science necessary to know how to properly use them.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Humanity does not do large scale fundamental change in less than a few decades. We are actually changing very quickly. Now that solar is cheaper than coal, we are simply turning coal plants down, even on the middle of their lifetime. Transport electrification is basically bounded by supply, we are just not able to do it faster. The one thing that could be better is grid storage. It doesn't help that there is a patent minefield around battery chemistries, and it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. A government could intervene on both of those problems right now, but if they are left for markets, it will take another decade after we start working really hard on them (what is still quick, by the way, and it helps that we can solve basically half of the emissions on the previous paragraph alone).
  - toast0 5y ago
    > it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. There's certainly already wholesale price variability throughout the day, so buy at night, sell during the day arbitrage is at least conceptially valid, although real world ROI is going to depend on capital costs, full cycle efficiency, etc, and it doesn't seem like things are quite there outside of a few installations.
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    Chemistry is pretty much DONE for batteries. The only advancements possible are fairly limited and have to do with nanostructure of electrodes and electrolytes which won't give more than 2x-5x. There are NO 10x, 100x, 1000x futures with batteries. If you want 10x-100x, the answer is hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear energy. Period. Otherwise you are living in a fantasy bubble disconnected from STEM and factual reality.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Price and durability are pretty much open problems. Ion exchange materials are a completely open problem. Structure of electrodes and electrolytes on dissolved chemical batteries are an open problem. Substrate for the ion exchange element of molten chemical batteries is a completely open problem. There's nothing done in grid battery chemistry. The only thing people have ever optimized for is energy density by weight, and this is an almost completely irrelevant dimension for that application.
    - 71a54xd 5y ago
      Good thing Elon is funding the same anti-hydrogen lobbyists that the oil industry has employed for decades.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > 10x-100x 10x what?
greenie_beans 5y ago
carbon offsets let businesses not invest in those things, nor invest in the r&d that would create those things. further kicking the can down the road.
- goatlover 5y ago
  The have the carbon offsets go into funding r&d in cleaner tech.
  - greenie_beans 5y ago
    wait, what? the companies pay forest owners to offset carbon. so you're suggesting that forest owners fund the r&d with the money they make from selling offsets? that doesn't make much sense for a forest owner. they're already doing their part by providing a carbon sink. the responsibility is on the businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. and carbon offset credits don't incentivize the businesses to do that.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      No, the companies pay for the R&D as their carbon offset instead of the forest owners, if that's the concern. A fossil fuel company isn't going to reduce its carbon footprint as long as energy demands need to be met by fossil fuels.
      - greenie_beans 5y ago
        yeah that would make more sense.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

It seems like a much better solution to think in terms of continuous material flows, rather than trying to stop all flows of a material humans consider waste.

gizmondo 5y ago

It would've made sense if it was a true offset, i.e. carbon capture in various forms. But "offsetting" carbon-positive activity with carbon-neutral is just bizarre. Where is my money for sitting on a couch instead of taking a plane to Australia?

modriano 5y ago
That would be hard to sell. Trees actually pull CO2 out of the air and lock it away in wood fibers. That produces an actual (albeit infinitesimal) reduction in the net atmospheric CO2. Choosing to not take a flight to Australia, on the other hand, is just deciding to produce CO2, just less. That makes it categorically different, as it can't negate any amount of CO2 production. Also, the supply of "not flying to Australia" is unbounded, and without scarcity, the price will naturally go to $0. If you only focus on potential fliers, that would have the perverse effect of incentivizing people to take actions intended to convince the regulators of this market that they were planning on flying to Australia, which would likely result in empty seats on flights to Australia and a net increase in the number of chartered flights to Australia.
- notatoad 5y ago
  trees pull CO2 out of the air, so planting more trees is carbon-negative. but how is just allowing the trees that are already there to continue existing carbon-negative? it can't be less CO2 that the status quo if it's literally the status quo.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    Perhaps there are methods to maximize forest yield, it would probably be appropriate to bake that into the value I would think. I think forests that burn may leave behind char in the soil layers and on small time scales it would be insignificant but maybe it becomes significant over millennia?
- gizmondo 5y ago
  In addition to mature forests being carbon neutral, not negative, the scheme in question has exactly the same problem you described - the supply of "not cutting trees" is huge if not unbounded, and it has very little to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. This is indulgence trading, in my opinion.

notatoad 5y ago

don't think of it as offsetting a polluter, think of it as charging a polluter. requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with alternatives that don't require offsetting.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
“assuming it's fairly priced, “ From what I know we are far away from that. It would need to be priced much higher to effect change.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

This also rubs me the wrong way and feels like something that can be gamed too easily. It also feels like something rich people can throw some money at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I remember an article about Paul Allen’s super yacht and the enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly added that he had offset this by planting a few trees somewhere… In my mind it would better we didn’t have 100m yachts ship around a few people for leisure.