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I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to explain it

• ComradePhil 5y ago
  Dr. Shiva Ayurdhari explained this and more 5 years ago when Trump got out of the Paris accord: https://www.pscp.tv/va_shiva/1yoKMBMPeNnGQ https://www.pscp.tv/va_shiva/1yoKMBMPeNnGQ
• mikece 5y ago
  If we're going to be serious about reducing carbon emissions we need to end "cap and trade" and simply apply "cap" to everyone, celebrities and politicians included with no exceptions. If we cannot commit to that level of reducing carbon I have wonder if this isn't a trading scheme masquerading as an environmental cause.
  • naoqj 5y ago
    What it is is a way of growing the gap between the rich and the poor.
    • modmans2nd 5y ago
      • jjulius 5y ago
        >Using the poor as a reason not to cap carbon emissions is a bit perverse. And yet the wealthy, historically speaking, seem to have a real penchant for taking advantage of the poor in perverse ways.
        • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
          The problem is theoretical and practical... In theory, a cap would be the same for everyone... in practice, rich people would be able to avoid the cap, and the poor would still be capped. I lived in a country, where we had odd- even- systems of driving a car due to gas shortages many years ago (basically if your licence plate ended with an odd number, you could drive on odd dates, and even-even). Rich people bought another car... poor people had transport problems. We've come to a situation where rich people ride their private jets to eco-something conferences, tell Average Joes that they shouldn't eat meat and drive their cars, because in 20 years, the sea will rise for x meters anyway, and then those rich people take their private jets back to their newly bought beachfront properties. So, when the law (which is written by the rich) changes... who will get fucked the most? WIll they really hurt their own? If they're "afraid" of climate change, why don't they change their behaviour first? And if they don't, why should average joe do that, when he already pollutes A LOT less?
      • unmole 5y ago
        So, the countries that got rich using cheap and dirty energy continue to be rich but the poor shouldn't get the chance to get rich? That's rich!
        • kaibee 5y ago
          It is going to be cheaper for poor countries to go directly to renewables. There is no law that says that you need to pollute to become wealthy. The pollute-y kinda tech was just more cost-effective in the past.
          • unmole 5y ago
            > It is going to be cheaper for poor countries to go directly to renewables. Coal plants are the cheapest way to produce electricity. And no, solar which operates at a fraction of installed capacity and is useless for large periods of time is not a cheaper alternative.
          • Spinnaker_ 5y ago
            A third of the world still burns wood for fuel. One of the most effective things we can do to curb emissions is get them using coal instead. Renewables are not in the immediate future for much of the world.
            • yywwbbn 5y ago
              How is replacing wood with coal going to result in a decrease in emissions? That doesn’t make any sense.. wood/biomass is at least sort of renewable.
              • Spinnaker_ 5y ago
                Burning wood releases more ghg per unit of energy than coal. We're not talking about biomass pellets in efficient furnaces, but actual wood in a stove. The fact that a tree can grow back in 20 years and alter the equation doesn't help us at all right now. Leaving the trees standing and instead burning coal will result in a decrease of emissions.
      • rayiner 5y ago
        The poor will suffer the most from global warming, but they’ll still often be much better off than they are now. For example, there are estimates that global warming will cost Bangladesh 10% of its GDP by the end of the century. That’s a lot, but it would be far worse to try and avoid climate change and risk losing even 1 point of annual GDP growth until then.
        • cool_dude85 5y ago
          There are also estimates that Bangladesh will be under the ocean by the end of the century - wonder whether that's worth forgoing 1% annual GDP growth.
          • briandear 5y ago
            They’ve been estimating some place or another would be underwater for years. And it still hasn’t happened. What did Al Gore say in 2009 about the ice caps in “5-7 years?” Gore wasn’t even close to correct.
            • sethrin 5y ago
              Mentioning Al Gore in the context of climate change is unserious, although I'm sure it's good fodder for Facebook memes.
            • jjulius 5y ago
              >They’ve been estimating some place or another would be underwater for years. And it still hasn’t happened. Because most of those predictions weren't claimed to be happening within the next few years. This would still be some decades off, at least. >What did Al Gore say in 2009 about the ice caps in “5-7 years?” Gore wasn’t even close to correct. [sigh] Here, give me your hand, I'll hold it for you... >"These figures are fresh,” Gore said on Dec. 14, 2009, during the COP15 climate change conference in Copenhagen. >He added: “Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” >Gore cited findings from climatologist Dr Wieslav Maslowski, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. >However, it appears he mis-stated the forecast, according to reporting at the time. >In an interview with The Times published on Dec. 15, 2009, Dr Maslowski said: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-climate-change-idUSL1N2RV0K6 https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-climate-change-idU... I would also hope that I don't need to point out to you that just because Gore didn't know how to communicate data he was seeing, that that means climate change isn't a thing. I feel like I do, though, because your comment so obviously feels like you're willfully not paying attention.
    • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
      On the contrary, it's quite obvious that the rich emits far more than the poor. Even if the rich can accelerate their switch to renewable, they still couldn't fly more. They can't buy too many cars / houses, etc. Also, any reduction in CO2 emission from the rich would help the rest of the population as the allowed average footprint would increase. Can you explain your reasoning here?
      • naoqj 5y ago
        My reasoning is that these taxes increase the price of all goods, including food and energy. That hurts the poor much more than it hurts the rich because food and energy expenses are a much bigger % of their income for the poor.
        • kaibee 5y ago
          > My reasoning is that these taxes increase the price of all goods, including food and energy. If you do a cash transfer to low-income individuals funded by the tax, it is entirely possible to make the tax progressive or neutral instead. (and it still does all of the important market-pricing action things its supposed to)
          • michaelt 5y ago
            To an extent. But it can be tricky - some poor people use more gas than others. And if we want to give an extra cash transfer to the cleaner who starts work before public transit starts running, that's going to get complex to administer.
            • yywwbbn 5y ago
              Giving the same to him as anyone else at a similar income level would be just fine. Assuming he can get any other job requiring a similar skill level the market wage for ‘cleaners who have start work before public transport starts’ running would naturally have to increase.
    • moralestapia 5y ago
      While I think you have a valid point and I'm 100% behind it, cap and trade would not necessarily hurt "the poor". The difference in emissions between small and big polluters (them being people or companies) is abysmal, a low contributor could easily double/triple its footprint and still come out much lower than the big ones. I think a sensible solution is cap and trade at the country level and let it trickle down from there.
    • PaulHoule 5y ago
      It's worse than that. A system like "cap-and-trade" is sustainable politically precisely because it benefits a few carbon traders who can make huge profits from the system. They can feed back 0.1% of their profits to politicians to keep their privileges. The rest of us (who depend on this planet to live on) face a collective action problem where everybody has to lower carbon emissions. For instance the US has high per capita emissions but still is responsible for only 15% of global emissions. If the US had a breakthrough and stopped emitting carbon tomorrow it wouldn't solve the problem unless countries responsible for 80% or so of emissions also did. The structure of it is that there is always (and maybe will be) some major country that takes a contemptuous attitude about climate change (say the US under Trump) that gives other countries (say Germany) cover to talk a good game but take no action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
  • simulate-me 5y ago
    Cap and trade is a cap for everyone… trading doesn’t increase the total cap.
  • nh23423fefe 5y ago
    > serious ... celebrities and politicians ... seems like flamebait
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  Avoided emissions are a scam. "Nature based" offsets aren't that much better. It is mainly "pay us or we'll cut down this forest" but there is a fundamental timing problem: you emitted one ton of CO2 yesterday, somebody else has to protect a forest forever to keep that CO2 trapped. There are other schemes that claim to be low cost such as https://www.vesta.earth/ https://www.vesta.earth/ that have the problem of not being measurable. Contrast that to other schemes that get 1% of the press coverage, such as the "gold standard" of injecting CO2 into saline aquifers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750583615000146 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505... where you really can measure the gas going into the hole and can almost (but not quite) take it for granted that the CO2 will stay there for 10,000 years.
  • DennisP 5y ago
    Vesta does have the advantage of being extremely cheap, assuming it works and their cost estimates are correct. It seems like it could be approximately measurable with some periodic random sampling.
  • Gravityloss 5y ago
    Delta bought an oil refinery at some point. Maybe they could buy some nuclear reactors and offset coal and ultimately make synthetic fuels.
    • PaulHoule 5y ago
      The US Navy is talking about synthesizing aircraft fuel with nuclear power and direct carbon capture on aircraft carriers. An aircraft carrier has to slow down to take on fuel which reduces combat effectiveness (at full speed it can go a few miles while a ballistic missile in flight so it is hard to hit) they are probably paying upwards of $10/gal for fuel as it is. If synthetic fuel means they can operate independently of supplies for longer that's significant. The Army wants to synthesize fuels too because they are paying more like $50/gal to deliver fuel to forts in places like Afghanistan. They are considering crazy ideas like molten salt reactors, O'Neill style space solar power, etc. It's a matter though of trading a vulnerable and expensive supply chain (Ukraine didn't bother trying to stop the tanks charging towards Kyiv because the fuel trucks supplying them were a soft target) for some expensive (maybe dangerous) hardware that the enemy can blow up.
• gwd 5y ago
  The idea I've seen with the "cap and trade" is that you use the money to, say, help a factory in a developing country install more expensive, less carbon-emitting equipment -- equipment which may not have been economical for them to do without the subsidy. That helps reduce emissions for the lifetime of that factory, as well as encouraging the development of lower-carbon technology overall.
  • gameswithgo 5y ago
    Yes the idea is perfectly sensible, the issue is that such schemes are probably a practical impossibility for humans to implement and police in a such a way that we achieve the goals or reducing co2 output, rather than just achieving a way for people to game the system for profit. Even if everyone involved operated with good faith, even accounting accurately for the co2 externalities accurately is very difficult, and you can be sure a huge percentage of people will not be acting in good faith.
  • unholiness 5y ago
    Notably this article is about offsets, not cap and trade. Cap and trade is fundamentally different from offsets in that there is a central authority who decides precisely what caps every company gets before trading starts, so every transaction which increases one company's cap by 1 ton is guaranteed to decrease another's. Offsets are a decentralized attempt to quantify how various actions would lower the world's carbon output compared to some estimate of what would happen otherwise. The cheapest offsets prey on this ambiguity in the various ways the article suggestions. The other big difference is that cap and trade is mandatory while offsets are optional. There is so little offset-buying happening now that the markets are artificially cheap. Companies currently claiming to be "carbon neutral" would certainly be unable to afford doing so if it was required of every company (similar to if the "cap" was universally zero carbon, a clear non-starter today).
  • imtringued 5y ago
    The problem with cap and trade is that governments hand out free certificates to favorite industries which completely undermines the program. They are also reluctant to reduce the amount of certificates fast enough to actually bite. Then there is the problem of all the exempt sectors.
• thanatos519 5y ago
  This is a great explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRDseUEEsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRDseUEEsg
• intrasight 5y ago
  I'm with the majority of economists who say "tax carbon". Still complex technically and politically, but more effective in solving the problem.
  • karaterobot 5y ago
    Clarification question: when you say you're with the majority of economists who say "tax carbon", are you implying that the majority of economists conclude you should tax carbon in some form? Or are you saying that you agree with most of the economists who do, whether or not they are a majority?
    • intrasight 5y ago
      I am implying that the majority of economists conclude you should tax carbon in some form. I am in the minority of non-economists who agree with that consensus.
  • peder 5y ago
    Unless govts become addicted to carbon tax revenue, in which case they may allow the same level of carbon emissions anyway.
    • eutropia 5y ago
      avoid the addiction by turning it directly into a citizen’s dividend
      • kspacewalk2 5y ago
        This is what Canada is doing. Equal rebates for everyone - use less and you get a subsidy, use more and you're the one doing the subsidizing. Now of course Canada's carbon tax is tiny, but there's probably some behavioural economics rationale behind the idea that even a tiny cost can have outsized impact on behaviour.
        • 5y ago
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  I agree with the author, carbon offsets are a scam. They are equivalent to buying indulgences from the church. Now, the big question is, what public figures are promoting carbon offsets? It's not easy to figure out, but the usual suspects (oil companies) seem to be involved. Along with politicians who take donations from the same.
• manholio 5y ago
  Offsets make sense if those selling them can prove the emissions are physically avoided. For example, if I place a CCS system on my cement plant, for each year I use it I have avoided those emissions, so I can sell an offset certificate to someone who can't do the same, perhaps in some other industry where it's much harder to do CCS, say airflight. This withstands the "what if everybody is doing it?" test, because if everybody tries to offset in this manner the demand for certificates would push their price to infinity, so everybody is forced by the market to stop emitting instead of purchasing offsets. The whole rainforest affair sounds like a complete scam. I haven't the faintest idea how rainforest protection, even if it's real, can offset carbon emissions by some other party. It sounds like an ideological connection, because both are "green" things to do, albeit unrelated.
  • snewman 5y ago
    The problem is that in this scenario, the airline is still emitting CO2, so global emissions never go to zero. If you want to say that the airline is not at fault, because they purchased an offset, then the cement plant operator is at fault: they never offset their own emissions, they only offset the emissions of the airline.
    • manholio 5y ago
      > the airline is still emitting CO2, so global emissions never go to zero. Sure, but global emissions decrease, and the market will allocate effort to the industries where it's cheapest to reduce emissions. So you achieve the maximum reduction with the minimum cost, as opposed to a prohibitive "net zero" goal, which is neither achievable nor a worthwhile target.
      • snewman 5y ago
        > So you achieve the maximum reduction with the minimum cost Offsets do allow for a certain amount of optimization, which is a good thing. However, cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax, are better ways of reducing emissions while allowing for optimization. And unlike offsets, these other approaches can actually take us to net zero. It's also worth noting that in practice, regardless of the policy frameworks we apply, we will not get to net zero unless we start climbing the learning curve for every GHG-emitting sector of the economy (except for those where the best long-term solution is hard offsets via sequestration). A flaw in all of the models that allow optimization via trading of credits (offsets, cap-and-trade) is that they allow us to defer those critical early steps. If all the cement plants buy offsets for the next 10 years, then we don't start learning how to decarbonize cement. > a prohibitive "net zero" goal, which is neither achievable nor a worthwhile target. Citation needed. The mainstream consensus – as embodied in, for example, the IPCC reports – is that it is extremely important that we get to net zero greenhouse emissions. In fact, many scenarios envision that we can+should go to net negative emissions for a while, to draw down some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere. And with the ferocious progress in solar, wind, batteries, and an exploding plethora of other fields, net zero is starting to look very feasible. It's too bad we didn't start sooner, but we will get there.
• arbirk 5y ago
  Cap-and-trade is a colledge Econ professors fever dream. Pure in theory but very unhealthy in practice
  • RockyMcNuts 5y ago
    Cap-and-trade is just carbon tax + corporate welfare (existing polluters get to sell their right to pollute) + trading vigs for Wall Street http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/08/fundamental-theorem-of-carbon-taxation.html http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/08/fundamental-theorem-o...
• Proven 5y ago
• aaron695 5y ago
• Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  This reminded me of a quote from Catch 22: "His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done."
  • gsinclair 5y ago
    This had me in peals of laughter as a student. It was probably the only passage of the book I really enjoyed, being too young at the time to understand the rest of it.
    • scrumbledober 5y ago
      The chapter where they are driving around in a jeep at night with the headlights off was one of my favorite book moments long before i was mature enough to understand any of that book.
      • izzygonzalez 5y ago
        I read Catch-22 at around 16. I spent hours at the public library in a secluded corner desk trying so hard to stifle my laughter. Amazing book.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      I had a very wrong impression about what sort of books Vonnegut writes, and I've discovered that I'm very much not the only one. If you haven't read him because the titles and the descriptions sound heavy, they really aren't. You're thinking Dostoevsky or Nietzsche but he's closer to Mark Twain.
      • gnatman 5y ago
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. To be brief, the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin. End of story. Planting trees does not 'offset' fossil emissions unless you plan to take the tree and bury it in an anoxic environment in which it can never decay. Solar panels and wind turbines offset nothing at all. The only real fix for fossil-fueled global warming is to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix. A practical plan for doing that would result in perhaps a 3% reduction in fossil fuel PRODUCTION per year (no, don't try counting emissions, count production). In 30 years, this would mean zero fossil fuel production globally.
  • lm28469 5y ago
    > People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. They're the same as people pushing for mass adoption of EVs, they're not looking for a long term solution to the environmental problem, they're looking for a short term solution to extend their market for one more generation.
    • unholiness 5y ago
      Sorry, what? The long-term benefits of EVs is that they can be powered by clean, renewable and nuclear energy (though even without that they are more energy-efficient than ICE cars) Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
      • sudosysgen 5y ago
        The essential part of a long-term, low carbon future is to drastically reduce car use. After that wether it's an EV or an ethanol fueled ICE is really secondary.
        • cassandratt 5y ago
• cool_dude85 5y ago
  The main framework the author presents - will it work if everyone does it? - sometimes produces reasonable results, sometimes not. That's the commons for you! Imagine someone in the global North building an annual net-zero home with solar panels. That will not work if everyone does it. There are not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries... it won't work for people living in the arctic circle, for hunter-gatherer societies, on and on. Doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do for the individual guy building the house. In short, the framework proposed by the author is helpful in evaluating things, but not dispositive. He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will.
  • snewman 5y ago
    [Author here] A more careful wording of "will it work if everyone does it" would be "if many people do it, does that reduce its feasibility for everyone else"? This addresses the arctic circle and hunter-gatherer examples. Obviously there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in life. Solar panels won't work above the arctic circle, EVs won't work in an area with no roads, hydropower won't work in a desert. But if I install a solar panel, that doesn't interfere with your ability to also install a solar panel. "Not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries" would be a real problem if true, but my understanding is that it is not true. Of course we have a lot of work to do in developing mineral sources, scaling up battery production, and so forth. But I have not seen a credible source indicating that it cannot be done. Do you have any such pointers? (The actual trends so far have been very strongly in the opposite direction: the more batteries we produce, the cheaper they get.) As for this: > He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will. The limitations of offsets are different than the limitations of, say, solar power. It's absolutely true that solar power can only be part of the solution, but when you put solar power together with wind and storage and (pick your favorites) geothermal, nuclear, etc., you can get to a complete solution for power generation. In this picture, solar is providing an important contribution. Offsets, conversely, cannot be composed with other tools to achieve a complete solution. If a cement plant operator pays to preserve a forest, who is going to address the (ongoing!) emissions from the cement plant? Not the cement plant operator; they already did their part, they purchased an offset.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  There are definitely issues with providing companies with a lot of fuzzy legislation that allow them to effectively dodge taxes. Big companies are good at tax evasion in general. And carbon taxes are just yet another tax with a lot of very sketchy and rushed through rules and legislation where people have lobbied heavily for all sorts of loop holes to be in place. Carbon offsetting is one of those loopholes. Company X gets to burn a lot of coal/gas/whatever but it's OK because they put some trees in the ground in a place where that absolutely adds no value whatsoever. The trees probably won't be there in ten years. The only thing that counts is the hypothetical and typically vastly inflated carbon offset that this company gets to dodge their taxes with. The higher the better it gets for the tax dodging company. Offsetting is just a fancy word for tax dodging. Mostly it means spend a little to avoid spending a lot. But take value added tax for example. It's a pretty normal thing around the world and people love avoiding having to pay that. VAT used to be easy to dodge with online shopping: just sell/buy your goods from a place that doesn't charge any VAT and you are good to go. They closed that loop hole years ago and it's a lot harder now. Reason, governments did not like missing out on that income and they closed a lot of the loop holes. So, now when you buy something on Amazon, you pay the appropriate VAT. Carbon tax is not any different it's a tax and we need to make sure it gets paid by the people and companies that owe it. There are no easy answers here but taxing definitely inspires behavior for minimizing cost. And sometimes the smart thing just becomes minimizing the carbon intensity because not doing that becomes costly/risky once you close all the loopholes.
• markvdb 5y ago
  On a related note, I've just started playing around building a calculator for another externality of fossil fuels: financing Russia's war. First baby step is an API: https://api.putinhuil.io/redoc https://api.putinhuil.io/redoc Anyone who feels volunteering some frontend work on that, do contact me. You'll find my email in my profile.
• lesgobrandon 5y ago
  I love anything that tries to solve the problem by making people rich while prolonging the problem. Especially when politics are involved. Still have the same problems as 100+ years ago.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  The most hilarious (sad?) aspect of offsets is tree rental. Promise to maintain a forest for 100 years and cities, states, or countries will pay you to "offset" their emissions. Average adult lifespan is about 55 years but perhaps these forest rental services are making promises on behalf of their unborn grandchildren. ...and please ignore the basic fact that no one can guarantee a forest will survive. Fires happen.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• rob74 5y ago
  I was kind of expecting some of the stuff in this article, but I was actually amazed that he was able to demonstrate the absurdity of carbon offsets without even getting into sticky topics like corruption (i.e. you pay for a tree to be planted which never gets planted, or the m² of rainforest you "protected" doesn't get cut down today, but in one month). Someone has described carbon offsets as modern-day indulgences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) - you pay someone to "wash away" your CO2-emitting "sins", and the less you think about how it works, the better you can feel about it...
  • yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
    Serious question I have about carbon offests with respect to forestry. If you pay me money to not cut my trees and they all burn up in a fire, do you lose your carbon credits, and if so, do I owe you a refund?
    • chii 5y ago
      I would imagine the requirement to replant the burnt down area would exist. The carbon offset would still exist after replanting, but the time-frame has been shifted to a further future (the time it take the tree to regrow back to pre-burnt size).
      • yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
        Yeah but all that sequestered carbon is now in the atmosphere with your 'offset' emissions while everything still looks good on paper.
  • dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Yeah. Because there is a moralistic view that there is no way out—humans are evil and must atone. Any market-based or tech-based approach cannot work because we are dealing with sins. A lot of armchair environmentalists have this view.
• ejb999 5y ago
  buying carbon offset always struck me as the same as regularly beating your wife and kids, and then absolving your sins by donating some money each year to a domestic violence non-profit.
• willmadden 5y ago
  Our current lack of understanding of the Earth’s climate system does not allow us to determine reliably the magnitude of climate change that will be caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, let alone whether this change will be for better or for worse. The major errors in the models (we think) are related to not accounting fully for the sun's energy, and not modeling clouds accurately. There is very high confidence that uncertainties in cloud processes explain much of the spread in modeled climate sensitivity. Even the relationship between CO2 concentrations and temperature is complicated. The glacial record shows geological periods with rising CO2 and global cooling and periods with low levels of atmospheric CO2 and global warming. According to a 2001 article in Climate Research by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon and his colleagues, “atmospheric CO2 tends to follow rather than lead temperature and biosphere changes.” A large proportion of the warming that occurred in the 20th century occurred in the first half of the century, when the amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the air was one quarter of the total amount there now. The rate of warming then was very similar to the rate of warming recently. We can’t have it both ways. The current warming can’t be unambiguously caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions if an earlier period experienced the same type of warming without the offending emissions. Even so, the political narratives and trans-national push for net-zero emissions have only strengthened in the face of this growing uncertainty. Why is that?
  • modmans2nd 5y ago
    When did the 90's invent a time machine?
  • the_why_of_y 5y ago
    > astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers There were no grants from Nasa, the National Science Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil fuel lobby. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/21/climate-change-denier-willie-soon-funded-energy-industry https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/21/climate-...
• datadata 5y ago
  One thing I'm curious about to see quantified (I'm sure this has been done, but don't know where to look): If you burn a gallon of gas, it immediately releases some quantity of heat into the environment, this becomes heat pollution regardless of how the energy is used. The CO2 then joins the atmosphere and contributes some marginal change in the balance of energy of the atmosphere by inhibiting radiation of energy into space, this can be expressed as an amount of power (greenhouse effect power). There is some amount of time (greenhouse breakeven time) where these effect balance each other out, and the amount of greenhouse effect power * time is equal to the initial energy released. After that point, the greenhouse impact becomes larger than the impact of initial energy released and the greenhouse term matters. I did some really rough calculation of this time period and got ~ 1 year. If total CO2 in the atmosphere were at equilibrium (it is not currently), there would also be a mean amount of time for CO2 to be sequestered. The ratio of (mean CO2 time / greenhouse breakeven time) would exactly characterize how much worse for the climate energy sources with carbon emissions are relative to zero carbon sources in terms of the total contribution of heat into the environment. With CO2 not at equilibrium, there is probably some fancier model to get a similar characterization. Finally, it would be interesting to see quantification of different sources of renewable power in terms of thermodynamic impacts. For example, I would expect that solar would lead to energy that would otherwise likely be reflected back to space instead be dissipated into heat. It would probably for example be worse to have a planet that is entirely covered with black solar panels from a radiation perspective. On the other hand, for something like hydroelectric or geothermal, it would seem like we are simply channeling a energy source that is already just about to be dissipated into heat on its own.
• Arnt 5y ago
  "I liked the idea of carbon offsets, until I tried to explain it as if its aim were something it isn't. Then I found out that it was badly suited to the goal I imagined." As I remember the aim from when the carbon emission quotas were proposed and introduced, offset trading was meant purely as a transition mechanism, and wasn't intended to have any effect on the long-term situation afterwards. All the carbon emitters at the time got large quotas valid for a long time, so large that noone protested much. Later, the idea was that the quotas should be reduced and then lead to quotas being sold sale and emitters closing down. This what happens now, as I see it. I read about a company recently that decided to replace its vehicle park with zero emission vehicles, but gradually, and buy carbon offsets from someone to compensate for the old vehicles. So someone with one of those old quotas shuts down a polluting plant a few years earlier than necessary and sells an offset, someone gets to brag about zero carbon vehicles quite soon in the process of replacing their vehicles. The offsets mean that both of them can get a PR win, and arguably push both of them stop emitting carbon a little earlier than would otherwise be the case. It's a win-win effect on the transition and has nothing to do with anything other than the transition.
• gumby 5y ago
  Carbon credits for non-offset activity (basically GHG removal) are a good way to fund development and operation of such systems.
• daveed 5y ago
  I've looked into this area. I agree with the author that current sources of carbon offsets are poor and sketchy. However, that's not to say that people aren't working on more promising methods. Direct air capture and growing and sinking seaweed are two things that I think definitely pass the additionality aspect. A big problem, I think, is that the market doesn't really differentiate between these, and that there are no strong regulatory pressures to buy "good" credits. We don't have a carbon tax in the US, and we don't have anything that pressures companies to say, if we want to buy offsets, that we only buy "good" offsets. To people who say we need to move off fossil fuels - yes, but how do we do it? We can't just move our physical processes from A to B process. It seems to me that imposing economic costs for every extra unit of carbon emitted, and only allowing high-quality offsets to subtract that, is the best incentive to move forward.
  • snewman 5y ago
    [author here] I agree that offsets based on sequestration, as you mention, are a completely legitimate tool. I mentioned that briefly in the post, but didn't dwell on it as the post was getting too long already. The deep problem with the more common "avoided emissions" credits is not that they're low quality (e.g. "protecting" a forest that might just burn down) -- though some are indeed low quality. The deep problem is that if I pay you to halt your emissions, who is going to pay me to halt mine? That's the shell game aspect. We start out with two emitters, we halt one, we never do anything about the other. One emitter is "done" because they're no longer emitting, and the other emitter is "done" because they've purchased an offset. The model is broken at its core.
    • daveed 5y ago
      I completely agree with you on avoided emissions. I think these should just not be counted. I just hope that going forward, people don't lump all carbon offsets into one bucket and say "they're all a scam". I feel like we need more regulation here.
• randomsilence 5y ago
  >Some offsets may come down in price due to economies of scale, but they will never be cheaper than “no offset” There is one: pricing carbons out of the energy market. If there is e.g. so much progress in carbon fibers that all construction is done with carbon, then all available carbon will be used for that and nobody will waste it to create energy. Cement will cease to be used because there is not enough rough sand available. If carbon fibers replace that usage, emissions will be stopped. It's actually stupid to store CO2 in saline storage because in 20 years or so, we will pay good money to get it back. It should be possible to calculate the price of carbon in 100 years when each of the 10 billion global citizens demands their share of carbon. Offering investment opportunities now in a venture that stores carbon e.g. in the arctics like people store aluminum in the Mexican desert, should provide the funds to create extraction technologies and facilities to make carbon emissions a non-issue. *edit: Looking at wikipedia, this doesn't make sense. There are 54tonnes available per person. Maybe humanity has to grow to 1000 billion people to question carbon emissions. >Proven sources of natural gas are about 175×1012 cubic metres (containing about 105 gigatonnes of carbon), but studies estimate another 900×1012 cubic metres of "unconventional" deposits such as shale gas, representing about 540 gigatonnes of carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon
• lettergram 5y ago
  Who is always pushing and agreeing to reduce emissions? China and Russia. Who every year increases energy output (particularly non-green energy)? China and Russia. The west is now paying China and Russia to produce green technology. Which requires mass destruction and mining. At some point it would be nice to truly assess the situation... As someone who makes money from harvesting plants, I hope for higher carbon and a warmer climate. It means more, larger harvests. Cheaper food for all.
  • EcoMonkey 5y ago
    I fear that you've been misinformed on climate change's impact on agriculture. According to the 2018 National Climate Assessment[0], a rigorous accounting of climate change's impact on the United States by 13 federal agencies [1]: "Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability. " Higher carbon and a warmer climate is going to mean smaller and less nutritious harvests, and food crises the world over. It is in your own self-interest to want rapid decarbonization. Also, you may not have heard that many climate policies call for a border carbon adjustment, which puts a WTO-compliant fee on imports from countries that are not effectively curbing their emissions. Well-designed national climate policies generally include this, as it largely addresses your valid concerns about making other countries play fair. Here's more[2] from NASA on it the impacts of climate change on agriculture. [0] https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/#sf-10 https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/#sf-10 [1] NOAA, the DOA, DOC, DOD, DOE, HHS, DOI, DOS, DOT, EPA, NASA, NSF, Smithsonian Institution, and the USAID [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3124/global-climate-change-impact-on-crops-expected-within-10-years-nasa-study-finds/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3124/global-climate-change-imp...
• kisamoto 5y ago
  Self plug but I built Https://carbonremoved.com to offer carbon removal in an easy to use way as an alternative to carbon offsets
• bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Under a proper accounting scheme, "avoided emissions" are incentivized by not having to pay the carbon tax on the emissions you avoided. You shouldn't get paid for avoiding emissions, you should just get the benefit of not having to pay the costs of the emissions you avoided.
• web007 5y ago
  I'm a little confused about the cement example. Every inch of rainforest is preserved in year 0, so those factories can produce their ridiculous amounts of CO2 to compensate for the now-safe rainforest. That works IMO since the annual capture of an acre of rainforest is equal to one emission-credit worth of factory. (If that's not how the math works out then that is a fundamental problem that can be solved.) That's all year 0. The author forgot about year 1, 2, 3, etc. where those factories would still need to offset their production. Where are the offsets for those years? The article also neglects some of the point of paying money for offsets, which is paying to research those alternatives that are required to get to true net-zero or negative emissions. They are VC for science that could solve the problem, funded by those causing the problem.
• dtdimond 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• citizenpaul 5y ago
  The idea of carbon offsets is comical from even surface evaluation. I will pollute as much as I want but I paid my friend John not to pollute so all is good. Also I get free money from the GOV when I do this.
• autokad 5y ago
  carbon offsets are the modern day equivalent to indulgencies.
• skybrian 5y ago
  > Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever. We’re still nowhere near net zero! This is true, but as a side effect you've saved the rainforests, which would be amazing! Maybe we shouldn't judge the worth of a carbon offets scheme solely by carbon emissions? It can be kind of dubious and still have good side effects.
• Angostura 5y ago
  I prefer the Carbon Fee and Dividend approach https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/
• sandbx 5y ago
  "additionality" is a difficult idea to capture, and can lead to perverse incentives to not make good behavior mandatory
• rob_c 5y ago
  Like most carbon technologies/statements be it capture, neutral, offset, whatever when it comes with an asterix its 99.999% of the time not true and usually involves a lot of money and probably PR for a multinational, a member of the neauveau riche or a member of the upper class with a guilty conscience or bad image/rep
• bwanab 5y ago
  I’ve got a funny feeling that the author didn’t really understand how offsets are supposed to work. Consider the example of all the rain forests. Assume they’ve all been sold off, but we still haven’t reduced carbon in the atmosphere. So far so bad, but given that, there are still going to be emitters left who’d like to keep emitting. To do that, they’ve got to bid the price of credits up. But any owner of credits that wants to sell now has to find a way to reduce emissions so they can sell. As the price of credits goes up, the incentives become reducing emissions to profit from selling credits. It’s trying to align firm’s desire to profit with reducing emissions.
• Gimpei 5y ago
  There’s something I’m not understanding in this critique . If somebody buys a whole bunch of trees, that would presumably increase the price of lumber overall and thus encourage a substitution away from lumber. So somebody certainly could chop down some other trees, but now the opportunity cost would be higher. The more people bidding for trees in order to offset emissions, the greater this opportunity cost would be. Isn’t this precisely a “market solution”?
• giorgioz 5y ago
  The article focuses mainly on offset through forest. The word forest is mentioned 11 times and the word solar is mentioned 2 times in the article. Solar panels are a much more tangible form of offsets given they produce energy that can be measured. Also insulation and temperature can be measured and are much more quantitative. The author picks on purpose the hardest offsets to measure/quantify in order to support the anti-offset claims.
  • kitbrennan 5y ago
    Agreed. I work in the sustainability industry, and forestry carbon accounts for a small minority of offsets available. It also has plenty of well documented flaws so we often steer out customers clear of it. Yet the media and every blog writer loves to talk about offsets as though the only projects available are plopping trees in the ground. The vast majority of offsets fall into filling the funding gap for renewable energy, methane capture and burning (a fun one to explain, but results in a net reduction), biomass use, and on and on. The simple fact is offsets are one of the greatest funders of decarbonisation in low income nations. It’s also worrying how high this post was voted considering the authors apparent lack of understanding for how the carbon certification or economics work. Examples seemingly missed out include the fact that most certification schemes require buffers for forestry carbon to cover the unknowns in this type of project, or the economics idea that if every offset was purchased it would force offsets to go up in price until they encourage carbon reduction.
• chrischen 5y ago
  “If everyone did it” would just increase the price of offsets to the point some people would have to actually curb their own carbon emissions no?
• Vladimof 5y ago
  Carbon offsets are a backward way of reducing pollution... large polluters probably lobbied to get the system the way it is...
• mupuff1234 5y ago
  Any thoughts on carbon credit ETFs?
• jgraham 5y ago
  So the fundamental premise of the article seems to be "offsetting via avoidance can't get you to net zero, so it's a bad idea". I agree with the premise (that it can't get you to net zero), but I wonder if it can hep with resource allocation and efficient sequencing? For example we currently don't seem to have a good plan to reduce the carbon emissions of the aviation industry other than "fly much less". And whilst I can certainly get on board with that, it seems unlikely there's going to be the necessary big shift in behaviour (and corresponding shrinkage of the aviation sector) over the next five to ten years. Meanwhile we do know that things like reducing the carbon emissions of dwellings by improving insulation is relatively straightforward. But individuals often don't have the capital to make those changes themselves (even where it would provide cost savings in the medium term). So if aviation companies were providing money that was redistributed to projects which are short-term viable but lacking the necessary funding, that could make an impact now, even though it doesn't fully solve the long term problem. Make those contributions mandatory and we have something that looks like a carbon tax used to fund decarbonisation programmes. Of course, in the end you still need to tackle the hard problems. But artifical carbon sequestration still seems to be very much at the "reasearch project" stage, and whilst creating natural environments that can sequester carbon (forests, bogs, etc.) is undoubtedly a great idea — not just for carbon, but also for habitat creation, biodiversity, staving of desertification, and a host of other reasons — it seems problematic as a form of offsetting for the reasons identified in the article, plus the fact that it operates over a period of decades, so it's almost impossible to create any accountablity if the carbon is not in fact sequestered. More than that, the fact that increasing tree cover and restoring natural habitats is so important means it's worrying when the funding plan is based on pennance for carbon emissions. We don't want to create a situation where resources for these incredibly important projects start to dry up just because more companies have successfully reduced their corporate emissions (even if they still have product-usage emissions which are usually unaccounted for).
• austinbv 5y ago
  It's an economic bet - the article assumes static pricing for offsets vs mitigation. That's just naive. As there is less rainforest to buy and the last few squares get more and more expensive. Along the way things like solar, bio, and other green energy continue to become more economical to implement Eventually there will be a tipping point where it's cheaper to move to green than to offset emissions.
• tunesmith 5y ago
  I don't understand the general thrust of this argument. There are carbon offset companies that are investigated according to sets of standards, specifically to rule out abuses like planting trees that will just get cut down again. And I understand the basic system effects of: Currently it is cheap to buy enough offsets to cancel out one year of citizenship. If everyone does it, then these plentiful opportunities dry up - whether it's running out of land to plant trees or running out of pilot programs to bury carbon, it gets more expensive. But that's a feature, not a bug. It means that over that period of time, more externalities have been captured into the system, which is exactly what we want. If companies are mandated to buy offsets and they get expensive, then it creates the incentive to create more tech to be able to sequester more carbon. Which is what we want.
  • phillipcarter 5y ago
    The issue is that they need to be dramatically reducing their carbon footprint right now to avoid catastrophic consequences 50 years from now (and even that is tenuous). Kicking the can down the road by paying a little tax from their record profits does not help.
• julienb_sea 5y ago
  Let's be honest, offsets are a brand of corporate social responsibility, similar to marketing spend. They are ripe for abuse and don't do a whole lot in aggregate. To be fair, when we're talking about an airliner buying offsets, realistically what else could they possibly do? We are not flying commercial airplanes without emissions during this century. From the individual company standpoint, it is a net benefit to leverage their profits for emission reductions in other sectors. This is similar to Norway's approach of leveraging fuel profits to subsidize emission-offset projects, i.e. outcompete the emission-burning activities that the market would pay for.
• random314 5y ago
  How about a carbon tax/offset that directly subsidizes EV and solar manufacturing. Certainly worked with Tesla!
• rr808 5y ago
  The other problem right now is shipped natural gas. Sure, gas is better than carbon if its local. But if you extract gas in Qatar, compress it then ship it to Europe, it uses way more carbon than Russian gas, so you might as well burn coal.
• nephanth 5y ago
  Offsets should only be negative emissions (like reforestation). Then they would be pretty legitimate
• tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Additionality means that it wouldn't have happened without the offset. It's nice that we should or need to do X, but if X isn't going to happen, then any action that causes X to happen is a positive change. If it's a "valid" offset, then we already know X wasn't going to happen without it, regardless of whether it should or must happen. Double counting is a serious problem here, of course, and the article is right that removal based offsets alone cannot get us to net zero. What genuine offsets (i.e. those that actually meet the 4 required criteria) can do is that (finite) resources get invested where they're more effective, letting us achieve specific intermediate goals earlier than without them. That's actual kilograms of CO2 that aren't in the atmosphere by a certain date. "If Everyone Did It, Would It Still Work?" - until we actually get to net zero, yes, actually. As the cheap and easy opportunities go away, genuine offsets become much more expensive, to the point where avoiding the emissions will often be cheaper than offsetting them. Likewise, as regulation tightens towards net zero, the opportunities for offsets that meet the "additionality" requirement go toward zero too. There are many serious issues with offsets (like the lack of additionality, double counting, non-permanence, and leakage, as mentioned in the article), but the article makes it sound like they can't work even theoretically. "“Preserving an acre of rainforest” fails the test. Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever." - then the offsetting potential of rainforest protection is exhausted, and other ways to get to net zero will need to be found. Also, the "additionality" criterion should, if applied correctly, already limit the amount of offsets you can get out of protecting the rainforest.
• robbrown451 5y ago
  The "but what if everyone did it?" argument doesn't make sense and shows a lack of understanding of basic supply and demand. The more people want to buy credits, and the fewer people willing to sell them, the more the price goes up. If someone is willing to pay me $100 to walk a mile to work, I'm going to walk a mile to work. Jeff Bezos probably won't, but that's ok. The point is, the price will stabilize at an equilibrium. If this sort of thing didn't work, our whole market economy would collapse almost immediately.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Carbon offsets are just a reinvention of barter, which is a most inefficient way to trade. Cap & trade is yet another barter scheme. Use a scheme that works - money. Tax the carbon content of the fuels. It's economically efficient, and it works.
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  The only way to make "pay for emissions" actually do what we want it to do without degenerating into countless scams and excess management wastage, is tax it at the literal coal face, and at the port. The market really will figure out who pays what share of the price increases, that's what markets a great at. It needs to be done slowly, so that markets and stakeholders have time to adjust, and there are no great shocks that destroy otherwise-solvent businesses or industries, but it's the only way it can ever be done fairly.
• perrygeo 5y ago
  Agree. And to add another huge risk factor into the mix, how do you know that the offsets will last through the impacts of climate change? What if a company emits CO2 today, and purchases offsets which invest in the growth of a forest somewhere. In X years, that forest experiences the most intense wildfire season on record and all the carbon they paid to sequester go up in flames. Their offset is worth nothing, yet they already cashed out. Nobody wins, except the polluter who is strangely not liable to keep up their end of the bargain.
• a5withtrrs 5y ago
  This is a surprisingly timely post given the recent "Honest Government Ad | Carbon Credits & Offsets" from JuiceMedia[1]. It's more Australian focused, but it sums it up quite succinctly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRDseUEEsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRDseUEEsg
• Jenda_ 5y ago
  A satire about renting a personal vegetarian to offset your meat-eating: http://www.tabootrades.com/veggie/ http://www.tabootrades.com/veggie/ A more serious essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/ Previous discussion on cement and CO2 emissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604335 tl;dr cement releases lots of CO2 when manufactured (you are basically running CaCO3 → CaO + CO2), but the reaction runs partially in reverse when the cement cures. There was no clean conclusion on what is the overall result.
• pabs3 5y ago
  I like the Juice Media's Honest Government Ad about carbon credits/offsets: https://www.thejuicemedia.com/carboncredits/ https://www.thejuicemedia.com/carboncredits/
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  Any carbon emission reduction program that has no global consensus among all countries is a fraud and certainly has the backing of China, Russia and India if you follow the money deep enough. Sure, you want to reduce emissions, but how do you stop industries from moving out to more polluting countries? How do you get Nordic countries such as Canada and Russia to agree when the unfreezing of their northern territories advantages them? How do you tell the poorest citizens of the world to suffer the brunt of the consequences of higher gas price for something that is centuries in scale and when their family is hungry now? Not addressing these problems means you're showing off your support for the current cause.