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[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"?

[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.

tinco 5y ago
There's no maths in your article. I don't get how you can write an article about the impact of climate change policy without maths. > 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! We're not? How far would we be? Would all the cement operators offset equal or exceed the amount of offsets needed to protect the entire Amazon? What percentage of carbon offsets is the entire Amazon? Your entire argument hinges on these questions. Ask yourself, what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2?
- snewman 5y ago
  The idea of "protect the rainforest" offsets, and "avoided emissions" offsets in general, is as follows: 1. Party A is planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as cutting down an acre of forest, or operating their diesel bus. 2. Party B is also planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as operating their cement plant. 3. Party B pays party A to halt / avoid their carbon-emitting activity. Note that nowhere in this scenario is anyone removing any CO2 from the atmosphere; they're just jockeying over who gets to keep emitting. If you're thinking, "but merely by existing, the rainforest is actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere", then that's a separate, complicated topic and not what I'm trying to address here. If you prefer, strike out "preserve an acre of forest" and substitute "replace my diesel bus with an electric bus". > what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2? Again, to avoid getting bogged down in complicated analysis of the carbon dynamics of forests, let's focus on the diesel-bus example. Each year, I can pay the bus owner to continue leasing an electric bus, rather than the diesel bus, for that year. I can keep "offsetting" my cement plant forever.
  - tinco 5y ago
    > Avoided emissions are when I pay my brother to clean his room. Only one approach can lead to a tidy house. What if you have to pay your brother two clean two rooms. You are right that just offsetting your own emissions doesn't get us to carbon zero, it sort of gets us half way there (provided it actually works of course). If instead everytime you're emitting CO2 you're not just responsible for offsetting your own CO2, you're also responsible for rolling it back. If you want to be part of the problem, you'd have to be part of the solution as well. Anyway that's in the hypothetical situation where we want to have carbon offsets be the driver of solving the entire climate crisis. I don't think that's the main idea. The main idea is just to be a privatized hedge on carbon tax. A carbon tax could be the other half, or the other half could just be a general tax for example on CO2 positive products. My original point is at some point you're going to run out of bus operators that can lease electric buses. All the non-electric buses also have to offset their carbon emissions after all. At some point all the avoidable carbon is bought up and offset, and the only way you can continue to buy offsets is by buying more expensive methods such as clean energy generation or even sequestration. What is triggering my math concern in your article is that your examples involve an infinite amount of offsets being available. Maybe there's enough electric buses for the first cement factory, but what about the second cement factory, it will have to compete for the offsets with the first one, raising the cost of the offsets, enabling innovation where possible (provided again the certification works well enough).

tinco 5y ago

There's no maths in your article. I don't get how you can write an article about the impact of climate change policy without maths. > 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! We're not? How far would we be? Would all the cement operators offset equal or exceed the amount of offsets needed to protect the entire Amazon? What percentage of carbon offsets is the entire Amazon? Your entire argument hinges on these questions. Ask yourself, what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2?

snewman 5y ago
The idea of "protect the rainforest" offsets, and "avoided emissions" offsets in general, is as follows: 1. Party A is planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as cutting down an acre of forest, or operating their diesel bus. 2. Party B is also planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as operating their cement plant. 3. Party B pays party A to halt / avoid their carbon-emitting activity. Note that nowhere in this scenario is anyone removing any CO2 from the atmosphere; they're just jockeying over who gets to keep emitting. If you're thinking, "but merely by existing, the rainforest is actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere", then that's a separate, complicated topic and not what I'm trying to address here. If you prefer, strike out "preserve an acre of forest" and substitute "replace my diesel bus with an electric bus". > what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2? Again, to avoid getting bogged down in complicated analysis of the carbon dynamics of forests, let's focus on the diesel-bus example. Each year, I can pay the bus owner to continue leasing an electric bus, rather than the diesel bus, for that year. I can keep "offsetting" my cement plant forever.
- tinco 5y ago
  > Avoided emissions are when I pay my brother to clean his room. Only one approach can lead to a tidy house. What if you have to pay your brother two clean two rooms. You are right that just offsetting your own emissions doesn't get us to carbon zero, it sort of gets us half way there (provided it actually works of course). If instead everytime you're emitting CO2 you're not just responsible for offsetting your own CO2, you're also responsible for rolling it back. If you want to be part of the problem, you'd have to be part of the solution as well. Anyway that's in the hypothetical situation where we want to have carbon offsets be the driver of solving the entire climate crisis. I don't think that's the main idea. The main idea is just to be a privatized hedge on carbon tax. A carbon tax could be the other half, or the other half could just be a general tax for example on CO2 positive products. My original point is at some point you're going to run out of bus operators that can lease electric buses. All the non-electric buses also have to offset their carbon emissions after all. At some point all the avoidable carbon is bought up and offset, and the only way you can continue to buy offsets is by buying more expensive methods such as clean energy generation or even sequestration. What is triggering my math concern in your article is that your examples involve an infinite amount of offsets being available. Maybe there's enough electric buses for the first cement factory, but what about the second cement factory, it will have to compete for the offsets with the first one, raising the cost of the offsets, enabling innovation where possible (provided again the certification works well enough).