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I’m shocked at the uniform cynicism here. The big banks are just now getting involved—and hate as you like, but they will bring way more accountability to a mul

I’m shocked at the uniform cynicism here. The big banks are just now getting involved—and hate as you like, but they will bring way more accountability to a multibillion dollar market. When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed. They expect meaningful carbon reductions and accountability systems will improve the market efficiency over time. For instance, adjusting the credit amount based on probability and risk. No one wants to invest in something fraudulent! We need an all-of-the-above approach to climate change and if carbon credits make a meaningful reduction in rainforest destruction, increase environmentally diverse farm fallowing, subsidize mangrove planting or more efficient technologies/practices, it could have a HUGE impact. Maybe give it a little time before adopting such dismissive cynicism towards markets and technology, please? Am I completely out on a limb here?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 5y ago
Let me go out on a limb. Carbon trading of some kind has been a popular policy since the 1980s. In fact it's almost completely substituted for any real action. If there really was going to be some justice for people's crimes in this life in the next I'd suggest that William Nordhaus might, looking back 1000 years from now, be seen as the most evil person in history. https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of-climate-change-is-misleading-and-dangerous-heres-why-145567 https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of... You might assign 100 million or so deaths to the communist and fascist movements, but a real climate crisis could kill 10x or 50x that. Nordhaus brought climate change into the space of neoliberalism and promoted the idea that trading carbon credits could fix it. If we go down this road in 30 years people are going to be saying "we need an all-of-the-above approach... it could have a HUGE impact ... give it a little time."
- Retric 5y ago
  Such estimates always depend on what you consider the baseline. Is a world without the industrial revolution the baseline for a world without climate change? If so you can arguably reach a negative death total from climate change or multiple billions by excluding all positive effects. Which is why people never really take such estimates seriously, it’s far too arbitrarily a number to really mean much.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Are disputing the efficacy of carbon trading? This article isn’t. Cap and trade is different from offsets. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918128117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918128117
pzduniak 5y ago
>When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed. Don't they benefit from the status quo? It's not the companies that get scammed, it's the people who select the cheap "offset my carbon footprint" option when getting a plane ticket and pay for JetBlue to transfer that money to some scammy offsetting service. JetBlue gets good PR for contributing to "carbon offsetting programs" on behalf of customers - which are cheap enough because the market is not heavily regulated. I don't trust international corporations to do anything but optimize to make more money.
sdeframond 5y ago
> When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed Yes, except what they are really buying is regulatory compliance, not meaningful reduction. I do agree with your general sentiment though.
Clent 5y ago
Is it cynicism to notice that capitalist system that created the problem is trying to solve the problem it created with more capitalism or is it magically thinking to believe this is the moment where self imposed regulations will come together to solve the problem?
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Doesn’t technology often create problems that technology solves? Don’t people create problems that people solve? Can you explain the logic of your argument?
  - uoaei 5y ago
    It seems incredibly lazy to flatten all the various forms and scales of disasters into a single layer of "problems". Climate change is incomparable to many of the so-called "problems" you may point to.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Why is climate change incomparable? I would compare it to the technology that was developed in response to CFCs and the ozone hole. Don’t call me lazy as an insult, please.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Technology and people are even broader categories than a particular economic system. One could also point out population growth over the same time period. Or the scientific revolution that made the industrial one possible, which allowed us to feed billions more people and everything that comes with.
- chii 5y ago
  If "the problem" you refer to is "climate change", i don't see how it is capitalism's fault. Under any communism economics, the same climate change "problem" would occur, if the lifestyle of today is kept the same. Of course, if you argue that there wouldn't be as much development and energy use under communism, then i agree - but that means the "problem" is not the economic system, but lifestyle and energy use. If people were willing to sacrifice their energy use - aka, no cars, no transport, no plastic products etc.
snewman 5y ago
[Author of the original post here] I agree that some carbon offsets / credits are "high quality", i.e. represent actual, durable reductions in someone's emissions. They can help with the important projects you mention. When the result is to durably sequester carbon from the atmosphere, I also agree that this is a good contribution toward net zero. I don't know anything about mangrove planting, but that sounds like it might fit. Certainly the Climeworks project someone mentioned elsewhere in this discussion fits. The problem is with "avoided emissions" offsets. Suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop. That's a half solution, but it is often treated as a complete solution: X looks good because they bought an offset, and Y looks good because they're no longer emitting anything. That's the shell game. Concretely, let's consider rainforest preservation. This is critically important, and plausibly (I don't actually know a lot about it) requires payments to relevant actors in places like Brazil. So yes, as a society, we need to come up with money for those payments. But we need to come up with that money in a way that doesn't let some other polluter permanently off the hook for their emissions. If an airline pays to protect some rainforest, says "hey look an offset", and declares victory, how will we ever address the airline's emissions? We've done some good in the short run (we accelerated the effort to preserve the rainforest), but then we arrive at a dead end. Cap-and-trade systems avoid this problem, if all of the buyers and sellers of credits are part of the system, and the cap is gradually reduced to zero. But if a company says "my plan to reach net zero relies heavily on purchasing offsets", outside of a cap-and-trade system that eventually squeezes avoided-emissions offsets to zero, then we're back to the shell game.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Is there a moral question here about whether some things, like responsibility, are intrinsically "non-transferable"? When thinking of simple goods or services it seems fine that I can buy a car and then sell it. That's part of property rights. For other things like a medical prescription, driving license or degree certificate it seems correct that these things are somehow tied to an individual. Capitalism has evolved to allow transfer of many non-tangibles. Financialisation is really the ability to trade companies, and more importantly "titles and rights". Eventually this has extended to buying and selling debts. Through this mechanism we've accepted, in the limit, the trading of responsibility. Yet there are already obvious limits to this. If I murder a man I cannot sell that burden by contract, such that if I'm convicted another will go to prison in my stead.[1] These carbon trades feel a little bit more like this last case than selling a car. Should one get to commit a tangible harm and then offload the responsibility? [2] [1] actually I think this may have been historically possible in some cultures. [2] This is a Kantian question - because clearly under Utilitarian analysis I can simply claim a "greater good is served".
axus 5y ago
The big banks did not bring accountability to the coronavirus relief loans, because there was no penalty to them for failing.
mschuster91 5y ago
The core problem with carbon offsetting is that it allows the rich elites to continue polluting the environment (because in their mind, they paid for it) while the poor have to take the brunt of the load instead. The richest 10% of the world account for half the CO² emissions [1], a figure that will only grow larger. What the world needs are clear and hard bans: no more import of meat from Brazil until the country provably prevents further razing of the Amazonas rain forest, a hard cap on flights per person and year to two or four (with reasonable allowance for people in multi-national relationships, expats and the likes), a ban on twenty different brands of yogurt (or any other product class) in stores, and most importantly a hard cap on vehicle size and gas consumption: no fat SUV/truck until you prove to the government you have a reasonable need for such a vehicle. Everyone else gets a standard electric vehicle that serves their needs (i.e. singles and no-child households get either a single 2-seater standard car or two Smart-sized cars, and families get a 3+number_of_children sized car). Yes, part of this sounds like "omg communism!!!" but the sooner people realize that the status quo is not sustainable and never has been, the better. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-footprint-gap-between-rich-poor-expanding-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f...
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Viva la revolution! But, I think the “let’s just dictate” approach is likely to fail for many, many reasons.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    If humanity continues its current path of not caring or actively worsening the problem (such as Brazil is doing), more likely than not nature will dictate and send us into extinction - which is why the German Constitutional Court required our previous government to produce scientifically sound plans for CO² reductions in a landmark ruling [1]. The reasoning was that if nothing or not enough is being done today, the freedom of future generations is automatically restricted, to the point that there may be no choices left. [1] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2021/bvg21-031.html https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...
uoaei 5y ago
What precedent exists to make you think that big finance will "bring accountability" to anything that they themselves are completely unaccountable for? It is trivial to identify many examples where they are neck-deep in investments that run counter to the stated goals of environmental movements. Oil investments are a very simple example, but so is the continued financial support for companies which dump toxic waste into public lands. If there is no accountability now, how the hell will there be more accountability when they get even more fingers in more pies? Investment relies on a simple idea: that the investment returns more money than you put in. Which part of what you've described makes that expectation compatible with solutions to the climate crisis?
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  It is pretty simple: now there can be investment in companies that make money from reducing carbon. If the products don’t actually reduce carbon, their customers flee them and the investment fails. Does that make sense?
  - uoaei 5y ago
    It makes sense in absence of any acknowledgment of our global economy's structure, sure.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      I don’t follow. The structure of making investments? Capitalism?
scythe 5y ago
It seems like you should be able to buy offsets that do something like building solar panels in South America rather than just slowing things down.
cr__ 5y ago
> Am I completely out on a limb here? Yes. The idea that you can use "many businesses believe in concept X, including lots of banks" as a metric for determining the value of an idea is absurd on its face.
- chii 5y ago
  If the reason for carbon offset sales is due to marketing and the desire to look good, then the firms buying it won't care how good or efficient the offsetting is done - they want branding and marketing out comes, not environmental outcomes.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Big banks will bring accountability in terms of ensuring the market functions to make them money. Whether or not it functions to help the environment in any way at all would be entirely incidental. Notice all the financial institutions self-congratulatory boasting a few years ago about divesting from thermal coal. Little odd how that wasn't timed with any new revelation about climate change or coal in the past 50 years, but rather exactly with sagging coal price and estimates of peak coal and continued demand collapse and replacement by cheaper sources. They've gone a little quiet about that since coal prices skyrocketing 5x to historic highs in the past year. God help us if the big banks are the only ones who can save us.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 5y ago

Let me go out on a limb. Carbon trading of some kind has been a popular policy since the 1980s. In fact it's almost completely substituted for any real action. If there really was going to be some justice for people's crimes in this life in the next I'd suggest that William Nordhaus might, looking back 1000 years from now, be seen as the most evil person in history. https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of-climate-change-is-misleading-and-dangerous-heres-why-145567 https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of... You might assign 100 million or so deaths to the communist and fascist movements, but a real climate crisis could kill 10x or 50x that. Nordhaus brought climate change into the space of neoliberalism and promoted the idea that trading carbon credits could fix it. If we go down this road in 30 years people are going to be saying "we need an all-of-the-above approach... it could have a HUGE impact ... give it a little time."

Retric 5y ago
Such estimates always depend on what you consider the baseline. Is a world without the industrial revolution the baseline for a world without climate change? If so you can arguably reach a negative death total from climate change or multiple billions by excluding all positive effects. Which is why people never really take such estimates seriously, it’s far too arbitrarily a number to really mean much.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Are disputing the efficacy of carbon trading? This article isn’t. Cap and trade is different from offsets. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918128117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918128117

pzduniak 5y ago

>When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed. Don't they benefit from the status quo? It's not the companies that get scammed, it's the people who select the cheap "offset my carbon footprint" option when getting a plane ticket and pay for JetBlue to transfer that money to some scammy offsetting service. JetBlue gets good PR for contributing to "carbon offsetting programs" on behalf of customers - which are cheap enough because the market is not heavily regulated. I don't trust international corporations to do anything but optimize to make more money.

sdeframond 5y ago

> When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed Yes, except what they are really buying is regulatory compliance, not meaningful reduction. I do agree with your general sentiment though.

Clent 5y ago

Is it cynicism to notice that capitalist system that created the problem is trying to solve the problem it created with more capitalism or is it magically thinking to believe this is the moment where self imposed regulations will come together to solve the problem?

dr_dshiv 5y ago
Doesn’t technology often create problems that technology solves? Don’t people create problems that people solve? Can you explain the logic of your argument?
- uoaei 5y ago
  It seems incredibly lazy to flatten all the various forms and scales of disasters into a single layer of "problems". Climate change is incomparable to many of the so-called "problems" you may point to.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Why is climate change incomparable? I would compare it to the technology that was developed in response to CFCs and the ozone hole. Don’t call me lazy as an insult, please.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Technology and people are even broader categories than a particular economic system. One could also point out population growth over the same time period. Or the scientific revolution that made the industrial one possible, which allowed us to feed billions more people and everything that comes with.
chii 5y ago
If "the problem" you refer to is "climate change", i don't see how it is capitalism's fault. Under any communism economics, the same climate change "problem" would occur, if the lifestyle of today is kept the same. Of course, if you argue that there wouldn't be as much development and energy use under communism, then i agree - but that means the "problem" is not the economic system, but lifestyle and energy use. If people were willing to sacrifice their energy use - aka, no cars, no transport, no plastic products etc.

snewman 5y ago

[Author of the original post here] I agree that some carbon offsets / credits are "high quality", i.e. represent actual, durable reductions in someone's emissions. They can help with the important projects you mention. When the result is to durably sequester carbon from the atmosphere, I also agree that this is a good contribution toward net zero. I don't know anything about mangrove planting, but that sounds like it might fit. Certainly the Climeworks project someone mentioned elsewhere in this discussion fits. The problem is with "avoided emissions" offsets. Suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop. That's a half solution, but it is often treated as a complete solution: X looks good because they bought an offset, and Y looks good because they're no longer emitting anything. That's the shell game. Concretely, let's consider rainforest preservation. This is critically important, and plausibly (I don't actually know a lot about it) requires payments to relevant actors in places like Brazil. So yes, as a society, we need to come up with money for those payments. But we need to come up with that money in a way that doesn't let some other polluter permanently off the hook for their emissions. If an airline pays to protect some rainforest, says "hey look an offset", and declares victory, how will we ever address the airline's emissions? We've done some good in the short run (we accelerated the effort to preserve the rainforest), but then we arrive at a dead end. Cap-and-trade systems avoid this problem, if all of the buyers and sellers of credits are part of the system, and the cap is gradually reduced to zero. But if a company says "my plan to reach net zero relies heavily on purchasing offsets", outside of a cap-and-trade system that eventually squeezes avoided-emissions offsets to zero, then we're back to the shell game.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
Is there a moral question here about whether some things, like responsibility, are intrinsically "non-transferable"? When thinking of simple goods or services it seems fine that I can buy a car and then sell it. That's part of property rights. For other things like a medical prescription, driving license or degree certificate it seems correct that these things are somehow tied to an individual. Capitalism has evolved to allow transfer of many non-tangibles. Financialisation is really the ability to trade companies, and more importantly "titles and rights". Eventually this has extended to buying and selling debts. Through this mechanism we've accepted, in the limit, the trading of responsibility. Yet there are already obvious limits to this. If I murder a man I cannot sell that burden by contract, such that if I'm convicted another will go to prison in my stead.[1] These carbon trades feel a little bit more like this last case than selling a car. Should one get to commit a tangible harm and then offload the responsibility? [2] [1] actually I think this may have been historically possible in some cultures. [2] This is a Kantian question - because clearly under Utilitarian analysis I can simply claim a "greater good is served".

axus 5y ago

The big banks did not bring accountability to the coronavirus relief loans, because there was no penalty to them for failing.

mschuster91 5y ago

The core problem with carbon offsetting is that it allows the rich elites to continue polluting the environment (because in their mind, they paid for it) while the poor have to take the brunt of the load instead. The richest 10% of the world account for half the CO² emissions [1], a figure that will only grow larger. What the world needs are clear and hard bans: no more import of meat from Brazil until the country provably prevents further razing of the Amazonas rain forest, a hard cap on flights per person and year to two or four (with reasonable allowance for people in multi-national relationships, expats and the likes), a ban on twenty different brands of yogurt (or any other product class) in stores, and most importantly a hard cap on vehicle size and gas consumption: no fat SUV/truck until you prove to the government you have a reasonable need for such a vehicle. Everyone else gets a standard electric vehicle that serves their needs (i.e. singles and no-child households get either a single 2-seater standard car or two Smart-sized cars, and families get a 3+number_of_children sized car). Yes, part of this sounds like "omg communism!!!" but the sooner people realize that the status quo is not sustainable and never has been, the better. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-footprint-gap-between-rich-poor-expanding-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f...

dr_dshiv 5y ago
Viva la revolution! But, I think the “let’s just dictate” approach is likely to fail for many, many reasons.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  If humanity continues its current path of not caring or actively worsening the problem (such as Brazil is doing), more likely than not nature will dictate and send us into extinction - which is why the German Constitutional Court required our previous government to produce scientifically sound plans for CO² reductions in a landmark ruling [1]. The reasoning was that if nothing or not enough is being done today, the freedom of future generations is automatically restricted, to the point that there may be no choices left. [1] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2021/bvg21-031.html https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...

uoaei 5y ago

What precedent exists to make you think that big finance will "bring accountability" to anything that they themselves are completely unaccountable for? It is trivial to identify many examples where they are neck-deep in investments that run counter to the stated goals of environmental movements. Oil investments are a very simple example, but so is the continued financial support for companies which dump toxic waste into public lands. If there is no accountability now, how the hell will there be more accountability when they get even more fingers in more pies? Investment relies on a simple idea: that the investment returns more money than you put in. Which part of what you've described makes that expectation compatible with solutions to the climate crisis?

dr_dshiv 5y ago
It is pretty simple: now there can be investment in companies that make money from reducing carbon. If the products don’t actually reduce carbon, their customers flee them and the investment fails. Does that make sense?
- uoaei 5y ago
  It makes sense in absence of any acknowledgment of our global economy's structure, sure.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I don’t follow. The structure of making investments? Capitalism?

scythe 5y ago

It seems like you should be able to buy offsets that do something like building solar panels in South America rather than just slowing things down.

cr__ 5y ago

> Am I completely out on a limb here? Yes. The idea that you can use "many businesses believe in concept X, including lots of banks" as a metric for determining the value of an idea is absurd on its face.

chii 5y ago
If the reason for carbon offset sales is due to marketing and the desire to look good, then the firms buying it won't care how good or efficient the offsetting is done - they want branding and marketing out comes, not environmental outcomes.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Big banks will bring accountability in terms of ensuring the market functions to make them money. Whether or not it functions to help the environment in any way at all would be entirely incidental. Notice all the financial institutions self-congratulatory boasting a few years ago about divesting from thermal coal. Little odd how that wasn't timed with any new revelation about climate change or coal in the past 50 years, but rather exactly with sagging coal price and estimates of peak coal and continued demand collapse and replacement by cheaper sources. They've gone a little quiet about that since coal prices skyrocketing 5x to historic highs in the past year. God help us if the big banks are the only ones who can save us.