49 ms·

Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing

241 points by boredemployee 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smileysteve 4y ago
This seems like a no true scotsman opinion. The author is asking questions about life span or species of trees without doing any of the journalistic legwork. There are many reasons to say that credits aren't enough if we're still contributing carbon, because few people have been saying "don't plant trees" in the areas that have established credits. But it's not the same as green washing; it might be more similar to cancer awareness campaigns, but there is some action. And of course the answer is "do x less", but that's not an option most of the developed world will choose. Do Y more is much more achievable, especially if it benefits the end user. So new recycling campaign "Recycle aluminum cans, it'll save you 5% on your next 24 cans, reduce the trade deficit, and help build pontoon boats and airplanes"
- cowpig 4y ago
  I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon offsetting creates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY Here is the list of sources for that video if you're interested: [1] https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-the-climate-and-the-mountain https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-the-... [2] https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/ https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/ [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorgan-chase-tops-dirty-list-of-35-fossil-fuel-funding-banks https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorga... [4] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/jpmc-cr-esg-report-2019.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas... [5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-ER09-001-Measuring_emissions_against_an_alternative_future.pdf https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-E... [6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/204717/9789241565233_eng.pdf%3Bjsessionid%3D84BFF76A06408DC1638440E76A746C3D?sequence=1%C2%A0 https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.i... [7] https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-carbon-economy/ https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-ca... [8] https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf [9] https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-cookstove-and-fuel-stacking-achieve-sdg https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-cookstove-a... [10] https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/sei-wp-2013-01-cookstoves-carbon-markets.pdf https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/... [11] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.0065 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.006... [12] https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?accessId=fd91dd https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?acc...
- TSiege 4y ago
  This really misses the point of the claim. Carbon Credits are greenwashing because as it currently exists doesn't work. And almost every approach is based an unfounded schemes. Furthermore, carbon offsets are used to justify ecological damage; they exist for no other purpose. The problem with carbon offsetting is that almost none of the solutions work for long term. For example, if you're digging up oil and burning it, planting a tree wont help. The carbon you dug up from miles underneath our feet is removed from the global carbon cycle for millions of years, the carbon in a tree lasts as long as that tree is alive. Every living organism should be assumed to be decayed and returned to the carbon cycle unless specifically proven otherwise. For example, most of the carbon offset operations in California are being destroyed by wild fires [(1)](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wildfires-are-destroying-californias-forest-carbon-credit-reserves-study-2022-08-05/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wildfires-are-destroying-ca...) If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground. We will delude ourselves if we think any growing any lifeform to capture carbon will work unless humans directly put it into the ground in old oil fields. The only other possibly viable alternative is through mineral reactions with carbon, turning it into stone
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    > If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground. I live in the UK. I think it’s reasonable to visit my family in Australia every few years. Is it bad if I purchase carbon offsets?
    - hgsgm 4y ago
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      Carbon offsets are just donations to environmental groups. There's nothing bad about either taking flights or making donations, but it's wrong in the "factually incorrect" sense to think that if you pick the right amounts to donate to the right groups you can make your flight environmentally friendly. It's like buying a "local business" offset every time you shop at Walmart - you can just do it if you want to or don't do it if you don't.
jwilk 4y ago
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw ("Carbon Offsets! Can't we just buy our way out of climate change?" from the Climate Town channel)
blueflow 4y ago
I find the whole framing of "stopping emissions" odd. Where burning charcoal and burning hard coal are treated the same. But in fact, they are different: charcoal is made from plants, who captured the carbon recently from the air. If the plants are given enough time and space to recapture, burning charcoal is carbon neutral. Hard coal, to the contrary, was isolated from the carbon cycles for like, 300 million years, thus re-adding it to the cycle is going to make a dent that plants probably cannot offset. Stopping digging out carbon (hard coal, oil, liquid gas, limestone) would be like the first thing to do, but it seems the focus was shifted elsewhere...
- cowpig 4y ago
  This argument could make some sense if we were talking about designing a sustainable system in the abstract, but the climate issue is an emergency leading to catastrophic outcomes in the present, and so decreasing emissions by any means necessary in the short-term is what matters.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Continuing to dig out carbon and inserting it into the carbon cycle is guaranteed to exceed what we can offset with plants. What you describe is still a trajectory to doom or whatever awaits us.
    - btilly 4y ago
      With plants that remain part of the life cycle? Sure. But growing plants can lock away carbon more permanently depending how it is disposed of. Consider https://charmindustrial.com/ https://charmindustrial.com/. They take bio waste products (for example corn husks and cobs), turn it into oil, then put that back into wells. So growing plants (in this specific case, food) winds up permanently locking waste away.
      - blueflow 4y ago
        > They take bio waste products [...], turn it into oil I was about to call bullshit because of the first law of thermodynamics, but their FAQ states: > Unlike crude oil, bio-oil cannot sustain a flame, bio-oil has much lower energy density Good! > are heated up to about 500°C in a few seconds without burning I wonder where that heat comes from.
mbgerring 4y ago
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
I've been very careful to not wade into one of these threads too readily, as when I read them, I almost always find a huge range of variability around what people understand or don't understand about forests, soils, or ecosystem scale biogeochemical cycling. There also seem to be some very assertive, and often very uninformed claims around voluntary versus compliance marketplaces, and what role nature based mitigation efforts play currently or might play in the future. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that most authors in the pop science journalism space have a limited capacity for understanding the nuance or uncertainties associated with remote sensing models and principles of biogeochemistry. As well, the armchair analysts make many wrong assumptions about forests, forestry, or how carbon cycling works. Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks. There are often claims made around what forests can or cant do with regards to carbon cycling, and almost always they tend to fundementally misunderstand how carbon cycling, and nutrient cycling work in relationship to long term carbon stability. Not used taking advantage of forests and their ability to represent both (relatively, 10's-100's yr) short term stores of carbon, as well as less labile longer term storage pools (100's-1000's yr). We've been basically mining the world's forests and haven't even remotely attempted using natural ecosystems ability to not only sequester carbon, but to provide significant opportunities for climate resilience. Granted, we have an extraordinary limited understanding of the upper and lower bounds of many of these systems, but that's hardly any argument that we can't engage with and begin learning about the potential of these systems.
- user_named 4y ago
  Okay, so you're saying that everyone but you is too stupid to understand the question. But you also don't understand that the question here is about carbon credits, not about carbon sequestration or any biological process.
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    No? The issue is fundementally about the limits of what we understand about how forests process and store carbon; that current crediting systems are fundementally flawed in what they reward and how they reward it; and that these markets and systems are very very young, and it will take time to understand if and how a market based approach can be effectively implemented. In broad strokes we understand parts of these questions, but the actual science is very hard, and based on expensive, finicky, difficult to get data.
mhh__ 4y ago
Tax the fucking carbon
- xupybd 4y ago
  To what end? Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems, or is it just going to move money around and do little to change the amount of carbon emitted. I suspect the latter. We need to think about solutions from end to end not just ones that appear to punish the parties that we think need punishing.
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    Taxing carbon is the only way the government can be reasonably confident of effecting any change while minimizing economic disruption. Markets work, use them.
    - wonnage 4y ago
      Directly regulating the amount of pollution emitted is effective too, look at how California's auto emissions laws have become a de-facto standard. The US is the #1 source of demand in the world, entire economies (e.g China's) have been built around suppressing domestic demand in favor of making more money exporting to the US. If we change our regulations, the rest of the world will follow.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    > Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems Yes, and give a financial base to begin remediation. Your suspicions are unfounded here, given we already have a proven model pricing pollutants: https://www.nber.org/digest/feb16/cap-and-trade-sulfur-dioxide-allowances-market-experiment https://www.nber.org/digest/feb16/cap-and-trade-sulfur-dioxi... A tax is just more direct, even when subject to political cowardice.
- trothamel 4y ago
  That's a very good way to get unelected.
tunesmith 4y ago
These kind of opinions are increasing in frequency and they all seem poorly reasoned to me. Yes, there are standards organizations to make sure that, for instance, tree farms aren't just logging their trees and selling the same plots for offsets again. The author makes the point that the timeframes are too long, but that just strikes me as thinking similar to "planting trees doesn't work, we need x instead!" When the point is that every little bit helps. Given good enough standards, it just means that while carbon offset opportunities are plentiful, they'll be cheap - and as they become more popular, the price will increase, and this is a good thing. I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!" argument, because it just seems a lazy argument designed to remove any personal agency. Corporations are made out of people. If people didn't exist, neither would the corporations. If demand for a corporations products or services dried up, the corporation would cease to exist. As corporations reduce their emissions, the per-person carbon footprint shrinks. In the US, the per-person carbon footprint is lower than it used to be. They're related. Communicating a per-person carbon footprint increases people demanding corporations reduce emissions. If the per-person carbon footprint were a scheme developed by corporations to avoid accountability, it seems a very poorly-thought-out and ineffective scheme from those corporations.
- hgsgm 4y ago
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  > I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!" Oh come on... People like Leo Dicaprio and Taylor Swift fly on their private jets to tell Johnny Average here, that he should bike for 15 miles to his workplace. Organizations are the same... look at coca cola for example, some water, sugar and aromas, in a plastic bottle, plastic cap, plastic sticker, packed in a sixpack wrapped in plastic, on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic. Reusable glass bottles? Nope (atleast not in my country). Just look at packaging of most items.. clamshell packaging, toothpaste double or tripple wrapped, shrinkflation (less product, same amount of packaging, more packages bought), single peppers wrapped in plastic, bananas wrapped in plastic, electronics literally designed to be unrepairable, tractors going that way too, cars following, user replacable batteries are usually too expensive to replace on 2 year old devices, sotware updates slow down devices, big corps requiring computer-bound workers to come to office, instead of working from home, clothes companies replacing cotton clothes with synthetics, leaking microplastics everywhere, companies catchign fish in US seas, or even meat, shipping them to china to be cleaned, cut and packaged, and then shipped back to US, zero regulation on 3rd world, where corpos either mine raw materials or "recycle" stuff (and recycling copper means burning the insulation off first... literally burning heaps of plastic),... and lets not forget the "accidents" when companies like BP ignore safety and cause fucking huge oil spills and destroy huge areas with their carelessness, and they don't even get properly punished for that. But no... let's pass the blame on people, who have no alternative on the market, and let's ban straws, because "that'll surely help the environment".
Comevius 4y ago
The problem with climate change is that it creates a reality distortion field. Anyone who would honestly try to think about it would give up on life, so instead we have this fake optimism accompanied by fake solutions, basically a fantasy not unlike Harry Potter. Those 2 billion new cars aren't going to help the environment, which is already on the fritz, but if they are electric that means we are on the right path to the unicorn to come and fix everything. Which is great because then we don't have to change our way of life. Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  this pretty much. i think the way we're living is so broken, from education to everything else.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    - boredemployee 4y ago
      Please, highlight who said we need to lower our quality of life? Maybe avoiding waste is a great place to start.
      - alar44 4y ago
        Anyone who is being realistic understands that we have to stop eat food out of season, keeping all buildings at 68 degrees during the summer, getting rid of multi hour commutes in cars, taking vacations in cruise ships, buying new phones every year, shipping everything in multiple layers of plastic over 1000s of miles etc etc. We are so fucking far past "reduce reuse recycle." No one is changing anything about their lives and that should be more than obvious to anyone paying attention.
        RealityVoid 4y ago
aaron695 4y ago
epolanski 4y ago
Why is the elephant in the room, agriculture and cattle so little discussed compared to transport. A burger pollutes more than driving an suv for 50 miles,yet the enemy is always transport. Forget a family of 4 in a single lunch can easily pollute much more than they would with transport in a week.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Transportation is 27% of US carbon emssions vs 11% for agriculture.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    Cattle emission is severely downplayed, starting from the fact that cattle produces methane which is 200 times worse than carbon dioxide, it's also severely downplayed how much it impacts resources like land, water and the many disaster byproducts such as ocean dead zones.[1] Cattle is also the biggest reason for deforestation (Amazon being the most famous example), people want to greedily eat damn steaks everyday, put their head under the sand and pretend electric vehicles will change our fate. Consuming less will. Moving less is good for the environment but eating less meat has much more impact. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
    - twobitshifter 4y ago
      The methane problem is easily solved by feeding them a diet which includes seaweed, why this isn’t mandated is beyond me.
    - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
      > Cattle emission is severely downplayed. No, Cattle emissions are well studied and modelled. Methane emissions from active _and_ abandoned Oil wells, now that is a GHG emission that is largely dismissed and hidden away by the Oil&Gas industry.
- poorlyknit 4y ago
tinco 4y ago
Carbon offsetting becomes effective when it causes less carbon to be emitted. It has to be so expensive that it makes the consumer of the carbon to think twice. This can only happen if the offsetting is mandatory. The further up the chain it is the more effective it is as well. We might be able to death by a thousand cuts the CO2 problem. The more sectors we inconvenience with "green washing" type extra costs, the more attractive greener alternatives become, and the more funding potential solutions get. The article suggests investing in a strategic fund instead, but it's really the same thing and has the same problem as the CO2 offsetting which is that the calculation of the amount of offset CO2 is not realistically calculated. The charities might have unrealistic long term CO2 offset estimates, but making the amount dependent on how much your budget allows for doesn't really make things better. If you fly economy from LAX->AMS and back, you emit ~2500kg of CO2. Easiest way to capture that CO2 is by planting trees. Say you want to capture it within 5 years. That's about 50kg per tree, and about a third dies so you'll need to plant 150 trees to cover your flight, which is $150 on teamtrees.org. Provided of course they actually plant it within the next year (do they?). That's already $50 more than that GCC site suggested you spend if you've got plenty money. Trees grow somewhat superlinearly so if you give your tree 10 years you need maybe $50 worth of trees. Anyway, it still won't save the planet, that only happens when all of this is mandatory and not just for flights but for everything.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  I'd like to add to that, how much more soil carbon becomes present because of the litter being dropped by those trees? How much more water is being stored in the ground because of an increase in soil carbon? How much longer is the growing season extended by with additional water availability? How does extending the growing season impact mineralization and root exudate formation? How do these processes impact site specific net primary productivity? How does growing trees in a space impact our ability to grow trees in a space? These questions are all individually difficult to answer empirically, but are compounded by the massive amount of geologic and climatic variation we see across the planet.
  - just-ok 4y ago
    Absolutely, and it can also easily lead to direct, personal benefits: How much less air conditioning do you need because your house has more shade?
Devasta 4y ago
If I pay for my friend to have a weekend away with his girlfriend, thereby strengthening their relationship, then he shouldn't be mad when I sleep with her too and weaken it right?
- mastax 4y ago
  If you were going to sleep with her anyway that seems like a net good.
- tunesmith 4y ago
  Are we all mindless automatons? I've had it with the binary thinking. How about you pay for your friend's weekend away with his girlfriend, and don't sleep with her yourself? How about pay for carbon offsets and reduce your personal emissions? I don't think I've ever read an article that says if you buy offsets then you can just keep living as you always have. I've seen a lot of articles that accompany carbon offset information with tips on how to reduce your emissions, though.
TedShiller 4y ago
Carbon credits were invented to allow billionaires to fly private jets and use mega yachts without criticism from the public
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  People might dismiss your comment as shallow but I'll add a bit more accuracy: The concept of "Carbon footprint" was fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers.[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
  - gruez 4y ago
    >The concept of "Carbon footprint" was fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers.[0] What's "fabricated" about it? Are consumers not responsible for the carbon they emit through the gas they buy? If you drive a SUV or fly half way across the world for your vacation why should you be able to pass on the buck to BP/American Airlines?
    - oifjsidjf 4y ago
      And in the end YOU will pay for it while big oil pays nothing.
      - gruez 4y ago
        Yeah, because at the end of the day you're burning the oil. If everyone stopped consuming oil, the oil companies will stop drilling. The inverse doesn't really hold. Just look at how gas prices have doubled yet everyone's still driving their cars.
        DoingIsLearning 4y ago
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
A proper carbon tax would only increase flight costs by about 8%, since there's lots of other costs than fuel. People don't seem to believe that though. Because a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have a financial incentive to burn less of it, and there's alternatives for almost all uses. And so, a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry, and not really bother any other industry, is portrayed as an impossible dream because the fossil fuel industry has a lot of money and power.
- indymike 4y ago
  > a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry Increasing the cost of flights by 8%, and by doing so, killing the source of fuel for those flights sounds like economic Armageddon.
  - aoeusnth1 4y ago
    I guess we have to choose between two Armageddons then, one real and one inconvenient.
    - indymike 4y ago
      > I guess we have to choose between two Armageddons then, one real and one inconvenient. We can chose something that is less perfect, but does not result in Armageddon. Solutions that are as bad or worse than the problem are a very hard sell.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        climate change will result in famine and war, maybe nuclear war. Madagaskar has a drought xaused famine right now. Uf that hapens in Pakistan thats a powderkeg situation. Which 'solution' is as bad?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Imagine what it would do if we put heavy restrictions on borders and travel and there was a massive drop in demand from, something like a terrorist attack, or maybe a virus. It would snuff out all industry. Impossible to cope.
Aunche 4y ago
Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver. https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY
adolph 4y ago
I'll gladly pay for some trees that will remove my carbon over the next 25 years if you you let me fly today. In 1932, this then became the famous "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Rough House explains why Wimpy is able to get away with this tactic in one strip, stating that "He never comes around on Tuesday". Rough House once suffered a mental breakdown from Wimpy's shenanigans, and demanded that Wimpy be kept out of his hospital room. Wimpy disobeyed this command, resulting in a rare altercation with Popeye. The phrase was also slightly altered in the episode "Spree Lunch" to "I'll have a hamburger, for which I will gladly pay you Tuesday." This phrase is now commonly used to illustrate financial irresponsibility and still appears in modern comedies such as The Drew Carey Show and The Office. The initial part of the phrase was even the title of Episode 6 of the fourth season of Cheers "I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy
jimbob45 4y ago
Been seeing a lot of these threads pop up over the last week. Also saw the US Senate trying to push a big climate change bill in the last week. Could these two things be related?
somewhereoutth 4y ago
Global warming is being caused by us digging up carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere. Leave It in the Ground. Ban fracking and new exploration. Close wells. Dismantle rigs. Shutoff pipelines. Shutter mines. There will be an economic cost for this - ensure it is carried by those most able to afford it.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > There will be an economic cost for this - ensure it is carried by those most able to afford it. Meanwhile, in reality, the EU's jet fuel tax proposal seems to have exemptions for private jets. The problem, though, is that the way we've designed our civilization is that many things require fossil fuels or some close substitute in order for things to remain habitable. Germany this winter (and the EU in general) will be ones to watch closely to see what happens when it's not a question of the price of natural gas, but the simpler is it available at any cost problems. Or you can point to Texas a couple winters ago - their power production required natural gas. Natural gas, in sufficient quantities, simply wasn't available at any price. And so the state largely went dark. One might hope the problems were fixed, but as record profits were made in a few days, it's unlikely anything will be fixed. Just like it wasn't fixed after the same rough issue happened a decade ago in... oh, 2011? Somewhere around there.
- SamPatt 4y ago
  The economic cost of driving energy prices through the roof will be most harmful to the poor. This is well established, and likely unavoidable. As an overall portion of their expenses, the poor pay much more for energy than the wealthy. Driving up the cost will decrease their standard of living substantially, but much less so to the wealthy. Let's see how Europe fares with higher energy prices this winter, then determine if we should force that on the entire world.
Syonyk 4y ago
> If you are reading this August column of Green is the New Black, it is very likely that you have either recently been away or have an imminent overseas trip. Of course it’s now a given that flying is seriously bad for the planet and that the best way to avoid generating all those emissions is to avoid getting airborne in the first place. But we also know that international travel, whether for business or pleasure, is often unavoidable and/or irresistible; and that, especially given the current mayhem in the UK’s seaports, there are often no other options to get to where we need or want to go. > So what to do when, despite every good green intention, you simply have to fly? I... live in such a different world from this person. Though admittedly everything from the UK is "overseas," I doubt they're really that concerned about a hop over the Channel here (there being a perfectly good tunnel as I understand it). I'll generally agree with "carbon offsets" as "Greenwashing," though there are some notable exceptions - the Climeworks style "deep rock fixing of CO2" seems entirely legitimate, if a bit more energy intensive and harder to scale than pencil whipping some forest data. But it's also far harder to game (outside outright fraud in the sense of "Claim 10MT injected and captured, only injected 8MT and observed 2MT leaking back out the bore holes"). If it involves "forest protection" sort of techniques, it's probably having nearly zero net effect (nobody particularly cares which acres of forest they're cutting, so... go over a few miles instead). What annoys me greatly are the people who claim climate change is a huge looming crisis that will end humanity... so therefore the only thing one can possibly do is vote one way or another and do nothing else unless It Has a ROI. And changing the way we live is literally unthinkable, so... They'll Think of Something. Too many Hollywood movies with "pulled out of the writer's rear end" endings that magically solve all problems at the last minute. And I don't think that's likely. The future is going to be, like it or not, far lower energy, with a lot more "use energy when available and use less when it isn't" - so, basically, the entire history of humanity until the past few hundred years. And there's a lot that can be done to work towards this - some of which does look like dusting off the old work from the 1970s in which a lot of this was worked out, in detail, with practical testing. It looks a lot more like passive solar collectors and a lot less like blockchain... Lately, I've been trying to figure out what it looks like to take "tech money," in some form or another, and make that more directly useful in places where it can have an actual impact. I've been trying to do things like organize group buys of solar panels and help people do their own solar (a DIY install out here, ground mount/grid tie is around $1.25/W right now in materials if you can get a good deal on a truck full of panels shipped in), and I've put in an EV charger or two in places that didn't previously have any - not that it gets much use right now. Or maybe large ebike purchases, fund half on donations from tech workers, half paid for by lower income users. Open to ideas, but there's a lot of money sloshing around in the tech industry and I don't see much in the way of actually focused use. Start building out 1-2MW solar facilities on spare land closer into town instead of building 100MW farms out in the middle of nowhere, or even just helping fund solar carports. Split the cost with the property owners. Or to figure out how to do local, small scale carbon capture on surplus energy. Locally, I've no shortage of basalt, and I know one can grind it and weather it on fields, but can one do something more aggressive, like a fluidized bed reactor sort of concept? I don't have the skills to do all of the work required (mostly the chemistry to verify it), but that sort of small scale thing could scale out and even if it's not 100% efficient, well, it's happening. But I reject the concept that individual action doesn't have an impact, because any sort of massed action starts with individuals who care and are willing to take the actions and steps required to do something. I'm now responsible for several additional solar installs in the area (rural, conservative, and, yes, I live out here willingly and enjoy it) from either talking about it to people who wouldn't otherwise have considered it, or providing technical documentation and resources to people who have the skills to do the installs, but not the design work from the ground up. Having something I can point to, take the covers off, and say "This is what it looks like" is very useful, so people can see if it's something they're willing to do. I'm hoping a 21kW array near me will be approved for operation this week if all goes well. When people live out what they talk about, that works an awful lot better than the standard practices of "trying to insult people into agreeing with you." Anyway. I agree, buying offsets isn't likely to be useful, but neither is sitting on our collective asses waiting for someone else to solve the problem. If anyone has ideas in the areas listed above, I'm easy enough to find!
pabs3 4y ago
There are legitimate and ethical carbon offset programs though, for example Gold Standard's programs: https://www.goldstandard.org/ https://www.goldstandard.org/
godmode2019 4y ago
I have a theory that C02 released at different levels of the atmosphere will have different affects on greenhouse warming. (And should be taxed differently) For example planes release C02 to areas far above normal levels, so their is no natural mechanism for it to become part of the carbon cycle. Carbon released at ground level only a small amount actually makes it to the upper atmosphere, because rain and other factors keeps it near ground level. My theory is planes skip these steps and are basically dumping greenhouse gasses to levels far above the natural rate. I have no way to test this hypothesis. - I am under the impression that their is less air moment the higher you go, if so you could use 80 years of flight data to predict temperature change in localised areas. - I am under the impression that the northern hemisphere is more affected by climate change than the southern. Could be because more flights in this area. - I am under the impression that water in the air has the same band of IR of c02 , so areas with less atmospheric water c02 will have a higher greenhouse affect. Ie above the clouds. - I am under the impression that c02 is water soluble and tends to be higher concentrations closer to the ground. - I am also under the impression that c02 is heavier than air, so tends to sink.
Ekaros 4y ago
Maybe we should flip the model around. Only allow selling proven carbon credits. That is proven in some reasonable timeframe 50 or 100 years.

241 points by boredemployee 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This seems like a no true scotsman opinion. The author is asking questions about life span or species of trees without doing any of the journalistic legwork. There are many reasons to say that credits aren't enough if we're still contributing carbon, because few people have been saying "don't plant trees" in the areas that have established credits. But it's not the same as green washing; it might be more similar to cancer awareness campaigns, but there is some action. And of course the answer is "do x less", but that's not an option most of the developed world will choose. Do Y more is much more achievable, especially if it benefits the end user. So new recycling campaign "Recycle aluminum cans, it'll save you 5% on your next 24 cans, reduce the trade deficit, and help build pontoon boats and airplanes"

cowpig 4y ago
I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon offsetting creates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY Here is the list of sources for that video if you're interested: [1] https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-the-climate-and-the-mountain https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-the-... [2] https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/ https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/ [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorgan-chase-tops-dirty-list-of-35-fossil-fuel-funding-banks https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorga... [4] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/jpmc-cr-esg-report-2019.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas... [5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-ER09-001-Measuring_emissions_against_an_alternative_future.pdf https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-E... [6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/204717/9789241565233_eng.pdf%3Bjsessionid%3D84BFF76A06408DC1638440E76A746C3D?sequence=1%C2%A0 https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.i... [7] https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-carbon-economy/ https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-ca... [8] https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf [9] https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-cookstove-and-fuel-stacking-achieve-sdg https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-cookstove-a... [10] https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/sei-wp-2013-01-cookstoves-carbon-markets.pdf https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/... [11] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.0065 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.006... [12] https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?accessId=fd91dd https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?acc...
TSiege 4y ago
This really misses the point of the claim. Carbon Credits are greenwashing because as it currently exists doesn't work. And almost every approach is based an unfounded schemes. Furthermore, carbon offsets are used to justify ecological damage; they exist for no other purpose. The problem with carbon offsetting is that almost none of the solutions work for long term. For example, if you're digging up oil and burning it, planting a tree wont help. The carbon you dug up from miles underneath our feet is removed from the global carbon cycle for millions of years, the carbon in a tree lasts as long as that tree is alive. Every living organism should be assumed to be decayed and returned to the carbon cycle unless specifically proven otherwise. For example, most of the carbon offset operations in California are being destroyed by wild fires [(1)](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wildfires-are-destroying-californias-forest-carbon-credit-reserves-study-2022-08-05/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wildfires-are-destroying-ca...) If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground. We will delude ourselves if we think any growing any lifeform to capture carbon will work unless humans directly put it into the ground in old oil fields. The only other possibly viable alternative is through mineral reactions with carbon, turning it into stone
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  > If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground. I live in the UK. I think it’s reasonable to visit my family in Australia every few years. Is it bad if I purchase carbon offsets?
  - hgsgm 4y ago
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    Carbon offsets are just donations to environmental groups. There's nothing bad about either taking flights or making donations, but it's wrong in the "factually incorrect" sense to think that if you pick the right amounts to donate to the right groups you can make your flight environmentally friendly. It's like buying a "local business" offset every time you shop at Walmart - you can just do it if you want to or don't do it if you don't.

jwilk 4y ago

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw ("Carbon Offsets! Can't we just buy our way out of climate change?" from the Climate Town channel)

blueflow 4y ago

I find the whole framing of "stopping emissions" odd. Where burning charcoal and burning hard coal are treated the same. But in fact, they are different: charcoal is made from plants, who captured the carbon recently from the air. If the plants are given enough time and space to recapture, burning charcoal is carbon neutral. Hard coal, to the contrary, was isolated from the carbon cycles for like, 300 million years, thus re-adding it to the cycle is going to make a dent that plants probably cannot offset. Stopping digging out carbon (hard coal, oil, liquid gas, limestone) would be like the first thing to do, but it seems the focus was shifted elsewhere...

cowpig 4y ago
This argument could make some sense if we were talking about designing a sustainable system in the abstract, but the climate issue is an emergency leading to catastrophic outcomes in the present, and so decreasing emissions by any means necessary in the short-term is what matters.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Continuing to dig out carbon and inserting it into the carbon cycle is guaranteed to exceed what we can offset with plants. What you describe is still a trajectory to doom or whatever awaits us.
  - btilly 4y ago
    With plants that remain part of the life cycle? Sure. But growing plants can lock away carbon more permanently depending how it is disposed of. Consider https://charmindustrial.com/ https://charmindustrial.com/. They take bio waste products (for example corn husks and cobs), turn it into oil, then put that back into wells. So growing plants (in this specific case, food) winds up permanently locking waste away.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      > They take bio waste products [...], turn it into oil I was about to call bullshit because of the first law of thermodynamics, but their FAQ states: > Unlike crude oil, bio-oil cannot sustain a flame, bio-oil has much lower energy density Good! > are heated up to about 500°C in a few seconds without burning I wonder where that heat comes from.

mbgerring 4y ago

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

I've been very careful to not wade into one of these threads too readily, as when I read them, I almost always find a huge range of variability around what people understand or don't understand about forests, soils, or ecosystem scale biogeochemical cycling. There also seem to be some very assertive, and often very uninformed claims around voluntary versus compliance marketplaces, and what role nature based mitigation efforts play currently or might play in the future. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that most authors in the pop science journalism space have a limited capacity for understanding the nuance or uncertainties associated with remote sensing models and principles of biogeochemistry. As well, the armchair analysts make many wrong assumptions about forests, forestry, or how carbon cycling works. Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks. There are often claims made around what forests can or cant do with regards to carbon cycling, and almost always they tend to fundementally misunderstand how carbon cycling, and nutrient cycling work in relationship to long term carbon stability. Not used taking advantage of forests and their ability to represent both (relatively, 10's-100's yr) short term stores of carbon, as well as less labile longer term storage pools (100's-1000's yr). We've been basically mining the world's forests and haven't even remotely attempted using natural ecosystems ability to not only sequester carbon, but to provide significant opportunities for climate resilience. Granted, we have an extraordinary limited understanding of the upper and lower bounds of many of these systems, but that's hardly any argument that we can't engage with and begin learning about the potential of these systems.

user_named 4y ago
Okay, so you're saying that everyone but you is too stupid to understand the question. But you also don't understand that the question here is about carbon credits, not about carbon sequestration or any biological process.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  No? The issue is fundementally about the limits of what we understand about how forests process and store carbon; that current crediting systems are fundementally flawed in what they reward and how they reward it; and that these markets and systems are very very young, and it will take time to understand if and how a market based approach can be effectively implemented. In broad strokes we understand parts of these questions, but the actual science is very hard, and based on expensive, finicky, difficult to get data.

mhh__ 4y ago

Tax the fucking carbon

xupybd 4y ago
To what end? Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems, or is it just going to move money around and do little to change the amount of carbon emitted. I suspect the latter. We need to think about solutions from end to end not just ones that appear to punish the parties that we think need punishing.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Taxing carbon is the only way the government can be reasonably confident of effecting any change while minimizing economic disruption. Markets work, use them.
  - wonnage 4y ago
    Directly regulating the amount of pollution emitted is effective too, look at how California's auto emissions laws have become a de-facto standard. The US is the #1 source of demand in the world, entire economies (e.g China's) have been built around suppressing domestic demand in favor of making more money exporting to the US. If we change our regulations, the rest of the world will follow.
- tomrod 4y ago
  > Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems Yes, and give a financial base to begin remediation. Your suspicions are unfounded here, given we already have a proven model pricing pollutants: https://www.nber.org/digest/feb16/cap-and-trade-sulfur-dioxide-allowances-market-experiment https://www.nber.org/digest/feb16/cap-and-trade-sulfur-dioxi... A tax is just more direct, even when subject to political cowardice.
trothamel 4y ago
That's a very good way to get unelected.

tunesmith 4y ago

These kind of opinions are increasing in frequency and they all seem poorly reasoned to me. Yes, there are standards organizations to make sure that, for instance, tree farms aren't just logging their trees and selling the same plots for offsets again. The author makes the point that the timeframes are too long, but that just strikes me as thinking similar to "planting trees doesn't work, we need x instead!" When the point is that every little bit helps. Given good enough standards, it just means that while carbon offset opportunities are plentiful, they'll be cheap - and as they become more popular, the price will increase, and this is a good thing. I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!" argument, because it just seems a lazy argument designed to remove any personal agency. Corporations are made out of people. If people didn't exist, neither would the corporations. If demand for a corporations products or services dried up, the corporation would cease to exist. As corporations reduce their emissions, the per-person carbon footprint shrinks. In the US, the per-person carbon footprint is lower than it used to be. They're related. Communicating a per-person carbon footprint increases people demanding corporations reduce emissions. If the per-person carbon footprint were a scheme developed by corporations to avoid accountability, it seems a very poorly-thought-out and ineffective scheme from those corporations.

hgsgm 4y ago
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!" Oh come on... People like Leo Dicaprio and Taylor Swift fly on their private jets to tell Johnny Average here, that he should bike for 15 miles to his workplace. Organizations are the same... look at coca cola for example, some water, sugar and aromas, in a plastic bottle, plastic cap, plastic sticker, packed in a sixpack wrapped in plastic, on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic. Reusable glass bottles? Nope (atleast not in my country). Just look at packaging of most items.. clamshell packaging, toothpaste double or tripple wrapped, shrinkflation (less product, same amount of packaging, more packages bought), single peppers wrapped in plastic, bananas wrapped in plastic, electronics literally designed to be unrepairable, tractors going that way too, cars following, user replacable batteries are usually too expensive to replace on 2 year old devices, sotware updates slow down devices, big corps requiring computer-bound workers to come to office, instead of working from home, clothes companies replacing cotton clothes with synthetics, leaking microplastics everywhere, companies catchign fish in US seas, or even meat, shipping them to china to be cleaned, cut and packaged, and then shipped back to US, zero regulation on 3rd world, where corpos either mine raw materials or "recycle" stuff (and recycling copper means burning the insulation off first... literally burning heaps of plastic),... and lets not forget the "accidents" when companies like BP ignore safety and cause fucking huge oil spills and destroy huge areas with their carelessness, and they don't even get properly punished for that. But no... let's pass the blame on people, who have no alternative on the market, and let's ban straws, because "that'll surely help the environment".

Comevius 4y ago

The problem with climate change is that it creates a reality distortion field. Anyone who would honestly try to think about it would give up on life, so instead we have this fake optimism accompanied by fake solutions, basically a fantasy not unlike Harry Potter. Those 2 billion new cars aren't going to help the environment, which is already on the fritz, but if they are electric that means we are on the right path to the unicorn to come and fix everything. Which is great because then we don't have to change our way of life. Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever.

boredemployee 4y ago
this pretty much. i think the way we're living is so broken, from education to everything else.
- XorNot 4y ago
  - boredemployee 4y ago
    Please, highlight who said we need to lower our quality of life? Maybe avoiding waste is a great place to start.
    - alar44 4y ago
      Anyone who is being realistic understands that we have to stop eat food out of season, keeping all buildings at 68 degrees during the summer, getting rid of multi hour commutes in cars, taking vacations in cruise ships, buying new phones every year, shipping everything in multiple layers of plastic over 1000s of miles etc etc. We are so fucking far past "reduce reuse recycle." No one is changing anything about their lives and that should be more than obvious to anyone paying attention.
      - RealityVoid 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago

epolanski 4y ago

Why is the elephant in the room, agriculture and cattle so little discussed compared to transport. A burger pollutes more than driving an suv for 50 miles,yet the enemy is always transport. Forget a family of 4 in a single lunch can easily pollute much more than they would with transport in a week.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Transportation is 27% of US carbon emssions vs 11% for agriculture.
- epolanski 4y ago
  Cattle emission is severely downplayed, starting from the fact that cattle produces methane which is 200 times worse than carbon dioxide, it's also severely downplayed how much it impacts resources like land, water and the many disaster byproducts such as ocean dead zones.[1] Cattle is also the biggest reason for deforestation (Amazon being the most famous example), people want to greedily eat damn steaks everyday, put their head under the sand and pretend electric vehicles will change our fate. Consuming less will. Moving less is good for the environment but eating less meat has much more impact. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    The methane problem is easily solved by feeding them a diet which includes seaweed, why this isn’t mandated is beyond me.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    > Cattle emission is severely downplayed. No, Cattle emissions are well studied and modelled. Methane emissions from active _and_ abandoned Oil wells, now that is a GHG emission that is largely dismissed and hidden away by the Oil&Gas industry.
poorlyknit 4y ago

tinco 4y ago

Carbon offsetting becomes effective when it causes less carbon to be emitted. It has to be so expensive that it makes the consumer of the carbon to think twice. This can only happen if the offsetting is mandatory. The further up the chain it is the more effective it is as well. We might be able to death by a thousand cuts the CO2 problem. The more sectors we inconvenience with "green washing" type extra costs, the more attractive greener alternatives become, and the more funding potential solutions get. The article suggests investing in a strategic fund instead, but it's really the same thing and has the same problem as the CO2 offsetting which is that the calculation of the amount of offset CO2 is not realistically calculated. The charities might have unrealistic long term CO2 offset estimates, but making the amount dependent on how much your budget allows for doesn't really make things better. If you fly economy from LAX->AMS and back, you emit ~2500kg of CO2. Easiest way to capture that CO2 is by planting trees. Say you want to capture it within 5 years. That's about 50kg per tree, and about a third dies so you'll need to plant 150 trees to cover your flight, which is $150 on teamtrees.org. Provided of course they actually plant it within the next year (do they?). That's already $50 more than that GCC site suggested you spend if you've got plenty money. Trees grow somewhat superlinearly so if you give your tree 10 years you need maybe $50 worth of trees. Anyway, it still won't save the planet, that only happens when all of this is mandatory and not just for flights but for everything.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
I'd like to add to that, how much more soil carbon becomes present because of the litter being dropped by those trees? How much more water is being stored in the ground because of an increase in soil carbon? How much longer is the growing season extended by with additional water availability? How does extending the growing season impact mineralization and root exudate formation? How do these processes impact site specific net primary productivity? How does growing trees in a space impact our ability to grow trees in a space? These questions are all individually difficult to answer empirically, but are compounded by the massive amount of geologic and climatic variation we see across the planet.
- just-ok 4y ago
  Absolutely, and it can also easily lead to direct, personal benefits: How much less air conditioning do you need because your house has more shade?

Devasta 4y ago

If I pay for my friend to have a weekend away with his girlfriend, thereby strengthening their relationship, then he shouldn't be mad when I sleep with her too and weaken it right?

mastax 4y ago
If you were going to sleep with her anyway that seems like a net good.
tunesmith 4y ago
Are we all mindless automatons? I've had it with the binary thinking. How about you pay for your friend's weekend away with his girlfriend, and don't sleep with her yourself? How about pay for carbon offsets and reduce your personal emissions? I don't think I've ever read an article that says if you buy offsets then you can just keep living as you always have. I've seen a lot of articles that accompany carbon offset information with tips on how to reduce your emissions, though.

TedShiller 4y ago

Carbon credits were invented to allow billionaires to fly private jets and use mega yachts without criticism from the public

DoingIsLearning 4y ago
People might dismiss your comment as shallow but I'll add a bit more accuracy: The concept of "Carbon footprint" was fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers.[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
- gruez 4y ago
  >The concept of "Carbon footprint" was fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers.[0] What's "fabricated" about it? Are consumers not responsible for the carbon they emit through the gas they buy? If you drive a SUV or fly half way across the world for your vacation why should you be able to pass on the buck to BP/American Airlines?
  - oifjsidjf 4y ago
    And in the end YOU will pay for it while big oil pays nothing.
    - gruez 4y ago
      Yeah, because at the end of the day you're burning the oil. If everyone stopped consuming oil, the oil companies will stop drilling. The inverse doesn't really hold. Just look at how gas prices have doubled yet everyone's still driving their cars.
      - DoingIsLearning 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

A proper carbon tax would only increase flight costs by about 8%, since there's lots of other costs than fuel. People don't seem to believe that though. Because a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have a financial incentive to burn less of it, and there's alternatives for almost all uses. And so, a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry, and not really bother any other industry, is portrayed as an impossible dream because the fossil fuel industry has a lot of money and power.

indymike 4y ago
> a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry Increasing the cost of flights by 8%, and by doing so, killing the source of fuel for those flights sounds like economic Armageddon.
- aoeusnth1 4y ago
  I guess we have to choose between two Armageddons then, one real and one inconvenient.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > I guess we have to choose between two Armageddons then, one real and one inconvenient. We can chose something that is less perfect, but does not result in Armageddon. Solutions that are as bad or worse than the problem are a very hard sell.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      climate change will result in famine and war, maybe nuclear war. Madagaskar has a drought xaused famine right now. Uf that hapens in Pakistan thats a powderkeg situation. Which 'solution' is as bad?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Imagine what it would do if we put heavy restrictions on borders and travel and there was a massive drop in demand from, something like a terrorist attack, or maybe a virus. It would snuff out all industry. Impossible to cope.

Aunche 4y ago

Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver. https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY

adolph 4y ago

I'll gladly pay for some trees that will remove my carbon over the next 25 years if you you let me fly today. In 1932, this then became the famous "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Rough House explains why Wimpy is able to get away with this tactic in one strip, stating that "He never comes around on Tuesday". Rough House once suffered a mental breakdown from Wimpy's shenanigans, and demanded that Wimpy be kept out of his hospital room. Wimpy disobeyed this command, resulting in a rare altercation with Popeye. The phrase was also slightly altered in the episode "Spree Lunch" to "I'll have a hamburger, for which I will gladly pay you Tuesday." This phrase is now commonly used to illustrate financial irresponsibility and still appears in modern comedies such as The Drew Carey Show and The Office. The initial part of the phrase was even the title of Episode 6 of the fourth season of Cheers "I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy

jimbob45 4y ago

Been seeing a lot of these threads pop up over the last week. Also saw the US Senate trying to push a big climate change bill in the last week. Could these two things be related?

somewhereoutth 4y ago

Global warming is being caused by us digging up carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere. Leave It in the Ground. Ban fracking and new exploration. Close wells. Dismantle rigs. Shutoff pipelines. Shutter mines. There will be an economic cost for this - ensure it is carried by those most able to afford it.

Syonyk 4y ago
> There will be an economic cost for this - ensure it is carried by those most able to afford it. Meanwhile, in reality, the EU's jet fuel tax proposal seems to have exemptions for private jets. The problem, though, is that the way we've designed our civilization is that many things require fossil fuels or some close substitute in order for things to remain habitable. Germany this winter (and the EU in general) will be ones to watch closely to see what happens when it's not a question of the price of natural gas, but the simpler is it available at any cost problems. Or you can point to Texas a couple winters ago - their power production required natural gas. Natural gas, in sufficient quantities, simply wasn't available at any price. And so the state largely went dark. One might hope the problems were fixed, but as record profits were made in a few days, it's unlikely anything will be fixed. Just like it wasn't fixed after the same rough issue happened a decade ago in... oh, 2011? Somewhere around there.
SamPatt 4y ago
The economic cost of driving energy prices through the roof will be most harmful to the poor. This is well established, and likely unavoidable. As an overall portion of their expenses, the poor pay much more for energy than the wealthy. Driving up the cost will decrease their standard of living substantially, but much less so to the wealthy. Let's see how Europe fares with higher energy prices this winter, then determine if we should force that on the entire world.

Syonyk 4y ago

> If you are reading this August column of Green is the New Black, it is very likely that you have either recently been away or have an imminent overseas trip. Of course it’s now a given that flying is seriously bad for the planet and that the best way to avoid generating all those emissions is to avoid getting airborne in the first place. But we also know that international travel, whether for business or pleasure, is often unavoidable and/or irresistible; and that, especially given the current mayhem in the UK’s seaports, there are often no other options to get to where we need or want to go. > So what to do when, despite every good green intention, you simply have to fly? I... live in such a different world from this person. Though admittedly everything from the UK is "overseas," I doubt they're really that concerned about a hop over the Channel here (there being a perfectly good tunnel as I understand it). I'll generally agree with "carbon offsets" as "Greenwashing," though there are some notable exceptions - the Climeworks style "deep rock fixing of CO2" seems entirely legitimate, if a bit more energy intensive and harder to scale than pencil whipping some forest data. But it's also far harder to game (outside outright fraud in the sense of "Claim 10MT injected and captured, only injected 8MT and observed 2MT leaking back out the bore holes"). If it involves "forest protection" sort of techniques, it's probably having nearly zero net effect (nobody particularly cares which acres of forest they're cutting, so... go over a few miles instead). What annoys me greatly are the people who claim climate change is a huge looming crisis that will end humanity... so therefore the only thing one can possibly do is vote one way or another and do nothing else unless It Has a ROI. And changing the way we live is literally unthinkable, so... They'll Think of Something. Too many Hollywood movies with "pulled out of the writer's rear end" endings that magically solve all problems at the last minute. And I don't think that's likely. The future is going to be, like it or not, far lower energy, with a lot more "use energy when available and use less when it isn't" - so, basically, the entire history of humanity until the past few hundred years. And there's a lot that can be done to work towards this - some of which does look like dusting off the old work from the 1970s in which a lot of this was worked out, in detail, with practical testing. It looks a lot more like passive solar collectors and a lot less like blockchain... Lately, I've been trying to figure out what it looks like to take "tech money," in some form or another, and make that more directly useful in places where it can have an actual impact. I've been trying to do things like organize group buys of solar panels and help people do their own solar (a DIY install out here, ground mount/grid tie is around $1.25/W right now in materials if you can get a good deal on a truck full of panels shipped in), and I've put in an EV charger or two in places that didn't previously have any - not that it gets much use right now. Or maybe large ebike purchases, fund half on donations from tech workers, half paid for by lower income users. Open to ideas, but there's a lot of money sloshing around in the tech industry and I don't see much in the way of actually focused use. Start building out 1-2MW solar facilities on spare land closer into town instead of building 100MW farms out in the middle of nowhere, or even just helping fund solar carports. Split the cost with the property owners. Or to figure out how to do local, small scale carbon capture on surplus energy. Locally, I've no shortage of basalt, and I know one can grind it and weather it on fields, but can one do something more aggressive, like a fluidized bed reactor sort of concept? I don't have the skills to do all of the work required (mostly the chemistry to verify it), but that sort of small scale thing could scale out and even if it's not 100% efficient, well, it's happening. But I reject the concept that individual action doesn't have an impact, because any sort of massed action starts with individuals who care and are willing to take the actions and steps required to do something. I'm now responsible for several additional solar installs in the area (rural, conservative, and, yes, I live out here willingly and enjoy it) from either talking about it to people who wouldn't otherwise have considered it, or providing technical documentation and resources to people who have the skills to do the installs, but not the design work from the ground up. Having something I can point to, take the covers off, and say "This is what it looks like" is very useful, so people can see if it's something they're willing to do. I'm hoping a 21kW array near me will be approved for operation this week if all goes well. When people live out what they talk about, that works an awful lot better than the standard practices of "trying to insult people into agreeing with you." Anyway. I agree, buying offsets isn't likely to be useful, but neither is sitting on our collective asses waiting for someone else to solve the problem. If anyone has ideas in the areas listed above, I'm easy enough to find!

pabs3 4y ago

There are legitimate and ethical carbon offset programs though, for example Gold Standard's programs: https://www.goldstandard.org/ https://www.goldstandard.org/

godmode2019 4y ago

I have a theory that C02 released at different levels of the atmosphere will have different affects on greenhouse warming. (And should be taxed differently) For example planes release C02 to areas far above normal levels, so their is no natural mechanism for it to become part of the carbon cycle. Carbon released at ground level only a small amount actually makes it to the upper atmosphere, because rain and other factors keeps it near ground level. My theory is planes skip these steps and are basically dumping greenhouse gasses to levels far above the natural rate. I have no way to test this hypothesis. - I am under the impression that their is less air moment the higher you go, if so you could use 80 years of flight data to predict temperature change in localised areas. - I am under the impression that the northern hemisphere is more affected by climate change than the southern. Could be because more flights in this area. - I am under the impression that water in the air has the same band of IR of c02 , so areas with less atmospheric water c02 will have a higher greenhouse affect. Ie above the clouds. - I am under the impression that c02 is water soluble and tends to be higher concentrations closer to the ground. - I am also under the impression that c02 is heavier than air, so tends to sink.

Ekaros 4y ago

Maybe we should flip the model around. Only allow selling proven carbon credits. That is proven in some reasonable timeframe 50 or 100 years.