28 ms·

Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

316 points by donutshop 3y ago

asu_thomas 3y ago
This should be news to exactly nobody.
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
> From project implementation until 2020, those 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold in the global carbon market. But researchers estimate that only 5.4 million of the 89 million, or 6.1 percent, would be associated with actual carbon emission reductions. It sounds like a massively fraudulent market with little actual oversight.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Curious about someone in the industry's opinion, but the problem sounds like carbon offsets should actually be treated as carbon offset futures. I.e. the value is determined at the time of delivered carbon offsets, and the instrument's price floats on the market before that time, including relative to how likely / valuable the delivery is If company A buys a carbon offset from entity X, and it becomes increasingly apparent that entity X isn't going to be able to deliver the face value in terms of carbon, the instrument bought by company A should decrease in value. Consequently, next time around, company A would not purchase from entity X. Which is exactly what you'd want to happen! Corollary: Verification by third party should be required, with less measurable schemes less valued. Multiple satellites confirming forests intact? Proof. Direct air capture or weathering? Proof. Some nebulous walk through how this might have influenced this other thing? Eh...
  - wmf 3y ago
    That doesn't really match the way people are using offsets. If you buy offsets for a flight and ten years later you learn that that they were ineffective... what? The least effective offsets having the lowest price isn't a good incentive either.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      I don't believe the majority of VCM offsets are being purchased by end users. Are they? I thought they're typically purchased by corporate entities to support "net zero carbon by X year" pledges. Apparently this stuff has matured a lot in the last 10 years, and I haven't been keeping pace with it. There's already a concept of "vintage" (i.e. year carbon reduction realized in), but I still don't think they're being traded in a floating price futures model. It sounds like the international community is leaning on certification-first, then sale of only certified offsets. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#Other_international_programs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#O... ... which, doesn't feel like it fully harnesses the power of market investment in new technologies. If a corporate buyer finds a new technology that has promise, they should be able to plow money into it! (At a cheaper per-offset-CO2-ton price than alternatives) If that new tech delivers, the company just saved money. (For the same amount of CO2 offset purchase) If the new tech fails to deliver, the offset buying company should be forced to realize financial losses. Ergo, companies will be incentivized to invest in the most effective tools for future CO2 offsetting.
      - asu_thomas 3y ago
        > Apparently this stuff has matured a lot in the last 10 years Matured is not the word I would choose.
        ethbr1 3y ago
        Last time I checked on the international side of this, it was mostly an imaginary future. Now, it looks like there's non-trivial implementation work being done: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#Programs_and_markets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#P...
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The problem with carbon offsets is worse than that. First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. You have an existing operation which is already cost effective to modernize because the fuel savings exceed the cost, so you were going to do it anyway, but now you get to sell credits even though the modernization would have happened regardless. So you have a significant amount of preexisting supply without motivating any real emissions reduction. Second, not everyone is required to buy them, so the demand side is artificially low. The result is that credits are available for less than $2/ton, or to put it another way, less than $0.02 per gallon of gasoline. This is obviously not going to provide any meaningful incentive to reduce emissions.
    - quixoticelixer- 3y ago
      > First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can What they're talking about is determining if you've paid someone to not burn down a forest and then they do it even after taking the money. Which you could conceivably verify. The problem is when someone already intends not to burn down a forest, or do whichever other thing counts for credits. Then they can sell credits in exchange for proceeding with their existing intentions. Everyone already intending to do any of those things can profit from selling the credits, so they do and the market contains tons of credits that are not actually making any difference. > Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2 https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/ https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/ Offset are worth less than $2. "Credits" in the EU are worth significantly more, because they use "cap and trade", which results in significant carbon pricing but is manifestly unjust because it directly rewards companies for having been the largest polluters.
    - 3y ago
- tito 3y ago
  I think that's an acceptable conclusion. So then, what's next? We need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Current solutions aren't working great, so how do we do it?
  - asu_thomas 3y ago
    You have to end capitalism, and anybody taking this stuff seriously knows that, and they knew carbon offset nonsense was fraudulent the entire time. It was painfully obvious. So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism.
    - avitous 3y ago
      This right here. Either we collectively as a species take steps right away to correct course and achieve a sustainable now, or nature will do it for us; and the latter will occur cataclysmically. The former, too, except hopefully with less loss of life.
    - x-complexity 3y ago
      > You have to end capitalism, and anybody taking this stuff seriously knows that, and they knew carbon offset nonsense was fraudulent the entire time. It was painfully obvious. 1) This makes the axiomatic leap that *everyone* knows that carbon offsets are fraudulent. There're definitely *some* that think so, but not all. Extraordinary claims of "All X is Y" require a proof that X leads to Y in *all* cases, not just *some*. 2) Another axiomatic leap made is that carbon offsets are inherently fraudulent, which again *some* may be, but not all. Similar comprehensive evidence is required to establish that *all* carbon offsets are fraudulent. 3) What is "painfully obvious" to someone may not be to anyone not steeped deep into the subject at hand. Even after being through the subject itself, there is no guarantee that an incrementalistic viewpoint would not be adopted as a result of seeing the faults within the system. > So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism. Socialism is reductively state capitalism with the added façade that democratic consensus & redistribution alone allows for the best outcome. It doesn't take into account desires that may go against the beliefs of the majority, whose desires can run counter to minorities within such a system (e.g LGBTQ+ rights & drug criminalization). Modern tolerances towards them happen to be lucky circumstances that shouldn't be taken for granted, as it could be just as likely for the opposite to have happened. Even in a dysfunctional state, niches are allowed to manifest within markets that can cater to them without the oversight of the State, for better or for worse. Denying the ability to create said pocket niches by enforcing the majority's views via the State invites levels of authoritarianism & Mother-Knows-Best attitudes that should be opposed from anyone seeking to preserve individual autonomy, which should include the minorities themselves. In cases of a non-State-based socialism, markets will inevitably be created as a consequence of having to trade with unknown/untrusted parties. The egalitarianistic "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can only work in scenarios where parties know who each other are, & can consequently apply adjustments to prevent excessive misuse from exploiting parties. Markets arise due to the alternative requiring much more effort to establish & maintain relationships with all parties on all possible tradable goods & services, whereas only a neutral area is required for the former.
labster 3y ago
Carbon credits are the only financial instrument that is scammier than crypto.
- smilespray 3y ago
  What about crypto carbon credits? https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-to-watch-in-2023/ https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-...
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Match made in heaven Or somewhere
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    Of course there are so many of these that people made "top-N" lists.
ihsw 3y ago
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Explore3003 3y ago
The money going towards carbon offsets would be better spent on lobbying in favor of carbon taxes, and establishing Enhanced Weathering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  > lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear -- well... put it like this: If you want right-wing populist governments, that's how you're going to get them.
  - wmf 3y ago
    The populists may enjoy sticking it to the rich with a carbon tax and dividend.
  - labster 3y ago
    And yet that’s still better than carbon credits
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations still pay the tax but only individuals get the checks. It would also be a very informative trial run for a UBI (though in this case the amount would be smaller). The "problem" with this is strictly politics: a) It would actually work, so the fossil fuel energy companies hate it; b) There is no opportunity for graft because the money is distributed to everyone and not just the politically connected, so there is no special interest lobby trying to make it happen.
realusername 3y ago
The thing which doesn't make sense with those is that it's always projects in developing and poor countries ... whereas the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries. If you would conceive a scheme to reduce emissions, there's no way that it's going to be in any other place than the top emitting countries, where the emission is in the first place. Those projects are kind of shifting blame onto people and places which aren't causing the issue.
- voisin 3y ago
  > the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries. This is true, but the low hanging fruit (in terms of cost) in terms of drawdown might be developing countries, where things like birth control, paying farmer not to cut down rainforest, etc can be done inexpensively.
  - realusername 3y ago
    There's also a lot of low hanging fruits in developped countries, better farming techniques, electric cars, heat insulation, financing renewables depending of the electric mix, making food products with less emissions cheaper for consumers to shift consumption... It's true that the state has the upper hand but there's also things that an NGO or a private company could do.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      > There's also a lot of low hanging fruits in developped countries, better farming techniques, electric cars, heat insulation, financing renewables depending of the electric mix, making food products with less emissions cheaper for consumers to shift consumption... That's moderately hanging fruit, and all of it is being done in most EU countries and to a significant degree in the US.
aSithLord 3y ago
Good luck trying to offset Popocatepetl...
rohan_ 3y ago
doesn't this just mean they're priced incorrectly? like can't you have different ratings for different carbon credit products - the more accurate ones are priced higher?
- burkaman 3y ago
  Not really, because most carbon credits are based on counterfactuals - would this forest have been logged if you didn't protect it, would this farmer have used less efficient practices if you hadn't paid them, would this land have remained empty if you hadn't paid to plant trees, etc. No matter how reputable the rating agency is, they still won't be able to answer these questions very accurately. Additionally, when you purchase a credit you're generally purchasing a prediction of how much carbon might be absorbed in the future. For a afforestation credit, you're often purchasing the amount of carbon that forest will absorb over 100 years. No rating agency can legitimately tell you that your forest isn't going to burn down or be logged in the next century. It's a pretty ridiculous idea - the seller, purchaser, and rating agency will all probably not exist after 100 years, and the government of whatever country the forest is in will probably have been overthrown. I think contributing money to protect and rewild nature in the interest of increasing carbon sequestration is a great idea that should continue, but nobody should be receiving offsets that they weigh 1-to-1 against their actual real-world emissions. It just isn't a meaningful comparison. Even if your purchase actually makes an impact, it's like dumping toxic chemicals into a river and setting aside money to fund an organization that will gradually clean up the river over the next century, and then claiming that you've now achieved net-zero pollution.
  - tito 3y ago
    I think you two are saying different things. Agree that the existing products for decarbonization have a lot of room for improvement. Some solutions include: 1. Stopping the dumping 2. Pay the full cost of the impact of any dumping that does happen. In your analogy, this would mean the longer you leave the river polluted, the more you have to pay to clean it up.
- tito 3y ago
  I like this framing. That's because it seems like a working carbon market is a must have to hit decarbonization goals. Therefore it's a question not of "if", but "how". And a lot of the current "how" is probably best priced close to zero. Lots of opportunity here for entrepreneurs.
paulcole 3y ago
Carbon offsets never made sense from the start. Obviously just a way to continue polluting, maintain a clean image, and line somebody’s pockets.
- tito 3y ago
  Then how do we effectively decarbonize the planet quickly? That's the need.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Surprise: We don’t! I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime but at some point we’re going to change our thinking from “fixing climate change” to dealing with the effects as best we can. The sooner the better IMO, even though it’s going to be a painful transition to be sure.
    - tito 3y ago
      I hear you, I appreciate the clarification in how you're thinking about this.
ngcazz 3y ago
Great moment to plug Climate Town's video from a couple years back on precisely this https://youtu.be/EIezuL_doYw https://youtu.be/EIezuL_doYw
cumshitpiss 3y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I would argue carbon offsets are exactly doing their job: allowing people and corporations to throw a bit of money at the problem and continue with business as usual. They are the equivalent of medieval indulgences.
- tito 3y ago
  The job we have to do is rapidly decarbonize our economy and also remove billions of tons of carbon already in the air. This pursuit is likely in the trillions of dollars in our lifetime. Existing carbon offsets are best thought of as an attempt. The opportunity is, what's next? What's going to actually solve this multi-trillion dollar problem?
mrshadowgoose 3y ago
The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined/regulated and are therefore almost never "honest". The definition of "honest" here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future", which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one's purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn't negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it's mitigated. Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. If you find yourself "offsetting" for a few dollars / ton, you're just fooling yourself.
- finite_depth 3y ago
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- quixoticelixer- 3y ago
  > Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. For stuff like direct air capture, not for afforestation.
  - mrshadowgoose 3y ago
    Same issue of "honesty" with afforestation-based credits. A ton of carbon removed during the growth of a new tree is not equivalent to a ton of carbon already removed today. However, as these types of projects actually do remove carbon, one could probably compute an adjustment factor and purchase additional credits to achieve an "honest" offset.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      That's assuming the afforestation is even helpful and not one of the various examples of incentives for planting trees leading to work that's actually doing more harm than good.
emodendroket 3y ago
Or perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be. It seems a bit like a modern-day version of indulgences.
- tito 3y ago
  I appreciate this comment. It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I feel like the biggest obstacle here is that any invocation of shared sacrifice or giving up forms of convenience, even fairly minor ones, prompts howls of indignation. Maybe we’re just doing some things we can’t do going forward even if it was comfortable to be able to do so.
    - tito 3y ago
      Stopping doing things we're doing today is one possibility. How are you going to do that?
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        If I were in charge I might institute rules controlling, for instance, how low one may set their thermostat, or banning new natural gas home appliances despite whatever boutique complaints people have about gas stoves. I doubt that goes far enough but the fact that this kind of stuff is so difficult/controversial feels like a massive obstacle.
gustavus 3y ago
"Okay," I say. "Carbon credits are a bit like beating someone up on this side of the world and sponsoring one of those poor starving kids on the other side of the world to make up for the fact that you're a complete shit at home." .... "OK," the PFY says as we leave the building via the service entrance. "All we have to do to be nastiness neutral is to find a couple of people bound and gagged in a skip bin, take them out, give them a couple of wallets, unkick them a few times, unelectrocute them with a cattle prod and say 'clothing hippy on discount percent seventy look oh'." "On the other side of the world," I add. - The BOFH https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/01/bofh_episode_4/ https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/01/bofh_episode_4/
Biologist123 3y ago
I once worked in the sector, and left once I realised that the scam is that sellers of offsets characterise a complex system as a simple system.
- tito 3y ago
  How do we rapidly decarbonize in the next decade?
  - Biologist123 3y ago
    Stop producing carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse) emissions.
tejohnso 3y ago
Cynical take: The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following: - Assuage guilt - Virtue signal (personal, political, or corporate) - Profit financially from government incompetence - Profit financially from corporate PR efforts
- tito 3y ago
  We absolutely need a working market to meet decarbonization goals for a stable climate. The state of the current market means there's a lot of opportunity for improvement.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    Many people say that markets fundamentally can't do that. If you think a market can, could you explain? (If they can, that would by far be the easiest coördination approach: we understand markets quite well.)
    - tito 3y ago
      I don't see why a market can't do it. Carbon dioxide is invisible, mostly useless gas, and it's currently emitted by most cars, planes, trains, and factories. The accounting needs to happen somewhere, markets seem good at that. Above I said "we absolutely need a carbon market", and I'm open to dropping that. It's possible markets are not the most effective option but I'm kind of short on how else to solve it. To someone who says that markets "fundamentally can't", I would ask them what solution they prefer instead, I'm open! To maintain a stable climate we need to decarbonize rapidly. A carbon market is a potential solution for rapid decarbonization that so far is not working great.
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        Markets are good at accounting for things that people want.
yawboakye 3y ago
both carbon offset and the business surrounding it (especially carbon sequestration) are mostly for the purpose of virtue signaling. it’s no different from the sunday confessions held mostly in catholic cathedrals, where one can sin all they want during the week and have it all forgiven in a couple minutes talk with a priest. if you can keep current operations as is, reap massive profits, and pay pennies towards carbon removal, which dumb business executive will refuse?
- tito 3y ago
  At the root of this is "do we need to decarbonize?". I'm curious where you land on this.
  - yawboakye 3y ago
    sure we may need to decarbonize. but an arms race between how much you can pump into the air and how much i can remove is a stupid strategy. if too much carbon in the atmosphere is net negative, maybe we should revise whatever processes cause us to release that much? but i think any attempt there will necessarily demand that we put brakes on the false progress march (powered by capitalist greed). men with tiny dicks and assortments of self-help sex toys need the ‘billionaire’ drug injected into their veins, to prop up their self-worth so any attempt to pause the certified dollar-churning processes will be defeated, easily. but i digress. if too much carbon in the atmosphere is bad, stop putting too much into it. or maybe it’s not necessarily bad but we’re stuck with a global warming narrative that’s wrong, on net, but hard to recant? i don’t know. what i do know is that virtue signaling is a moth-gathering flame. see america.
deleted 3y ago
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machina_ex_deus 3y ago
You know what actually needs an investment? Climate models which are completely shit right now. It's actually preposterous that there are trillions of dollars worth of decisions in ESG and climate credits and government incentives while the science behind this is supported by old fortran code that has terrible quality and can't give reasonable predictions. We have trillions of dollars chasing predictions of code barely worth a million dollar investment. That's absurd, it's a recipe for disaster. Instead of useless government beaurocrats shuffling hypothetical CO2, should invest in climate models that aren't patched together by grad students in universities and old as hell code and a few NASA engineers maintaining an untested unreadable and unverifiable monstrosities. Maybe there's no crisis at all. Maybe it's all doom and gloom, but the certainty that everyone's pretending that science gives is just not reflective of the reality of how climate models look right now. They are absolutely shit and I don't blame them given the resources they have, they did their best, but it's absolutely insane how much money is moving around on predictions coming out of that mess.
- tito 3y ago
  Say more about this! Let's say you had $100B to build better climate models over the next 5 years. Where would you spend it? My general sense is the models are good enough to tell us that a) things are headed in the wrong direction and b) we're really far off from a solution. Generally in agreement with you but I haven't researched deeply about what's needed on more modeling and how to prioritize.
  - machina_ex_deus 3y ago
    You need at least two completely independent teams who don't see each other's code so you'll have a rough idea how much developer bias is responsible for the signal. Right now they are all copying code from each other, a single error in these and all the climate models are effected. Replication here should mean different scientists writing different code arriving at the same estimates. It needs to be open source, and it needs to be way more organized, no physical constants which aren't constant or which have bad precision or which have different values in different parts of the code. Actual error modeling built in or at least a way to measure and quantify the accuracy. Some models only use CO2 input for radiation and not for many other parameters that depend on CO2. Because the code is a mess and constants that shouldn't be constants are all over the place. And getting "constants" right is even more important than having high resolution to the simulation. Getting real physical data to replace all the ad hoc constants is extremely important. And validating the correctness of the cloud modeling with real world data is also important. And you can't write huge spaghetti code, it needs to be readable and comprehensible to someone other than original programmer so that people can validate the assumptions.
opportune 3y ago
No mention of ESGs? Want to know why corporations participate in this idiotic charade, as well as other weirdly ubiquitous theatrics? It’s because paying lip service to this kind of stuff is a requirement for certain funds to be able to hold their stock: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_corporate_governance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_c... So corporations have a big financial incentive to do the bare minimum to satisfy ESG requirements, and carbon offsets are an unregulated sham. No surprise, the market finds a way and delivers impossibly cheap “offsets” so that such environmental stewards as Chevron, and soon Phillips Morris, can be considered to be environmentally friendly and socially benevolent enough to be included in ESG funds.
- tito 3y ago
  In line with this, another comment someone said "perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be." It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?
bradgessler 3y ago
I’m looking forward to the day where the problem is framed as “we need to learn how to control our climate” and become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization. I’ve found when I’m around people on either side of the climate change issue, they agree it’s a worthy goal to try to control and harness all of earths natural phenomena. It might take hundreds of years, thousands of years, or maybe we never get there, but it seems like a good goal.
KingLancelot 3y ago
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NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.
dirtyoldmick 3y ago
I am going to auction off urine credits. Save the world and pay me in advance for every time you take a leak.
savrajsingh 3y ago
jon oliver did a great episode about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> “Potential buyers benefit from consistently low prices created by the flood of credits. It means that companies can tick their net zero box at the lowest possible cost,” he said. Basically, the companies only care about the being able to tout their green initiatives at the lowest possible price, so this is exactly what they want.
- deleted 3y ago
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- TylerE 3y ago
  I knew it was all BS as soon as it went to "carbon neutral" or the like with no emphasis on, ya know, using less in the first place.
turnsout 3y ago
At this rate, we'll be able to make every company carbon neutral by 2030 without making any actual changes to the environment! Go capitalism!
- shaunxcode 3y ago
  And when it all goes to shit they can blame it on a flakey excel formula.
- staplers 3y ago
  You mean making "while making monumental changes to the environment"
- taberiand 3y ago
  Don't underestimate them, I'm sure they'll find ways to make the environment considerably worse
pictureofabear 3y ago
I was looking through the Alabama property records one time because I was wondering who owns all these huge tracks of land with nothing on them. They all traced back through a series of shell companies to Wall Street investment banks.
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  just for future reference, the word is tract
  - pictureofabear 3y ago
    I thought tracts of land were something else. https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2016/5/8393471_14636056590836_rId34.png https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2016/5/8393471_14636...
- jpk 3y ago
  Do you have an example? Some seemingly empty stretches you see along I75 through Georgia, for example, are farmed for trees that're periodically harvested to make paper products. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these parcels traced back to private equity or something, despite actually being used to make toilet paper or whatever.
  - pictureofabear 3y ago
    https://isv.kcsgis.com/al.franklin_revenue/ https://isv.kcsgis.com/al.franklin_revenue/ You can poke around on the map and find ownership by companies like GMO THRESHOLD TIMBER COURTLAND LLC, FRANKLIN TIMBER MANAGEMENT LLC, BASCOM GULF LLC, SMI LAND COMPANY LLC, etc.
Sytten 3y ago
I get similar a similar vibe about carbon credits than I got with crypto currencies / NFT. I am wondering if the SEC is going to look into them at some point and treat them a unregistered securities fraud.
- foota 3y ago
  I don't think they're similar, are they? Securities are about investments, whereas carbon credits are "consumed"?
- motohagiography 3y ago
  I like how the people who say the cryptocurrencies millions of people actually want and use are ponzi scams, but don't apply the same standard of reasoning to carbon credits that nobody wants, and for which organic demand is zero. Carbon credits are just nihlist virtue tokens that spread viral malignant bureaucracy. It's a made up thing to insert party faithful into organizations to "manage," this pretend virtue money.
andreshb 3y ago
Pachama (YCW19) addresses this problem https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/carbon-credit-platform-pachama-raises-55-mln-latest-funding-round-2022-05-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/carbon...
ls612 3y ago
Carbon credits; Indulgences dressed to serve modern sensibilities
- SamBam 3y ago
  I mean, if they could actually work then they'd be perfectly valid. Say Carbon-capture were at a point where we could actually say that my paying $100 caused an extra metric ton of CO2 to be extracted from the atmosphere. Then it actually would work to reduce what I can and offset the rest. Carbon is fungible. If I release 100 tons and capture 120 tons, I've done the world a favor. The issue is simply that the Carbon Capture schemes seem to be hot air.
  - hhs 3y ago
    > The issue is simply that the Carbon Capture schemes seem to be hot air. If interested, this is how the University of Cambridge named the url of this story: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air
  - imtringued 3y ago
    >Then it actually would work to reduce what I can and offset the rest. Carbon is fungible. If I release 100 tons and capture 120 tons, I've done the world a favor. Except what if you only offset 30 tons and you produced an additional 80 tons because you thought you offsetted most of your emissions?
    - SamBam 3y ago
      Yes, I addressed that in my comment.
_madmax_ 3y ago
You can expect this kind of dishonesty and self-serving politics for as long as we tolerate climate change induced disasters and its consequences on the human kind.
reilly3000 3y ago
> “These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction." I struggle to think of an expletive that works here. The people of the UK are providing welfare to companies for what? Not cutting down trees that don’t exist? The article later goes in to say researchers found evidence that 6% of the credits are having the intended effects. The malignancy of the authors of this program is astonishing.
- netfl0 3y ago
  How is anyone surprised anymore.
- beatthatflight 3y ago
  Am I going blind? I can't find your quotes in the article linked?
  - reilly3000 3y ago
    https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air I found that quote on that article, and I could have sworn I commented on a link to that post, not this Ars article on the same subject. Perhaps they were merged in the last hour?
    - beatthatflight 3y ago
      Odd. Thanks though, appreciate hunting down the link for me!
jakeinspace 3y ago
Every corporation that has advertised itself as being carbon neutral should be accountable to class action suits for false advertising. I’m sure most are careful enough to specify exactly what they mean by carbon neutral in fine print though, so they’re probably safe.
abalaji 3y ago
What we need are measured carbon credits that are past-looking... i.e. this device or plant captured x tons of carbon
SamBam 3y ago
If you had $5000 that you wanted to use to fight climate change, and you wanted to have it have a bigger multiplying effect than your own personal consumption (install heat pumps, get electric car, etc.), where would you put that, given that most carbon credits seem to be scams? That is, what's the least-scammy carbon credit, and/or place of concrete change? Places I donate to, but wonder how much the effect of each is: * Climate charities focused on legislation (EarthJustice, Clean Air Task Force, EDF, NRDC) * Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow. * Goldstandard.org Carbon Credits. May be just as scammy, but appears to be direct gifts to green energy projects in developing world. (Of course, maybe they would have gotten the money anyway.) What are other people's thoughts?
- VintageCool 3y ago
  Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures in blues states with red State Legislatures or split governments. > Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on. > The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. > Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week. https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emissions#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emis...
  - amrocha 3y ago
    Not everyone lives in the US
  - lmm 3y ago
    They passed a law that "commits" them to doing something long after the end of the current legislative term, assuming it somehow avoids being amended or repealed until then. Have they made a concrete difference e.g. measurable reductions in emissions, or is this just feel-good party-politics?
efitz 3y ago
Carbon credits and offsets of all flavors are a scam. I just searched Google[1] for "carbon credits scam" and the first several entries were from Vox[2] (it's complicated), WaPo[3] (it's a scam), GreenPeace[4] (it's a scam), the Guardian[5] (scam), and Center for American Progress[6] (we need new oversight to curb fraud). These are hardly right-wing or climate skeptics. I am very inclined to believe them; I believe that con artists are gonna find a way to game any new financial system to their own advantage. Personally, as the market is so abstract and as verification is often difficult, I don't see an effective way to remove the fraud from such systems. Granted, I am no expert in carbon trading, but the abstractness seems like a fraud magnet. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+credit+scam https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+credit+scam [2] https://www.vox.com/23817575/carbon-offsets-credits-financialization-ecologi-solutions-scam https://www.vox.com/23817575/carbon-offsets-credits-financia... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/04/17/carbon-offsets-flights-airlines/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/04/17/carbon-offs... [4] https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/carbon-offsets-net-zero-greenwashing-scam/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/carbon-... [5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/23/australias-carbon-credit-scheme-largely-a-sham-says-whistleblower-who-tried-to-rein-it-in https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/23/australi... [6] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cftc-should-raise-standards-and-mitigate-fraud-in-the-carbon-offsets-market/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cftc-should-rai... [ed] added line feeds to fix run-ons
maeil 3y ago
Misleading title; the study is very specifically about carbon offsetting by slowing deforestation. There are other incredibly common methods of carbon offsetting, e.g. renewable energy projects in developing countries. This study does not cover those. It's been known for a long time that tree-related carbon offsetting is one of the least reliable ways in general.
- palata 3y ago
  Carbon offsetting is a joke in general. You need to reduce your carbon emissions, not offset them.
fsn4dN69ey 3y ago
It's interesting, because there is indeed a system in the EU known as carbon allowances. While everyone and their dog can buy offsets, allowances exist in the EU and California (I think?) which are a legal mandate that firms must purchase which are necessary to pollute. There's even tradeable products based on this, and the market seems healthy enough. Offsets are definitely a scam, but I'd love to hear anyone else's opinion on allowances. https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-system-eu-ets_en https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-... Allowances https://sparkchange.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SparkChange-CO2-Product-Guide-FM01_2dBrk2-1.pdf https://sparkchange.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SparkChang... Guide on allowances from a firm that sells a physically backed allowances product
- Tade0 3y ago
  Hailing from a coal-heavy EU member state(Poland), the least carbon allowances did was to dissuade investors from financing new coal projects. There's also a shift to renewables - the public at large especially jumped on it because fossil-genereated electricity simply became expensive and there are government subsidies in place to to further sweeten the deal. There's a law coming into force soon which will allow apartment blocks to produce more solar energy than they consume and sell it, which wasn't the case to date. Overall the system is working as intended and the share of renewables went from a low point of 11% in 2018 to 20% in 2022 and the trend is likely to continue considering how many new solar projects are in the pipeline.
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  Allowance is the new indulgence?
- dependsontheq 3y ago
  It worked, it partly financed Tesla for several years.
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
The tree planting business is harmful too. In one case they just cleared an area in africa of natural brush, planted millions of monoculture trees in rows. The people lost their farmland. Run by people in suits of course
Moldoteck 3y ago
I still don't get why govts are bot offering carbon offsets by sponsoring public transport like trams, trains and electric busses. This will contribute to its development in terms of quality and funding and hopefully reduce car dependency if dedicated lanes are provided to this new transport
captainbland 3y ago
This feels like an extension to Goodhart's law that should be obvious. A measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure, especially if it is financialised and traded.
lincon127 3y ago
Well yah, anyone could have told you that. Relying on consumers to change the world through "market forces" is hardly going to work, because "market forces" are dictated by major market players. Not to mention that if these credits are transferrable then the government is essentially subsidizing companies for being polluters under a certain threshold. Meanwhile the companies that can afford a lot of credits buy them up and offset the cost via consumers, thus the pollution is still made, it just becomes more focused. Plus, they can no doubt hide exactly where that money is going, since they have all this capital to invest in these offsets in the first place. The only way to fix climate change is with real legislation. Not through governments attempting to manipulate the market.
chubaka 3y ago
So funny. The poeple on this website like to seriouly talk about climate change but does not blame the Canana fire burning for months.

316 points by donutshop 3y ago

This should be news to exactly nobody.

> From project implementation until 2020, those 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold in the global carbon market. But researchers estimate that only 5.4 million of the 89 million, or 6.1 percent, would be associated with actual carbon emission reductions. It sounds like a massively fraudulent market with little actual oversight.

ethbr1 3y ago
Curious about someone in the industry's opinion, but the problem sounds like carbon offsets should actually be treated as carbon offset futures. I.e. the value is determined at the time of delivered carbon offsets, and the instrument's price floats on the market before that time, including relative to how likely / valuable the delivery is If company A buys a carbon offset from entity X, and it becomes increasingly apparent that entity X isn't going to be able to deliver the face value in terms of carbon, the instrument bought by company A should decrease in value. Consequently, next time around, company A would not purchase from entity X. Which is exactly what you'd want to happen! Corollary: Verification by third party should be required, with less measurable schemes less valued. Multiple satellites confirming forests intact? Proof. Direct air capture or weathering? Proof. Some nebulous walk through how this might have influenced this other thing? Eh...
- wmf 3y ago
  That doesn't really match the way people are using offsets. If you buy offsets for a flight and ten years later you learn that that they were ineffective... what? The least effective offsets having the lowest price isn't a good incentive either.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    I don't believe the majority of VCM offsets are being purchased by end users. Are they? I thought they're typically purchased by corporate entities to support "net zero carbon by X year" pledges. Apparently this stuff has matured a lot in the last 10 years, and I haven't been keeping pace with it. There's already a concept of "vintage" (i.e. year carbon reduction realized in), but I still don't think they're being traded in a floating price futures model. It sounds like the international community is leaning on certification-first, then sale of only certified offsets. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#Other_international_programs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#O... ... which, doesn't feel like it fully harnesses the power of market investment in new technologies. If a corporate buyer finds a new technology that has promise, they should be able to plow money into it! (At a cheaper per-offset-CO2-ton price than alternatives) If that new tech delivers, the company just saved money. (For the same amount of CO2 offset purchase) If the new tech fails to deliver, the offset buying company should be forced to realize financial losses. Ergo, companies will be incentivized to invest in the most effective tools for future CO2 offsetting.
    - asu_thomas 3y ago
      > Apparently this stuff has matured a lot in the last 10 years Matured is not the word I would choose.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Last time I checked on the international side of this, it was mostly an imaginary future. Now, it looks like there's non-trivial implementation work being done: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#Programs_and_markets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#P...
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The problem with carbon offsets is worse than that. First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. You have an existing operation which is already cost effective to modernize because the fuel savings exceed the cost, so you were going to do it anyway, but now you get to sell credits even though the modernization would have happened regardless. So you have a significant amount of preexisting supply without motivating any real emissions reduction. Second, not everyone is required to buy them, so the demand side is artificially low. The result is that credits are available for less than $2/ton, or to put it another way, less than $0.02 per gallon of gasoline. This is obviously not going to provide any meaningful incentive to reduce emissions.
  - quixoticelixer- 3y ago
    > First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can What they're talking about is determining if you've paid someone to not burn down a forest and then they do it even after taking the money. Which you could conceivably verify. The problem is when someone already intends not to burn down a forest, or do whichever other thing counts for credits. Then they can sell credits in exchange for proceeding with their existing intentions. Everyone already intending to do any of those things can profit from selling the credits, so they do and the market contains tons of credits that are not actually making any difference. > Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2 https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/ https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/ Offset are worth less than $2. "Credits" in the EU are worth significantly more, because they use "cap and trade", which results in significant carbon pricing but is manifestly unjust because it directly rewards companies for having been the largest polluters.
  - 3y ago
tito 3y ago
I think that's an acceptable conclusion. So then, what's next? We need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Current solutions aren't working great, so how do we do it?
- asu_thomas 3y ago
  You have to end capitalism, and anybody taking this stuff seriously knows that, and they knew carbon offset nonsense was fraudulent the entire time. It was painfully obvious. So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism.
  - avitous 3y ago
    This right here. Either we collectively as a species take steps right away to correct course and achieve a sustainable now, or nature will do it for us; and the latter will occur cataclysmically. The former, too, except hopefully with less loss of life.
  - x-complexity 3y ago
    > You have to end capitalism, and anybody taking this stuff seriously knows that, and they knew carbon offset nonsense was fraudulent the entire time. It was painfully obvious. 1) This makes the axiomatic leap that *everyone* knows that carbon offsets are fraudulent. There're definitely *some* that think so, but not all. Extraordinary claims of "All X is Y" require a proof that X leads to Y in *all* cases, not just *some*. 2) Another axiomatic leap made is that carbon offsets are inherently fraudulent, which again *some* may be, but not all. Similar comprehensive evidence is required to establish that *all* carbon offsets are fraudulent. 3) What is "painfully obvious" to someone may not be to anyone not steeped deep into the subject at hand. Even after being through the subject itself, there is no guarantee that an incrementalistic viewpoint would not be adopted as a result of seeing the faults within the system. > So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism. Socialism is reductively state capitalism with the added façade that democratic consensus & redistribution alone allows for the best outcome. It doesn't take into account desires that may go against the beliefs of the majority, whose desires can run counter to minorities within such a system (e.g LGBTQ+ rights & drug criminalization). Modern tolerances towards them happen to be lucky circumstances that shouldn't be taken for granted, as it could be just as likely for the opposite to have happened. Even in a dysfunctional state, niches are allowed to manifest within markets that can cater to them without the oversight of the State, for better or for worse. Denying the ability to create said pocket niches by enforcing the majority's views via the State invites levels of authoritarianism & Mother-Knows-Best attitudes that should be opposed from anyone seeking to preserve individual autonomy, which should include the minorities themselves. In cases of a non-State-based socialism, markets will inevitably be created as a consequence of having to trade with unknown/untrusted parties. The egalitarianistic "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can only work in scenarios where parties know who each other are, & can consequently apply adjustments to prevent excessive misuse from exploiting parties. Markets arise due to the alternative requiring much more effort to establish & maintain relationships with all parties on all possible tradable goods & services, whereas only a neutral area is required for the former.

labster 3y ago

Carbon credits are the only financial instrument that is scammier than crypto.

smilespray 3y ago
What about crypto carbon credits? https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-to-watch-in-2023/ https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-...
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Match made in heaven Or somewhere
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Of course there are so many of these that people made "top-N" lists.

ihsw 3y ago

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Explore3003 3y ago

The money going towards carbon offsets would be better spent on lobbying in favor of carbon taxes, and establishing Enhanced Weathering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
> lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear -- well... put it like this: If you want right-wing populist governments, that's how you're going to get them.
- wmf 3y ago
  The populists may enjoy sticking it to the rich with a carbon tax and dividend.
- labster 3y ago
  And yet that’s still better than carbon credits
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations still pay the tax but only individuals get the checks. It would also be a very informative trial run for a UBI (though in this case the amount would be smaller). The "problem" with this is strictly politics: a) It would actually work, so the fossil fuel energy companies hate it; b) There is no opportunity for graft because the money is distributed to everyone and not just the politically connected, so there is no special interest lobby trying to make it happen.

realusername 3y ago

The thing which doesn't make sense with those is that it's always projects in developing and poor countries ... whereas the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries. If you would conceive a scheme to reduce emissions, there's no way that it's going to be in any other place than the top emitting countries, where the emission is in the first place. Those projects are kind of shifting blame onto people and places which aren't causing the issue.

voisin 3y ago
> the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries. This is true, but the low hanging fruit (in terms of cost) in terms of drawdown might be developing countries, where things like birth control, paying farmer not to cut down rainforest, etc can be done inexpensively.
- realusername 3y ago
  There's also a lot of low hanging fruits in developped countries, better farming techniques, electric cars, heat insulation, financing renewables depending of the electric mix, making food products with less emissions cheaper for consumers to shift consumption... It's true that the state has the upper hand but there's also things that an NGO or a private company could do.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > There's also a lot of low hanging fruits in developped countries, better farming techniques, electric cars, heat insulation, financing renewables depending of the electric mix, making food products with less emissions cheaper for consumers to shift consumption... That's moderately hanging fruit, and all of it is being done in most EU countries and to a significant degree in the US.

aSithLord 3y ago

Good luck trying to offset Popocatepetl...

rohan_ 3y ago

doesn't this just mean they're priced incorrectly? like can't you have different ratings for different carbon credit products - the more accurate ones are priced higher?

burkaman 3y ago
Not really, because most carbon credits are based on counterfactuals - would this forest have been logged if you didn't protect it, would this farmer have used less efficient practices if you hadn't paid them, would this land have remained empty if you hadn't paid to plant trees, etc. No matter how reputable the rating agency is, they still won't be able to answer these questions very accurately. Additionally, when you purchase a credit you're generally purchasing a prediction of how much carbon might be absorbed in the future. For a afforestation credit, you're often purchasing the amount of carbon that forest will absorb over 100 years. No rating agency can legitimately tell you that your forest isn't going to burn down or be logged in the next century. It's a pretty ridiculous idea - the seller, purchaser, and rating agency will all probably not exist after 100 years, and the government of whatever country the forest is in will probably have been overthrown. I think contributing money to protect and rewild nature in the interest of increasing carbon sequestration is a great idea that should continue, but nobody should be receiving offsets that they weigh 1-to-1 against their actual real-world emissions. It just isn't a meaningful comparison. Even if your purchase actually makes an impact, it's like dumping toxic chemicals into a river and setting aside money to fund an organization that will gradually clean up the river over the next century, and then claiming that you've now achieved net-zero pollution.
- tito 3y ago
  I think you two are saying different things. Agree that the existing products for decarbonization have a lot of room for improvement. Some solutions include: 1. Stopping the dumping 2. Pay the full cost of the impact of any dumping that does happen. In your analogy, this would mean the longer you leave the river polluted, the more you have to pay to clean it up.
tito 3y ago
I like this framing. That's because it seems like a working carbon market is a must have to hit decarbonization goals. Therefore it's a question not of "if", but "how". And a lot of the current "how" is probably best priced close to zero. Lots of opportunity here for entrepreneurs.

paulcole 3y ago

Carbon offsets never made sense from the start. Obviously just a way to continue polluting, maintain a clean image, and line somebody’s pockets.

tito 3y ago
Then how do we effectively decarbonize the planet quickly? That's the need.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Surprise: We don’t! I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime but at some point we’re going to change our thinking from “fixing climate change” to dealing with the effects as best we can. The sooner the better IMO, even though it’s going to be a painful transition to be sure.
  - tito 3y ago
    I hear you, I appreciate the clarification in how you're thinking about this.

ngcazz 3y ago

Great moment to plug Climate Town's video from a couple years back on precisely this https://youtu.be/EIezuL_doYw https://youtu.be/EIezuL_doYw

cumshitpiss 3y ago

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

I would argue carbon offsets are exactly doing their job: allowing people and corporations to throw a bit of money at the problem and continue with business as usual. They are the equivalent of medieval indulgences.

tito 3y ago
The job we have to do is rapidly decarbonize our economy and also remove billions of tons of carbon already in the air. This pursuit is likely in the trillions of dollars in our lifetime. Existing carbon offsets are best thought of as an attempt. The opportunity is, what's next? What's going to actually solve this multi-trillion dollar problem?

mrshadowgoose 3y ago

The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined/regulated and are therefore almost never "honest". The definition of "honest" here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future", which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one's purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn't negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it's mitigated. Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. If you find yourself "offsetting" for a few dollars / ton, you're just fooling yourself.

finite_depth 3y ago
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quixoticelixer- 3y ago
> Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. For stuff like direct air capture, not for afforestation.
- mrshadowgoose 3y ago
  Same issue of "honesty" with afforestation-based credits. A ton of carbon removed during the growth of a new tree is not equivalent to a ton of carbon already removed today. However, as these types of projects actually do remove carbon, one could probably compute an adjustment factor and purchase additional credits to achieve an "honest" offset.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    That's assuming the afforestation is even helpful and not one of the various examples of incentives for planting trees leading to work that's actually doing more harm than good.

emodendroket 3y ago

Or perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be. It seems a bit like a modern-day version of indulgences.

tito 3y ago
I appreciate this comment. It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I feel like the biggest obstacle here is that any invocation of shared sacrifice or giving up forms of convenience, even fairly minor ones, prompts howls of indignation. Maybe we’re just doing some things we can’t do going forward even if it was comfortable to be able to do so.
  - tito 3y ago
    Stopping doing things we're doing today is one possibility. How are you going to do that?
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      If I were in charge I might institute rules controlling, for instance, how low one may set their thermostat, or banning new natural gas home appliances despite whatever boutique complaints people have about gas stoves. I doubt that goes far enough but the fact that this kind of stuff is so difficult/controversial feels like a massive obstacle.

gustavus 3y ago

"Okay," I say. "Carbon credits are a bit like beating someone up on this side of the world and sponsoring one of those poor starving kids on the other side of the world to make up for the fact that you're a complete shit at home." .... "OK," the PFY says as we leave the building via the service entrance. "All we have to do to be nastiness neutral is to find a couple of people bound and gagged in a skip bin, take them out, give them a couple of wallets, unkick them a few times, unelectrocute them with a cattle prod and say 'clothing hippy on discount percent seventy look oh'." "On the other side of the world," I add. - The BOFH https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/01/bofh_episode_4/ https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/01/bofh_episode_4/

Biologist123 3y ago

I once worked in the sector, and left once I realised that the scam is that sellers of offsets characterise a complex system as a simple system.

tito 3y ago
How do we rapidly decarbonize in the next decade?
- Biologist123 3y ago
  Stop producing carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse) emissions.

tejohnso 3y ago

Cynical take: The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following: - Assuage guilt - Virtue signal (personal, political, or corporate) - Profit financially from government incompetence - Profit financially from corporate PR efforts

tito 3y ago
We absolutely need a working market to meet decarbonization goals for a stable climate. The state of the current market means there's a lot of opportunity for improvement.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  Many people say that markets fundamentally can't do that. If you think a market can, could you explain? (If they can, that would by far be the easiest coördination approach: we understand markets quite well.)
  - tito 3y ago
    I don't see why a market can't do it. Carbon dioxide is invisible, mostly useless gas, and it's currently emitted by most cars, planes, trains, and factories. The accounting needs to happen somewhere, markets seem good at that. Above I said "we absolutely need a carbon market", and I'm open to dropping that. It's possible markets are not the most effective option but I'm kind of short on how else to solve it. To someone who says that markets "fundamentally can't", I would ask them what solution they prefer instead, I'm open! To maintain a stable climate we need to decarbonize rapidly. A carbon market is a potential solution for rapid decarbonization that so far is not working great.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Markets are good at accounting for things that people want.

yawboakye 3y ago

both carbon offset and the business surrounding it (especially carbon sequestration) are mostly for the purpose of virtue signaling. it’s no different from the sunday confessions held mostly in catholic cathedrals, where one can sin all they want during the week and have it all forgiven in a couple minutes talk with a priest. if you can keep current operations as is, reap massive profits, and pay pennies towards carbon removal, which dumb business executive will refuse?

tito 3y ago
At the root of this is "do we need to decarbonize?". I'm curious where you land on this.
- yawboakye 3y ago
  sure we may need to decarbonize. but an arms race between how much you can pump into the air and how much i can remove is a stupid strategy. if too much carbon in the atmosphere is net negative, maybe we should revise whatever processes cause us to release that much? but i think any attempt there will necessarily demand that we put brakes on the false progress march (powered by capitalist greed). men with tiny dicks and assortments of self-help sex toys need the ‘billionaire’ drug injected into their veins, to prop up their self-worth so any attempt to pause the certified dollar-churning processes will be defeated, easily. but i digress. if too much carbon in the atmosphere is bad, stop putting too much into it. or maybe it’s not necessarily bad but we’re stuck with a global warming narrative that’s wrong, on net, but hard to recant? i don’t know. what i do know is that virtue signaling is a moth-gathering flame. see america.

deleted 3y ago

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machina_ex_deus 3y ago

You know what actually needs an investment? Climate models which are completely shit right now. It's actually preposterous that there are trillions of dollars worth of decisions in ESG and climate credits and government incentives while the science behind this is supported by old fortran code that has terrible quality and can't give reasonable predictions. We have trillions of dollars chasing predictions of code barely worth a million dollar investment. That's absurd, it's a recipe for disaster. Instead of useless government beaurocrats shuffling hypothetical CO2, should invest in climate models that aren't patched together by grad students in universities and old as hell code and a few NASA engineers maintaining an untested unreadable and unverifiable monstrosities. Maybe there's no crisis at all. Maybe it's all doom and gloom, but the certainty that everyone's pretending that science gives is just not reflective of the reality of how climate models look right now. They are absolutely shit and I don't blame them given the resources they have, they did their best, but it's absolutely insane how much money is moving around on predictions coming out of that mess.

tito 3y ago
Say more about this! Let's say you had $100B to build better climate models over the next 5 years. Where would you spend it? My general sense is the models are good enough to tell us that a) things are headed in the wrong direction and b) we're really far off from a solution. Generally in agreement with you but I haven't researched deeply about what's needed on more modeling and how to prioritize.
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago
  You need at least two completely independent teams who don't see each other's code so you'll have a rough idea how much developer bias is responsible for the signal. Right now they are all copying code from each other, a single error in these and all the climate models are effected. Replication here should mean different scientists writing different code arriving at the same estimates. It needs to be open source, and it needs to be way more organized, no physical constants which aren't constant or which have bad precision or which have different values in different parts of the code. Actual error modeling built in or at least a way to measure and quantify the accuracy. Some models only use CO2 input for radiation and not for many other parameters that depend on CO2. Because the code is a mess and constants that shouldn't be constants are all over the place. And getting "constants" right is even more important than having high resolution to the simulation. Getting real physical data to replace all the ad hoc constants is extremely important. And validating the correctness of the cloud modeling with real world data is also important. And you can't write huge spaghetti code, it needs to be readable and comprehensible to someone other than original programmer so that people can validate the assumptions.

opportune 3y ago

No mention of ESGs? Want to know why corporations participate in this idiotic charade, as well as other weirdly ubiquitous theatrics? It’s because paying lip service to this kind of stuff is a requirement for certain funds to be able to hold their stock: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_corporate_governance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_c... So corporations have a big financial incentive to do the bare minimum to satisfy ESG requirements, and carbon offsets are an unregulated sham. No surprise, the market finds a way and delivers impossibly cheap “offsets” so that such environmental stewards as Chevron, and soon Phillips Morris, can be considered to be environmentally friendly and socially benevolent enough to be included in ESG funds.

tito 3y ago
In line with this, another comment someone said "perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be." It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?

bradgessler 3y ago

I’m looking forward to the day where the problem is framed as “we need to learn how to control our climate” and become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization. I’ve found when I’m around people on either side of the climate change issue, they agree it’s a worthy goal to try to control and harness all of earths natural phenomena. It might take hundreds of years, thousands of years, or maybe we never get there, but it seems like a good goal.

KingLancelot 3y ago

[dead]

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.

dirtyoldmick 3y ago

I am going to auction off urine credits. Save the world and pay me in advance for every time you take a leak.

savrajsingh 3y ago

jon oliver did a great episode about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> “Potential buyers benefit from consistently low prices created by the flood of credits. It means that companies can tick their net zero box at the lowest possible cost,” he said. Basically, the companies only care about the being able to tout their green initiatives at the lowest possible price, so this is exactly what they want.

deleted 3y ago
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TylerE 3y ago
I knew it was all BS as soon as it went to "carbon neutral" or the like with no emphasis on, ya know, using less in the first place.

turnsout 3y ago

At this rate, we'll be able to make every company carbon neutral by 2030 without making any actual changes to the environment! Go capitalism!

shaunxcode 3y ago
And when it all goes to shit they can blame it on a flakey excel formula.
staplers 3y ago
You mean making "while making monumental changes to the environment"
taberiand 3y ago
Don't underestimate them, I'm sure they'll find ways to make the environment considerably worse

pictureofabear 3y ago

I was looking through the Alabama property records one time because I was wondering who owns all these huge tracks of land with nothing on them. They all traced back through a series of shell companies to Wall Street investment banks.

jakeinspace 3y ago
just for future reference, the word is tract
- pictureofabear 3y ago
  I thought tracts of land were something else. https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2016/5/8393471_14636056590836_rId34.png https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2016/5/8393471_14636...
jpk 3y ago
Do you have an example? Some seemingly empty stretches you see along I75 through Georgia, for example, are farmed for trees that're periodically harvested to make paper products. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these parcels traced back to private equity or something, despite actually being used to make toilet paper or whatever.
- pictureofabear 3y ago
  https://isv.kcsgis.com/al.franklin_revenue/ https://isv.kcsgis.com/al.franklin_revenue/ You can poke around on the map and find ownership by companies like GMO THRESHOLD TIMBER COURTLAND LLC, FRANKLIN TIMBER MANAGEMENT LLC, BASCOM GULF LLC, SMI LAND COMPANY LLC, etc.

Sytten 3y ago

I get similar a similar vibe about carbon credits than I got with crypto currencies / NFT. I am wondering if the SEC is going to look into them at some point and treat them a unregistered securities fraud.

foota 3y ago
I don't think they're similar, are they? Securities are about investments, whereas carbon credits are "consumed"?
motohagiography 3y ago
I like how the people who say the cryptocurrencies millions of people actually want and use are ponzi scams, but don't apply the same standard of reasoning to carbon credits that nobody wants, and for which organic demand is zero. Carbon credits are just nihlist virtue tokens that spread viral malignant bureaucracy. It's a made up thing to insert party faithful into organizations to "manage," this pretend virtue money.

andreshb 3y ago

Pachama (YCW19) addresses this problem https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/carbon-credit-platform-pachama-raises-55-mln-latest-funding-round-2022-05-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/carbon...

ls612 3y ago

Carbon credits; Indulgences dressed to serve modern sensibilities

SamBam 3y ago
I mean, if they could actually work then they'd be perfectly valid. Say Carbon-capture were at a point where we could actually say that my paying $100 caused an extra metric ton of CO2 to be extracted from the atmosphere. Then it actually would work to reduce what I can and offset the rest. Carbon is fungible. If I release 100 tons and capture 120 tons, I've done the world a favor. The issue is simply that the Carbon Capture schemes seem to be hot air.
- hhs 3y ago
  > The issue is simply that the Carbon Capture schemes seem to be hot air. If interested, this is how the University of Cambridge named the url of this story: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air
- imtringued 3y ago
  >Then it actually would work to reduce what I can and offset the rest. Carbon is fungible. If I release 100 tons and capture 120 tons, I've done the world a favor. Except what if you only offset 30 tons and you produced an additional 80 tons because you thought you offsetted most of your emissions?
  - SamBam 3y ago
    Yes, I addressed that in my comment.

_madmax_ 3y ago

You can expect this kind of dishonesty and self-serving politics for as long as we tolerate climate change induced disasters and its consequences on the human kind.

reilly3000 3y ago

> “These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction." I struggle to think of an expletive that works here. The people of the UK are providing welfare to companies for what? Not cutting down trees that don’t exist? The article later goes in to say researchers found evidence that 6% of the credits are having the intended effects. The malignancy of the authors of this program is astonishing.

netfl0 3y ago
How is anyone surprised anymore.
beatthatflight 3y ago
Am I going blind? I can't find your quotes in the article linked?
- reilly3000 3y ago
  https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air I found that quote on that article, and I could have sworn I commented on a link to that post, not this Ars article on the same subject. Perhaps they were merged in the last hour?
  - beatthatflight 3y ago
    Odd. Thanks though, appreciate hunting down the link for me!

jakeinspace 3y ago

Every corporation that has advertised itself as being carbon neutral should be accountable to class action suits for false advertising. I’m sure most are careful enough to specify exactly what they mean by carbon neutral in fine print though, so they’re probably safe.

abalaji 3y ago

What we need are measured carbon credits that are past-looking... i.e. this device or plant captured x tons of carbon

SamBam 3y ago

If you had $5000 that you wanted to use to fight climate change, and you wanted to have it have a bigger multiplying effect than your own personal consumption (install heat pumps, get electric car, etc.), where would you put that, given that most carbon credits seem to be scams? That is, what's the least-scammy carbon credit, and/or place of concrete change? Places I donate to, but wonder how much the effect of each is: * Climate charities focused on legislation (EarthJustice, Clean Air Task Force, EDF, NRDC) * Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow. * Goldstandard.org Carbon Credits. May be just as scammy, but appears to be direct gifts to green energy projects in developing world. (Of course, maybe they would have gotten the money anyway.) What are other people's thoughts?

VintageCool 3y ago
Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures in blues states with red State Legislatures or split governments. > Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on. > The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. > Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week. https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emissions#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emis...
- amrocha 3y ago
  Not everyone lives in the US
- lmm 3y ago
  They passed a law that "commits" them to doing something long after the end of the current legislative term, assuming it somehow avoids being amended or repealed until then. Have they made a concrete difference e.g. measurable reductions in emissions, or is this just feel-good party-politics?

efitz 3y ago

Carbon credits and offsets of all flavors are a scam. I just searched Google[1] for "carbon credits scam" and the first several entries were from Vox[2] (it's complicated), WaPo[3] (it's a scam), GreenPeace[4] (it's a scam), the Guardian[5] (scam), and Center for American Progress[6] (we need new oversight to curb fraud). These are hardly right-wing or climate skeptics. I am very inclined to believe them; I believe that con artists are gonna find a way to game any new financial system to their own advantage. Personally, as the market is so abstract and as verification is often difficult, I don't see an effective way to remove the fraud from such systems. Granted, I am no expert in carbon trading, but the abstractness seems like a fraud magnet. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+credit+scam https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+credit+scam [2] https://www.vox.com/23817575/carbon-offsets-credits-financialization-ecologi-solutions-scam https://www.vox.com/23817575/carbon-offsets-credits-financia... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/04/17/carbon-offsets-flights-airlines/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/04/17/carbon-offs... [4] https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/carbon-offsets-net-zero-greenwashing-scam/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/carbon-... [5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/23/australias-carbon-credit-scheme-largely-a-sham-says-whistleblower-who-tried-to-rein-it-in https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/23/australi... [6] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cftc-should-raise-standards-and-mitigate-fraud-in-the-carbon-offsets-market/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cftc-should-rai... [ed] added line feeds to fix run-ons

maeil 3y ago

Misleading title; the study is very specifically about carbon offsetting by slowing deforestation. There are other incredibly common methods of carbon offsetting, e.g. renewable energy projects in developing countries. This study does not cover those. It's been known for a long time that tree-related carbon offsetting is one of the least reliable ways in general.

palata 3y ago
Carbon offsetting is a joke in general. You need to reduce your carbon emissions, not offset them.

fsn4dN69ey 3y ago

It's interesting, because there is indeed a system in the EU known as carbon allowances. While everyone and their dog can buy offsets, allowances exist in the EU and California (I think?) which are a legal mandate that firms must purchase which are necessary to pollute. There's even tradeable products based on this, and the market seems healthy enough. Offsets are definitely a scam, but I'd love to hear anyone else's opinion on allowances. https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-system-eu-ets_en https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-... Allowances https://sparkchange.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SparkChange-CO2-Product-Guide-FM01_2dBrk2-1.pdf https://sparkchange.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SparkChang... Guide on allowances from a firm that sells a physically backed allowances product

Tade0 3y ago
Hailing from a coal-heavy EU member state(Poland), the least carbon allowances did was to dissuade investors from financing new coal projects. There's also a shift to renewables - the public at large especially jumped on it because fossil-genereated electricity simply became expensive and there are government subsidies in place to to further sweeten the deal. There's a law coming into force soon which will allow apartment blocks to produce more solar energy than they consume and sell it, which wasn't the case to date. Overall the system is working as intended and the share of renewables went from a low point of 11% in 2018 to 20% in 2022 and the trend is likely to continue considering how many new solar projects are in the pipeline.
TexanFeller 3y ago
Allowance is the new indulgence?
dependsontheq 3y ago
It worked, it partly financed Tesla for several years.

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago

The tree planting business is harmful too. In one case they just cleared an area in africa of natural brush, planted millions of monoculture trees in rows. The people lost their farmland. Run by people in suits of course

Moldoteck 3y ago

I still don't get why govts are bot offering carbon offsets by sponsoring public transport like trams, trains and electric busses. This will contribute to its development in terms of quality and funding and hopefully reduce car dependency if dedicated lanes are provided to this new transport

captainbland 3y ago

This feels like an extension to Goodhart's law that should be obvious. A measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure, especially if it is financialised and traded.

lincon127 3y ago

Well yah, anyone could have told you that. Relying on consumers to change the world through "market forces" is hardly going to work, because "market forces" are dictated by major market players. Not to mention that if these credits are transferrable then the government is essentially subsidizing companies for being polluters under a certain threshold. Meanwhile the companies that can afford a lot of credits buy them up and offset the cost via consumers, thus the pollution is still made, it just becomes more focused. Plus, they can no doubt hide exactly where that money is going, since they have all this capital to invest in these offsets in the first place. The only way to fix climate change is with real legislation. Not through governments attempting to manipulate the market.

chubaka 3y ago

So funny. The poeple on this website like to seriouly talk about climate change but does not blame the Canana fire burning for months.