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How authentic are those carbon offsets though? Are you willing to buy carbon offsets the next time a forest fire runs through your land, which may exceed the to
by labster 3y ago
How authentic are those carbon offsets though? Are you willing to buy carbon offsets the next time a forest fire runs through your land, which may exceed the total amount of offsets you sold?
- sokoloff 3y agoTrees burning and then forest regrowth is carbon-neutral. (Today's fire releases the last few decade's worth of CO2 temporarily, but then starts recapturing it.)
- MrVandemar 3y agoProbably even more than carbon neutral, because some of that carbon gets folded into the soil layer.
- imtringued 3y agoThat only works if you turn the wood into biochar. If you burn the tree down completely, only ash remains.
- olddustytrail 3y agoAsh is mostly carbon.
- labster 3y agoDesertification is not carbon neutral, though. You have to have the forest regrow to do that. It might be radiation budget negative though, because forests have pretty low albedo, and deserts reflect a lot more light.
- MrVandemar 3y agoWhen you get down to it, Carbon Offsets, credits, etc is just a way on paper to let people keep polluting. They're not authentic at all. Forest fires are irrelevant to that though. We've planted thousands of trees. Do we get any of those credits? No. Do you know what does? The massive bluegum monoculture down the road that they are going to harvest in ten years with big fossil-fuel machines and turn into paper with a lifetime of about a week. It's basically fraud, another “business as usual” green-wash, another way for companies to get free money from mates in government, and people being able to feel good that “we're doing something”.
- labster 3y agoPreaching to the choir, I studied atmospheric science in university, carbon credits for anything outside of geoengineering just seems like greenwashing to me. Cap and more cap seems to be the right approach to me, the "trade" part has never been anything but an excuse to move money around. I was actually interested in how OP thinks that a carbon credit could be authentic though. Especially one where the landowner is paid for ecosystem services previously provided by nature for free, now being compensated for the land they already want to keep as a forest.
- naasking 3y ago"Moving money around" is how anything gets done. Cap and trade is exactly intended to move money around, specifically to move money from carbon polluters to fund sustainable and renewable development that didn't have market advantage.
- labster 3y agoI agree with everything you say, however cap and trade is not working as designed. Instead, we have gotten a system of questionable carbon offsets where neither the buyer nor the seller is interested in investigating the quality of the product closely, nor are the regulators. The money is moving without achieving the goal of reducing global warming. Some of these policies have been in place for 20 years, and has hardly gotten any movement of the needle. ESG investing has done more, for crying out loud. We need to be acting like this is an emergency, because it is, and not rely on the market to produce a quality offset where no one cares about the quality. Tax emissions over the cap to pay for the externalities. Put a hard cap, like we do on vehicles, and the market will adjust. Stop tax benefits to oil production -- I know we still need petrochemicals for plastics, but not this much.
- imtringued 3y agoCap and trade is not the same as carbon offsetting at all. You are mixing up things. The idea behind cap and trade is that there is a limit to the total amount of emissions and you need a certificate from the government to pollute. The trading part just moves certificates around with a monetary incentive. Carbon offsetting is the exact opposite of cap and trade, since it raises the cap by issuing more certificates.