Carbon Offsets, a Much-Criticized Climate Tool, Get Federal Guidelines (nytimes.com) 37
The Biden administration on Tuesday laid out for the first time [PDF] a set of broad government guidelines around the use of carbon offsets in an attempt to shore up confidence in a method for tackling global warming that has faced growing criticism. From a report: Companies and individuals spent $1.7 billion last year voluntarily buying carbon offsets, which are intended to cancel out the climate effects of activities like air travel by funding projects elsewhere, such as the planting of trees, that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but that wouldn't have happened without the extra money.
Yet a growing number of studies and reports have found that many carbon offsets simply don't work. Some offsets help fund wind or solar projects that likely would have been built anyway. And it's often extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of offsets intended to protect forests. As a result, some scientists and researchers have argued that carbon offsets are irredeemably flawed and should be abandoned altogether. Instead, they say, companies should just focus on directly cutting their own emissions.
The Biden administration is now weighing in on this debate, saying that offsets can sometimes be an important tool for helping businesses and others reduce their emissions, as long as there are guardrails in place. The new federal guidelines are an attempt to define "high-integrity" offsets as those that deliver real and quantifiable emissions reductions that wouldn't have otherwise taken place. [...] The new federal guidelines also urge businesses to focus first on reducing emissions within their own supply chains as much as possible before buying carbon offsets. Some companies have complained that it is too difficult to control their sprawling network of outside suppliers and that they should be allowed to use carbon offsets to tackle pollution associated with, for instance, the cement or steel they use.
Yet a growing number of studies and reports have found that many carbon offsets simply don't work. Some offsets help fund wind or solar projects that likely would have been built anyway. And it's often extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of offsets intended to protect forests. As a result, some scientists and researchers have argued that carbon offsets are irredeemably flawed and should be abandoned altogether. Instead, they say, companies should just focus on directly cutting their own emissions.
The Biden administration is now weighing in on this debate, saying that offsets can sometimes be an important tool for helping businesses and others reduce their emissions, as long as there are guardrails in place. The new federal guidelines are an attempt to define "high-integrity" offsets as those that deliver real and quantifiable emissions reductions that wouldn't have otherwise taken place. [...] The new federal guidelines also urge businesses to focus first on reducing emissions within their own supply chains as much as possible before buying carbon offsets. Some companies have complained that it is too difficult to control their sprawling network of outside suppliers and that they should be allowed to use carbon offsets to tackle pollution associated with, for instance, the cement or steel they use.
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Bill Gates [simpleflying.com] for example. You know he cares about us because he's blasting out the carbon emissions of a small country [axios.com] all by his lonesome.
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What? "Nonprofits" selling shares of fake trees isn't legitimate business?
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The problem with planting trees, is that it's a 70 year payoff. Trees sequester carbon, but their net benefit isn't achieved for 70 years.
A lot of tree planting is ineffective, because an old growth forest just gets logged, or burned, and the remaining soil is washed away or damaged from that process that planting new seedlings doesn't really do anything to keep the soil from eroding, or burning in the meantime.
The loss of tree canopy dries out the soil, and thus fires.
Realistically, "carbon offsets" should
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We need nuclear power to replace all coal, oil and gas power plants. Also we will geo engineer, there is no way to avoid it, we've been geo engineering for thousands of years on this planet, this time we will have to use aerosols to block some of the sunlight and to deacidify the oceans that we turned into acid baths because half of the new CO2 that we generate per year (50 billions of tons) is absorbed by the oceans.
No, no and no! Only batteries are a viable alternative along with solar and wind. Give it a couple years and batteries are going to have the same energy density as gasoline, will never discharge and will last for at least 100 years!
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You are right of course, I have been deservedly marked as both, insightful and troll, which makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Who gets the carbon offsets (Score:3)
The transferring numbers for carbon book keeping around is a type of economic trade. And it has value to those who are trading it, so it ought to be taxed. I think they should be forced to split carbon offsets that they purchase with the electric utilities. Electric utilities should use the money to build out distribution infrastructure and capacity. If we're going "green" then we need some way to get the electricity where it is needed, and not simply stop at adding a new kind of trading community to the market.
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trading commodity*
Others taking your punishment (Score:5, Interesting)
To me it's no different than allowing others to take your place for punishments. Like a slave that you decide will bear your sins instead of you.
"Why aren't you simply acting good?"
"Well I have hired some slaves to repent for me, so why should I change?"
Re:Others taking your punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
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So a Catholic Priest and a Rabbi are chatting when a young boy walks past them. The Priest says, "I'd fuck that" to which the Rabbi responds, "Out of what?"
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Catholics used to be able to purchase an "indulgence" from the church for some sins. This is pretty similar.
Wouldn't an indulgence be more like a carbon tax? Indulgences would actually change behavior, if they were expensive enough.
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I mean indulgences would change how companies generate emissions, not that they would prevent immoral behavior from Catholics. Because money is fungible, charging for emissions would still shift the cost/benefit balance. (Companies would only emit carbon when it's really worthwhile, unlike an individual wealthy Catholic that would just keep buying indulgences. Publicly traded companies are more rational than individuals. They respond better to market forces.)
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In other words, it's a scam.
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I suppose it's better than the usual wasted money that's pissed away hiring consultancy firms for any number of useless reasons in that someone might plant a tree, which might live for more than a few years.
I think you're on to something here. While we'd all love for businesses to become socially responsible, I don't think society collectively has the appetite to make meaningful change happen in that space. So if, in the real world, our choices are to:
"pay the CEO's nephew's company to plant trees" or
"pay the CEO's other nephew's company to waste our time with yet another seminar on hurting peoples feelings in the workplace"
then the former is definitely the lesser of the two evils.
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It's not; it's like having someone else pay your bills or fines. It's perfectly fine in principle (unlike indulgences). The trouble is that the only reason anyone wants to do carbon offsets/credits instead of a carbon tax is because they hate the environment and would like to keep polluting and maybe steal your money for good measure. The CO2 reductions are fake or worse. But from a pure technical perspective, reduced emissions by proxy is perfectly sensible, there's no Earth goddess keeping track of who di
Politicians and Business will figure this out (Score:2)
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That was with a republican legislature and a demo
scam and grift (Score:3)
It's nothing but scam and grift just making everything more expensive, while actually accomplishing next to nothing, or nothing, or less than nothing.
Indulgences (Score:2)
This is nothing more than indulgences to the environmental church. If climate change is so important to the planet, why does anyone or any nation or government get special dispensation?
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This is nothing more than indulgences to the environmental church. If climate change is so important to the planet, why does anyone or any nation or government get special dispensation?
Do you have similar thoughts about wastewater treatment? Are those who pay to have a municipal treatment plant deal with their waste somehow less environmentally pure than those with an onsite septic system?
There are many problems with the carbon offset industry. This isn't one of them. CO2 is effectively fungible and net emission rates are what matter.
Ministry for the Future (Score:2)
I'd like to hear what Kim Stanley Robinson thinks of these "high integrity" carbon credits. Until he (or someone with his degree of credibility and knowledge) weighs in, I'll assume this is just typical, ineffective, politically-motivated lip service.
Carbon Offsets Market (Score:2, Insightful)
The carbon "offsets" market is largely fraudulent as a means to reduce emissions. The most profitable offsets are the ones that accomplish nothing. Someone agrees not to cut down a forest and then they pretend that the folks that bought their timber aren't getting it somewhere else and that there are zero additional emissions when they spend the money they make. They pay to put up a solar array and pretend that the panels used wouldn't have been put up somewhere else anyway. The fundamental problem is that
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The fundamental problem is that you can't pay money to reduce emissions because money is largely the product of creating emissions. If Bill Gates buys offsets for his private jet he pays for those offsets with profits from Microsoft that are entirely dependent on a massive network of emission creating processes.
If this argument held, then there would also be no way to process wastewater emissions because money is largely the product of wastewater. After all, what economically-productive endeavor doesn't rely on humans that produce a steady stream of the stuff? The reality, of course, is that modern society has devised systems to process sewage at a cost low enough to be offset by the value created by those sewage-generating activities.
This doesn't address the fraudulent offset schemes you describe (mitigations
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If this argument held, then there would also be no way to process wastewater emissions because money is largely the product of wastewater.
The world economy does not run on wastewater. Nor is there a market for wastewater offsets. But if there were and someone made a fortune creating enormous amounts of wastewater and then used the money they made to buy a much smaller wastewater offset for their home's wastwater you would quickly have a world overrun with wastewater.
Doesn't always work (Score:2)
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/08/02/climate-change-carbon-offset-oregon/
What happens when your carbon sink goes up in flames?
STOP THESE (Score:3)
What is needed is for a small constellation of GHG measuring sats that scan nations constantly. Far too many nations are cheating at this, and it needs to be stopped. And with this approach, all we do is measure and then let the nations decide how to stop which emissions first.
Stop the guidelines (Score:2)
And stop anything legitimizing this scam.