The effects fundamentally do not seem offsetable. The offset industry is based on an idea that you can remove greenhouse impacts from your process without a significant impact on prices, and a corporation is somehow better positioned to donate to a fund than a consumer is. That's bullshit.
From the report: 16% were problematic, AKA they could not determine with enough precision if they were junk. The remaining 6% didn't publish enough information to even assess them.
In principle, offsetting CO2 production seems like a sensible idea to me.
Someone willing to extract CO2 from the air and store it in some rock forever can indeed offset some carbon you emitted.
The reality is that nobody is doing that - instead the fraudulent offsetting companies are getting paid to do something they wanted to do anyway - for example planting trees for papermaking, or just plain-old lying about what they're doing.
> Someone willing to extract CO2 from the air and store it in some rock forever can indeed offset some carbon you emitted.
This isn't what carbon offsets typically are though.
More like this: I promise not to slash and burn this forest if you give me $1000. There, you've now removed however many CO2 from being emitted, meanwhile I sell the forest to someone else who either makes the same deal with some other guy or just cuts it down because whatever they aren't under any obligations to not slash and burn the forest.
> Someone willing to extract CO2 from the air and store it in some rock forever can indeed offset some carbon you emitted.
Except that doing so requires more energy than you got out of the process which created the CO2 in the first place.
The only way to mitigate climate change is to keep CO2, in the form of Hydrocarbons, in the ground in the first place.
If we have any hope at averting the worst case scenario we would be start globally marking proven reserves as "never to be extracted". As it stands we are on course to release all of the CO2 stored in currently leaded fossil fuel reserves. We can slow that process down a bit by regulation, but it will matter on the scales we're working with.
Carbon offsets always seemed to me to be a way of ameliorating one's guilt of one's pollution. If recycling rarely actually happened, I figured that carbon offsets tended not to happen, too. We do not even really have the technology to do it on a large scale. People were really indulgences (heh, literally, they could continue to indulge in polluting instead of doing the hard to work to figure out to live differently). I'm shocked, shocked! to find grift in the indulgences market. Real virtue cannot be purchased.
> Carbon offsets always seemed to me to be a way of ameliorating one's guilt of one's pollution.
This is actually very common.
Here me out - EVs are not bad and in most scenarios produce less emissions than ICE vehicles. But they are similarly used to displace guilt about emissions.
EVs don’t eliminate emissions as some assume. They just displace them further up the supply chain. And if electricity is generated primarily by coal (which is the case in China, for example, which boasts about EVs) then it actually increases emissions. EVs aren’t inherently cleaner, but they do inherently hide emissions.
This does not describe every proponent of EVs but it does describe too many proponents of EVs.
The most verifiable type of offset that I've heard about is landfill methane capture. You can measure the amount of methane captured, and that is what you've offset.
The methane will eventually break down in to CO2 on it's own, so whether your burn it or not you'll get that CO2.
However before it breaks down methane is a wildly more potent greenhouse gas. It still takes decades to break down, during which time it's going to be multiple magnitudes more impactful that the CO2 it will eventually become either way.
I wondered the same thing. It’s hard to imagine a single non-junk example. If we could just pay money to undo emissions then none of this is even a problem.
They premise is basically a violation of the law of thermodynamics and market forces. Any process making this viable, would quickly replace any other energy source available?
Incentives are just completely misaligned. There are more ways to pretend you're helping than to actual help, these ways are cheaper, and nothing incentivizes punishment. The buyers of the snake oil are just as happy as the sellers.
But even if the abuse, the double-counting, and the fraud were all fixed, voluntary offsets would still look silly. Buying a carbon offset in a market of whoever feels like participating is about as good as buying the NFT for Manhattan. Offsets are only a finite resource in a virtual sense. We can't take their price seriously as a moral indulgence.
In other news, world oil consumption is at record highs at 101.5 million barrels of oil per day.
Thats 2 liters (large coke bottle) of oil per person in the world per day, and when burned turns into 3000 liters of CO2 (about the volume of a large couch).
If everyone produced a couch-size piece of any other kind of junk each day, within a week the streets would be jammed with couches. But because it's invisible gas, life goes on as if we're not making a huge mess.
Maybe so, but worldwide they're still going up. If the whole world wants a quality of life equal to the US, emissions will go up a lot. A US person uses 13 MWh of electricity per year, while the world average is 3 MWh. The difference is even bigger when comparing other energy sources.
More like emissions are being moved to other countries so the US and EU can claim their emissions are dropping like a rock. When a US company moves production out of the US to China, suddenly the emissions become China's problem.
I once worked somewhere where I found some evidence that the offsets we were considering buying were probably junk. The CEO agreed, bought them anyway, and proudly proclaimed to all staff how we were now a net-zero company. Junk offsets are cheaper.
A hug part of the power of religions, such as christianity or ESG, is that it provides a mechanism to allow normal people to engage in evil but feel forgiven or justified.
"If someone can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities."
Getting fossil fuel sourced carbon permanently out of the atmospheric carbon cycle with currently available tech (i.e. planting trees doesn't work because they burn and decompose) is an absurdity.
There's no realistic tech on the horizon that can actually reverse novel carbon emissions. Even if we had that kind of carbon capture tech, we would likely need to devote at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.
The adults in the room aren't talking about reversing carbon pollution on human timescales anymore. They're talking about planetary heat engineering to adapt to a more densely insulated Earth. That means adapting to a changing environment on the ground, as well as possibly limiting the amount of solar energy entering the system in the first place.
Humanity is entering childhood's end. We can't depend on our mother to do all the work of providing a safe cradle for us anymore. We either grow up and take ownership by proactively managing our environment, or we die. The teenage years are usually painful.
> at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.
Several orders of magnitude? That's not right at all.
If we more or less stopped emitting carbon, and devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.
Even if you include the growth to replace all current energy use, you don't even need a single order of magnitude.
Also it's entirely possible today to do things like make carbon-bearing liquids and stick them in a dead oil well, using local solar power to run the equipment. Something doesn't have to scale to the entire planet to be a real thing that some entities could pay for and legitimately be net negative on carbon. Geoengineering is almost certainly more cost-effective, but that's a different issue. Paying for $5 of cleanup every time you toss a piece of litter isn't cost-effective either, but it does legitimately improve things.
World renewable at around 12% * in 2022 [1], Nuclear is 9%. "2x current renewable and nuclear" for reclamation involves tripling current installations, and then it's another nearly 5x increase on current installations just to "stop emitting carbon".
Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.
Right, so you agree with my math? They were talking about just the energy to capture, so I gave that number first, followed by the number to do both.
> Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.
The hard part of that 7x is switching our current energy uses. It's not the extra power. And a reliable grid with that many renewables should make lots of extra power as a side effect.
> devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.
Some quick and dirty back of the envelope math.
According to this source, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption, oil, coal, and nat gas, the big culprits, currently account for 137,000 TWh of energy use per year, or 76.5%. Bump that up to 82.5% if you include traditional biomass burning.
So, only 31,000 TWh per year come from renewables and nuclear. One third of that is hydropower, which is largely tapped out and certainly doesn't have exponential growth potential. So, we currently have about 20,000 TWh of renewable and nuclear generation capacity as a civilization, compared to 179,000 total consumption.
So, just to maintain current civilization standards without fossil fuels, we need to grow our renewable nuclear fleet by a little less than a single order of magnitude. Does it make sense to devote any of our renewable fleet to renewing atmospheric carbon if we are still emitting any of it? Seems like the more prudent action would be to use 100% of renewables to decrease emissions in the first place, because emission/extraction is always going to be an inefficient process.
Now, this doesn't account for the fact that most humans in the world are still incredibly energy poor. Your refrigerator uses more energy than the total use of the average person in Nigeria, which is expected to become more populous than China by the end of the century. Let's say that we agree that US levels of energy consumption is too high to target, and we would like a world where everyone has a European standard of living. The average European consumes about 38 MWh per year, US is double at 79 MWh, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use.
This means by the year 2100, human civilization would need control of about 400,000 TWh of energy to accommodate an expected population of 10.4 billion humans. Therefore, we need a 20x increase in the renewable and nuclear fleet just to serve all humans with a good standard of living without any fossil fuel consumption.
Now that we have people taken care of and we're not adding more carbon, we can start talking about removing carbon.
Back to the first data source, human civilization has currently consumed an aggregate of 5,341,110 TWh of fossil fuels since 1800. Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. Dedicated our current fleet of renewables, that would take 178 years. Let's assume that by the year 2100, we have 100,000 TWh of excess energy and we somehow have the political will to devote 20% of collective energy to the reversal project. That would take 53 years to remove the carbon added as of 2023 assuming 100% efficiency, and not accounting for the growing rate of carbon emissions until 100% carbon free. Given the fact we've been way overly generous with efficiency assumptions, we're looking at a project that takes multiple centuries.
So to your initial point, I am wrong. Not really several orders of magnitude, but between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude even in the most generous case where we don't make social progress eliminating poverty and just maintain the status quo. And that's assuming the crisis isn't that urgent and we can lazily take on the order of centuries to remove all the carbon we've added.
Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project.
The rest of your analysis is quite correct but this is too pessimistic. You don't have to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel to get it out of the atmosphere. You only have to turn it into a stable non-gaseous compound, like magnesium carbonate. That can be done by crushing silicate rocks rich in alkaline earth metals, like olivine, and spreading them in coastal areas to get exposure to water and wave action. The magnesium silicate exchanges with carbonic acid to form magnesium carbonate and silica. The chemical reaction is thermodynamically spontaneous. The energy input to crush the rocks is just to accelerate the kinetics of weathering by exposing more surface area.
It's an accelerated version of the geological carbon cycle that naturally removes CO2 from the atmosphere:
Accelerated silicate weathering seems like the most affordable carbon capture solution that actually works, but it's still a more expensive way to decarbonize than shutting down coal fired plants or partially displacing gas-generated electricity with non-combustion electricity sources. The vast majority of countries that want to decarbonize still burn coal and gas for energy; incrementally reducing combustion of these fuels is the most cost effective incremental move for the next several years. That's why (IMO) no country is doing large scale carbon capture yet.
As for the research efforts, some privately funded work is trying to get a saleable product out of carbon capture, like turning CO2 into useful polymers or other chemicals. Accelerated silicate weathering is simpler but it also has no hope of producing any valuable outputs. It's purely a mitigation measure for CO2 that has already been emitted. I don't think that these efforts are likely to yield profitable processes, but it would be great if they did because then even countries without government decarbonization mandates could improve via private business efforts.
On the government-funded side, I think that some unproductive R&D work is being funded either due to funding bodies not being savvy enough or due to politics. Kind of like how NASA has to go forward with the Space Launch System even though it's ridiculously expensive for what it does.
As I said in another comment, almost all of the difficulty you're describing is decarbonizing our current use, not about capturing past use.
Also my original comment was about specific people or companies paying for capture. At that scale, paying for the increase in renewable power production isn't very hard. Many people and companies already use carbon-free power sources.
And I will note that over the course of decades scaling an industry up by 20x isn't particularly hard.
Fun analogy, but the link you provided seems to contradict your interpretation:
> An indulgence does not forgive the guilt of sin, nor does it provide release from the eternal punishment associated with unforgiven mortal sins. The Catholic Church teaches that indulgences relieve only the temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin ... an indulgence is not a permit to commit sin, a pardon of future sin, nor a guarantee of salvation for oneself or for another.
It's not a terrible idea as a way of funding work to scrub atmospheric carbon for companies who don't want to or can't do it themselves. I just wish we were more strict about only including sellers that remove (not reduce) carbon from the atmosphere in a directly measurable way.
I've seen this phrasing frequently in regards to carbon sequestration and it always seems to wildly understate the real problem with removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
CO2 isn't some unnecessary byproduct of creating energy, compared to say soot in wood burning. The CO2 created is an essential part of the carbon cycle by which all living things store and release solar energy. CO2 + H2O + (Solar) Energy => Hydrocarbons + O2. This is how energy is stored on our planet from the energy in a high calorie soda to petroleum (okay technically sugar is not a hydrocarbon, but the idea still holds).
When we extract energy from foods, burning organic material, or fossil fuels we do so by reversing that equation: Hydrocarbons + 02 => CO2 + H2O + Energy
To "scrub" carbon necessarily requires more energy than we got out of the process in the first place. Photosynthesis, for example, is only 4% efficient. Which means it takes about 25x as much solar energy to build the log you burn then the heat and light you experience burning the log.
"Scrubbing" CO2 fundamentally requires tremendous amounts of energy, and more than we got from the energy source in the first place. There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale.
When I see people talking about processes where the end goal is removing carbon from the atmosphere, it's generally two setups.
The first setup is growing a lot of plants, turning them to charcoal, and burying it. This does require lots of energy, but the plants do it for you. You don't have to input the energy.
The second setup is a process that uses CO2 but doesn't generate fuel, so it needs much less energy than creating hydrocarbons.
> There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale.
any efforts to combat this issue? or approach it through a different perspective entirely ? seems like a fundamental/ circular problem, where in search for energy,
optimisation for the long term (sustainable conservation of fossil fuels) you need to input more energy or ‘value’ than you get ‘value’ out of it
If only there was a way for the government to incentive folks to stop consuming and companies to stop producing by rewarding folks who don't with some kind of monetary compensation.
Sounds like your CEO is a piece of shit. Luckily not all companies operate this way and being directly involved in my company's net zero initiative I know we investigate every single carbon offset we purchase and its rarely the cheapest option. In some cases it's a little frustrating when you see things like "this offset is we won't cut down a forest in Alaska for the next 10 years" as that is piss poor, but there needs to be better regulations and oversight...and the government doesn't care because they are getting their piece of the pie too.
There are three parties in such contracts. Look at their incentives.
* The company who wants a certificate saying they offset their carbon usage - the certificate being useful for publicity, and possibly tax breaks/subsidies. They care just about the certificate, not about offsetting carbon.
* The tree planting (or whatever way they are offsetting) company. They just want to claim they planted the tree. Nobody else is really checking to see if they planted the trees, if these trees were only planted for one offset contract, and five years later if the trees hit maturity.
* The company handing out the certificates. They match a claim from a tree-planting company with a certificate buying company. They don't really care that the carbon was offset. In fact, the larger their record of past projects, the bigger clients they can score in the future. So they have every incentive not to look too closely at the tree planter. Just to print out a certificate with minimal oversight.
It is my firm belief that anyone who wants to solve climate change through "carbon sequestration" either doesn't actually understand the technological requirements involved or is just trying to kick the can down the road.
It's worse. We've been pumping out CO2 on an industrial scale for two centuries and using the energy that gave. So now we've got to put back that energy on the industrial scale. Needless to say, we do not have an industrial level of excess energy.
>we do not have an industrial level of excess energy
If only there was some turnkey design we could build that produces utterly massive amounts of energy with a few grams of fuel that can also be continually recycled based on physical principles understood for over a century.
Fortunately for environmentalists, no such solution exists. Could you imagine how much of a socioeconomic disaster it would be if we printed a trillion dollars to build hundreds of gigawatts of excess generating capacity to just run carbon capture directly (and desalinization once we're done with that)?
Besides, we would never print a trillion dollars to save 0.01 quality-adjusted-life-years across the world population. The bill for that is just too high.
There's a fair amount of snark there but I would agree that environmentalists being against nuclear energy is one of the most unfortunate impediments to a sane climate change in modern years - the constant lobbying and sheer economic force of fossil fuel companies has definitely had a stronger negative impact but everyone I meet someone who associates with environmentalism that is anti-nuke I want to bop them over the head. I even formally lived in Vermont where Vermont Yankee made an absolute mess of running a responsible and clean plant (releasing a lot of very bad stuff into local water supplies) and yet all those released carcinogens are still not nearly to the level you can expect from good ol' coal power (even if you use a brillo pad on the coal first).
That all said - the amount of power we'd need for carbon sequestration with our current technological prowess dwarfs what we're producing at the moment and would require a massive investment in human and material capital that I don't believe the US (at least) is willing to deal with. The only nation that I'd really hold my breath here for is France which, while it has some significant issues itself, it has a strong advantage in having a workforce that is actually trained to operate and care for nuclear plants.
Your comment excites me for a moment. Could we effectively have made US carbon neutral with stimulus money alone?!
Then I looked up a few numbers. At 20Bil a pop, 5Tril only gets you 250 reactors. US already has ~100 reactors, but that’s only 8% of our energy usage. So 2.5x that gets us fully off coal and 1/4 of our natural gas, and it doesn’t touch our oil usage at all. So we’d still be 50% fossilized. Sad.
This is Napkin math of course. But this shows how dang large a project we have left to do…
It’s not going to be solved. We will adapt with new body plans. Nature is on its own, but will bounce back with lots of extinction and adapted species.
Carbon sequestration doesn't require deep understanding of chemistry or physics. It can be understood by politicians, CEOs, economists and the general public.
If we could effectively communicate the science we could support/fund more scientific solutions. However, money rots science too.
This is in the voluntary carbon markets, quite separate to regulated carbon markets. It is unfortunate that so many may be junk, but in the end 380 billion T of carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere between 2050 and 2100 to keep earth at 1.5 degree warming, assuming we hit current net zero pledges. This just means more regulation is needed for trust, not that carbon markets themselves should be ditched.
I want to eat this cake, but I'm already overweight.
But no problem, the baker tells me. As it happens, he was planning to put out another cake with the same amount of calories tomorrow, which I'd surely eat too. But if I pay him a dollar, he'll hold off doing that and hand me a fancy certificate documenting his intention.
I can then take the negative calories that spring from my act of not-eating the hypothetical future cake and use them to offset the positive calories of the actual cake right in front of me - and in the end, the cake will have net zero calories and I can finally eat in piece. Yum!
Complicated solutions are, well, complicated. How do you know that doing x results in less net emissions? Action x is, very likely, part of a graph that starts at one point on the globe and spreads all over. Is it possible to honestly tally emission effects?
What about the "side effect" of economic growth?
If company Y produces vehicles that emit CO2, and CO2-emitting vehicles are taxed, company Y will transition to electric vehicles which, for the sake of exposition, let's really believe don't produce CO2. But now company Y can contribute to economic growth, for example by selling trucks that can transport more goods at no "environmental cost", other than the environmental cost of the goods themselves (e.g., imagine the trucks are transporting coal, meat, or people), the cost of making and maintaining the roads, etc.
Generally, if GDP grows a factor of z in a certain time-period and CO2 emissions are reduced by a factor of w per unit of GDP in the same period, then as long as z / w > 1, CO2 emissions increase.
In my opinion, the best solution for Earth is to reduce GDP units while also trying to reduce CO2 emissions per GDP units. The best solution for people is to keep economic growth unchecked. Since the two things are incompatible, Earth and people should part ways.
What kind of garbage is this site? There's no way to go back. It pollutes the whole history. I can go back up to the last 15 visited sites and all of them are this site.
People who actually want to make a climate impact with their money are supporting policy change and technology research.
One estimate puts the price of averting a ton of CO2 through the Clean Air Task Force's policy advocacy programs at $0.10 to $1 [1]. They've played a huge role in shaping things like the US's latest infrastructure bill.
However, donating to them means admitting that preventing climate change is messy, political, and uncertain - not great for greenwashing your company.
I like the idea of carbon offsets and carbon trading (i.e. give a market incentive to take CO2 out of the air), but this obviously isn't working. Stricter controls might help, but it would become a cat and mouse game.
Part of me, jokingly (mostly), thinks we should replace it with a "carbon buy-back" program where people and/or the government can donate money to buy carbon from people and bury it deep or sink it in the ocean or something. Go clear cut all that land, sell it to the program, then replant. That's the only way I can see a market solution really working. Corporations donate to the fund to ease their corporate consciences and the carbon gets dumped down an old mine shaft and buried in concrete.
Of course, it likely wouldn't work for a lot of reasons, but it would at least be more on point. "Don't just promise to sequester carbon, bring it to us to dispose of" would at least help take the gaming out of that particular system.
Seems to me this would be susceptible to the cobra effect:
> where people and/or the government can donate money to buy carbon from people...
No matter what you do with the carbon afterwards, this scheme means you first have to buy it and the other party can sell it. I think being able to sell carbon would create exactly the opposite incentive from what is needed - suddenly it becomes profitable to produce carbon and a profit risk to reduce emissions.
I just wonder how do "mishaps" like this square with techno-optimists looking at graphs going up and convincing us "everything is on track for an amazing future!" [1].
I don't know if this is just my cynicism but I just can't believe we are going to fix the climate. Every now and then something like this sees the light of day and it seems like we are just doing some clever feel-good bookkeeping rather than fixing the core of the issue.
I looked into Wren and others a little while ago and raised my eyebrows when I saw that all that was needed to completely offset my impact on the environment was a tiny sliver of my income! I don’t recall the exact number but it was under $60/mo.
That’s it? For my travel, growing and shipping and refrigerating all of my food, digging up and purifying all the special metals in my devices and appliances, throwing all my waste in a landfill?
It just doesn’t add up. If net zero were that cheap and easy, it wouldn’t be a problem.
It seems like they’re selling a way to feel good about yourself without a real lifestyle change. Having said that, though, I do get the impression that the proceeds are put to good use.
Net zero will probably save you money, not cost you money.
But giving you that small amount, or even charging you a small amount doesn't solve the problem, even after you scale it up to billions doing it. Because those billions are currently going to a relatively small number of people who really don't want those billions to stop coming to them and have the concentrated power to stop the vast democratic majority from getting their way.
And one of their techniques, alongside pretending the problem doesn't exist, or blaming other people, is to claim it would be expensive to fix.
Imagine a monopolist arguing, oh it would be really expensive to fix this market failure! and you have the rough idea.
It's a "collective action" problem, not one of missing tech or unwillingness to pay.
It is much higher. From the guardian article, the "analysis" this link discusses:
"39 ... were categorised as likely junk", "Eight others (16%) look problematic", "the remaining three projects (6%) could not be determined definitively".
The original article was submitted here too, but didnt get any upvotes.
The Permian Basin in Texas, which has provided most of the oil supply growth for the last decade, is starting to slowly decline from its peak. Let's say that climate change is a nice way to tell people that we're running out of oil. Why would you want to do that? You'd want to say that energy demand is the problem, not energy supply. Thus, we need to get people to cut back on their usage and come together in a global rules based order to implement that. Telling the world we are running out of oil will encourage hyper-nationalism and cause the oil exporters to prematurely starve the rest of the world in an every nation for itself war of all against all.
What would be the tells that oil supply depletion is what's really going on?
Electrification of transport would be a high priority.
Carbon credits would be likely BS and half-hearted and nobody would check.
China would build 6x more coal plants than the rest of the world combined[1] and encourage reduction in coal usage in other countries to provide a more ample supply[2].
I've thought along these lines too. Any time the possibility of scarcity it publicized, panic buying makes the problem far worse than it needs to be, as in the looming rice shortage or the recent toilet paper shortages. Oil is the lifeblood of industrial civilization, needed for everything from energy to raw materials; panic in the oil markets would threaten industrial civilization.
Not sure I follow this narrative regarding China building a ton of coal plants being a signal for oil shortage. Can you elaborate? There aren't any power plants that run on oil there and the whole thing seems like a move away from hydroelectric power which has been severely weakened due to drought.
If climate change is the motivation for the great energy transition, then China would build a lot of coal plants to prepare for running out of oil and an enormous need for new sources of electricity in order to expand electrification of transport and possibly hydrogen production for long range air travel and other applications where electrification to replace oil is impractical. They wouldn't be concerned at all about the carbon emission impact of their coal plants and would simultaneously encourage the west to stop building coal plants so they could get a cheaper supply.
We will do anything but decrease our dependency on oil and gas (automobiles, energy generation, …), meat production/consumption, regulate O&G producers, and make our cities more efficient (migrate away from car centric transportation in the USA).
John Oliver had a piece on that [0] over a year ago. Companies want the most CO2 offset per dollar to present themselves as neutral as per their greenwashing campaign, so naturally they buy those from the lowest bidder. And those are the ones least likely to be legit, so it's mostly only scams that get the business lmao.
The idea that 22% of them are NOT junk is honestly surprising to me. I would've expected a number north of 90% to come out of even a cursory investigation.
Carbon cap and trade, Carbon Offsets, and any other scheme to "cap and market" pollution is not about saving the environment, it is protectionist program of wealth redistribution nothing more.
These programs are about control, and wealth redistribution lets stop pretending otherwise
If you want to advocate wealth distribution fine, do it openly and honestly, not under the guise of a "climate crisis"
Of course most people understand wealth distribution is generally bad, and leads to terrible outcomes and rarely actually fairly and equitably distributes any wealth that is why it is almost universally rejected by the masses when tried.
wealth distribution is normally simply a method to impose authoritarian governance on a population while claiming to be a social good, so more or less wealth distribution is the same scam as Carbon Offsets.
> Of course most people understand wealth distribution is generally bad
Evidence to the contrary is the US progressive taxation policy, which is universally popular. In the absence of sane wealth redistribution mechanisms, wealth inevitably accumulates and stays at the top, at which point the vast power concentrated in a tiny group of hands hollows out democracy.
That is not wealth redistribution, using a progressive tax policy for then direct payments is, but the vast majority of US Taxes are not used for that despite attempts to do so.
Now if we get Single Payer health systems, UBI, etc then you would have a case.
>>wealth inevitably accumulates
Incorrect, in fact most of the reason why we have massive amounts of wealth inequality in the US is the failed policies of "war on poverty" as well as policies created in WWII like Price Controls on wages that forever changed the relationship of employers and employee's
Government created the problem, only removing government regulations will resolve it,. More government is not the solution
They just turn everything into a new way to make money. I’m not even mad, it’s kind of impressive at this point, and they keep getting away with it! What’s next? Pay-per-use single occupant gender neutral restrooms?
The restroom debate is always odd to me, I would 100% pay to use "single occupant gender neutral restroom"
Public Restrooms are terrible, I would prefer to be alone when I am using them. I am not sure why people fight so hard to preserve something so bad....
I'm honestly surprised Europe puts up with it. I imagine if they tried it here, people would just let loose on the floor if they were out of change. It seems like some do even while they're free. Maybe public urination is less of a big deal in Europe and people are fine with doorways or bushes if they're unable to pay the pee fee.
I know in a lot of cities they have public latrines so popping a number 1 is easier.
Number 2 is harder. And yeah, if I had to drop a 2 and didn't have any change, I would probably do it right in front of the pay toilet to prove a point.
Let's get a baseline for comparison. For example, how many climate tech startups, or tech startups in general, are "likely junk"? That would give us some helpful context.
Junk startups don't cause much harm to the outside world. In contrast, selling junk carbon offsets is basically fraud, you're selling an environmental impact that just isn't there.
Giving junk a pass under normal circumstances may be what is causing much of this greenwashing. It speaks to the overall culture of startups.
If this 78% figure is consistent with the figures of tech startups in general, that would suggest a connection.
And that's only one reason why I'd like a baseline; there are many more. Throwing out a single percentage without comparisons for context is just plain bad statistics. It is not meant to inform, merely to persuade.
Three years ago I entered this business as I saw some opportunity. After about a year I got out because everything there was fraud. F R A U D.
>most of them exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate the potential harm [...]
>projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing” that undermines its alleged emissions offsetting power [...]
Stop trying to disguise these operations as something else than fraud. These people made no "mistakes", this not a "sorry, we didn't know better" situation, they DID know. It is plain old pre-meditated fraud, the owners knew they were selling crap from the start, they lied about it, still lie about it and they get to profit off that.
Edit: Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment for the past hour and getting lots of upvotes every minute, to the very bottom. I must be onto something here :).
> Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment
Looks like a mod downweighted your comment, probably because it was a bit fulminatey and a bit generic. Those are inauspicious markers for an HN thread, which is why the site guidelines ask people to avoid them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Your comment wasn't terrible, nor bad enough to get a moderation scolding—though it would have been better if you had shared some interesting details about actual fraud!—always a popular and curious topic—instead of generic rhetoric about it.
However, these markers are particularly bad at the top of a page, because the top subthread has a power-law influence on how the whole discussion ends up going. So when we see such a subthread at the top, we often downweight it, refresh the page, and then repeat the procedure until something more HN-salubrious is at the top.
Actually this way of moderating subthreads is probably the single biggest thing we've ever hit on for thread quality.
Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an impact
There were a few carbon capture (CC) projects that were genuine, shoutout to the guys at AirMiners, they also have a great community and they're a pretty smart bunch of people.
Downside of CC is it's still too expensive and current methods capture carbon on the order of kilograms/month where gigatons/month is needed. Sure, the tech will improve with time, and there's economies of scale, etc..., but a 10,000,000,000-fold change? Doubt it. Also, there's some fundamental physical limits that you'll hit way before you get close to that throughput. I wouldn't think of them as fraud though, as the people involved (usually) do not lie about what the current state of tech is.
I'd say whatever shows reduction on carbon emissions is a legit thing; far from ideal, but the best thing we have atm.
Some googling suggests that it's $200 per metric ton, is that right?
That would put the cost of capturing the world's entire footprint at $7T per year. That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing. Especially given that once we decide to do it, it will get cheaper quickly.
When I was involved in this, the real cost of capture, all things considered, was in the high thousands/ton. Climeworks, which is one of the companies trying to take this to a big scale, quotes it at 1,000EUR/ton. No one really talks about "carbon emitted while capturing carbon", though, as that would make the numbers MUCH worse.
So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
> That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing
Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.
“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
I heard stories of companies like this doing things like buying old coal power plants that were slated to be closed, closing them, then claiming they had reduced emissions by 1 coal powerplant's worth. To give people an idea of what the kinds of fraud looked like.
Well, since you need licenses for those cows, which are limited in number, by not exploiting those (and also not selling those!) you _are_ indeed offsetting some emissions. (Given that the quota are not adjusted for unexploited licenses).
I'm just suprised most intelligent people never ever question all the research coming out of the climate science area.
There is literally zero, zero, zero incentive to research or publish anything that might remotely suggest we aren't heading for some climate catastrophe.
In fact you are likely to get banished from science if you ever question anything.
In fact it's worse, the best way to get publicity and further funding is to be as dramatic as possible about what the future holds.
That isn't reliable science. That's speculation at best, and fraud at worst.
Many many other areas of this entire climate industry needs to be questioned.
How do I know the new trees have really been planted, and that they haven't sold them dozens of times over?
How do I know the trees will survive and actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than dying in a year or two? Which they might do, if they're planted on unsuitable but cheap land.
How do I know that, in 20 years time, they won't have gone out of business and sold the land on to a logging company who turns it all into firewood?
There's also a wealth of scammers who'll do things like "buy rainforest to protect it from development" when no development was going to happen anyway.
A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee that what you pay for will be around in X years and policing us extremely difficult. X is traditionally 100 years. If I sell you a carbon credit and then cut all my trees down, what happens?
Another is fraudulent sites - people selling credits for sites that already exist, we're already planned for protection, etc.
Not surprised in the least. The simple, effective, and efficient way to deal with CO2 emissions is to tax the carbon content of fuels. The other schemes are all nonsense, and it baffles me why otherwise intelligent and educated people think they can determine the "carbon footprint" of a business.
Taxing the carbon content also has the desired effect of making low carbon fuels, like natural gas, less expensive than higher carbon fuels, like gasoline, and even less expensive than all carbon fuels, like coal.
I mean you could if you rationed access to fossil fuels. Obviously the framework to do that isn't in place today in the US but it probably will be at some point as reserves thin out over time and just letting the market handle it is going to result in chaos when it's no longer profitable for private ambulance companies to fill their tank or local police department can't afford it.
What's your solution then, say fresh water after a hurricane? The grocery store has enough to go around if everyone takes only 1 container. Charging 100x the normal price to soft limit purchases seems way worse than a sign that says "limit one per customer".
We know what happens. Filthy capitalist swine outside the blast area immediately load their pickups full of water, gasoline, food, and other supplies. They rush them to where the need is highest and sell them to the highest bidder. As more of these running dogs pour in, the supply increases and the prices come down. The goods pass to those most in need (i.e. willing to pay). There is no hoarding, as the prices are declining.
With rationing, nobody rushes in with supplies, because that would be illegal. (Of course there will be smugglers, but the prices will be much higher than that charged by the swine, as the legal risk carries with it a price premium.) The local supply will quickly run out. Since need varies from person to person, the ones who don't need it will hoard it to sell later at black market prices. The ones who do need it will face shortages as everyone else is hoarding it and the local supply ran out.
"Let's do wind turbines to generate clean electricity!"
The wind turbine manufacturing and decommissioning processes are hugely inefficient, not to mention the negative impacts wind turbines have during their operational period. Regardless of these findings large areas of land in North America and Europe are littered with wind turbines. Oh while we're at it lets shut down all the nuclear power plants because we're scared of them.
"Hey, this whole green energy thing has been a total disaster. Regardless, let's start setting arbitrary deadlines on which we want to eliminate gas powered cars and replace them with electric cars that rely on our disastrous green energy rollout!"
The push to widespread electric car usage is ignoring major infrastructure short comings in many places where the push is happening.
It's almost like the people in charge of this stuff are a bunch of idealistic nitwits who are risking plunging us into the dark ages.
The effects fundamentally do not seem offsetable. The offset industry is based on an idea that you can remove greenhouse impacts from your process without a significant impact on prices, and a corporation is somehow better positioned to donate to a fund than a consumer is. That's bullshit.