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

arstechnica.com

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

#31

Post by Gibbon1 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17
Explore3003 wrote: post #6

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

> 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…

My more colorful language is beating poor people and the middle class with a rubber hose and hope that solves the problem while ignoring the large frictions present in those people lives.

You want poor people to switch to an electric car? Do what California is doing with car buybacks and grants for new and used EV's. A low income person in some counties can get a couple of grand to trade in his old gas car for a used EV's like a Bolt. That's better because instead of feeling attacked people feel like they got a decent deal.

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

#32

Post by Nifty3929 »

Explore3003 wrote: post #6

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

I would be happy to support a carbon tax, as long as the proceeds are held off-books and distributed annually to all citizens equally, with no income or other qualification criteria. Basically a carbon funded pure UBI.

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

#34

Post by ethbr1 »

wmf wrote: post #21
ethbr1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

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#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.

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

#35

Post by sokoloff »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #30
nine_k wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds cool. What would be the cost of administering this tax?

We already collect federal excise tax on fuel. Changing the amount has a trivial cost. We already collect withholding tax from individuals. Changing the amount has a trivial cost (your boss adds money to your paycheck every week instead of removing it if your tax rate is now negative, retirees and people on disability/unemployment have the amount added to their existing social security/benefits check). There would be…

This misses embodied carbon in imports and much of the emissions from domestic agricultural and industrial processes, which are surely large enough to not be ignorable.

If you want to only tax fuels, that's a start.

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

#36

Post by sofixa »

realusername wrote: post #13
voisin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

#37

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ethbr1 wrote: post #15
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #3

> 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.

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 a…

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.

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

#39

Post by quixoticelixer- »

postmodest wrote: post #27
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY. The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.

The world isn't actually going to end.

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

#40

Post by mrshadowgoose »

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.

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