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

>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?

Or buy some land and leave it alone, let nature do it's thing. Sadly this is not possible as in most places there is legislation in place that prevents you from "mismanaging" land like this.

> Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow.

I kindly disagree, and I think it is extremely important to understand that. This tech is fundamentally flawed and completely misses the point: climate change (hence CO2) is only a symptom of our biggest problem.

Our biggest problem is abundant energy:

1. Because we have access to a lot of energy, we transform the world in a way that is killing biodiversity: we are currently living a mass extinction (that's not a prediction, that's a fact, it's happening, we can measure it right now). We should do less with less, and preserve habitat for biodiversity. There is no high-tech solution to that, we should preserve life on Earth.

2. Because that abundant energy is mostly fossil based, it emits a ton of CO2. That creates climate change which threatens our very survival (now in the short term). Climate change will create global instability, mass immigration, wars, famines, etc. We don't want that, so we need to emit much, much less CO2. So much less, in fact, that the only viable solution is to do less with less. One could argue that we should "just" replace fossil fuels with better energies (good luck with that, we are not even remotely on that path), but that would not remove point 1 above.

3. Fossil fuels are not unlimited. The peak of conventional oil production was in 2008. The global peak for oil is around now, for gas it is soon. From the peak on, energy will become harder and harder to get (which will induce price instability). Whether we care about climate change and biodiversity or not, fossil energy is going down soon. We don't have viable replacements, so we will have to do less with less. Without abundant energy, we have the same kind of consequences as climate change: global instability, famines, etc. We need to prepare our society to live with less energy. Would you rather go to space on holiday, or eat?

Finally, CO2 removal requires a ton of energy. The only way it can ever possibly be useful is if we suddenly find a way to completely replace fossil energy with renewables (say with nuclear fusion). But it's really not clear at all if we will find such an energy now (nope, wind and solar are not viable replacements for all fossil fuels). Even if we did suddenly get fusion to work, it's already too late: it would take a lot of time to build enough plants everywhere and then rebuild the whole infrastructure to remove fossil fuel.

We need to act now, for our survival. It's high time we accepted that we failed to replace fossil fuels entirely, and even if we did we would still be in a mass extinction. We need to do less with less. Remove what's unnecessary, keep the essential.

It does not mean going back to how people lived in the Middle Age. We need a lot of clever technology if we want to do less with less. That's actually more challenging than what we are doing now, so we need clever people to rethink society and do less with less.

I'm thinking about doing something like this, but it involves work. I'm going to find native species, maybe focusing on some insect that's in decline, find it's nursery/food plants and fill an area with them, along with any other plants and fungi that have symbiotic relationships with them. Then apply for a grant that specifically targets the threatened species. That way, it's official. It's a ton of work though.

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.