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Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

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Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#81

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 ope…

Seems like planting trees is easy enough? What is wrong with projects like that?

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#82
post #54
post #34

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. We need to reduce - that is the solution.

Reducing only slows the process. It can theoretically buy time to solve the climate problems but it doesn't solve them on its own.

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.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 wou…

> Except that doing so requires more energy than you got out of the process which created the CO2 in the first place.

That's fossil fuels for you: they are nothing more than an energy loan which we have to pay back with interest.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#84
For example:

"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.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#85

Are there any that aren't junk? Wren got a lot of promotion by YouTubers recently. Maybe they were paid to say nice things? Doesn't prove it's junk though? Where would you invest if you wanted to help?

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 m…

> completely offset my impact on the environment

That's not what they're promising.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#86
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-f…

> Downside of CC is it's still too expensive

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.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#87

S06E06 of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! debunked carbon credits. That was 15 years ago. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1272784/

Carbon credits can work in a system where you don't just let people make them with weak verification. The problem isn't the underlying concept.

The problem is inseparable from the system, because people are involved.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#88
post #81

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 ope…

Seems like planting trees is easy enough? What is wrong with projects like that?

* Some people sell you a forest that was already there.

* Some people will sell you a future forest that will never be there.

* Even if we cover all available land with trees, it won't be enough. See, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00058...

* Most of these projects are bullshit as well. See, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

* There's an ongoing debate on whether or not forests are permanent carbon storage, because forests burn quite often and put CO2 back into the atmosphere very quickly. See, https://www.ft.com/content/d54d5526-6f56-4c01-8207-7fa7e532f....

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. A modern instantiation of buying indulgences from the Catholic Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence 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 some carbon out of the air isn't an absurdity. There are lots of evils that can easily be undone (in multiples!) with cash. Like littering.

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.

Perhaps the best you can do is mitigate warming factors, like investing in burning previously vented methane, but that might be risking triggering a Cobra Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...

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.

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