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

power-technology.com

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

#121

Post by mdgrech23 »

WalterBright wrote: post #118

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.

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.

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

#123

Post by mdgrech23 »

dvdkon wrote: post #116
SantalBlush wrote: post #5

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.

You should read up on the IPCC. They sugar coat reports to make us feel better.

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

#124

Post by qball »

prewett wrote: post #95
munk-a wrote: 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.

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.

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

#126

Post by jamie_ca »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #99
anonporridge wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 c…

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.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... * "electricity production", probably excludes direct-use such as vehicle transportation

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

#127

Post by tick_tock_tick »

IKantRead wrote: post #77
londons_explore wrote: post #30

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…

Or couldn't we just build a ton of nukes and start sucking? The power ratio only matters when power actually has a real cost.

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

#128

Post by nonethewiser »

akho wrote: post #6

Are the other 22 % certain junk? 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.

> Are the other 22 % certain junk?

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.

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

#129

Post by nonethewiser »

Maken wrote: post #23
akho wrote: post #6

Are the other 22 % certain junk? 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. So yes, they are also junk.

That is incredible. I just assumed the other 22% were not junk but it’s actually worse than the title implies.

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

#130

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #118

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.
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