Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

power-technology.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 173 posts

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

#141

Post by godshatter »

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.

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

#142

Post by xg15 »

godshatter wrote: post #141

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 t…

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.

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

#143

Post by Dylan16807 »

anonporridge wrote: post #136
Dylan16807 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

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.

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

#144

Post by pauldenton »

hotpotamus wrote: post #20
luxuryballs wrote: post #9

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?

I mean, I'm a bit mad after living through the hottest summer of my life.

Perhaps you would be less mad if you read through a Weather Almanac, and learned about the weather our ancestors had to put up with before the internal combustion engine or any chance of "Carbon emission driven climate change" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England%27s_Dark_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_meat_shower

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

#145

Post by godshatter »

xg15 wrote: post #142
godshatter wrote: post #141

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 t…

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…

Which works in the case of planting more trees, but fails if someone brings in a barrel of oil. As I said, lots of problems with it.

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

#146

Post by londons_explore »

cm2012 wrote: post #117
londons_explore wrote: post #37

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, l…

Emissions are dropping like a rock though in the US and EU.

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.

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

#147

Post by phpisthebest »

mullingitover wrote: post #63
phpisthebest wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 autho…

> 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.

>>US progressive taxation policy,

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

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

#149

Post by mullingitover »

phpisthebest wrote: post #147
mullingitover wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>>US progressive taxation policy, 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…

> That is not wealth redistribution

Oh good, sounds like we agree it's a good thing and we should do more of it.

Post reply on HN