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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“

#151

Post by hotpotamus »

pauldenton wrote: post #144
hotpotamus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would have guessed that a Kentucky Meat Shower was something else.

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

#152

Post by badtension »

I just wonder how do "mishaps" like this square with techno-optimists looking at graphs going up and convincing us "everything is on track for an amazing future!" [1].

I don't know if this is just my cynicism but I just can't believe we are going to fix the climate. Every now and then something like this sees the light of day and it seems like we are just doing some clever feel-good bookkeeping rather than fixing the core of the issue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3VVrggKz4

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

#153

Post by TearsInTheRain »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #104
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. This isn't what carbon offsets typically are though. More like this: I promise not to slash and burn this forest if you give me $1000. There, you've now removed however many CO2 from being emitted, meanwhile I sell the forest to someone else who either makes the same deal with some other guy or j…

sell the same plot of forest to n number of people. Send everyone the same pic of the forest they "saved"

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

#154

Post by therealdrag0 »

Supply5411 wrote: post #87
Dylan16807 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I don’t follow. Most problems involve humans and yet we solve problem after problem.

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

#155

Post by therealdrag0 »

qball wrote: post #124
prewett wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your comment excites me for a moment. Could we effectively have made US carbon neutral with stimulus money alone?!

Then I looked up a few numbers. At 20Bil a pop, 5Tril only gets you 250 reactors. US already has ~100 reactors, but that’s only 8% of our energy usage. So 2.5x that gets us fully off coal and 1/4 of our natural gas, and it doesn’t touch our oil usage at all. So we’d still be 50% fossilized. Sad.

This is Napkin math of course. But this shows how dang large a project we have left to do…

[0] Some numbers from here https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...

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

#156

Post by marginalia_nu »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #153
marginalia_nu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone willing to extract CO2 from the air and store it in some rock forever can indeed offset some carbon you emitted. This isn't what carbon offsets typically are though. More like this: I promise not to slash and burn this forest if you give me $1000. There, you've now removed however many CO2 from being emitted, meanwhile I sell the forest to someone else who either makes the same deal with some other guy or j…

sell the same plot of forest to n number of people. Send everyone the same pic of the forest they "saved"

Yes, exactly. In practice, there is no limit to how many times you can vow to not cut down a tree.

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

#158

Post by ZeroGravitas »

jamie_ca wrote: post #126
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…

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-…

If you use the "split by metric" option you get a much more optimistic graph for solar and wind:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

The rollout of PV and wind is a modern miracle success story that many are intentionally ignoring.

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

#160

Post by anticensor »

phpisthebest wrote: post #50
mullingitover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These programs are about control, and wealth redistribution lets stop pretending otherwise Shrug , if it's all BS but it does something to the mind-bogglingly skewed wealth distribution[1] we can still chalk it up as a win. [1] https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?si=90mDv90g1mq6-a0T

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…

In fact, the poor reject more than the rich.
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