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

arstechnica.com

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

#41

Post by shipman05 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #31
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and…

My more colorful language is beating poor people and the middle class with a rubber hose and hope that solves the problem while ignoring the large frictions present in those people lives. You want poor people to switch to an electric car? Do what California is doing with car buybacks and grants for new and used EV's. A low income person in some counties can get a couple of grand to trade in his old gas car for a used…

Electric cars are an optimization something we shouldn't be doing in the first place.

E-bikes and trains can save the world.

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

#42

Post by quixoticelixer- »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #37
ethbr1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious about someone in the industry's opinion, but the problem sounds like carbon offsets should actually be treated as carbon offset futures . I.e. the value is determined at the time of delivered carbon offsets, and the instrument's price floats on the market before that time, including relative to how likely / valuable the delivery is If company A buys a carbon offset from entity X, and it becomes increasingly a…

The problem with carbon offsets is worse than that. First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. You have an existing operation which is already cost effective to modernize because the fuel savings exceed the cost, so you were going to do it anyway, but now you get to sell credits even though the modernization would have happened regardless. So you have a significant amount of pree…

> First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway.

There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can

Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2

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

#43

Post by quixoticelixer- »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #40

The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined/regulated and are therefore almost never "honest". The definition of "honest" here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous project…

> Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton.

For stuff like direct air capture, not for afforestation.

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

#44

Post by finite_depth »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #40

The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined/regulated and are therefore almost never "honest". The definition of "honest" here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous project…

[dead]

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

#45

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sokoloff wrote: post #35
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already collect federal excise tax on fuel. Changing the amount has a trivial cost. We already collect withholding tax from individuals. Changing the amount has a trivial cost (your boss adds money to your paycheck every week instead of removing it if your tax rate is now negative, retirees and people on disability/unemployment have the amount added to their existing social security/benefits check). There would be…

This misses embodied carbon in imports and much of the emissions from domestic agricultural and industrial processes, which are surely large enough to not be ignorable. If you want to only tax fuels, that's a start.

Obviously the administrative cost of taxing some other emissions source is going to depend on the nature of that emissions source, but if hypothetically evaluating emissions from certain sources turned out to be prohibitively burdensome, that would not be any excuse to avoid doing it for fuels at a minimum, which constitute the majority of emissions anyway.

And a more efficient way to handle imports would be to impose general tariffs on imports from countries that don't themselves impose a carbon tax, rather than trying to calculate the effects of something happening in a foreign country. Which would have a more significant effect anyway, because causing the entire country to reduce its own emissions would be a much bigger win than causing only their exports to do so.

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

#46

Post by veavo »

postmodest wrote: post #27
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and…

> "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY. The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.

[flagged]

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

#47

Post by papercrane »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #22
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and…

The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations…

This is essentially the Canadian model. The federal government mandates that every province must put a minimum price on carbon. If they don't the federal program puts a direct price on carbon and rebates the residents of the province directly. About 90% of the money goes directly to residents and the other 10% is directed by the federal government to programs within the affected province, for example in Ontario they used the money for energy retrofits of public schools.

https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...

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

#48

Post by hunter-gatherer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #22
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and…

The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations…

Why wouldn't people just use their UBI on buying more things, which, as rudimentary understanding of physics goes, yields more demand for production, which increases C02 output?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't understand how taxing and redistributing the money does anything besides shifts the consumer power a bit???

I mean, wouldn't a better solution just be to have a carbox tax and then destroy the taxed money?

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

#49

Post by WicWacWok »

Explore3003 wrote: post #6

The money going towards carbon offsets would be better spent on lobbying in favor of carbon taxes, and establishing Enhanced Weathering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering

I mean better late than never, but somehow I don't see this reducing carbon emissions so much as slowing them.

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

#50

Post by gattilorenz »

quixoticelixer- wrote: post #39
postmodest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY. The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.

The world isn't actually going to end.

No, but I'd prefer not to have to deal with more and more extreme weather events, increased sea levels, etc. The planet will survive, we as a species probably too, but it's going to get shittier for many of us.
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