This is how you get people skeptical of anything climate related in general
Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
91–100 of 173 posts
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#92Are 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.
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…
Carbon offsets always seemed to me to be a way of ameliorating one's guilt of one's pollution. If recycling rarely actually happened, I figured that carbon offsets tended not to happen, too. We do not even really have the technology to do it on a large scale. People were really indulgences (heh, literally, they could continue to indulge in polluting instead of doing the hard to work to figure out to live differently). I'm shocked, shocked! to find grift in the indulgences market. Real virtue cannot be purchased.
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#9322% is a lot higher than I would've guessed (.1%)
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step 1 - buy something “full of carbon” or potentially “making carbon” (like a future cow farm) Step 2 - get paid for “offsets” not to do that thing that you never did
Well, since you need licenses for those cows, which are limited in number, by not exploiting those (and also not selling those!) you _are_ indeed offsetting some emissions. (Given that the quota are not adjusted for unexploited licenses).
What countries require per-cow licenses, and of those countries, which ones wouldn’t adjust the quota upwards to meet consumer demand?
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#95It 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.
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When I was involved in this, the real cost of capture, all things considered, was in the high thousands/ton. Climeworks, which is one of the companies trying to take this to a big scale, quotes it at 1,000EUR/ton. No one really talks about "carbon emitted while capturing carbon", though, as that would make the numbers MUCH worse.
So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing
Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#98Three 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…
Step 1 - buy something “full of carbon” or potentially “making carbon” (like a future cow farm) Step 2 - get paid for “offsets” not to do that thing that you never did
“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 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.
Even if you include the growth to replace all current energy use, you don't even need a single order of magnitude.
Also it's entirely possible today to do things like make carbon-bearing liquids and stick them in a dead oil well, using local solar power to run the equipment. Something doesn't have to scale to the entire planet to be a real thing that some entities could pay for and legitimately be net negative on carbon. Geoengineering is almost certainly more cost-effective, but that's a different issue. Paying for $5 of cleanup every time you toss a piece of litter isn't cost-effective either, but it does legitimately improve things.
Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
#100Three 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…
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