Compensating carbon emissions
carbonaltdelete.eu
carbonaltdelete.eu
Far too many emission certificates have been given out for free to industries. And there are plenty of loopholes in the system.
My understanding was that that was only in the beginning, when the system was introduced. Businesses that previously polluted for free could continue to pollute for free for a transitional period. I may be wrong.
> And there are plenty of loopholes in the system.
Do you have a good source to read up on this?
Primary takeaways:
1. Price is volatile, depending on weather and season
2. For 2°C goal, the price per metric ton should be $50 but it's only €5.5
3. Politics - elections, growth, and other factors play a significant role in setting cap and price.
Not sure why you think that is a problem. Emissions depend on weather and season. It would not be a market if it didn't react to relevant aspects of reality.
> price per metric ton should be $50
There are too many certificates, agreed. I wasn't surprised to read that Parliament advocated stricter rules.
> Politics - elections, growth, and other factors play a significant role in setting cap and price.
I don't find that in the article. It does say that the Commission screwed us over by empting airlines, but well, that's what we expect from the Commission.
Anyway, so far I'm not convinced about the alleged loopholes mentioned above. The system doesn't work as an efficient market, that is true. As far as I can tell, that could be fixed by stricter caps.
You are wrong: https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/allowances_en
The free allowances are declining slowly, but there's no plan whatsoever to discontinue them.
> Do you have a good source to read up on this?
It's a complicated issue, but roughly things like this can happen: You can get extra certificates if you can show that you funded some kind of climate project somewhere outside of the EU ETS. This is called Clean Development Mechanism.
Then you could do something like this: fund a particularly bad industrial plant that creates severe emissions of highly potent greenhouse gases. Then you create a CDM project to reduce these emissions again. You get emission certificates for a plant that you only built dirtier in the first place.
Plenty of such schemes have been done in combination with HFC 23 (a very potent greenhouse gas that gets created in some industrial processes), wikipedia is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Development_Mechanism#De...
For HFC 23 this loophole has been closed. But there are plenty more such problems.
Further reading, there's an NGO focused on such issued called Carbon Trade Watch: http://www.carbontradewatch.org/
My examples are a bit dated, because it's been a while when I was following it in detail. But it's a weird system that's so corrupted by lobbying that it hardly does any good.
As a non-profit organization, we don’t make profit on our operations. All the payments we receive go directly to deleting emission allowances. The price we charge you for deleting one emission allowance consists of 3 parts:
1. The price of the emission allowance. We buy emission allowances upfront and uses the price that was paid for it. Therefore, the price of an emission allowance might be different than the spot price at the time that you buy it. 2. A transaction fee of 15%. We use the transaction fee to cover operational costs (such as web hosting and payment systems). 3. VAT of 21%, imposed by the Belgian government.
But is it really this simple? I arrived at ~120€ per year to offset all my CO2 emissions. (I live in a small apartment, don't use a car but fly quite a lot). If this extra cost is all it takes, we should increase taxes accordingly, at once. I would think that the price of producing all my goods and services with only sustainable energy (all the way to the raw materials of the plane I fly) is a significant multiple of this number. Has anyone done the calculation to arrive at a more specific number?
That's the theory, anyway. We haven't tried it - currently, demand is limited even at these low offset prices.
Expressing frustration at the status quo is one thing, but I don't see how expressing a negative attitude toward incremental progress can be seen as more helpful than holding your tongue.