Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing

Forests and sustainable land-use management sequester massive amounts of carbon. Full stop. They're up on the list of recommended actions by the IPCC. We need to be doing it. And landowners aren't going to do it for free; they need to be paid.

Like I said, there is a potential moral hazard with credits – companies think they can offset and continue emitting. Currently this is possible because carbon, in general, is still ridiculously inexpensive. Aggressive carbon taxes are ultimately what's going to bring down emissions.

Once economic constraints are in place, you still need to reduce carbon. And again, forests are one of the best ways to do this.

My problem with the article is that it's flippant towards carbon credits. It's highlighting problems with the current implementation, and using that to make a judgment about the whole idea of carbon credits.

We need a carbon tax, and we need better standards of accountability. These are solvable problems.

If you think that carbon credits by their nature can't accomplish what is needed, then what do you think would?

I'm curious, do you know how water and air conditions affect carbon capture rates (and would you be willing to explain it to me)?

reading "The State of the Carbon Cycle" 2018 USGCRP it is not so easy to sum up.. basically, there is "flux" which is the activity of both uptake and production.. the coastal zones have a lot of organic matter, so the flux is very active, while open oceans are different. Rivers carry carbon to the oceans and dump it in sediment, mostly.. do you count that ? and, the differences between anthropogenic sources, which are changing, and the base rates, which are changing more slowly, are hard to separate because we can only observe total activity as best as possible..

The problem is that when the oceans absorb carbon, they become more acidic.

If technology doesn't catch up, then we're doomed. But that's unlikely; there's nothing like a crisis to spur innovation.

We're dealing with human nature here. People have their own problems to deal with, and tend to ignore things that aren't an immediate concern. So you need to adjust their environment in a way that aligns their goals with some environmental goals, all without destroying your economy. Do it too fast or hard, and your economy crashes, and all environmental incentives go out the window as your country's focus changes to getting out of bankruptcy.

It calls for finesse and timing.

I'm sitting here, half-way through Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", and I keep wondering - why can't we grow chloroplast in vats, force-flow CO₂ through them, and dump the resulting products into a mine shaft?

Not just that: we need fast-growing trees that don't let the carbon back into the atmosphere.

For that, the trees may not rot, may not be used as firewood, and may not be processed into paper or other products that eventually get incinerated in a waste-processing plant.

Ideally we should play artificial Carboniferous, and let these trees sink in lifeless bottomless oxygen-depleted bogs where they get preserved for millennia, and turn eventually back into coal deposits, to replace the ones we've depleted for last 300-400 years, putting the carbon from them into the air.

This takes much more than just fast-growing tress, or more land allocated to growing them. We also need these carbon burial grounds, that likely won't look (and likely smell) as pretty as a nice pine forest. Drowning in a carbon burial bog would be a hazard for hikers, too.

We also need economic incentives to bury the carbon from these carbon-fixating trees, and not to use them productively in the economy.

A genetically engineered plant that grows fast, does not require a lot of water, accumulates lots of anti-microbial and anti-fungi substances that prevent rotting, and produces timber which is not nice and desirable timber, to avoid the temptation, which is also heavier than water to make drowning easier, could be helpful.

Except that there a numerous examples in the past century where we’ve put the environment ahead of economic concerns: The Clean Water Act, a significant reduction in urban smog, the reversal of the Ozone hole through cap-and-trade.

As far as our overall economic system, the immediate problem is figuring out how to de-carbonize growth, first-and-foremost. And simultaneously reduce the carbon floating around in the atmosphere. I’m all for exploring alternatives and agree we don’t need so much “stuff”. But I don’t necessarily agree that that means we have to turn off economic growth either. We need to de-carbonize it.

An analogy I like to use is this: If you have a popular website and it’s becoming overwhelmed with customers, you have a couple of options. Turn everyone away and start kicking people off — or identify the bottlenecks and solve them. We’re running society on an inefficient algorithm, and that needs to change. We’ve built an amazing server that has drastically reduced conflict, poverty, and starvation, worldwide. Do we close the door to that, or do we find a more efficient algorithm?

> The problem is that the economic incentive to exploit the environment will always outweight the economic incentive to protect it.

That's quite literally why government exists. To solve coordination problems like these.

> Solutions like green technology or carbon credits seem to rest on this assumption that we can prevent environmental collapse without significantly changing our consumerist economy, standard of living, and energy consumption. This seems like magical, faith-based thinking.

On the contrary, thinking the opposite - e.g. that everyone could "just" reduce our consumption - is magical thinking, because it goes directly against the gradient of human nature. Humans want to improve lives for themselves and their children, which creates incentives for consumption, and utterly suck at coordinating at scale to achieve a long-term goal, which is why we had to invent governments and markets to provide necessary incentive structures. Any solution for the climate crisis has to work with these constraints, not against them.

> There are theoretical limits on how efficient any energy conversion will be, no matter how advanced our technology is.

We're nowhere near the limits of efficiency in technology.

> The more our economy grows, the more we consume and produce...the more energy we use and the more waste we create.

More energy is good. We need energy to fix the damage we've done to the climate. And waste is a waste management problem, only partially related to the issues that are critical now. Trying to shut down the economy won't help save us from upcoming climate issues, it'll only make a lot more people suffer. The problem of weaning off the growth-based economy is something we can handle later.

(It's also worth pondering, what exactly is it that we want to save here. The planet? No, the planet will be fine; we can't really do anything to hurt it. The animals? To the extent of our knowledge, animals don't care. They don't think. Human race? Humans as a species will be fine too, no expected climate damage scenario would wipe us all out. What we're trying to save here is ourselves, our children, our way of life. Which essentially boils down to technological civilization. Civilization that's dependent on the shape of the economy we have now. Trying to drastically alter it is as risky as climate change itself.)

I buy them from Cool Effect. I try to pick energy projects because it’s easier to see the accounting ... and you get carbon sequestration faster (trees take a long time to grow vs erecting a wind turbine).

Ah I see..I had thought that producing fewer emissions than target/allowance would be given a credit they can sell to others. That is different than Credits for Carbon capture. Thanks for clarifying.

I think this is different as it's not charity.

Increasing oil price beyond a certain point destroys demand [1] [2]. It would not be infeasible to buy oil fields and inject oil consuming bacteria to negate the ability to extract that oil in the future. The capital required would be substantial though. Either get a hat to go in hand with to billionaires to get support, or perhaps go to carbon tax markets to obtain funding.

In some jurisdictions, a carbon tax will never fly politically, so you'll need to make due with less efficient mechanisms.

[1] https://in.reuters.com/article/oil-prices-kemp/column-rising...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-10-30/oil-s-slide... (Warning: Video)

Yeah, true. But a higher price would cut consumption as well, and make renewables more attractive.