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Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions. For example, look at some of the projects here: https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissio...

Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or cleaner-burning cooking gases. Prices are as low as 10-15 USD per tonne of CO2.

If we ever make a serious attempt to decarbonize the entire economy, we will run out of cheap/easy options and be forced to make harder, more expensive tradeoffs.

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> Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions.

Yeah, that the trick. To put it boldly: What they offer is not sustainable. This means that these green initiatives hide the real price of CO2 or at least give a very wrong impression.

That statement is too bold -- the price of a CO2 offset is not a constant. As the easy methods become exhausted, we'll have to move to more expensive methods, yes. But currently there's still an absolute glut of fairly-cheap CO2 reduction methods that just aren't being done, or wouldn't be done without the offset pricing, so it's still a net benefit to do them.

> the price of a CO2 offset is not a constant.

Well asymptocially it is. And then the real intersting stuff happens, because economy becomes aligned.

> But currently there's still an absolute glut of fairly-cheap CO2 reduction methods that just aren't being done, or wouldn't be done without the offset pricing, so it's still a net benefit to do them.

There also is a net harm if people get the wrong impression of what the real cost of CO2 is.

What is the "real cost" of a loaf of bread? It doesn't make sense to talk of things as if they have an absolute inherent dollar value, as both the cost to produce these things and the relative utility of dollars both change. The asymptotic bound assumes current technology and current dollar values, which are both going to change in the tens of years involved.

Some of these sound like double counting too.

Like you can fund an already-built wind turbine plant - the capital is already built, so even without your funding this is going to stay open...

But even if we forget that, the people buying energy from these plants will be buying a 'green megawatt' - so surely that means each megawatt will have been both offset and sold as 'green energy'?

And then to add to that - these power plants are also claimed against national emission reduction targets (at least the one in Indonesia is) and were actually built as part of a government fund - so then it's kind of triple-counting too!

(i.e. well for every green megawatt we sell, the company we sell it to gets to say they have a green megawatt, the offset company gets to say that they offset a megawatt, and the government gets to say it's generated 1 megawatt of green energy! In reality no actual carbon was saved other than the government intervention)

Or how Canada can claim forest growth as carbon reduction, but then not count forest fires towards their carbon emissions...

> cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions

Contraception.

Sent to the third world countries you mean?

In general. Fewer people == Less Carbon

Not buying the access to clean water = less burning of hydrocarbon.

The poor people by definition are resource strapped and will use any means of energy available, just for different purpose.

On the cynical side: clean water -> less mortality -> more population -> more carbon use to sustain said population.

clean water -> less mortality -> less population (as people stop having extra children) -> roughly the same amount of carbon.

Yeah, but there is an "initial surge" of lots of additional people before the mortality-rate signal lowers it (maybe 2-3 generations?) And then you're stuck with a lot of people that are now consumers and generating more carbon than if you just told them "No" in the first place and gave them a good quality of life improvement. We're watching that happen right now, we're many generations in and most of the 3rd world is not slowing down their population growth fast enough despite lowered mortality rates.

Way I see it, any help or financial aid to 3rd world countries (with high birth rates) needs to be coupled with comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives that is overseen by independent 1st world entities such as the WHO with the intent on lowering mortality rates and birth rates. And if these countries' birth rates don't start following a downward trajectory after a short period, then stop giving fancy aid and switch to bare-bones humanitarian aid. Seems way better than "lending" them the money they need and then making them dependent on the 1st world in perpetuity.

> mandatory contraceptive

Starts to sound a lot like eugenics.

All the evidence suggests that if you raise standards of living and give women control of their own fertility, then birth rates drop naturally (and fairly rapidly). Turns out, when given the choice, most women prefer to have one or two children. This trend has been replicated across (all?) developed countries with very different cultures.

There's no reason to believe the kind of coercion you're proposing is necessary, if you could even justify it ethically.

I didn't say mandatory contraceptives, there was a whole sentence you missed the ending of.

"comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives"

You make it sound like like I'm saying people need to be forced to use contraceptives. Guess the phrasing is not great. Maybe 'program' would have been better? But the mandatory modifier was on the drive/program, not the usage of contraceptives.

It still seems very ethically dubious to me to have a bunch of rich people (with absolutely massive carbon footprints) telling a bunch of poor people they need to get their birth rate down.

If you were serious about a programme like this, you should at least phrase it in terms of carrots, not sticks: if you embrace feminism, educate and empower your female citizens, we'll reward that with increased foreign direct investment.

It's pretty well established that lower mortality leads to less reproduction and lower overall population. When mortar is high, proof reliability over correct with extra "cushion" children.

Wealth is a far larger source of pollution than life.

> Wealth is a far larger source of pollution than life.

It's both. Wealth drives down the birth rate (as does empowerment and higher education of women [1]), but it also drives up the rate of pollution [2]. You need "Clean Wealth" (high quality of life with low or zero CO2 emissions, pollution, etc) if you want lower birth rates (which we do, we're on track to hit 10 billion people by the end of the century) and less pollution.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=chart&xScale=li...

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