The growing market of not cutting down trees
wsj.com
wsj.com
"The other reason to love this story is that it is about getting paid not to do things. That is always complicated. If you are paid to do things, it is relatively easy to measure how much you did and how much you should get paid. If I want you to cut down trees for my sawmill, we might agree on a price of $5 per tree. You will cut down the trees and deliver them to me, and I will count them. If you deliver 100 trees then I’ll pay you $500.
"But if I want you not to cut down trees for my carbon capture program, it is harder to measure how many trees you didn’t cut down. Just sitting here right now, typing this column on my computer, I have cut down zero trees,[1] which means in theory that there are absolutely billions of trees that I have not cut down. Where is my check? A landowner might have planned to cut down only a few trees this year, but she will have incentives to say “I was planning to cut down all my trees,” in order to get paid for not cutting down all of them. She might have trees that are impossibly un-economic to cut down, but it’s easy enough for her not to cut them down.
"Similarly, if I agree to buy 100 trees from you, and you sell me the trees, you can’t sell them to anyone else: I have the trees. If I agree to pay you not to cut down 100 trees, though, what’s to stop you from getting paid by someone else not to cut down the same trees? The trees stay there; you can sell the concept of them staying there as many times as you like."
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Highly recommend this book to any and all people reading this btw. It's a ride you go on as much as a story you read.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/771699-his-specialty-was-al...
I'm guessing the throughput on that is incredibly fast.
The only logical solution is to force you to buy some carbon offsets from coal miners. In the form of obligation not to mine some coal.
E.g. Encourage more wooden houses and your not only capturing carbon but storing it separately so more can be captured in that same place.
While there are probably many better solutions, you would think whatever they are we need something that can continue to capture carbon ongoing. A forest, as great as they are for a plethora of reasons, is fairly finite in terms of carbon capture.
"Timber Towers" London proposal: https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/news/timber-towers-could-... (2019)
(encountered via the easy-listening of BBC Radio 4's 39 Ways to Save the Planet: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qy43 )
and the Province Of British Columbia's Wood First Initiative:
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/support...
Personally, my solution is to start chucking trees down a mineshaft and backfill the shaft when it's full. It's crude but it gets the idea across.
Edit: happened to be listening to a podcast writing this and right as I finish they start talking about olivine, which is a mineral that can absorb it's weight in CO2 and prices around $7 USD/ton. Maybe a better option for carbon removal
If you have a reasonable forestry plan to supply the source wood, do reasonable emissions control and harvest the energy released while producing the charcoal, and have a good place nearby to sequester the carbon, it might be a pretty decent way to get to carbon sequestration.
This is, of course, a hand wavey argument. I'm not qualified to put together real numbers for how effective this could be and what the relative emissions and energy output would be.
https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
Stripe (and others) are currently purchasing negative emissions from a bunch of projects like this to help move them down the cost curve: https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
There's lots of cool work in this space at the moment, which is much more measureable than "trees not cut down"
But in the case of houses, you have these costs, but you also offsetting bricks and concrete etc. This also has a huge carbon production but without the offset. Also increasingly the logging and transport will be cleaner as EVs advance.
And yes buildings will be hauled to landfill, but that's timber in landfill and burying carbon for some time too.
Would be interesting for someone to run the numbers on actual impact.
I have an even simpler idea: Cut the trees down and store the wood permanently.
Left in the wild, the wood will eventually break down, and the carbon return to the atmosphere. But there must be some low tech way to preserve the wood for a century at least.
That's easily long enough!
1. The assumptions behind forestry and soil offsets on closer inspection can seem a bit stretched.
2. An offset creates revenue for the person creating the offsets - which money is then spent on things which have their own carbon intensity - eg fuel or a vehicle or whatever. So there’s ultimately no offset.
3. Being able to offset your carbon emissions has unpredictable consequences. I remember seeing some study which showed people who bought a Macdonald’s salad were likely to reward themselves with a burger. I can see how I’d offset a flight and then piously reward myself with a steak later.
4. Companies buying offsets open themselves to reputational risk associated with the quality of the offsets. Is it worth the risk?
There seem to be a bunch of other reasons why offsets are questionable but those are my four reasons for not going into this space.
[Edit: I added reason 4].
Care to elaborate? I'm very interested in this. Thanks.
2. Leakage seems inescapable both physical and in an economic sense as I described above.
3. Because the market is voluntary, it’s extremely vulnerable to cost-cutting.
I’d say those are the three main issues which have not been resolved since last time.
Now, society has decided that incentivizing growth in energy consumption isn't a winning strategy in the long run. Or, at least, politicians have signed into law various incentive programs to change the business calculus of energy companies, wherein an energy company can get reimbursed for energy efficiency campaigns that it runs and, if total energy consumption is less than a certain rate year over year, the energy company can claim a prize to offset the profit forgone by promoting energy efficiency.
However, it is not so straightforward to account for how much energy _isn't_ being used on account of a specific intervention. Enter here the entire EM&V industry! We would run studies to account for this missing energy, and it was a very thorough business - comparing lists of equipment replaced under industrial efficiency programs, measuring Watt-hours offset, surveying households to figure out how many of them actually installed those complementary LED lightbulbs. Every year we would run through the same process with the same energy companies and then they'd find out how much energy they saved.
At times it felt surreal to be a part of this giant industry competing for a chance to count how much of something wasn't used, but it looks like that industry is only going to grow as carbon caps and offsets become a bigger deal.
I don't think it's a bad thing, just a profoundly weird one. In 50 years I wonder how many people will derive their income from counting things that don't exist :)
TLDR; there is a percentage set aside for fires but it seems way too little.
For example just growing a tree is no net carbon reduction - the tree dies naturally the carbon is released at some point.
On the micro-scale, I wonder if towns and cities could start incentivizing people to dispose of more yard waste. For instance, you get a rebate on your garbage bill based on how many hundreds of pounds of lawn clippings and branches you stuff in your yard waste bins each year (assuming that yard waste is processed in a way that sequesters the carbon, and people don't try to game the system by filling their bins with dirt or trash). You could also have something like a free service for people in rural areas to request a dumpster that they can fill with organic material and have hauled away as an alternative to just burning it.
a) Trees can live for hundreds of years. We're in the midst of transforming how we produce energy and improving energy efficiency all around... A good CO2 'battery' to smooth out the problem can still be very helpful. Think of it as a low-pass filter to help reduce a shock.
b) Forests have a massive number of positive effects beside co2 sequestration, including local cooling and aiding the water cycle. A world with more forests is a healthier world. (See also: riding a bike instead of driving. It saves CO2, and has numerous health benefits.)
It seems like having a national or a global database of trees would be a useful and interesting public data set to have. For instance, you could have the location, approximate age, approximate mass and height, and probable species for all the known trees in your region of interest. I wonder what the technical limitations on collecting this data are? I mean, the imagery and metadata Google Maps uses probably could be used to find most of the full-grown trees, as long as they aren't clustered too tight to each other to distinguish. Maybe you'd need radar scans or close-up imagery for dense forests. Most young trees would probably be missed unless you had some very precise way to detect them. (Drones flying through forests, maybe? Or miniaturized Google-streetview-type cameras affixed to wild deer?)
We are actually changing very quickly. Now that solar is cheaper than coal, we are simply turning coal plants down, even on the middle of their lifetime. Transport electrification is basically bounded by supply, we are just not able to do it faster.
The one thing that could be better is grid storage. It doesn't help that there is a patent minefield around battery chemistries, and it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. A government could intervene on both of those problems right now, but if they are left for markets, it will take another decade after we start working really hard on them (what is still quick, by the way, and it helps that we can solve basically half of the emissions on the previous paragraph alone).
The only advancements possible are fairly limited and have to do with nanostructure of electrodes and electrolytes which won't give more than 2x-5x. There are NO 10x, 100x, 1000x futures with batteries.
If you want 10x-100x, the answer is hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear energy. Period. Otherwise you are living in a fantasy bubble disconnected from STEM and factual reality.
There's nothing done in grid battery chemistry. The only thing people have ever optimized for is energy density by weight, and this is an almost completely irrelevant dimension for that application.
10x what?
There's certainly already wholesale price variability throughout the day, so buy at night, sell during the day arbitrage is at least conceptially valid, although real world ROI is going to depend on capital costs, full cycle efficiency, etc, and it doesn't seem like things are quite there outside of a few installations.
the responsibility is on the businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. and carbon offset credits don't incentivize the businesses to do that.
Choosing to not take a flight to Australia, on the other hand, is just deciding to produce CO2, just less. That makes it categorically different, as it can't negate any amount of CO2 production.
Also, the supply of "not flying to Australia" is unbounded, and without scarcity, the price will naturally go to $0. If you only focus on potential fliers, that would have the perverse effect of incentivizing people to take actions intended to convince the regulators of this market that they were planning on flying to Australia, which would likely result in empty seats on flights to Australia and a net increase in the number of chartered flights to Australia.
This is indulgence trading, in my opinion.
requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with alternatives that don't require offsetting.
From what I know we are far away from that. It would need to be priced much higher to effect change.
It also feels like something rich people can throw some money at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I remember an article about Paul Allen’s super yacht and the enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly added that he had offset this by planting a few trees somewhere… In my mind it would better we didn’t have 100m yachts ship around a few people for leisure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/31/pine-need...
I wonder how much I could get for my 5 acres of big ass trees?