I'm not too versed in the terminology, but my intent with 'offset' was to mean e.g. planting X amount of trees to counter the exhaust of a long-haul flight (or other such activities which can't easily be decarbonised)
I agree that the wood->gas stove example creates perverse incentives. It can certainly be a good investment, but the costs/risks/rewards need to be distributed to the appropriate stakeholders. In this example, I could imagine a setup like:
- Country levies a flat tax on carbon emissions
- Country pays out a flat/progressive dividend, to prevent the carbon tax making the poor worse off
- We can imagine the above balance out, such that person A with a wood-burning stove doesn't notice any cost difference
- Person A now has an incentive to switch to a gas-powered stove (reducing their tax without affecting their dividend)
- Person A can purchase such a gas-burning stove using a loan, paid for by their dividend saving (with some dividend left over to incentivise the switch)
Such a setup would be essentially the same as giving away gas-burning stoves, but the incentive structure is different: the 'potential future emissions' question has to be answered by the people who stand to gain. In the above example, Person A knows how much they spend on wood fuel (including tax); they decide whether a particular gas-stove loan is worth taking; and they gain the dividend savings during and after the loan's repaid.
I'm always iffy when it comes to loans for the most economically vulnerable; but the state can still play a role, by reducing predatory lending practices, etc.
> To actually clean up we would need Direct Air Capture. The cost is 100+x higher than the usual cost of carbon offsets, and supply is very limited.
Whenever I see such schemes I always like to see what happens if we incrementally simplify the setup. For example, we might start with:
- Extract oil -> burn oil -> synthesise carbonate rock (DAC) -> bury carbonate rock
If we use a different DAC system, we can synthesis hydrocarbons instead of carbonate rock:
- Extract oil -> burn oil -> synthesise oil (DAC) -> bury oil
The burning and DAC steps cancel out, saving money and energy:
- Extract oil -> bury oil
The extraction of fossil oil cancels out with the burying of (fossil or synthetic) oil:
- Do nothing
In other words, the simplest, cheapest form of carbon capture is to leave the oil in the ground. In that sense, DAC has two roles:
- Cancel out the burning we've already done
- Decouple energy usage from energy availability, e.g. if some remote location is great for hydro/geothermal/etc., but there's no local demand, we could use that energy for DAC. However, the majority of the time it would be even more efficient to just run electricity cables (e.g. HVDC).