I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to explain it

"His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done."

"Nature based" offsets aren't that much better. It is mainly "pay us or we'll cut down this forest" but there is a fundamental timing problem: you emitted one ton of CO2 yesterday, somebody else has to protect a forest forever to keep that CO2 trapped.

There are other schemes that claim to be low cost such as

https://www.vesta.earth/

that have the problem of not being measurable. Contrast that to other schemes that get 1% of the press coverage, such as the "gold standard" of injecting CO2 into saline aquifers

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...

where you really can measure the gas going into the hole and can almost (but not quite) take it for granted that the CO2 will stay there for 10,000 years.

The only real fix for fossil-fueled global warming is to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix. A practical plan for doing that would result in perhaps a 3% reduction in fossil fuel PRODUCTION per year (no, don't try counting emissions, count production). In 30 years, this would mean zero fossil fuel production globally.

Someone has described carbon offsets as modern-day indulgences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) - you pay someone to "wash away" your CO2-emitting "sins", and the less you think about how it works, the better you can feel about it...

As I remember the aim from when the carbon emission quotas were proposed and introduced, offset trading was meant purely as a transition mechanism, and wasn't intended to have any effect on the long-term situation afterwards. All the carbon emitters at the time got large quotas valid for a long time, so large that noone protested much. Later, the idea was that the quotas should be reduced and then lead to quotas being sold sale and emitters closing down.

This what happens now, as I see it. I read about a company recently that decided to replace its vehicle park with zero emission vehicles, but gradually, and buy carbon offsets from someone to compensate for the old vehicles. So someone with one of those old quotas shuts down a polluting plant a few years earlier than necessary and sells an offset, someone gets to brag about zero carbon vehicles quite soon in the process of replacing their vehicles. The offsets mean that both of them can get a PR win, and arguably push both of them stop emitting carbon a little earlier than would otherwise be the case. It's a win-win effect on the transition and has nothing to do with anything other than the transition.

Imagine someone in the global North building an annual net-zero home with solar panels. That will not work if everyone does it. There are not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries... it won't work for people living in the arctic circle, for hunter-gatherer societies, on and on. Doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do for the individual guy building the house.

In short, the framework proposed by the author is helpful in evaluating things, but not dispositive. He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will.

To be fair, when we're talking about an airliner buying offsets, realistically what else could they possibly do? We are not flying commercial airplanes without emissions during this century. From the individual company standpoint, it is a net benefit to leverage their profits for emission reductions in other sectors. This is similar to Norway's approach of leveraging fuel profits to subsidize emission-offset projects, i.e. outcompete the emission-burning activities that the market would pay for.

A big problem, I think, is that the market doesn't really differentiate between these, and that there are no strong regulatory pressures to buy "good" credits. We don't have a carbon tax in the US, and we don't have anything that pressures companies to say, if we want to buy offsets, that we only buy "good" offsets.

To people who say we need to move off fossil fuels - yes, but how do we do it? We can't just move our physical processes from A to B process.

It seems to me that imposing economic costs for every extra unit of carbon emitted, and only allowing high-quality offsets to subtract that, is the best incentive to move forward.

If total CO2 in the atmosphere were at equilibrium (it is not currently), there would also be a mean amount of time for CO2 to be sequestered. The ratio of (mean CO2 time / greenhouse breakeven time) would exactly characterize how much worse for the climate energy sources with carbon emissions are relative to zero carbon sources in terms of the total contribution of heat into the environment. With CO2 not at equilibrium, there is probably some fancier model to get a similar characterization.

Finally, it would be interesting to see quantification of different sources of renewable power in terms of thermodynamic impacts. For example, I would expect that solar would lead to energy that would otherwise likely be reflected back to space instead be dissipated into heat. It would probably for example be worse to have a planet that is entirely covered with black solar panels from a radiation perspective. On the other hand, for something like hydroelectric or geothermal, it would seem like we are simply channeling a energy source that is already just about to be dissipated into heat on its own.

This withstands the "what if everybody is doing it?" test, because if everybody tries to offset in this manner the demand for certificates would push their price to infinity, so everybody is forced by the market to stop emitting instead of purchasing offsets.

The whole rainforest affair sounds like a complete scam. I haven't the faintest idea how rainforest protection, even if it's real, can offset carbon emissions by some other party. It sounds like an ideological connection, because both are "green" things to do, albeit unrelated.

Carbon offsetting is one of those loopholes. Company X gets to burn a lot of coal/gas/whatever but it's OK because they put some trees in the ground in a place where that absolutely adds no value whatsoever. The trees probably won't be there in ten years. The only thing that counts is the hypothetical and typically vastly inflated carbon offset that this company gets to dodge their taxes with. The higher the better it gets for the tax dodging company. Offsetting is just a fancy word for tax dodging. Mostly it means spend a little to avoid spending a lot.

But take value added tax for example. It's a pretty normal thing around the world and people love avoiding having to pay that. VAT used to be easy to dodge with online shopping: just sell/buy your goods from a place that doesn't charge any VAT and you are good to go. They closed that loop hole years ago and it's a lot harder now. Reason, governments did not like missing out on that income and they closed a lot of the loop holes. So, now when you buy something on Amazon, you pay the appropriate VAT.

Carbon tax is not any different it's a tax and we need to make sure it gets paid by the people and companies that owe it.

There are no easy answers here but taxing definitely inspires behavior for minimizing cost. And sometimes the smart thing just becomes minimizing the carbon intensity because not doing that becomes costly/risky once you close all the loopholes.

It needs to be done slowly, so that markets and stakeholders have time to adjust, and there are no great shocks that destroy otherwise-solvent businesses or industries, but it's the only way it can ever be done fairly.

And I understand the basic system effects of: Currently it is cheap to buy enough offsets to cancel out one year of citizenship. If everyone does it, then these plentiful opportunities dry up - whether it's running out of land to plant trees or running out of pilot programs to bury carbon, it gets more expensive.

But that's a feature, not a bug. It means that over that period of time, more externalities have been captured into the system, which is exactly what we want. If companies are mandated to buy offsets and they get expensive, then it creates the incentive to create more tech to be able to sequester more carbon. Which is what we want.

That's all year 0.

The author forgot about year 1, 2, 3, etc. where those factories would still need to offset their production. Where are the offsets for those years?

The article also neglects some of the point of paying money for offsets, which is paying to research those alternatives that are required to get to true net-zero or negative emissions. They are VC for science that could solve the problem, funded by those causing the problem.

Double counting is a serious problem here, of course, and the article is right that removal based offsets alone cannot get us to net zero. What genuine offsets (i.e. those that actually meet the 4 required criteria) can do is that (finite) resources get invested where they're more effective, letting us achieve specific intermediate goals earlier than without them.

That's actual kilograms of CO2 that aren't in the atmosphere by a certain date.

"If Everyone Did It, Would It Still Work?" - until we actually get to net zero, yes, actually. As the cheap and easy opportunities go away, genuine offsets become much more expensive, to the point where avoiding the emissions will often be cheaper than offsetting them. Likewise, as regulation tightens towards net zero, the opportunities for offsets that meet the "additionality" requirement go toward zero too.

There are many serious issues with offsets (like the lack of additionality, double counting, non-permanence, and leakage, as mentioned in the article), but the article makes it sound like they can't work even theoretically.

"“Preserving an acre of rainforest” fails the test. Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever." - then the offsetting potential of rainforest protection is exhausted, and other ways to get to net zero will need to be found. Also, the "additionality" criterion should, if applied correctly, already limit the amount of offsets you can get out of protecting the rainforest.

Sure, you want to reduce emissions, but how do you stop industries from moving out to more polluting countries? How do you get Nordic countries such as Canada and Russia to agree when the unfreezing of their northern territories advantages them? How do you tell the poorest citizens of the world to suffer the brunt of the consequences of higher gas price for something that is centuries in scale and when their family is hungry now?

Not addressing these problems means you're showing off your support for the current cause.

Use a scheme that works - money. Tax the carbon content of the fuels. It's economically efficient, and it works.

It’s trying to align firm’s desire to profit with reducing emissions.

The more people want to buy credits, and the fewer people willing to sell them, the more the price goes up. If someone is willing to pay me $100 to walk a mile to work, I'm going to walk a mile to work. Jeff Bezos probably won't, but that's ok.

The point is, the price will stabilize at an equilibrium. If this sort of thing didn't work, our whole market economy would collapse almost immediately.

Meanwhile we do know that things like reducing the carbon emissions of dwellings by improving insulation is relatively straightforward. But individuals often don't have the capital to make those changes themselves (even where it would provide cost savings in the medium term). So if aviation companies were providing money that was redistributed to projects which are short-term viable but lacking the necessary funding, that could make an impact now, even though it doesn't fully solve the long term problem.

Make those contributions mandatory and we have something that looks like a carbon tax used to fund decarbonisation programmes.

Of course, in the end you still need to tackle the hard problems. But artifical carbon sequestration still seems to be very much at the "reasearch project" stage, and whilst creating natural environments that can sequester carbon (forests, bogs, etc.) is undoubtedly a great idea — not just for carbon, but also for habitat creation, biodiversity, staving of desertification, and a host of other reasons — it seems problematic as a form of offsetting for the reasons identified in the article, plus the fact that it operates over a period of decades, so it's almost impossible to create any accountablity if the carbon is not in fact sequestered.

More than that, the fact that increasing tree cover and restoring natural habitats is so important means it's worrying when the funding plan is based on pennance for carbon emissions. We don't want to create a situation where resources for these incredibly important projects start to dry up just because more companies have successfully reduced their corporate emissions (even if they still have product-usage emissions which are usually unaccounted for).

This is true, but as a side effect you've saved the rainforests, which would be amazing!

Maybe we shouldn't judge the worth of a carbon offets scheme solely by carbon emissions? It can be kind of dubious and still have good side effects.

...and please ignore the basic fact that no one can guarantee a forest will survive. Fires happen.

As there is less rainforest to buy and the last few squares get more and more expensive. Along the way things like solar, bio, and other green energy continue to become more economical to implement

Eventually there will be a tipping point where it's cheaper to move to green than to offset emissions.

https://api.putinhuil.io/redoc

Anyone who feels volunteering some frontend work on that, do contact me. You'll find my email in my profile.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRDseUEEsg

There is one: pricing carbons out of the energy market.

If there is e.g. so much progress in carbon fibers that all construction is done with carbon, then all available carbon will be used for that and nobody will waste it to create energy.

Cement will cease to be used because there is not enough rough sand available. If carbon fibers replace that usage, emissions will be stopped.

It's actually stupid to store CO2 in saline storage because in 20 years or so, we will pay good money to get it back.

It should be possible to calculate the price of carbon in 100 years when each of the 10 billion global citizens demands their share of carbon. Offering investment opportunities now in a venture that stores carbon e.g. in the arctics like people store aluminum in the Mexican desert, should provide the funds to create extraction technologies and facilities to make carbon emissions a non-issue.

*edit: Looking at wikipedia, this doesn't make sense. There are 54tonnes available per person.

Maybe humanity has to grow to 1000 billion people to question carbon emissions.

>Proven sources of natural gas are about 175×1012 cubic metres (containing about 105 gigatonnes of carbon), but studies estimate another 900×1012 cubic metres of "unconventional" deposits such as shale gas, representing about 540 gigatonnes of carbon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon

https://www.thejuicemedia.com/carboncredits/

A more serious essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/

Previous discussion on cement and CO2 emissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604335 tl;dr cement releases lots of CO2 when manufactured (you are basically running CaCO3 → CaO + CO2), but the reaction runs partially in reverse when the cement cures. There was no clean conclusion on what is the overall result.

China and Russia.

The west is now paying China and Russia to produce green technology. Which requires mass destruction and mining.

At some point it would be nice to truly assess the situation...

As someone who makes money from harvesting plants, I hope for higher carbon and a warmer climate. It means more, larger harvests. Cheaper food for all.

The major errors in the models (we think) are related to not accounting fully for the sun's energy, and not modeling clouds accurately. There is very high confidence that uncertainties in cloud processes explain much of the spread in modeled climate sensitivity.

Even the relationship between CO2 concentrations and temperature is complicated.

The glacial record shows geological periods with rising CO2 and global cooling and periods with low levels of atmospheric CO2 and global warming. According to a 2001 article in Climate Research by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon and his colleagues, “atmospheric CO2 tends to follow rather than lead temperature and biosphere changes.”

A large proportion of the warming that occurred in the 20th century occurred in the first half of the century, when the amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the air was one quarter of the total amount there now. The rate of warming then was very similar to the rate of warming recently. We can’t have it both ways. The current warming can’t be unambiguously caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions if an earlier period experienced the same type of warming without the offending emissions.

Even so, the political narratives and trans-national push for net-zero emissions have only strengthened in the face of this growing uncertainty.

Why is that?