Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing | Hacker News Reader

Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing

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241 pointsboredemployee320 comments

A proper carbon tax would only increase flight costs by about 8%, since there's lots of other costs than fuel.

People don't seem to believe that though. Because a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have a financial incentive to burn less of it, and there's alternatives for almost all uses. And so, a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry, and not really bother any other industry, is portrayed as an impossible dream because the fossil fuel industry has a lot of money and power.

> a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry

Increasing the cost of flights by 8%, and by doing so, killing the source of fuel for those flights sounds like economic Armageddon.

I guess we have to choose between two Armageddons then, one real and one inconvenient.

> I guess we have to choose between two Armageddons then, one real and one inconvenient.

We can chose something that is less perfect, but does not result in Armageddon. Solutions that are as bad or worse than the problem are a very hard sell.

climate change will result in famine and war, maybe nuclear war. Madagaskar has a drought xaused famine right now. Uf that hapens in Pakistan thats a powderkeg situation.

Which 'solution' is as bad?

Imagine what it would do if we put heavy restrictions on borders and travel and there was a massive drop in demand from, something like a terrorist attack, or maybe a virus. It would snuff out all industry. Impossible to cope.

My whole family went from just plain d poverty to extreme poverty thanks to the lockdowns....

Sorry that your family had to go through that, and all the people in affected industries, but the lockdowns also saved a lot of lives. Probably millions. Thousands of 9/11s. Worldwide. A lockdown "here" prevents covid spreading both here .... and there.

The main topic of this thread is saving humanity from adverse man-made climate change. We are also talking about saving millions here.

I was in favor of aggressive lockdowns at the time, but I live in a part of the US that proudly does not lockdown or wear masks. I think we had 2 weeks of total "lockdown" when people were legitimately scared. We haven't had significantly more deaths per capita than other stricter parts of the country.

We now have examples from all around the globe. China's super strict approach seems like it sort of worked for a while, but even they had cases.

Really disingenuous to compare the US to China in this way as if they are comparable failures. We're talking about under a million cases and 5,000 deaths. In the US we had 91 million cases and over a million deaths. Especially embarrassing for the US to loudly proclaim how impossible it is to do anything in a country this size when China's mainland is about the same land area with 3x the population. China's "super strict approach" didn't "sort of work for awhile". If they had taken a US approach millions more people would be dead.

The US is 91 million of the 584 million cases identified so far. It's ~5% of the global population with pretty low density outside of, what, 3 cities? Truly embarrassing that one of the wealthiest G8 countries can't handle outbreaks of any sort — to the point that NY has identified hundreds of polio cases for the first time in a decade.

It's not going to be pretty if the US faces another outbreak of something that kills and cripples the way that polio did just a few generations ago. I'm not convinced the answer then won't be the same, except now instead of sacrificing grandma we can place anyone on the altar of capital.

are you really going to take CPP numbers as fact? and even right now they still locking cities down in authoritarian ways that is killing people.... their approach has not worked... they are still living in lock downs who knows what the real numbers will be

Good point, better to compare US against Australia and NZ. The UK was sort of in between Australia and US in terms of lockeddown-ness.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Click on deaths per 100,000

Draw your own conclusions.

never said USA did well during pandemic... i mean didn't like 380,000 die just because they lacked health care in the USA? couldn't that also be a factor?

"the lockdowns also saved a lot of lives"

No, they didn't. This has been studied six ways from Sunday. They had no effect.

"Probably millions"

Lol. If you're an epidemiologist, sure, they love fantasy numbers like this.

Actual numbers of lives saved are probably negative, given the apparent absence of any impact on case numbers combined with the poverty and loss of access to healthcare they created.

Zero proof of this. Lockdowns destroyed lives as well.

It would be more correct to say "thanks to two pro-austerity political parties" — neither of which "listened to the science" or offered a solution more substantial than "sacrifice grandma for the GDP".

Public health measures didn't put your family in poverty. The lack of any social safety net in the US did. Stimulus should have gone to people directly and not companies, but that's communism or something.

Maybe in hindsight the pandemic could get us thinking about why it’s a bad idea to tie health insurance to employment? Or the idea that shelter is contingent on laboring. It costs more to have people suffering and it makes everyone less safe needlessly.

I thought COVID would show the huge cracks in the US healthcare system and safety net, but nothing changed, except a temporary stimulus check, which was nice. This stimulus didn't cover the missing income from the lockdowns for many people. The greatest burden was put on people who rent properties and mortgage holders (banks) with the eviction moratorium. This was deemed unconstitutional, was given a month to rectify by passing a law, and yet congress did nothing.

Everything you said was absolutely true, but nothing was done about it, even with a 2+ year plague that killed over a million people in the US. The only person with a plan was not elected; he didn't even win the primary. I'm not overly optimistic about change.

> Public health measures didn't put your family in poverty. The lack of any social safety net in the US did. Stimulus should have gone to people directly and not companies, but that's communism or something.

No. If the government had not locked down, their family would not have slipped into extreme poverty. Simple as.

As Sweden's example shows, no. The economic downturn was due to the pandemic (people being sick and isolating, other people preferring not to travel/go out to avoid getting sick with associated risks for them and friends/family, etc.), not actions trying to combat it.

"Public health measures didn't put your family in poverty"

They very obviously did do that, and attempts to deny their impact is a form of "socialism washing".

"Stimulus should have gone to people directly and not companies, but that's communism or something."

Great plan. Give people printed money so prices all immediately rise, and then forcibly destroy all the organizations that produce things, ensuring prices immediately rise again. Yes, printing money and giving it directly to people whilst the economy gets shut down IS in fact communism, which is why we are now dealing with the consequent poverty. And it was all for nothing, because the public health measures didn't have any effect.

We shouldn't say that the oil industry will be killed; it would be more like a ramp down over 30-40 years.

No, we would /reduce/ the source of fuel for those flights to the amount actually needed while people who don't have a good reason to fly stop flying.

It will also incentivize people to find better sources of fuel, and invent better aircraft.

Which is why we should never implement such a tax all at once. You implement such things slowly to let the market adjust.

>a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have a financial incentive to burn less of it.

This is not necessarily true. Oil has a traditionally low elasticity of demand, meaning that demand for it does not change significantly even when its price changes. This is particularly true in the US, where there are few public transportation options in most cities.

In the short term, yes. Long term there are so many things we can switch to electricity or to alternate sources.

Please explain how you obtained the 8% figure.

Not the parent poster, but if we assume fuel costs are 20% of total expenses [1] then a 40% tax on the fuel, if completely passed on to the customer, would make each flight 8% more expensive.

Whether 40% correctly offsets pollution externalities is a tougher question.

[1] https://www.transportation.gov/administrations/assistant-sec...

jet-a is a /lot/ more expensive since that article was written ;-)

Note though it's not fuel cost we're taxing, but carbon, so more efficiently made fossil fuels would be cheaper and have less carbon tax, even if they are chemically indistinguishable from other fuels and contain the exact same number of fossil carbon atoms.

Things like, does the delivery truck have an efficient engine. Does the refinery use green or gray hydrogen to desulpherise the inputs, do they buy their fossil fuels from Norway vs Russia and so on.

It might only be a small difference but small differences across the whole economy is how the carbon tax is supposed to work.

The EU calculate that as the price rise that would result in 2050 from their net zero plans.

Here's an aviation industry take on the plans, which seek to reduce the carbon by 55% by 2030

https://www.eurocontrol.int/article/eus-fit-55-package-what-...

But it's easy enough to find CO2 calculators and estimated costs of carbon and compare with current flight costs to get your own number for flights that matter to you.

When people do this though, they think "This seems suspiciously cheap? I thought this was going to take us back to the stone age, not just make long transatlantic flights a bit more expensive by not subsidizing them as much" then they come up with conspiracy theories about how it's all greenwashing to make sense of it all.

I’m of a different opinion. There actually aren’t alternatives to fossil fuel and that’s why there isn’t broad support for the tax. A tax on fossil fuel would make everything more expensive with little recourse for alternatives.

I bought an electric power washer and weed wacker recently. The performance is just laughable compared to the petrol powered version.

Electric cars have given people hope that a fossil fuel free future is possible. However, electric cars seem to occupy a niche where carrying around 30x the amount of “fuel” is possible. Most fossil fuel uses don’t share this luxury.

Climate change will likely force a fossil fuel free future. But it probably won’t look much like the society we have today. There certainly won’t be high PSI pressure washers.

Personally I’d like to see mass adoption of synthetic fuel made from the air for use cases where liquid fuel is the only practical solution. Like HIF Global’s plan to make synthetic fuel for about 8 USD per gallon (4.5 liters).

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/04/porsche-invests-75-mill...

There is lots of research in this area, along with renewable jet fuels, hydrogen, and electric powered jets.

yep gas is like 100 times more energy dense as lithium ion iirc so there's cases where it's just a better "battery". there's also a big carbon cost to replacing all the huge number of gas engines we have. so like what HIF Global wants to do using electricity to make gas can be a good solution.

$8 per US gallon (3.8 L), not imperial gallon.

Thanks for the correction. I missed that.

Part of the EU plan is to force a 1% blend of this in all jet fuel sold in the EU and slowly ratchet up the percentage over time.

There may be some truth here, and I have a suspicion a limited amount of fossil fuel burning will continue for the next century. It seems like we may be forced to rely on DAC to some extent an have to negotiate internationally how much CO2 we're pulling out of the atmosphere and how quickly.

> There certainly won’t be high PSI pressure washers

I wonder if a 220v plug in pressure washer would be practical.

> A tax on fossil fuel would make everything more expensive with little recourse for alternatives.

that money doesn't dissapear, it could be used to reduce other taxes, say income tax or VAT.

it's purpose is to rebalance relative cost of things

no its purpose is to fix an externality. it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted. or better yet license anybody to do carbon capture and require presenting a certificate of equal carbon removed. start at like 1/8 emissions removal and go up over time.

if you care about stopping carbon emissions i think this is the most realistic and efficient way. otherwise we get caught up in discussions of how this changes redistribution and "economic/environmental justice" or whatever and it will never happen. but unfortunately there are many people who care more about adding more free stuff or using the funds for more dumb congress policies then actually passing a carbon policy.

>>A proper carbon tax would only increase flight costs by about 8%

>no its purpose is to fix an externality. it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted.

So it would only cost 8% of the cost of a flight to completely remove all the carbon emitted from that flight? That seems pretty reasonable. How is this done?

By causing a reallocation of resources everywhere else - Fossil fuels would only be used where there is no alternative. A carbon tax won't completely kill them off, but it will cause anyone who can to switch away.

So it's incentive for someone to not take a flight? I would assume travel has a certain degree if inelasticity in demand which would cause the tax to be much less effective in actually reducing emissions. The only way for this to actually reduce emissions is if someone decided to not travel at all and just stay home. If they decided to go by car, I assume that would be worse (180 passengers don't take a flight but drive instead). I mean if you have to go to your grandmother's funeral 5 states away, you gotta go. If you have to go on a business trip, you have to go. What's the estimated percentage of carbon emissions would an 8% tax reduce? I guess this is aimed at leisure travel primarily.

This seems like one of those things that sound right on a macro level, but doesn't take into account the inelastic demand of travel. For it to actually reduce emissions (the goal), the tax would probably need to be much, much higher to the point where you just don't go to grandma's funeral.

Honestly, for me, the TSA and the actual flight experience in the US as kept me from flying at all since about 2006. I can't stand any part of it. I don't care much for driving either and only put around 2000 miles a year on my vehicle. Most of this is because I can work at home. I guess I've got a pretty low footprint.

> For it to actually reduce emissions (the goal), the tax would probably need to be much, much higher to the point where you just don't go to grandma's funeral.

Nah, you just need enough pressure to move people onto electric cars.

A plane might be one of the last holdouts on fossil fuels, but even then renewable fuel shouldn't be that expensive in bulk.

This exact issue helped kill Washington state’s twice proposed carbon tax initiative.

They just passed an entirely equivalent law though, so clearly it wasnt fatal.

> it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted

If it's to fix an externality, then it specifically should be exactly equal to the cost of that externality - that is, sufficient to compensate for all damages (and repairs for said damages) resulting from that externality. This should be right around the same as a carbon offset, but it's worth remembering why a carbon tax is necessary: not for the mere sake of punishing some dirty activity, but for the specific sake of compensating the victims of reckless negligence.

Which doesn't really work as a concept when there are things so terrible that no amount of money can compensate. What price would you put on human extinction?

> Which doesn't really work as a concept when there are things so terrible that no amount of money can compensate.

Well yeah, but surely some compensation is better than the current status quo of nothing at all.

> What price would you put on human extinction?

Well, if we want to get hyper-capitalist about it: whatever the resulting opportunity cost is from those humans no longer being able to produce value. Of course, seeing as how humans can produce other humans who then produce value and yet more humans and so on in perpetuity, that opportunity cost rather quickly approaches infinity.

Exactly, that's what I'm saying, the cost should be exactly equal to what it costs to fix it. The most efficient way to do that is allow anybody to get certified to fix that externality and require proof that the person who caused it also paid to get it fixed. This makes it easier than trying to determine what the current price of remediating is. Markets work really well at some things and this is one.

You could pay a carbon dividend and grant every human on earth equal pollution rights...

For pressure washers, the biggest issue is that the US generally uses 120 volts*15 amps. There are 240 volt models that have competitive specs with gas-powered models, but since consumers generally don't have 240 volt outlets other than for specific appliances, they're geared for the commercial/industrial market, and are accordingly expensive. I've toyed with the idea of importing a 240 volt pressure washer from India (specifically: https://www.starq.in/collections/high-pressure-washer-1/prod...) since they use 240 volts there, and their consumer-grade pressure washers are thus more powerful.

Weed wackers need to be cordless, though, so that's a different issue.

120 in the US is typically on a 15 amp circuit. 240 in Europe at least (and I'd assume most of the world) is generally on a 5 amp circuit. This is speaking in typical household voltages and amperages, so obviously someone will have outliers, but this has been my experience

120 * 15 = 1800 watts. 240 * 5 = 1200 watts. US circuits generally carry more power than their overseas equivalents. If you plugged that Indian 240v pressure washer into your 20 amp circuit, it wouldn't likely draw more current unless it was designed badly, and wouldn't perform any better.

The Indian pressure washer I linked is 2800 watts.

A NEMA 6-15 outlet can deliver that.

Right -- it's a chicken and egg thing where US manufacturers don't make consumer-grade 240v pressure washers because consumers don't have those outlets installed in the right places, and people don't have the outlets because there would be nothing to use them for.

Back a while I tried estimating what it would take to make 'electric weed burner'. The answer was you could do it but it needed a 30 amp 240V outlet.

One complaint I have in the opposite direction is hybrid water heaters. In heat pump mode they draw 500 Watts. But they require 240V @ 30 amps for the resistive heaters. Would be nice if they would run in heat pump mode only if connected to 120V single phase.

There are 2500W electric weed burners for sale in Europe, but they have mixed reviews.

https://bataviatools.co.uk/product/garden-tools/garden-machi...

It's chicken and egg, but one relatively easy to break on both sides.

- importing tools from Europe can kickstart the market and is a lot less risky than designing new tools

- 240V garage & exterior outlets are becoming common for hot tubs, RV's and electric car chargers.

The problem with 240V is that there are few NEMA standards used is USA (although , they look bulky and are kind of unsafe around the kids.

Which is not a problem for dedicated circuits (you could wire receptacle just for this specific dryer / hot tub / RV / whatever, plug it and never remove), but would be a bigger problem if 240V is shared between appliances.

I think, NEMA 6-15 / NEMA 6-20 would be the best (they look very similar to standard 120V outlets; they have tamper resistance; 15A or even 20A should be plenty enough), but nobody wires them.

Also, there are other minor differences like:

1. 50Hz in Europe vs 60Hz in USA. 2. The voltage between ground and "power" lines would be different. In Europe it would be 240v between line and ground and 0V between neutral in ground, in USA it would be 120V between ground and both power connectors, due to how 240V is typically delivered to single-family homes in USA (split phase). Should not make much difference (you are not supposed to have any current to ground anyway, and any short-circuit should trigger the circuit breaker), but maybe it will affect safety somehow? 3. Seems like in some cases in USA you can get 208V instead of 240V (and Europe is nominally 230V).

20A is typical in 240V UK

No, 13A is the limit for a UK plug. You can buy a 3kW portable heater.

Something wired in might be 32A or more, like a car charger or electric shower (7.5kW).

we're talking about the circuit, the bit between the distribution board and the plug

I went and checked and mine are actually 32A

I don’t know of anywhere where 5A is common, everywhere I know of is always 10A minimum (2300 W at 230 V nominal). Here in Australia 10 amp sockets are everywhere but it’s common to have at least one 15A (3450 W) outlet somewhere in the home too

No way being on 5 amp circuit is normal. Matter of a fact I'd be interested to hear where can you find it in Europe.

In Britain (possibly also Ireland, Malta, Cyprus) lighting and sockets are usually on separate circuits. The lighting circuit has a 5 amp fuse or breaker, enough for 12-20 old incandescent bulbs. A typical house probably has one circuit for each floor.

But that's certainly not where you'd connect a leafblower.

I don't know where you got 5A from? Most Europe radial circuits are sized for 16A. In the UK it is common that house sockets are on ring circuits sized for 32A.

I've never seen a 5A circuit in South-Eastern Europe, or even a 5A fuse for that matter (many buildings still have fuse blocks, not breakers, so that's what I'm familiar with). 6A fuses can be found in some stores, but 16A seems to be the most commonly used in apartments. Most places also have 20/25A lines for the washing machine and oven.

Where in Europe have you seen 5A?

Yeah, if we are going to avoid ICE engines around the house we need to modify the electric code. As it stands you can't get ICE-level power from anything electric because circuits of that power are not permitted for general use.

Is there actually something in the electrical code that prohibits installing a 240 volt outlet wherever you want? I know people often install them outdoors for EV chargers.

(everything below assumes US and NEC / local electrical codes)

I don't think code prohibits it, but in my (not very educated) opinion, you might get into some gray territory if you try install them everywhere.

There are some safety related provisions which are mandatory for regular 120V (GFCI and/or AFCI), but I don't think they are required for 240V circuits. Building inspectors might have questions if you install these outlets everywhere. Although, again, I don't remember any limitation of where you can have them.

Another issue is the type of the receptacle. Apparently, Leviton makes receptacle that might be allowed in US and is combination of regular 120V plus European style 240V. However, it is only limited to 2.5A, which is very little (I think, this receptacle is primarily designed for hotels / shared spaces where you only want to charge your devices). Also, I don't think it has ground for 240V.

Probably, the best would be to use US 15A/20A receptacles (NEMA 6-15 / NEMA 6-20), which look very similar to the regular 120V ones (the difference is blades are horizontal).

However, I've never seen any actual plug using them (even though I did install these 240V in my garage, expecting some 240V equipment). But you can rewire plugs on your "imported" equipment / appliances.

There are also some interesting differences of the supply: in US it is typically split phase 120V+120V=240V, but sometimes (according to the internet) it could be 3 phase 120V with 208V between phases; in some parts of the world, it would be 3 phase 230V with 400V between the phases. This probably would cause some differences in how grounding works, might affect safety.

But yeah, generally, 240V should not be a problem. Power-hungry equipment (water heater, range, electrical dryer, EV chargers) -- they all typically use 240V already.

No, there is a proper us code-compliant solution for outdoor 240 receptacles - it’s that 4 prong 50amp one … you see them coming out of the ground at ski resorts, for instance, and they are also used on those outdoor PDUs you see at concerts and parades …

Edit: I think it’s a 14-50r.

Edit2: You almost certainly don't need these. A plain old 20amp 110 receptacle, on a dedicated circuit, GFCI, is a perfectly reasonable and code-compliant receptacle to put all over the outside of your house and will power anything you might need.

I can believe that a 15amp (pressure washer, weeder, etc.) might seem underpowered but I am skeptical that a 20amp one would be ...

Right, there are code compliant solutions. I was just musing over an idea of having 240V "everywhere" (including inside the house in every room, having 240V for special needs is, of course, a solved problem).

14-50R is not what I would use in that case, they are bulky, unsightly and don't offer tamper resistance.

6-20R / 6-15R have variants that are tamper resistant, and they look like regular outlets.

"20A should be enough for everything".

We used to have 2.5-3kW kettles before we moved to US, which would require 20-25A (although, I don't think the math is that simple -- circuit breakers don't trip on "exactly 20A").

Also, the issue with 20A receptacles is that, again, I have never seen 20A plugs (NEMA 5-20P) on appliances (it has neutral connector "flat" rather than vertical). Which is understandable, why make them if nobody has 20A receptacles anyway. There is a requirement to have two 20A branches in a kitchen, but commonly they are wired to 15A receptacles.

Your anecdote about coffee makers is a good one - it bears repeating that one of the most intensive household loads are old-school coffee percolators, etc., and many school and church kitchens have circuits just for them.

As for 20amp, it may interest you to learn that I have a commercial microwave with two magnetrons that is actually 20amp (and has the horizontal pin, etc.).

Yeah, it shows that I have zero knowledge about commercial appliances. I guess, I wouldn't be surprised if they routinely use 20A plugs / receptacles. Would make sense. Maybe, hospital equipment, too?

You would routinely see IEC sockets in use in Europe in commercial kitchens, factories, anything outdoors like a music festival etc. Partly it's for higher power appliances (including 3 phase power), but also the waterproofing.

They're also the socket found in datacentres (in Europe) to connect a UPS or PDU.

Home users see them at campsites, marinas, and for charging electric cars without a special car charger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60309

I actually have a set of 4 20A receptacles within about 3' of me. I had to have an electrician wire a dedicated line, the main cost was the labor, might as well use 4-wire cable wired to 240V, I got 4 120V outlets out of it and he used the 20A type that takes either the usual household plug or the 20A version.

Wiring 240V is (typically) not an issue, as it is standard (in the US) to get 240V from the transformer to the house. The devil is in the details: what current would you wire it for, what receptacle are you going to use and what are you going to plug there.

ICE-powered pressure washers go up to 4,000 psi. I have never seen an electric pressure washer above about 3,000 psi and they're usually no more than the ballpark of 2,000 psi.

Your high power examples are all either dedicated wires (no outlet) or single-use outlets (like the dryer.) I'm saying there is no general use high power outlet permitted.

People install 240V outlets for EV chargers, RV's and hot tubs quite regularly. They usually don't break code to do so.

And those are usually 240V/50A outlets, a lot more powerful than the 240V/12A outlets of Europe.

How much power do weed wackers need?

I have one with an 80 watt hour battery. The level of power seems just fine to me, for the moderate amount of time it lasts.

And that's barely over one pound of battery. Add five more pounds and that's a ton of power while probably still lighter than a gas engine.

> Weed wackers need to be cordless, though

They don't really. I've had corded electric weed wackers. You've gotta be more careful, of course, and within an extension cord of an outlet, but that's fine for acheivable lot sizes in most of suburbia.

> more careful

Indeed. I did cut through one extension cord with my hedge trimmer already,

Please do post back here and let us know how long it took the 50 Hz motor to burn up from you running it at 60 Hz.

They certainly do make 240V 60Hz 20A rated pressure washers for the US market that typically come with inline GFCIs as well.

So you can feel good about saving the planet whilst cutting your toes off with the water jet.

It's not on their Web site, but the label on the device itself (visible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCHvgkPXGMk&t=175s) says it's rated for either 50 or 60 Hz.

Woods chips and hand weeding is an alternative. Concrete is carbon intense to produce; let’s stop using it for driveways and sidewalks. Alternatives!

Manual labor used to be applied to these things. One could argue the fossil fuel industry got us hooked to petrol solutions in search of a problem.

Look at us too addicted to our inventiveness to get our hands dirty, a little sweaty outside the air conditioned gym, or give up a grass lawn.

I'm just thinking that for the high energy density would a Hydrogen (fuel cell?) pressure washer work?

There are plenty of great cordless trimmers and electric power washers. Milwaukee, Greenworks, Ego, Krantzle (for car washing)…I think you should expand your search and look at GPM, not max PSI.

look at what hilti is making if you think electricity is a limiting factor for Power tools. they don't make power washers but they makes extremely powerful cordless electric tools. The kind that allows you to drill 1.5" wide holes in reinforced concrete and cut thought rebars.

Natural gas has half the carbon in it for the same energy as coal. Hence, a carbon tax would favor the use of n.g. over coal. Which is as it should be.

The various chemical versions of hydrocarbons all have different amounts of energy per carbon content.

Germany is proving this out in real time. Energy costs have gone through the roof and they are reactivating mothballed coal plants. The dirtiest fossil fuel.

The alternative is to use less energy

For the weed wacker, get yourself a 100ft 12-gauge extension cord and go wired. Unless your property is enormous, batteries are for suckers when it comes to yard work.

To me this sounds like an analogy for fake meat. I don’t care what anyone tells me. Fake meat, including impossible burger and whatever new, hyped up product they come up with taste like garbage. None of it will ever be as good as a real steak. I never want to try another vegan chicken wing again. Some inherently meatless foods are delicious though.

Maybe an electric weed whacker will never compare to a petrol one, but maybe the issue is that the typical suburban manicured lawn is an artifact of the petrol era, and we shouldn’t try to fake it with electric lawn mowers and weed whackers.

I have the 80V Greenworks Pro line of mower and trimmer (blower as well). They're much quieter and do an excellent job. The blower is powerful as hell. I don't know what this guy is talking about. I do my lawn about every two weeks as I live in Florida and it rains a lot.

This is a silly argument- a subjective situation vs an objective one. Can electric pressure washers output a stream of similar force to ICE washers? This can be quantified. While fake burgers don't taste exactly like hamburger, saying they taste like garbage is something without quantification.

Sounds like an incentive to invest in R&D.

My mom just bought a battery operated lawn mower, weed whacker, and leaf blower kit. She loves how portable, quiet, and easy to use they are. She’s 70 years old so portable and easy to use are more important to her than power.

I just mention this because what might not seem like an option for you can work fine for other people. She loves not having to pull start a gas mower or deal with the noise and smell of it.

I'm from Europe, and have never seen anyone use a gas-powered leaf-blower, pressure washer, or weed wacker in their garden. Do you really need them?

Also gas powered chainsaw.

I didn't need them in Europe, I do in the US.

>Climate change will likely force a fossil fuel free future. But it probably won’t look much like the society we have today. There certainly won’t be high PSI pressure washers.

It's a hard thing to accept, but I believe it to be true.

What's disturbing is that people can't even begin to imagine this ever being true. They vehemently refuse to accept the possibility that many of our modern comforts will cease to be - just look at the responses here talking about all the tech that will ostensibly save us and make everything okay and allow us to continue living exactly the way we do now, indefinitely. That's not good, because we really ought to be talking about a low-tech future as a serious possibility.

If we take it seriously, there are things we can start doing now to smooth the transition period. That transition period could be complete and utter hell, or it could be smooth and painless.

Humans have been around long before pressure washers and cars and planes, and they'll continue to be around long after these things are gone. If we wean our municipalities, our families, and ourselves from fragile dependencies, then the transition period might not cause serious harm.

would also need a way to generate steam without natural gas. Maybe nuclear, but that's just as unrealistic right now.

Steam is used to heat a lot of things outside of power generation and without steam our economy falls apart and this means without natural gas we are fucked.

>a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more

Where would this money go? Who would allocate it? Would it be allocated effectively, efficiently? As effective as road tax dollars, or as effective as lottery tax dollars? Would it just go to make more factories for Tesla? More eco-warehouses for Amazon? For the bureaucrat-in-charge's cousins? Where does it go and how does it get there?

The Canadian system mostly simply gives it back out evenly to all. That choice is a just one.

> Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Yukon and Nunavat use the federal carbon tax system, the Federal Fuel Charge, which started in 2019. Of these, all but Nunavat have a carbon fee and dividend scheme in place that redistributes tax revenue to the public. [0]

Since carbon use is skewed heavily to those that use the most, this means that the median user of carbon is actually given a tax credit each year.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend#Implem...

It also means the current generation of normal people have no incentive to put pressure on the large industries of their country, the more they use the more money they get and the more messed up they leave it for the next generation.

Okay but at an individual level you're still incentivized to reduce your own emissions. Every $1 of carbon tax you pay is $1 out of your wallet, but you're only getting $1/(39 million) back through the carbon rebate.

“Normal people” don’t have to put pressure for this to work.

Every point along the supply chain absorbs the price signal and will find cheaper (ie less CO2-producing) options where possible, raising the price a little. Where not possible the price goes up by the full CO2 tax amount. (In other words if it’s still the cheapest option to just pay the extra tax, like jet fuel, then the price just goes up.)

The consumer might hypothetically not get any different choices, but still see a CO2 tax cause all deliveries to use electric trucks, for example.

Consumers “putting pressure on companies” is a terrible way to fix this problem because few consumers have a clear picture of the current landscape of CO2 intensity and possible best fixes across the whole economy. But if you just price the externality in, then the market constraint-solves the problem for you.

(To be clear I don’t think markets are perfect, they are just much better than human coordinators at solving this class of problem.)

Taxing carbon is fine, that isn't the problem, the problem is giving that money to the current generation in the form of payouts.

Why should a random citizen get paid more just because in their country there's heavily polluting industries? It makes no sense.

> Why should a random citizen get paid more just because in their country there's heavily polluting industries? It makes no sense.

I'm not following. Random citizen also pays more in tax.

> Why should a random citizen get paid more just because in their country there's heavily polluting industries?

Because everyone - including that random citizen - experiences harm from said heavy pollution. That's my air being contaminated, my water being poisoned, my planet being wrecked; by what rationale would I somehow not be justified in demanding compensation for that harm?

Giving everyone a single vote in democracy makes no sense, we should just air drop paper pamphlets all across the country and let anyone who collects them vote once for each pamphlet. If they fall on privately owned land, the owner of the land gets all of the pamphlets.

Ah I see, so is your concern that we aren’t putting that revenue to work on explicitly decarbonizing projects to invest in the future? Or is it more that you think there is a perverse incentive where residents might prefer e.g. a cement factory to move to their country because it will result in more CO2 rebate?

But that does absolutely nothing to help the atmosphere.

This is a common misunderstanding, I think. But it actually still works. What matters is that the tax makes fossil fuels expensive relative to other energy sources. To take the extreme examples to make it clear: if you go 100 off fossil fuels, you pay no tax but get the dividend, so you win. On the other hand, if you were to for whatever reason choose the maximally carbon-intensive lifestyle you could, you'd pay way more in tax than the average dividend.

In other words, the tax you pay varies with your carbon emissions, while the dividend is constant (or rather, depends only on the total emissions of everyone). You still have a very strong incentive to reduce emissions, as it would reduce your living costs substatially but reduce your dividend by only a fraction of a penny (I.e. the change in total tax collected divided by the population).

So the 9.1% inflation we just experienced did more for the environment than an 8% carbon tax? Am I understanding this correctly? Did the emission of carbon actually go down because of inflation?

I think, to the degree that inflation is driven by rising gas prices, yes, it'll have a pretty substantial effect on reducing emissions. But my understanding is that inflation is also driven by things like federal reserve policy, stimulus bills, and supply issues due to the pandemic. Even then, if people are just consuming less and doing less fossil-fuel intensive stuff due to feeling squeezed economically, that'll reduce emissions. So it's kinda complicated. In the short term, it really depends on so many factors that I couldn't tell you, though I bet someone well versed in this sort of thing might be able to give a rough answer.

But also consider: in the long term, higher gas prices due to supply shortages encourage companies to drill for and produce more oil -- because they are getting the profits. But higher gas prices due to a carbon tax have the opposite effect -- the buyer is paying more, but that's because the producer is paying the tax, and passing on some or most of that cost to the buyer. They aren't making more profit, but less -- reducing their incentive to pull more oil out of the ground. So that's something powerful that a carbon tax does that inflation doesn't.

And inflation is (ideally) a temporary thing, and variable. A carbon tax is intended to be permanent (and ideally, slowly and steadily increasing), something predictable and inevitable that people can plan around. You'll act differently if you think gas is going to go back down by 20% than if you think it's going to stay at the higher prices forever, or keep getting more and more expensive over time.

My understanding is that even the possibility of a future carbon tax has caused some companies to start reducing their fossil fuel dependency, because if a tax happens, they'll be in a better place than if they did business as usual.

Not exactly the same, but emissions dropped pretty dramatically after the 2008 crash.

Inflation, recessions/depressions, and other economic maladies do indeed suppress carbon emissions, but I'd hope you'd agree that a more precise and direct lever (like a carbon tax) would be vastly preferable.

> So the 9.1% inflation we just experienced did more for the environment than an 8% carbon tax?

It probably helped a little, temporarily, but it probably helped a lot less than a carbon tax.

Imagine if anything that runs on electricity was immune to the inflation. That's closer to what you'd get, though still very different in other ways.

Bring it in to general government income and reduce other taxes by the amount it took in.

Can set it up so the average person is unaffected. The eco conscious consumer ends up richer. And the over consumers end up poorer.

No that would just make poor people poorer and rich people richer because you are increasing taxes on the poor while decreasing taxes on the rich.

Why? I haven't even written out a full proposal so you can't know that. It's quite easy to think of some schemes which work the other way. The rich are the largest consumers of useless crap.

The most economically sound way to do it is a revenue neutral tax. All of the tax collected is given back to the general public, with each person getting an equal share.

That means that if things you buy use cause an average amount of carbon emissions you break even. The price increases you see due to the tax are balanced out by your share of the revenue.

If your things are responsible for a less than average amount of emissions, you come out ahead. If your things are responsible for an above average amount, you pay more net.

No. You make it revenue neutral by using the money to reduce other taxes (and make the 0% bracket wider) rather than introducing a distribution system. Why make it more complex than it needs to be?

I'd like to see most forms of pollution handled this way--take the vast majority of pollution laws and throw them in the dumpster. Instead, make a list of pollutants and set a tax per ton (or other suitable unit) for emitting them. This tax is assessed at the point of creation (mining is considered a form of creation) and is rebated upon verified destruction (in many cases you'll "destroy" A to make B--you pay the tax on B but get back the tax on A) or long term sequestration. (Thus you can do things like grow trees and chuck the wood in an old salt mine and recoup the carbon tax even though you never emitted carbon.)

There ceases to be any issue of what is feasible and no issue of company A emitting a lot more than B because what B does is easier to control emissions. You don't get situations like what happened to my former employer--kept being hounded by the EPA because their record on reducing emissions had been so good and then they stopped. Duh, they stopped because they had done everything viable at that point--effectively we had the EPA on our case for doing too good a job!

That would hand over most of the money to the people responsible for the pollution.

Giving to everyone equally would invest a very large number of voters in continuing and expanding the program.

Devoting 10% to carbon emissions reduction tech would fund a never-before-seen flowering of development.

Eliminating subsidies for carbon miners would be helpful.

>No. You make it revenue neutral by using the money to reduce other taxes (and make the 0% bracket wider) rather than introducing a distribution system. Why make it more complex than it needs to be?

I don't see how a negative income tax is any different from a direct payout, you're just playing with terminology. Alternatively, if what you described is not a negative income tax then what you just did is a tax cut for people with high incomes which is anti progressive. People who pay little or no income taxes wouldn't get anything.

> No. You make it revenue neutral by using the money to reduce other taxes (and make the 0% bracket wider) rather than introducing a distribution system. Why make it more complex than it needs to be?

That are two problems with that as opposed to just returning the carbon tax money to the general population with each person getting an equal share.

First, which other taxes would you reduce? In the US I'm almost certain that the list of taxes that Democrats would want to reduce would be different from the list of taxes that Republican would want to reduce.

Second, even if we can get agreement on which tax to reduce, the benefits to the individual taxpayers aren't likely to be proportional to, or even correlate well with, with how well they are personally doing on emissions.

For example, suppose it is done as an income tax reduction. People who don't make enough money to own income tax would not benefit, but they would have their costs of living go up from the increases in fuel and energy costs due to the carbon tax. They are in effect being taxed to subsidize the carbon emissions of wealthier people.

> reduce other taxes (and make the 0% bracket wider)

I'd rather drag the 0% bracket into the negative than make it wider.

For a short term, you can use it to reduce government debts? Reducing it to the pre-covid level is going to take several decades, so let's not worry about where the money goes.

If oil costs rise, it will impact more than just jet fuel prices for planes. Wages and part prices are sure to rise as well.

That is the point. Carbon-intensive industry prices would rise more than others, and people would shift spending to alternatives, where presented. People would have more to spend, and would re-allocate according to price signals.

8% carbon tax is 8% higher power bill. Natural gas is still king in power generation.

8% higher power bill will increase the yield for alternatives and incentives investment in them.

This don't seem fair on people who dont have much of a choice, like if you live in the country (no public transport) and frequently have to make trips longer than an EV would typically allow. All a carbon tax there would do is make life more expensive.

Do you really believe that there are people that can't make their life work without making frequent 100+ mile long trips?

Even if there are, they are a vanishing minority - they're worth taking into account but not to the extent of not taking measures necessary to save everyone.

There indeed are here in the US, including quite a few of my family members.

That said, the people who live in such places (including the aforementioned family members) tend to be the hardy and adaptable sort, and would readily figure something out should carbon-emitting transportation become cost-prohibitive.

Many actual carbon taxes/fees that exist in the real world give rural people slightly more money for this reason.

I believe this is the case in parts of Canada and Austria for example.

They're often also phased per sector, so you might have a carbon fee for transport but not industry or vice versa, or have different levels of fees.

It's fairly flexible as a policy tool.

What you’re describing here is economic suicide. One party could vote this into law, but it would be repealed in absolutely no more than four years.

Fossil fuel lobbyists aren’t the problem. No one individual nation is willing to commit economic suicide while the rest of the world advances. There is no appetite at present for a global economic suicide pact.

Your 8% comment is fundamentally wrong, too. You don’t think the “lots of other costs” would be impacted by a 40% fuel tax?!? Back to reality, please.

Edit: you’re -> your

I was about to ask OP for a source, but since you're confident that they're incorrect, can you cite your claims too?

https://www.euractiv.com/section/biofuels/news/greening-meas...

News story with a summary but there's plenty of source documents out there if you feel like a deep dive.

You want a source that immediately increasing fuel costs by 40%, as suggested by OP, would be economic suicide?

Fortunately, I don’t need a study. Fuel costs rose in the US 40% over the last year before falling. If you want to know what happened in the US, pick up a newspaper and read about record high inflation.

Why did you introduce the idea of it happening immediately, overnight?

Did it seem too reasonable a suggestion to phase it in over decades with plenty of advance notice? Too achievable, too simple, too sensible?

Not to mention, the "extra cost" would be getting paid to the government in your own country, not to Vladimir Putin or similar in another. And then new business opportunities would be created, again in your own country, to meet this new demand.

Luckily, we've actually started doing this already. It seems important that the people who complain about it being impossible seem to have not noticed that it's already started and been quite successful so far, giving confidence to people who are paying attention.

If that's the case, how bad can it actually be?

That's not a link.

Are you suggesting it's suicide if only one country does it, or if they all do it?

I agree with the former, sort of. It would be like losing your life trying desperately to stop a bunch of suicides on your own. (Not sure if that counts as suicide) which is why there is in fact very strong movements towards international agreements on these matters.

e.g. one of the EU aviation rules specifically addresses that long distance flights leaving the EU need to leave with enough fuel on board, to disincentivize them stopping elsewhere to fill up on untaxed fuel.

But if they all don't do it, that is collective suicide (or if just one country continues on the path it's more like murder-suicide).

So we're trying to find a path where we can all work together with people we don't fully trust to do the thing that is best for all of us, even if we dont even fully agree on what that is.

Not an easy task. Especially when people would rather listen to fossil fuel lobbyists or their paid political pundits than economists on what would and wouldn't work.

The problem with climate change is that it creates a reality distortion field. Anyone who would honestly try to think about it would give up on life, so instead we have this fake optimism accompanied by fake solutions, basically a fantasy not unlike Harry Potter. Those 2 billion new cars aren't going to help the environment, which is already on the fritz, but if they are electric that means we are on the right path to the unicorn to come and fix everything. Which is great because then we don't have to change our way of life.

Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever.

this pretty much. i think the way we're living is so broken, from education to everything else.

If we had stayed on the path we were on, it was a path to over 5 degrees of warming.

If we keep our commitments, like the ones various nations have made to ban gas cars by 2035, we'll limit our warming to about 2.5 degrees.

The difference between 2.5 degrees and 5 degrees is the difference between a really bad time and an apocalypse.

But no one is going to keep those commitments, few if any countries are even close, and many are not even on any real path.

Not to mention, we're taking about 2.5 degrees of warning by 2100. But the world didn't end there. If we don't go to 0 emissions (and there is currently no realistic path to that that any country even remotely accepts - massive degrowth of the economy), we will eventually reach 5 or more degrees of warming, it will just be a little later than 2100.

These are concrete commitments, which countries do have a fairly good track record of keeping. The 2.5 does not require the nebulous "40% below 2010 emissions" type of commitments which countries have a really bad track record of keeping.

A country saying "We will do X" is much more likely to do X than a country that says "We will achieve Y" will achieve Y.

> Not to mention, we're taking about 2.5 degrees of warning by 2100. But the world didn't end there

To be fair, it might at the rate we're going

> But no one is going to keep those commitments, few if any countries are even close, and many are not even on any real path

Where are you seeing this? In the last few years alone there has been hundreds of billions if not trillions put into renewable energy.

The only number to really keep track of is the rate of fossil fuel extraction. It slumped during the peak of COVID, but is on a steady upward trajectory. Even though we're creating massive amounts of new solar energy, this number keeps going up. It's the only number that ultimately matters -- and it's hard to BS.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-production

You gotta compare it to the counterfactual, don't you? Maybe it's not going up as steeply as it would've otherwise. Maybe it's not curving up as sharply. Maybe the models that project the degrees warming are more sophisticated than just whether the line is pointing up or down. In order to make a line start to go down, you gotta bend the curve first, and we have been doing that. There's a long way to go, but we haven't done nothing.

This is a bit simplistic, the general plan is to slow growth and then reduce aiming for net zero around 2050.

There's plenty of science looking at those trajectories and arguing about if we are on schedule and what needs to be done to stick to the schedule and if its enough.

But its a bit more sophisticated than, if the line isn't going down today, we should just give up.

Another weird thing is that, it's fairly easy to make fossil fuels less carbon intense to eke them out a bit longer e.g. don't flare or leak raw methane which is much worse than the carbon you'd get from burning it. That's a good change that actually increases fossil fuel production and that we currently subsidize doing the opposite in the US.

One thing I'm looking at is the number of BEVs sold each year versus ICEVs. Sure, we're moving in a direction, but it's not fast enough to imagine the entire world will be using exclusively BEVs in 13 years - which is one of the requirements for 2.5 degrees. And I'm not even mentioning the fact that the trucking industry has no plans whatsoever to move to electrical any time soon, while the shipping and airplane industry have no such plans period.

Not to mention, we've recently seen things like Germany's Green government approving the construction of new coal-based power plants when they couldn't get enough gas from Russia, which really tells you how likely we are to move to renewables very quickly.

Most of the money going into renewables has been in addition to existing fossil fuel plants, so at best covering growth in energy demands. But to stop global warming at 2.5 degrees, we need a sharp decline in fossil fuel consumption, and that just isn't happening, not globally and not in most places in the world locally either.

> the trucking industry has no plans whatsoever to move to electrical any time soon, while the shipping and airplane industry have no such plans period.

Shipping industries plan:

https://www.globalmaritimeforum.org/getting-to-zero-coalitio...

Aviation's plan:

https://www.iata.org/en/programs/environment/flynetzero/

Road freight's plan:

https://www.weforum.org/projects/decarbonizing-road-freight-...

https://clean-trucking.eu/

> But no one is going to keep those commitments, few if any countries are even close, and many are not even on any real path.

The effects get harder and harder to ignore with each summer that passes. It's easy to dismiss a hypothetical future scenario, harder to miss noticing 45 C heatwaves.

Sure, but unfortunately that also means that people will tend to spend more energy to actually live comfortably with those conditions...

Nothing we do matters while China and India ramp up their emissions

The growth in developing economies is factored into the models, and they're both emitting way lower than we do in the US and Canada per capita.

In India's case it's silly to make a comparison.

Per capita means nothing. Total tonnage of carbon is all that matters.

So when will US reduce total tonnage to match Vatican City? Is US and iceland going to have same carbon budget?

Total tonnage is all that matters when it comes to how much warming we will get. But when it comes to deciding how to limit the total to under that amount we have to come up with a limit for each country.

Why by country? Because that is how we've split the world up for regulating.

When deciding each country's share of that allowed global tonnage, per capita does matter. Other allocations, such as equal amounts per country, lead to absurd outcomes. Here's a comment giving an example [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31935567

why would being born with the right passport allows you to pollute 5x more with impunity? the planet doesn't give a crap about our made up borders. What makes Europeans/Americans individuals so special that they get to consume wayyyyyy more than the rest of the planet?

If anything, Europe and the USA and Russia should get way less carbon credits per capita, since they've had a massive headstart at consuming fossil fuels compared to the rest of the world, which should really be priced in somehow if we're talking about fairness.

The carbon footprint of the major economies is shrinking, and given the technological development since the dawn of the industrial revolution, there is no reason for emerging economies to have the same emissions profile as they ramp up.

Their carbon footprint is shrinking, but it's still higher per capita then most other countries in the world except China (or, for the USA and Germany, including China).

And, while progress has been made, fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest source of energy around, especially if you don't have great expertise. So, in principle, we should be letting the developing nations of the world use much more fossil fuels to power their economies, while those that have been using it for centuries at this point should use far less.

Note that I'm not actually advocating for this, as stopping global warming is far more important than some abstract notion of historical fairness in international politics, which is even more idealistic than world peace.

Note that if we impose a carbon tax we just drive a lot of energy-intensive industry offshore. China and India very much do matter. I think we might be able to handle this by applying the tax to imports. As a rough model, look at the value of the import as a % of their GDP, it's taxed that % of their total carbon emission, credit for any foreign carbon tax already paid.

Absolutely. There will need to be treaties and a method to account for the carbon cost even when something is produced abroad if we are to achieve aggregate reductions.

Unfortunately things look grim when you look at the state of international relations. It doesn't feel like we'll see progress on international carbon pricing anytime soon.

Nothing of this sort will be done because it would effectively block the access of those privileged enough to care about carbon taxes to the markets of those that cant really afford it.

Carbon taxes are irrational and not a viable alternative.

Then nothing is rational.

It's hard to keep an optimistic and creative imagination when the status quo is as bad as it is, but don't let the present malaise limit your horizons. There is more than one way out.

To be fair, toddlers do the same with their incessant overconfidence, and yet in the end it is that overconfidence that helps them gain skills and achieve great things. Sometime blind optimism is optimal.

Toddlers have parents to save them when their incessant overconfidence gets them into danger.

This is funny because blind optimism and having a fatalistic attitude are the same behavior. In essence I'm overconfident about a dismal future. You have to be generally unhappy with the way things are going to feel this way, and many people are not, because they got theirs, in their own lives, and have no reason to care.

And this is the trap we find ourselves in. People have no reason to achieve great things outside of getting theirs.

Given the 2 options, I want the people working on the green technology to have blind optimism.

Between blind optimism and a fatalistic attitude, which is more biased toward action?

I’d say that’s exactly what makes Elon so unusual.

I mean, don't we already know the cheap, half-assed solution? (And therefore the one we'll take?) Eventually someone will start solar radiation management, and we'll plod along like we always do.

Geo engineering solutions have been proposed for a while. They were particularly popular in the public imagination back when there was fear of a new ice age. They are less popular now given the belief that there is something we can do to change our CO2 emissions.

I suspect the next major climate conference will include discussion on this topic given the present effects of global warming and our inability to control carbon emissions in any region for the last 30 years.

The US and most of Western Europe use less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago.

> Eventually someone will start solar radiation management, and we'll plod along like we always do.

I'm fairly certain that doesn't do a thing for ocean acidification...

I didn't say it was a whole-assed solution.

Not any sort of solution.

CO2 polluters would just pump out enough more that they would make no difference. But stopping them after that would be disastrous.

If you look at human history, desperation always triggered innovation. 120+ years ago people predicted that the streets would soon drown in horse manure. It wasn't averted by introducing horse taxes and auctioning limited-issue passes to leave your estate. It was fixed by transition to cars, that quickly sparked a whole new industry, radically improving the designs one after another.

Similar will happen with climate change. Once we get desperate enough (as in actual crop failures and actual fear of hunger), suddenly, figuring out mitigation and reversing techniques will become more profitable than minting shitcoins, and the humanity will very quickly figure something out.

Currently, the real desperation isn't there yet. There is a lot of fearmongering driven by hunger for power (restricting what others can do is power) or corporate profits (electric cars are a huge business niche that is only competitive due to the climate angle). It is doing its part, but it's akin to driving at half the speed to conserve fuel, while simultaneously having a huge leaky hole in the gas tank. Better than nothing, but won't fully solve the problem.

The best we can do currently is try to not completely forget the real scientific method (experiment -> theorize -> refine -> reproduce -> question -> improve) and the real project management (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely goals with prioritization by cost/reward/risk). We will need those thigs when the shit really hits the fan and they are currently being very rapidly eroded in favor of pledging loyalty to the unquestionable leader and throwing poop at the competing tribe.

innovation is not a faucet, you can't just pour a big one when you feel like it. of course you know this, but you identify "desperation" as the fuel for it.

which is definitely a big part of our human struggle, but that doesn't mean we can't do better by looking at exactly those previous transformational periods. (and we can see that it did not affect everyone the same, hence waiting for crop failures in areas that emit the vast majority of CO2 means condemning tens/hundreds of millions of people to having a super doubleplus ungood time. oh and that's when wars start, when desperation makes it look like a better alternative.)

it was not innovation that decreased smog and lead pollution.

yet at the same time there's this paradox of history drawing straight lines on graphs:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/13/does-reality-drive-str...

switching to cars generated a lot of economic surplus directly. just as back in the days the new railway lines.

the problem with CO2 that it's an externality. exactly that horse to car switch introduced this hidden trade off, and we need to make it seen, and then markets can/will pick the innovative solutions that optimize for less CO2.

"The problem with climate change is that it creates a reality distortion field"

Very much so!

"Anyone who would honestly try to think about it would give up on life"

Not at all. There are lots of people who studied this stuff carefully, thought honestly about it, and came to realize that the claims of doom and armageddon are woefully over-exaggerated. They realize that the people claiming the world is going to end because of climate change have been making those very same predictions for 70 years+ now and were always wrong, because their 'science' is flawed and agenda-driven.

Of course you aren't allowed to listen to such people, let alone be one, lest the sandwich-board wearers have a meltdown about it, so the mass hysteria gets worse every year, and the predictions get ever more extreme and less connected to reality.

"Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever."

Excellent! That is how it should be. The sort of people who want to "organize" the world have a terrible track record of causing hundreds of millions of deaths when their organized plans go awry and they can't admit it. The world needs much less organization a.k.a. central planning, and way more people being honest about climate science.

> There are lots of people who studied this stuff carefully, thought honestly about it, and came to realize that the claims of doom and armageddon are woefully over-exaggerated

Name two (that aren't Bjorn Lomborg).

Only two? Isn't that kind of unambitious, given that "lots of people" doesn't even restrict it to specific classes of people? Oh well, have five names and I'll restrict it for you to published scientists who specialize in climate/atmospheric science.

Nic Lewis, Roy Spencer, Judith Curry, William Happer, Richard Lindzen

There are many more of course. Dr Spencer's page is a good introduction to some of the issues (but by no means the only ones) that cause scientists to disclaim armageddon predictions:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/

Yes, there's a few contrarian scientists still around, some of whom may genuinely believe they are actively working to contribute towards better human understanding/knowledge of how the earth's climate works. I honestly hope they're right, but their failure to convince the vast majority of working climatologists and governments that avoiding catastrophic climate change isn't worth attempting speaks volumes. It's also not hard to compile a list of working climatologists who are quite critical of the IPCC for being overly conservative and dismissing the probability of even more extreme outcomes. Personally I'm of the view most people don't take it seriously because human brains aren't properly triggered by distant and largely invisible threats whose worst effects won't occur in their lifetime. If we had taken it seriously 40 years ago then by now there'd be nothing much to worry about (and our standard of living would quite likely be better than it is now).

What you've done here is retreat from a motte (I couldn't even name two people who disagree) to a much stronger bailey (OK maybe they exist but they're only in a minority). But how do you know if there's a consensus or not? How do you know they're a minority? Did some journalist tell you that? Or a scientist who has taken the doomer position? Nobody is really trying to properly measure this and it'd be meaningless to do so because we see what happens to scientists who disagree with end-of-the-world claims - they mysteriously can't get papers published anymore whilst counterclaims sail through peer review and straight into the front pages of national news. Academia doesn't have the systems needed to do something as hard as establishing the truth of things. That's why there's so many nonsensical or fraudulent papers out there.

So people don't take it seriously for a whole lot of reasons:

1. There's no penalty associated with making end-of-the-world predictions that turn out to be wrong, not even in the short term. We saw this with COVID. Scientists made predictions that were totally invalidated just weeks later, repeatedly, with no visible consequences or even any admission that anything had gone wrong. Indeed they routinely lied about their own predictions that were made in writing, and got away with it!

2. This is 100x more true in the long term. Climate predictions have a long history of being wrong. One dramatic example is Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich who in 1969 was saying we'd all "disappear in a cloud of blue steam" within 20 years. He predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. He said "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people". He was claiming the threat was global cooling before switching to claiming the opposite.

What happens to people who make such expensive claims (for society) and yet turn out to be wrong? Nothing - they pretend they were right all along and the parts of our society most dependent or in hock to academia goes along with the fraud rather than call it out (which is anyway pointless because universities are basically impervious to accountability for their output).

But people see it, they remember, and they tune it out. I think this is why skepticism is more common amongst the elderly population. They're old enough to remember the long history of bad claims. They see that getting it wrong never matters, that wrongness is rewarded. And they stop believing. The young haven't seen that so swallow it all.

3. Scientists who predict doom often don't act like they believe it. The famous discovery that climatologists attend more foreign conferences than many other types of scientists, the way Prof Ferguson insisted lockdown was impossible to avoid and then broke his own rules to see his married lover, etc. These people invariably claim everyone must submit to terrible hardship that mysteriously vanishes the moment it might get in the way of something they want.

And so on.

I didn't suggest you couldn't, was just curious who you considered as qualifying. Nothing in the rest of your post makes any sort of new or hard-to-refute claim. I'm desperately looking for reasons to be optimistic about our future and will happily embrace any movement that makes a good case for that optimism - but it really does require sustaining a level of cognitive dissonance that's beyond me currently.

Well, if you knew it was easy, why ask? A request like that implies you think it can't easily be done, which is why you excluded someone you thought I'd want to name up front.

I'd love for you to be optimistic! But it's unclear why you're not, beyond a perceived failure to convince other scientists. That means virtually nothing though. The position of these scientists I named is "the temperature wanders up and down, most of it is natural, a bit of it is artificial, it probably doesn't matter much". Of course you can't convince climatologists whose entire career, funding, labs, and self-identity are pegged to the idea that climatology is of critical importance. What would they say exactly? Oops, sorry guys, we realized we made some mistakes and there's no real climate crisis, stand down, false alarm? They could never do that! The social pressure to only ever ramp up their predictions and never down is overwhelming in that sort of role.

So the people who need it to be true due to their prior commitments are the last people you should care about whether they're convinced or not. It's people who are new to the topic, neutral, or who have taken the "climate realist" position despite the strong social pressures not to, who are worth paying attention to. And if you do, well, they make a lot of good points. The end result is kinda unsatisfying though. You can't feel good about saving the climate by doing tokenistic things like buying offsets or going to marches, if you come to believe there's probably bigger environmental problems out there.

Or you know, you could just watch the news and see the predictions coming true faster than the models said they would...

Also I don't buy the whole "self-identity...pegged to the idea that climatology is of critical importance" thing - a) climatology is still fundamentally important regardless of how much a problem AGW is b) plenty of scientists are pretty keen to stand out in their field and be remembered historically for being the one that demonstrated the current consensus was wrong. Lindzen tried to do that, and had a pretty decent hypothesis, but it just hasn't stood up to the testing that's been done (even he still only considers it a hypothesis).

You can't see predictions come true by watching the news because, as climatologists love to say every time there's a cold snap, climate isn't weather. And they're right. Climatology is all about long term averages. Unfortunately whenever there's a fire or hot spell somewhere on Earth, they stay rather silent whilst the media and even their colleagues ignore this and use it to ramp up the fear factor yet again. For example the recent hot weather in western Europe should be recalled with colder/wetter than average weather last year, and in other parts of the world this year. Also note that the news never reports on climate-related good news (the recent coral growth being a rare exception).

The models have always over-estimated warming. Things haven't been warming faster than they predicted, they've warmed slower. Claims to the contrary are the sort of retroactive rewriting of history that makes climatology seem so untrustworthy. If you plot model predictions against reality you get charts like these:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-mode...

The blue dotted line is satellite observations. The green dotted line is temperature as measured by averaging surface level thermometers from weather stations. Notice how those two measurements don't agree at all. That's because the surface datasets are heavily corrupted by various factors (ask for details if you're curious). But also notice that both are running well below the average of the models, and in fact observed temperatures from satellites are below basically all (>~95%) of the models.

"climatology is still fundamentally important regardless of how much a problem AGW is"

Do you really believe that? More importantly, do you believe other people believe that? How many people would care about climatology if they were reporting that nothing much was happening, the climate was pretty stable actually and humanity didn't have to change much of anything? I think if that was their consensus position climatology would have the same status as people who study butterflies, or people who study obscure metals. Yes there'd be some funding and a small number of scientists would be passionate about it. But the field would be tiny, they'd never be in the news, politicians wouldn't care.

"plenty of scientists are pretty keen to stand out in their field and be remembered historically for being the one that demonstrated the current consensus was wrong"

That's a very nice idea and I really wish it were true. I've been following how science works very carefully as an outsider for the past few years now, and less carefully for about a decade before that, and I just don't see this at all. Nothing special about science in this regard. Going against a convivial agreement of your peers is always hard in any context, especially when what you're arguing is bad for everyone involved.

Consider the following story of what happened when Remote Sensing Systems published an independent satellite temperature dataset that contradicted the "consensus" surface datasets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOHrYY3yAGE

The video demonstrates two things: (1) scientists who take the realist position immediately predicted that RSS would come under immense pressure to rewrite their results to remove the contradiction, and that within a few years the data would have been altered, (2) that's exactly what happened.

If you disproved the idea there's a climate crisis (which has been done! many times!) then this is what happens:

1. Other climatologists will claim you're wrong, a minority, outside the consensus etc. They will not care what your argument is. They will instead tell everyone that listening to you is dangerous because to stop believing in a crisis means the world will end.

2. Journalists won't want to report on your work because of (1). Instead they will smear it, believing themselves to be doing the right thing.

3. You won't be able to get papers published easily or at all. That in turn will eventually cut off your funding.

4. If you did somehow succeed against the odds, well done. Funding would drop like a stone so you just wrecked the careers of all your colleagues, many of whom are friends, also your students who are doing their PhDs and so on. Also you are now hated by the public who are asking themselves why experts were wrong for decades in such a catastrophic manner.

There are no benefits to being the guy who is right when your colleagues are all wrong. Not in climatology or any field, really. That's why our culture has so many social norms designed to protect the contrarians like freedom of speech, freedom of the press and so on. Unfortunately in recent times and especially in academia these norms have broken down completely. There are some outsiders and especially retired people who are willing and able to say things that are true, but within the field it's hopeless. Anyone who points out the magnitude of the exaggerations and corruptions is directly attacking the people who control their own careers and success.

Enjoy your central planning by private corporate interests, the entire point behind a carbon dividend is to decentralize pollution rights and decentralize decision making in the hands of more people.

Carbon trading is a great idea in principle, but the amount of carbon emissions available on the market is set by governments, so it comes back to down to central planning. Albeit a less aggressive and much preferable kind to EU style "ban high powered kettles" micro-management.

Densification requires land value taxes.

We already have a solution for the warming and the technology to implement it. Launch sulfur into the stratosphere.

Queue all the green democrats telling me all the silly reasons we can’t do it. Infinitely chasing a perfect outcome.

It’s the only plausible solution to buy us the time we need to advance renewable technology and move from fossil fuels without drastically altering quality of life. And we’ll do it just as soon as green democrats give up on the absurd dream of some renewable utopia just around the corner.

I predict no later than 2060.

So you want to simulate a volcanic induced winter? How many people will that starve?

It will starve zero people, because it's not at all the same as volcano ash.

None, because it doesn’t block sunlight.

That's a bit over downbeat for a number of reasons but here's a big one - solar has gone from about the most expensive source of electricity to the cheapest in 10 years https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Price-of-electric...

and I doubt that trend will let up for a while.

I've been very careful to not wade into one of these threads too readily, as when I read them, I almost always find a huge range of variability around what people understand or don't understand about forests, soils, or ecosystem scale biogeochemical cycling. There also seem to be some very assertive, and often very uninformed claims around voluntary versus compliance marketplaces, and what role nature based mitigation efforts play currently or might play in the future.

However, it's becoming increasingly clear that most authors in the pop science journalism space have a limited capacity for understanding the nuance or uncertainties associated with remote sensing models and principles of biogeochemistry. As well, the armchair analysts make many wrong assumptions about forests, forestry, or how carbon cycling works.

Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks. There are often claims made around what forests can or cant do with regards to carbon cycling, and almost always they tend to fundementally misunderstand how carbon cycling, and nutrient cycling work in relationship to long term carbon stability. Not used taking advantage of forests and their ability to represent both (relatively, 10's-100's yr) short term stores of carbon, as well as less labile longer term storage pools (100's-1000's yr). We've been basically mining the world's forests and haven't even remotely attempted using natural ecosystems ability to not only sequester carbon, but to provide significant opportunities for climate resilience.

Granted, we have an extraordinary limited understanding of the upper and lower bounds of many of these systems, but that's hardly any argument that we can't engage with and begin learning about the potential of these systems.

Okay, so you're saying that everyone but you is too stupid to understand the question. But you also don't understand that the question here is about carbon credits, not about carbon sequestration or any biological process.

No?

The issue is fundementally about the limits of what we understand about how forests process and store carbon; that current crediting systems are fundementally flawed in what they reward and how they reward it; and that these markets and systems are very very young, and it will take time to understand if and how a market based approach can be effectively implemented.

In broad strokes we understand parts of these questions, but the actual science is very hard, and based on expensive, finicky, difficult to get data.

No, it really isn't. TFA is about carbon credits.

And yet research on this topic suggest the opposite. "These days everyone seems to thinks that "planting trees" is an important solution to the climate crisis. They're mostly wrong, and in this paper we explain why. Instead of planting trees, we need to talk about people managing landscapes." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/13062214459331297...

That paper is in almosy 100% agreement wuth what I'm stating and the point that I'm making. The issue is about biogechemical cycling and limiting the view of what a forest us to a set of trees, as opposed to a set of processes, is a blocking factor to most people's understanding of their potential for increase carbon storage.

The broader issue I would also cute is that we have an extraordinary limited view of how these processes operate in most ecosystems because they are massively understudied.

I don't think the paper you posted disagrees with OP.

Tree planting can be a reasonable force of good for dealing with climate change however it needs to be done in such a way that the local ecosystem (both currently and in the targeted "restored state") is sustainable and able to survive with minimal human management in the long term.

And importantly, tree planting is only a viable solution of carbon offsetting as long as it isn't harming or displacing the local communities.

A good example of this is Tentree/Veritree's efforts. Restoring the heavily logged Mangrove forests on the coasts of Kenya, Madagascar, and in Indonesia recreates the local ecosystems for animals, fish, insects, and plants that live in marshes while also rebuilding the natural sea wall that protects inland areas from flooding due to weather. It's a good carbon sequestration project while more importantly serving to repair local ecosystems and reduce the impacts of further climate change on the local residents. Importantly these projects also focus on educating the locals on responsible forest management so that they can continue to harvest lumber for construction purposes without impacting the ecosystem or the sustainability of the recreated marshlands.

You can have good tree planting but it's more than just sticking saplings into the ground. Plenty of projects do really good work with the money they get towards forest restoration and most importantly these projects don't serve solely to offset environmental costs in western society but rather to repair ecosystems of disadvantaged regions and help protect these communities against the oncoming threat that is climate change.

TLDR: Tree planting as "more tree == less carbon" is obviously ineffective but in the bigger picture tree planting efforts can really make a difference as long as you put a modicum of research into what projects you are funding.

Thank you for making the point more clearly. Something I want to highlight is how little we actually know about how carbon cycling works in most of the Earth's ecosystems. Even just the uncertainty around carbon residency is something we understand very poorly in a broad geographic context. The answer is that we really don't know what most ecosystems potential is for carbon sequestration; and the critism I'm making is that just because we have high uncertainty around a system, doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it as a viable path, especially when it's probably the easiest to implement thing we can do with a wide range of well established cobenefits.

My main qualm with the parent comment was this in particular, "Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks." Even with the surrounding context it sounded like this strategy will just "work".

The example you give with mangroves is a great one which does in fact work. Pragmatically and historically most of the attempts however, have not due to mismanagement and other unseen complications.

Seeing the further comments I see the point the parent was making is more around first principles of Forrests as carbon sinks not about its implementations.

>The example you give with mangroves is a great one which does in fact work. Pragmatically and historically most of the attempts however, have not due to mismanagement and other unseen complications.

You need to cite this if you are going to keep making that statement. I'm not arguing that markets are well implemented, that common practice is well defined or even very useful, or that we're even prioritizing for the right outcomes, but the notion that forests don't sequester carbon over significant time horizons is 100% false. Global forests represent the most significant, straightforward opportunity for removing carbon from the atmosphere, no debate. Yes we need to do better at managing them from a climate change perspective (good fire, biodiversity, water), but there is simply no better option right now for doing any kind of meaningful drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere than forests.

Now take this Gell-Mann type observation and apply it broadly. The internet is full of highly confident people that, if you are lucky, skimmed a Wikipedia article.

Sorting the gold from the dross is THE contemporary skill.

The oceans - half the world's surface - create more than half the world's oxygen. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html

Rainforests cover 2 percent of the Earth's surface. A forest is considered to be a carbon sink if it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases. Carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. It then becomes deposited in forest biomass (that is, trunks, branches, roots and leaves), in dead organic matter (litter and dead wood) and in soils. This process of carbon absorption and deposition is known as carbon sequestration. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/climate-change-adapting-impacts-and-...

carbon dioxide is needed for plants to grow.

After 30 years of measurements, the ocean carbon community is realizing that tracking human-induced (carbon) changes in the ocean is not as easy as they thought it would be. It wasn’t a mere matter of measuring changes in carbon concentrations in the ocean over time because the natural carbon cycle in the ocean turned out to be a lot more variable than they imagined. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon

I guess I'm not sure what you are trying to say?

At least within broad strokes I see nothing wrong with your second paragraph, but I'm having trouble understanding what you are trying to say.

I can commiserate with the final paragraph in at least that these systems are very hard to study. While I focus on terrestrial carbon cycling, so many of the principles and process assumed to be true by generations of scientists are being challenged or need to be understood at a more granular level to be useful. It seems like the ocean side of the house faces similar challenges.

I know you focus on terrestrial carbon, but what are your thoughts (if any) on sequestration via ocean kelp farming? It appears to beat out forests at rate of growth / drawdown, and there's quite a lot of "unused" area to establish. Like regrowing terrestrial forests, there are many known benefits to local ecosystems from kelp forests - which hopefully can balance out the relative unknowns of mass growth. Nutrient feeding via upwelling in deeper oceans seems viable to feed even very large operations, though I personally don't know what impacts redirecting those nutrient flows might have and I'm not sure anyone does (though I'm inclined to say that shouldn't be a dealbreaker). From what I've seen of the economics, if the crop is harvested (around 10%) for fuel and plastic manufacturing a sequestration farm can be self-sustaining financially.

I'm afraid that we're going the wrong direction on this. Purple Sea Urchin's(probably from ship ballast) are decimating the kelp forest on the west coast of US. Same with our terrestrial forests only we are the ones doing the damage there. Sorry to be a downer but I'm thinking we're screwed.

Maybe trees in colder regions?

As we are seeing lots of forest fires all over the world, wouldn't the carbon captured just be released via forest fires unless the tress were planted in colder regions?

I'm just asking, not making a stance.

Temperature is definitely a major component, but the relationship between when moisture is available and soil temperature is more important.

Water when it's not warm enough to photosynthesize or respire versus significant water availability when soil surface temperature is warmer.

You might also note the significance of seasonal drought in northern climates. This also limits microbes ability to respire.

Carbon offsetting becomes effective when it causes less carbon to be emitted. It has to be so expensive that it makes the consumer of the carbon to think twice. This can only happen if the offsetting is mandatory. The further up the chain it is the more effective it is as well.

We might be able to death by a thousand cuts the CO2 problem. The more sectors we inconvenience with "green washing" type extra costs, the more attractive greener alternatives become, and the more funding potential solutions get.

The article suggests investing in a strategic fund instead, but it's really the same thing and has the same problem as the CO2 offsetting which is that the calculation of the amount of offset CO2 is not realistically calculated. The charities might have unrealistic long term CO2 offset estimates, but making the amount dependent on how much your budget allows for doesn't really make things better.

If you fly economy from LAX->AMS and back, you emit ~2500kg of CO2. Easiest way to capture that CO2 is by planting trees. Say you want to capture it within 5 years. That's about 50kg per tree, and about a third dies so you'll need to plant 150 trees to cover your flight, which is $150 on teamtrees.org. Provided of course they actually plant it within the next year (do they?).

That's already $50 more than that GCC site suggested you spend if you've got plenty money. Trees grow somewhat superlinearly so if you give your tree 10 years you need maybe $50 worth of trees.

Anyway, it still won't save the planet, that only happens when all of this is mandatory and not just for flights but for everything.

I'd like to add to that, how much more soil carbon becomes present because of the litter being dropped by those trees?

How much more water is being stored in the ground because of an increase in soil carbon?

How much longer is the growing season extended by with additional water availability?

How does extending the growing season impact mineralization and root exudate formation?

How do these processes impact site specific net primary productivity? How does growing trees in a space impact our ability to grow trees in a space?

These questions are all individually difficult to answer empirically, but are compounded by the massive amount of geologic and climatic variation we see across the planet.

Absolutely, and it can also easily lead to direct, personal benefits: How much less air conditioning do you need because your house has more shade?

We also need to plant trees for trees that have burned or died. So there is an ongoing cost. Maybe should be also a $1/month (?) subscription service forever, based on that one flight.

https://www.wren.co/

Do you also pay to store those trees in a salt mine or turned to charcoal and buried?

If not, what happens when they die? They will release carbon.

They could be used for forestry, replacing concrete by using them for LVL beams. You could just leave them where they are and let nature do the process of incorporating the carbon into the soil.

The opposite can also happen: people who can afford it not changing their habits because they are paying for the offset. If something is carbon neutral, many will pay to do it and not feel guilty about it.

This also increases inequality: those with less money need to degrade their lifestyle, but those with more can choose to keep it.

These kind of opinions are increasing in frequency and they all seem poorly reasoned to me. Yes, there are standards organizations to make sure that, for instance, tree farms aren't just logging their trees and selling the same plots for offsets again. The author makes the point that the timeframes are too long, but that just strikes me as thinking similar to "planting trees doesn't work, we need x instead!" When the point is that every little bit helps.

Given good enough standards, it just means that while carbon offset opportunities are plentiful, they'll be cheap - and as they become more popular, the price will increase, and this is a good thing.

I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!" argument, because it just seems a lazy argument designed to remove any personal agency. Corporations are made out of people. If people didn't exist, neither would the corporations. If demand for a corporations products or services dried up, the corporation would cease to exist. As corporations reduce their emissions, the per-person carbon footprint shrinks. In the US, the per-person carbon footprint is lower than it used to be. They're related. Communicating a per-person carbon footprint increases people demanding corporations reduce emissions. If the per-person carbon footprint were a scheme developed by corporations to avoid accountability, it seems a very poorly-thought-out and ineffective scheme from those corporations.

> I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!"

Oh come on... People like Leo Dicaprio and Taylor Swift fly on their private jets to tell Johnny Average here, that he should bike for 15 miles to his workplace. Organizations are the same... look at coca cola for example, some water, sugar and aromas, in a plastic bottle, plastic cap, plastic sticker, packed in a sixpack wrapped in plastic, on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic. Reusable glass bottles? Nope (atleast not in my country). Just look at packaging of most items.. clamshell packaging, toothpaste double or tripple wrapped, shrinkflation (less product, same amount of packaging, more packages bought), single peppers wrapped in plastic, bananas wrapped in plastic, electronics literally designed to be unrepairable, tractors going that way too, cars following, user replacable batteries are usually too expensive to replace on 2 year old devices, sotware updates slow down devices, big corps requiring computer-bound workers to come to office, instead of working from home, clothes companies replacing cotton clothes with synthetics, leaking microplastics everywhere, companies catchign fish in US seas, or even meat, shipping them to china to be cleaned, cut and packaged, and then shipped back to US, zero regulation on 3rd world, where corpos either mine raw materials or "recycle" stuff (and recycling copper means burning the insulation off first... literally burning heaps of plastic),... and lets not forget the "accidents" when companies like BP ignore safety and cause fucking huge oil spills and destroy huge areas with their carelessness, and they don't even get properly punished for that.

But no... let's pass the blame on people, who have no alternative on the market, and let's ban straws, because "that'll surely help the environment".

Clamshell packaging is used to prevent theft.

Heaven forbid. We can't have a nice planet to live on because somebody's metrics aren't what they want.

Like I said, I don't understand the logic. Rich corporations/people aren't doing everything I think they should do, so therefore I shouldn't track my carbon footprint? People like Leo/Taylor fly on their private jets, therefore Johnny shouldn't bike to work? Banning straws is useless (?) so therefore, companies aren't doing anything worthwhile at all in cutting emissions? Man... if we wait for everything else to be perfect before we put in any effort, that's a pretty great recipe for failure.

All those clauses you listed, the proper therefore is "therefore they should not do that". That's it. And if they stop doing it, or do it less, the per-person carbon footprint goes down. It doesn't have anything to do with shifting blame.

The concept of carbon footprint for the average person is in itself a scam to let corporations off the hook by blaming the average person and focusing the conversation on what Johnny average does or eats in a day while forgetting that Big Oil has done everything in its power within the last 50 years to avoid responsibility regarding the fact that they knew and lied about the potential effects of climate change.

That just strikes me as a reiteration of what I'm already talking about.

> In the US, the per-person carbon footprint is lower than it used to be. They're related. Communicating a per-person carbon footprint increases people demanding corporations reduce emissions.

How much of that is simply a result of moving dirty manufacturing industries into other countries?

I have wondered that too. I haven't found CO2 specific measures, but I did find this:

> And what he found was that the decline in pollution wasn't driven by offshoring. US factories were genuinely finding ways to cut emissions. In fact, the industries that saw the biggest drops in pollution intensity actually grew as a share of output.

https://www.vox.com/2015/2/8/7999417/US-factory-pollution-of...

But another paper (although this is from 2008) did find:

> Our results indicate that international trade is a significant factor in explaining the change in emissions in many countries, from both a production and consumption perspective.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1006388108

This is a well-studied subject and the answer is - not as much as you’d expect, and actively declining since 2005.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

What entity is responsible when a corporation chooses to externalize their known costs?

I'm all for mandating tracking of externalities in companies' finances. Do it through taxing carbon emissions or however it can be done. It just doesn't mean that carbon offsets are "greenwashing".

> If people didn't exist, neither would the corporations. If demand for a corporations products or services dried up, the corporation would cease to exist

If people didn't exist, neither would professional killers. If demand for taking out political opponenta and personal enemied dried up, professional killers would sease to exist.

This seems like a no true scotsman opinion.

The author is asking questions about life span or species of trees without doing any of the journalistic legwork.

There are many reasons to say that credits aren't enough if we're still contributing carbon, because few people have been saying "don't plant trees" in the areas that have established credits.

But it's not the same as green washing; it might be more similar to cancer awareness campaigns, but there is some action.

And of course the answer is "do x less", but that's not an option most of the developed world will choose. Do Y more is much more achievable, especially if it benefits the end user.

So new recycling campaign "Recycle aluminum cans, it'll save you 5% on your next 24 cans, reduce the trade deficit, and help build pontoon boats and airplanes"

I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon offsetting creates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

Here is the list of sources for that video if you're interested:

[1] https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-the-...

[2] https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorga...

[4] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...

[5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-E...

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.i...

[7] https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-ca...

[8] https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf

[9] https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-cookstove-a...

[10] https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/...

[11] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.006...

[12] https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?acc...

This really misses the point of the claim. Carbon Credits are greenwashing because as it currently exists doesn't work. And almost every approach is based an unfounded schemes. Furthermore, carbon offsets are used to justify ecological damage; they exist for no other purpose.

The problem with carbon offsetting is that almost none of the solutions work for long term. For example, if you're digging up oil and burning it, planting a tree wont help. The carbon you dug up from miles underneath our feet is removed from the global carbon cycle for millions of years, the carbon in a tree lasts as long as that tree is alive. Every living organism should be assumed to be decayed and returned to the carbon cycle unless specifically proven otherwise. For example, most of the carbon offset operations in California are being destroyed by wild fires [(1)](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wildfires-are-destroying-ca...)

If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground. We will delude ourselves if we think any growing any lifeform to capture carbon will work unless humans directly put it into the ground in old oil fields. The only other possibly viable alternative is through mineral reactions with carbon, turning it into stone

> If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground.

I live in the UK. I think it’s reasonable to visit my family in Australia every few years. Is it bad if I purchase carbon offsets?

Carbon offsets are just donations to environmental groups. There's nothing bad about either taking flights or making donations, but it's wrong in the "factually incorrect" sense to think that if you pick the right amounts to donate to the right groups you can make your flight environmentally friendly. It's like buying a "local business" offset every time you shop at Walmart - you can just do it if you want to or don't do it if you don't.

> Carbon offsets are just donations to environmental groups.

Well that isn't true. Most carbon offset schemes are run by businesses.

Is it bad? No. Is it worse than never going, in terms of global warming impact? Yes. Is it still reasonable to do it every few years? Yes.

It is surprisingly likely to be useless. If you think you've actually offset your flight and take the flight more often, that is bad. And that fact that we don't hold the standards organizations to a higher standard is definitely bad.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/04/carbon-o... discusses problems in the verification system most commonly relied on by airlines. As an example, of 12 projects that claimed to stop deforestation, 11 had no discernible effect, and the last overstated its impact by 40%. That's 95% "didn't happen". And they are temporary - a forest not cut down today may be cut down in 30 years. Or maybe not because someone else bought CO2 credits later for the exact same forest. (The offsets industry pointed out that the whole region saw reductions in logging for unknown reasons - and tried to take credit for all of it!)

As https://secondnature.org/climate-action-guidance/purchasing-... says, the average CO2 offset only costs $3-6 per tonne. But the science on whether a tonne of CO2 was actually offset is sadly lacking. And there is a constant economic pressure to do the cheapest thing that sounds reasonable. And it is an invitation to scammers to cut corners from there. There is a good reason that environmental organizations like Greenpeace say to treat offsets as a scam.

What does a real offset cost? Tech companies that are serious about making SURE that they have offset CO2 have been willing to promise https://charmindustrial.com/ about a billion dollars so far for verified CO2 removal. And it really is verified. Bio-oil is created out of agricultural waste and injected back into wells.

If you want to KNOW that you've ACTUALLY offset your CO2, you can do likewise. It will cost you $600/tonne. Companies like Microsoft and Google aren't spending $600/tonne because they want to. But because that is a competitive rate for independently verifiable, absolutely did happen, CO2 removal.

But you can continue to check that checkbox that guilt-free says you offset your carbon. And independent experts whose job isn't to pinky swear that it really happened are going to believe you really didn't offset your carbon.

> it’s not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground

I’m taking that flight. I can’t imagine a geopolitical regime that keeps oil in the ground for tens of thousands of years and beyond. The oil is coming out of the ground.

> For example, most of the carbon offset operations in California are being destroyed by wild fires

Shouldn't the corresponding carbon contracts be bought by the state, in that case, to keep the accounting correct?

Forests are regarded as renewable store of carbon. However, with fires and drought for eternity, that model breaks down exponentially quite rapidly. Some fire is good, but not with a hot house earth climate.

We need mineral based carbon removal (weathering) or direct air storage and capture.

Microsoft has a nice report what they bought and how long the carbon is captured:

https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE...

> More than 99% of the carbon removal volume we selected was from natural solutions with durability terms of 100 years or less, such as forest and soil projects. Looking ahead, we hope to increase the overall durability of our portfolio by helping to expand the market for long-term engineered solutions such as direct air capture and storage.

They are contracting 500 MtCO2 removal from Carbofex, which is producing Biochar (plant coal) and label that as a medium term solution (carbon is taken out for 800 years). If that Biochar is stored secludedly that could be a method to get it completely out of the cycle

https://www.carbofex.fi/Home

There are legitimate and ethical carbon offset programs though, for example Gold Standard's programs:

https://www.goldstandard.org/

Carbon credits were invented to allow billionaires to fly private jets and use mega yachts without criticism from the public

People might dismiss your comment as shallow but I'll add a bit more accuracy:

The concept of "Carbon footprint" was fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

>The concept of "Carbon footprint" was fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers.[0]

What's "fabricated" about it? Are consumers not responsible for the carbon they emit through the gas they buy? If you drive a SUV or fly half way across the world for your vacation why should you be able to pass on the buck to BP/American Airlines?

And in the end YOU will pay for it while big oil pays nothing.

Yeah, because at the end of the day you're burning the oil. If everyone stopped consuming oil, the oil companies will stop drilling. The inverse doesn't really hold. Just look at how gas prices have doubled yet everyone's still driving their cars.

CO2 and NO2 emissions are an externalized cost for Oil&Gas industry.

If I run a nuclear power business commissioning power plants I am responsible for the nuclear waste that is generated. That means that I have to internalize the cost of proper waste management to avoid environmental impact.

If I run an Automotive business or a Refinery the emissions are a by-product of my activity. A costumer wants to go from A to B in a car they don't want to spew NO2 and physically reduce the longevity of everyone around them.

For anything related to fossil fuels the industry has largely got away with externalizing the environmental costs of their activity.

This is exactly the same as the plastic usage in packaging. Polluting saves on the industry bottom line, the externalized cost is somehow expected to be picked up by governments/citizens. This is the main point were we all disagree with you.

Do you have a choice in terms of what fuel you can use for your car because I don't.

If you drive a diesel car, you can actually swap the diesel fuel with used cooking oil(after removing the impurities and doing a few modifications to the engine/car)

Yet, it is still not legal in France(among other countries) to do so for example. Why? because the government does not want people to stop paying 60% taxes each and every time they go to the pump to refill their tank.

Supposedly it will be legal soon but guess what, they are still going to tax the used cooking oil as if it was oil from the ground. So where is the incentive to switch?

This has been know for the last 15 years if not more. So yeah, I ll say consumers are not responsible for this mess.

Give people cheap EV and people will drive them. Where are they today? I am not a Musk die hard fan, but if Tesla had not shaken up the car companies and threaten them we would not even have electric vehicles today.

What did we have 10 years ago? A hybrid from Toyota and a few other car makers and that was it.

> This has been know for the last 15 years if not more. So yeah, I ll say consumers are not responsible for this mess.

No this has been known for more than half a century.

In 1958 Bell Labs Bell Science hour broadcast on public 'The Unchained goddess' a 1 hour documentary. Human caused climate change is addressed at about 50:00 mark. [0] Note this is a public documentary not confidential research.

Since the early 80's Oil&Gas have adapted there oil platforms designs to deal with incoming sea level rises. [1]

We have been conned into an Antropogenic Climate Crisis for profit.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ph_7C1Jq4

[1] https://gizmodo.com/how-big-oil-rigs-the-system-to-keep-winn...

> Do you have a choice in terms of what fuel you can use for your car because I don't.

>Give people cheap EV and people will drive them. Where are they today? I am not a Musk die hard fan, but if Tesla had not shaken up the car companies and threaten them we would not even have electric vehicles today.

>What did we have 10 years ago? A hybrid from Toyota and a few other car makers and that was it.

The way you juxtaposed this is weird. You're implying that if there isn't some pain-free way for consumers to quit fossil fuels then they're not responsible and it's all on governments/corporations. Fossil fuels are currently used because they're the cheapest source of energy, so it's entirely unreasonable to expect that you can quit them without making personal sacrifices.

>Yet, it is still not legal in France(among other countries) to do so for example. Why? because the government does not want people to stop paying 60% taxes each and every time they go to the pump to refill their tank.

>Supposedly it will be legal soon but guess what, they are still going to tax the used cooking oil as if it was oil from the ground. So where is the incentive to switch?

That makes sense considering that the fuel taxes are for funding roads, not as some sort of carbon sin tax.

> The way you juxtaposed this is weird. You're implying that if there isn't some pain-free way for consumers to quit fossil fuels then they're not responsible and it's all on governments/corporations

That's my point. Alternatives exists already but the governments are not enticing people to switch to EV or alternative fuel sources such as in my comment used frying oil.

Instead they tax the alternative as if it was regular oil coming from the ground.

You can't say that people need to switch/change habits if the alternative is no different than what you currently have.

> That makes sense considering that the fuel taxes are for funding roads, not as some sort of carbon sin tax.

That is not factually correct. The budget for road maintenance is not derived from these taxes. These taxes are simply used to plug the various gaps in the governments coffers.

Do some of these taxes end up being used for road maintenance? Certainly so but their primary purpose is simply to generate revenue for the governments.

See the articles seen on HN regarding the UK grappling with the fact that each year the fuel tax brings in around 30 Billion pounds that will need to be replaced once the transition to EV has been completed.

its the same in France FYI.

> Are consumers not responsible for the carbon they emit through the gas they buy

Sure we are responsible, but it's not our choice that this gas is emitted... we aren't the ones responsible to make the choice toward theses combustibles on the planes sadly.

Shifting it over the ones that actually have control over whether they use more or less gas, is a great way to incentive them to go toward the one that use less gas, as they only want the cheaper options, not the best options.

At the end of the day, we are still paying for it, but the one that do have the power to change it, now is the one that see it over their balance sheet.

Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver.

https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY

Why is the elephant in the room, agriculture and cattle so little discussed compared to transport.

A burger pollutes more than driving an suv for 50 miles,yet the enemy is always transport.

Forget a family of 4 in a single lunch can easily pollute much more than they would with transport in a week.

Transportation is 27% of US carbon emssions vs 11% for agriculture.

Cattle emission is severely downplayed, starting from the fact that cattle produces methane which is 200 times worse than carbon dioxide, it's also severely downplayed how much it impacts resources like land, water and the many disaster byproducts such as ocean dead zones.[1]

Cattle is also the biggest reason for deforestation (Amazon being the most famous example), people want to greedily eat damn steaks everyday, put their head under the sand and pretend electric vehicles will change our fate. Consuming less will.

Moving less is good for the environment but eating less meat has much more impact.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

The methane problem is easily solved by feeding them a diet which includes seaweed, why this isn’t mandated is beyond me.

> Cattle emission is severely downplayed.

No, Cattle emissions are well studied and modelled.

Methane emissions from active _and_ abandoned Oil wells, now that is a GHG emission that is largely dismissed and hidden away by the Oil&Gas industry.

Perhaps it's not discussed as much since it seems kind of far-fetched if you don't provide any sources.

I have a theory that C02 released at different levels of the atmosphere will have different affects on greenhouse warming. (And should be taxed differently)

For example planes release C02 to areas far above normal levels, so their is no natural mechanism for it to become part of the carbon cycle.

Carbon released at ground level only a small amount actually makes it to the upper atmosphere, because rain and other factors keeps it near ground level.

My theory is planes skip these steps and are basically dumping greenhouse gasses to levels far above the natural rate.

I have no way to test this hypothesis.

- I am under the impression that their is less air moment the higher you go, if so you could use 80 years of flight data to predict temperature change in localised areas.

- I am under the impression that the northern hemisphere is more affected by climate change than the southern. Could be because more flights in this area.

- I am under the impression that water in the air has the same band of IR of c02 , so areas with less atmospheric water c02 will have a higher greenhouse affect. Ie above the clouds.

- I am under the impression that c02 is water soluble and tends to be higher concentrations closer to the ground.

- I am also under the impression that c02 is heavier than air, so tends to sink.

I'll gladly pay for some trees that will remove my carbon over the next 25 years if you you let me fly today.

In 1932, this then became the famous "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Rough House explains why Wimpy is able to get away with this tactic in one strip, stating that "He never comes around on Tuesday". Rough House once suffered a mental breakdown from Wimpy's shenanigans, and demanded that Wimpy be kept out of his hospital room. Wimpy disobeyed this command, resulting in a rare altercation with Popeye. The phrase was also slightly altered in the episode "Spree Lunch" to "I'll have a hamburger, for which I will gladly pay you Tuesday." This phrase is now commonly used to illustrate financial irresponsibility and still appears in modern comedies such as The Drew Carey Show and The Office. The initial part of the phrase was even the title of Episode 6 of the fourth season of Cheers "I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw ("Carbon Offsets! Can't we just buy our way out of climate change?" from the Climate Town channel)

I find the whole framing of "stopping emissions" odd. Where burning charcoal and burning hard coal are treated the same. But in fact, they are different: charcoal is made from plants, who captured the carbon recently from the air. If the plants are given enough time and space to recapture, burning charcoal is carbon neutral. Hard coal, to the contrary, was isolated from the carbon cycles for like, 300 million years, thus re-adding it to the cycle is going to make a dent that plants probably cannot offset.

Stopping digging out carbon (hard coal, oil, liquid gas, limestone) would be like the first thing to do, but it seems the focus was shifted elsewhere...

This argument could make some sense if we were talking about designing a sustainable system in the abstract, but the climate issue is an emergency leading to catastrophic outcomes in the present, and so decreasing emissions by any means necessary in the short-term is what matters.

Continuing to dig out carbon and inserting it into the carbon cycle is guaranteed to exceed what we can offset with plants. What you describe is still a trajectory to doom or whatever awaits us.

With plants that remain part of the life cycle? Sure. But growing plants can lock away carbon more permanently depending how it is disposed of.

Consider https://charmindustrial.com/. They take bio waste products (for example corn husks and cobs), turn it into oil, then put that back into wells. So growing plants (in this specific case, food) winds up permanently locking waste away.

> They take bio waste products [...], turn it into oil

I was about to call bullshit because of the first law of thermodynamics, but their FAQ states:

> Unlike crude oil, bio-oil cannot sustain a flame, bio-oil has much lower energy density

Good!

> are heated up to about 500°C in a few seconds without burning

I wonder where that heat comes from.

That’s a great point. We had the carboniferous period in ancient history and all that carbon had been locked up. We’re not going to be able to put it back with plants. Our plants aren’t the same and mushrooms exist.

“The Carboniferous trees made extensive use of lignin. They had bark to wood ratios of 8 to 1, and even as high as 20 to 1. This compares to modern values less than 1 to 4. This bark, which must have been used as support as well as protection, probably had 38% to 58% lignin.[citation needed] Lignin is insoluble, too large to pass through cell walls, too heterogeneous for specific enzymes, and toxic, so that few organisms other than Basidiomycetes fungi can degrade it.”

Not really aware of anyone against charcoal other than the industry where we destroy american forests to make charcoal that we ship to europe to burn. Which 1) wastes energy from shipping that almost certainly isn't green and 2) destroys ecosystems that we need to begin rejuvenating in order to stabilize the climate system

Global warming is being caused by us digging up carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere.

Leave It in the Ground.

Ban fracking and new exploration. Close wells. Dismantle rigs. Shutoff pipelines. Shutter mines.

There will be an economic cost for this - ensure it is carried by those most able to afford it.

> There will be an economic cost for this - ensure it is carried by those most able to afford it.

Meanwhile, in reality, the EU's jet fuel tax proposal seems to have exemptions for private jets.

The problem, though, is that the way we've designed our civilization is that many things require fossil fuels or some close substitute in order for things to remain habitable. Germany this winter (and the EU in general) will be ones to watch closely to see what happens when it's not a question of the price of natural gas, but the simpler is it available at any cost problems. Or you can point to Texas a couple winters ago - their power production required natural gas. Natural gas, in sufficient quantities, simply wasn't available at any price. And so the state largely went dark. One might hope the problems were fixed, but as record profits were made in a few days, it's unlikely anything will be fixed. Just like it wasn't fixed after the same rough issue happened a decade ago in... oh, 2011? Somewhere around there.

The economic cost of driving energy prices through the roof will be most harmful to the poor.

This is well established, and likely unavoidable. As an overall portion of their expenses, the poor pay much more for energy than the wealthy.

Driving up the cost will decrease their standard of living substantially, but much less so to the wealthy.

Let's see how Europe fares with higher energy prices this winter, then determine if we should force that on the entire world.

Tax the fucking carbon

To what end?

Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems, or is it just going to move money around and do little to change the amount of carbon emitted. I suspect the latter.

We need to think about solutions from end to end not just ones that appear to punish the parties that we think need punishing.

Taxing carbon is the only way the government can be reasonably confident of effecting any change while minimizing economic disruption.

Markets work, use them.

Directly regulating the amount of pollution emitted is effective too, look at how California's auto emissions laws have become a de-facto standard. The US is the #1 source of demand in the world, entire economies (e.g China's) have been built around suppressing domestic demand in favor of making more money exporting to the US. If we change our regulations, the rest of the world will follow.

> Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems

Yes, and give a financial base to begin remediation.

Your suspicions are unfounded here, given we already have a proven model pricing pollutants: https://www.nber.org/digest/feb16/cap-and-trade-sulfur-dioxi...

A tax is just more direct, even when subject to political cowardice.

That's a very good way to get unelected.

I believe the best type of carbon tax would be an import tax on goods from countries that have more lax environmental legislation.

Not only would that attack the problem of "embodied emissions", but if you spin it right it could be seen as protecting domestic industry.

How about "Negative levy! X% of you income tax now paid by polluting corporations"

Maybe we should flip the model around. Only allow selling proven carbon credits. That is proven in some reasonable timeframe 50 or 100 years.

Been seeing a lot of these threads pop up over the last week. Also saw the US Senate trying to push a big climate change bill in the last week. Could these two things be related?

> If you are reading this August column of Green is the New Black, it is very likely that you have either recently been away or have an imminent overseas trip. Of course it’s now a given that flying is seriously bad for the planet and that the best way to avoid generating all those emissions is to avoid getting airborne in the first place. But we also know that international travel, whether for business or pleasure, is often unavoidable and/or irresistible; and that, especially given the current mayhem in the UK’s seaports, there are often no other options to get to where we need or want to go.

> So what to do when, despite every good green intention, you simply have to fly?

I... live in such a different world from this person. Though admittedly everything from the UK is "overseas," I doubt they're really that concerned about a hop over the Channel here (there being a perfectly good tunnel as I understand it).

I'll generally agree with "carbon offsets" as "Greenwashing," though there are some notable exceptions - the Climeworks style "deep rock fixing of CO2" seems entirely legitimate, if a bit more energy intensive and harder to scale than pencil whipping some forest data. But it's also far harder to game (outside outright fraud in the sense of "Claim 10MT injected and captured, only injected 8MT and observed 2MT leaking back out the bore holes"). If it involves "forest protection" sort of techniques, it's probably having nearly zero net effect (nobody particularly cares which acres of forest they're cutting, so... go over a few miles instead).

What annoys me greatly are the people who claim climate change is a huge looming crisis that will end humanity... so therefore the only thing one can possibly do is vote one way or another and do nothing else unless It Has a ROI. And changing the way we live is literally unthinkable, so... They'll Think of Something. Too many Hollywood movies with "pulled out of the writer's rear end" endings that magically solve all problems at the last minute. And I don't think that's likely.

The future is going to be, like it or not, far lower energy, with a lot more "use energy when available and use less when it isn't" - so, basically, the entire history of humanity until the past few hundred years. And there's a lot that can be done to work towards this - some of which does look like dusting off the old work from the 1970s in which a lot of this was worked out, in detail, with practical testing. It looks a lot more like passive solar collectors and a lot less like blockchain...

Lately, I've been trying to figure out what it looks like to take "tech money," in some form or another, and make that more directly useful in places where it can have an actual impact. I've been trying to do things like organize group buys of solar panels and help people do their own solar (a DIY install out here, ground mount/grid tie is around $1.25/W right now in materials if you can get a good deal on a truck full of panels shipped in), and I've put in an EV charger or two in places that didn't previously have any - not that it gets much use right now. Or maybe large ebike purchases, fund half on donations from tech workers, half paid for by lower income users. Open to ideas, but there's a lot of money sloshing around in the tech industry and I don't see much in the way of actually focused use. Start building out 1-2MW solar facilities on spare land closer into town instead of building 100MW farms out in the middle of nowhere, or even just helping fund solar carports. Split the cost with the property owners.

Or to figure out how to do local, small scale carbon capture on surplus energy. Locally, I've no shortage of basalt, and I know one can grind it and weather it on fields, but can one do something more aggressive, like a fluidized bed reactor sort of concept? I don't have the skills to do all of the work required (mostly the chemistry to verify it), but that sort of small scale thing could scale out and even if it's not 100% efficient, well, it's happening.

But I reject the concept that individual action doesn't have an impact, because any sort of massed action starts with individuals who care and are willing to take the actions and steps required to do something. I'm now responsible for several additional solar installs in the area (rural, conservative, and, yes, I live out here willingly and enjoy it) from either talking about it to people who wouldn't otherwise have considered it, or providing technical documentation and resources to people who have the skills to do the installs, but not the design work from the ground up. Having something I can point to, take the covers off, and say "This is what it looks like" is very useful, so people can see if it's something they're willing to do. I'm hoping a 21kW array near me will be approved for operation this week if all goes well. When people live out what they talk about, that works an awful lot better than the standard practices of "trying to insult people into agreeing with you."

Anyway. I agree, buying offsets isn't likely to be useful, but neither is sitting on our collective asses waiting for someone else to solve the problem. If anyone has ideas in the areas listed above, I'm easy enough to find!

If I pay for my friend to have a weekend away with his girlfriend, thereby strengthening their relationship, then he shouldn't be mad when I sleep with her too and weaken it right?

If you were going to sleep with her anyway that seems like a net good.

Are we all mindless automatons? I've had it with the binary thinking. How about you pay for your friend's weekend away with his girlfriend, and don't sleep with her yourself? How about pay for carbon offsets and reduce your personal emissions? I don't think I've ever read an article that says if you buy offsets then you can just keep living as you always have. I've seen a lot of articles that accompany carbon offset information with tips on how to reduce your emissions, though.

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