Companies are buying large numbers of carbon offsets that don’t cut emissions
wsj.com
wsj.com
Is this really the basic concept? I thought it was meant to deliver carbon cutting at the cheapest cost. Redesigning a Delta airlines jet to be electric or make the engine more fuel efficient is $$$$. Now, there is a village in India that uses a coal power plant. It's cheaper for Delta to build a solar power plant in India, shutdown the coal plant, and claim all the carbon output they've reduced in India then to try and build a new airplane.
Capital is therefore efficiently allocated to whatever carbon cutting project is the cheapest, therefore maximizing carbon reduction per dollar spent.
For example, as a fisherman it might be cheaper for me to buy some old, shitty, super-polluting boats, run them around for a bit generating huge amounts of emissions, and then go shopping for offsets. With the offsets I buy nicer boats that don’t pollute as much. But without the offsets I might have either not been fishing at all or gone straight for the nicer boats.
Basically, carbon offsets in theory allocate carbon savings where they are most effective financially, but in practice create structural inefficiencies (incentivized to start polluting to fix it). Also, they are prone to double counting. If I open a wind farm partially funded by carbon offsets, if I claim that the farm is removing as much CO2 as it actually saves, I’m double counting along with whoever paid for the offsets to be “carbon neutral” when there is indeed still a net amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere
1: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
My favorite one though is about the British paying China for dinosaur fossils, but they paid per fragment, so (naturally!) entire fossils were smashed into many small pieces.
This is driven by policy goals, not market forces, and the gap between profitable behavior and ecological responsibility calls for money.
A carbon tax which is fully refunded can be larger without causing economic damage, because it nets to zero for the average customer.
Meanwhile you eliminate the overhead and corruption opportunity on the decarbonization side. If you have a meaningful carbon tax, the incentive to decarbonize exists in proportion to the size of the tax, but people can do it however is most efficient rather than according to the way specified by the companies with the best lobbyists.
The above numbers are realistic examples for the magnitude of carbon taxes typically discussed and the manufacturing carbon footprint of a laptop, btw.
This is true, but it's a weird way to frame it. Yes, absolutely: carbon-sensitive regulation changes the market pricing such that less polluting activities and means of production are "worth more". So if you have some, you win. If you were planning on having some in the future ("were going to do anyway"), you likewise get a windfall.
And thats... good? It's not perfect. But it produces the result we want.
IMHO the much bigger problem with offset regulation is that it's likely to be nearly impossible to actually measure[1] and we'll be dealing with cheating and fraud for decades. But the incentives seem fine to me.
[1] Vs. a carbon tax which is pure simplicity: $xxx per ton of carbon (for extra credit: a floating price based on a dynamic bid-based sequestration market) pulled out of nonrenewable sources, paid by the extractor at the time of initial sale, and let the market sort out how to allocate the overhead.
Recognize that all your questions could have been asked about, say, sulphate emission regulation in the 1970's. (Or CFC's in the 90's). And that worked out OK.
Corporations buy carbon, to a good first approximation, as coal, gas, or crude.
That's what you tax. Plus a tarrif on countries which don't do likewise.
At the level of an individual, yes.* However consider a fleet of cargo ships. They last, and depreciate, over about 20 years. Even if the owner buys newer, cleaner ones, they aren't throwing away the old ones, and the one bought today will stay in service until around 2042. It's not unreasonable to offset this ancient cap ex, especially if governments also ramp up regulation so the economics for the oldest/worst of continued use vs scrapping make them uneconomic.
In a utopian sense this is clearly worse than just replacing all the polluting equipment, but in the real world a "big bang" solution can't work, not the least because there isn't enough shipbuilding capacity to replace the entire fleet overnight.
The ethics of offset vs removal credits, and the whole offset credit market is a complex and sorry situation and this article just scratches the surface. OTOH one reason it's so marginal, despite the efforts of some people (including Verra and Gold Standard) to make it better, are largely because credits of any non-mandatory size are barely used (about $1B traded last year) so there's little incentive to clean it up. Hopefully that is in the process of changing; the market is growing and prices are rising faster than the market is growing indicating that demand is increasing.
* At the consumer level this is all awful. Remember when Obama did "Cash for clunkers" to get polluting cars off the road? You couldn't get the credit unless you bored a hole in the block and injected some epoxy. In Germany they had a similar program, but just took the old cars and shipped them to LDCs in Africa where they could continue to pollute, just someplace else. Or for aging luxury cars, some nefarious companies would send them across the border into Poland and then smuggle them back in and get the credit another time.
Not only that, but it destroyed the secondary market by destroying all those vehicles, as you mentioned, requiring more production to make up for the short fall. Putting those second-life vehicles in other countries was a net benefit, reducing once again the new full production cost of vehicles there. In particular because less developed nations have historically been less accountable for pollution industrially by necessity.
The government needs to be focused on making it easy to build alternative energy sources.
What's also true is you get only a specific worldview and consequent narrative from these kinds of shows. They have convergent ideologies and parrot a single, totalizing, pro-capital, -moderation, -individualist method for solving the problems stated as such. It's great if you've drunk the Kool-aid but it does paper over a lot of prescient issues (climate change, culture war, etc.) on the assumption that they will be solved by emphasizing politicking and de-emphasizing economicking.
At one point most young people got there news from these sources. They do provide a point of view on an issue. By making someone else look stupid you as the viewer feel smarter and more informed even though you aren't.
Catholic indulgences as they were actually structured would be more akin to just a carbon tax.
Unless companies have moral people in their upper management and are doing their due diligence when selecting offsets then the money is just going to other corporate profits and not making any impact at all. I know this for a fact since my company is carbon neutral and I also oversee the review process for not just carbon offsets but also RECs. You can thank the government for little oversight in the carbon offset process that they developed.
Not investing into meaningfully reducing emissions now is a glaring lack of forward planning and due diligence. I fully expect some companies to tank in the next twenty years because of their current failure to adapt.
Oh legitimate carbon offsets will be in short supply, which you'd expect to raise prices. No doubt about that.
But fraudulent carbon offsets? Those can be produced in whatever quantities buyers are willing to pay for.
Well they actually are doing due diligence, the problem is they have a different objective: find the most carbon credits to buy for the least money. It's not like they actually care about being neutral, if they did they'd cut emissions instead of pushing it onto others. It's all PR and complying with government regulations.
Unfortunately the legit sources aren't gonna be a good choice for that goal.
Well that would drive up demand for fossil fuels and profits for extraction companies, leading to more extraction. Is this a real idea (proposed policy in a country) or just something you wrote down?
That matters very little. Carbon taxation is a Pigovian tax, and just making emitting CO2 more expensive creates strong incentives to stop emitting CO2. It also makes "green" alternatives comparatively cheaper.
In fact, many proponents of carbon taxation support equal redistribution of the tax money to everyone (e.g. as tax credits). Taxpayers polluting less than average would see their tax burden decrease, while those polluting more than average would be paying more and thus be incentivized to change their behavior.
(Of course, it's not that easy in the real world, some behavior can be extremely hard to change without help/subventions/large investments. But these helps don't have to be tied to carbon taxation.)
To be fair, many small/mid-sized companies that act as suppliers to larger companies would basically have the larger company doing the carbon accounting for them.
For large companies, I think it would look more like an accounting capability than a climate/energy science one. The carbon credit market might become regulated with some accreditation system after these wild west years.
Start first with usage of private jets or TV sets?
Carbon offsetting is a government program? I thought this was pretty much all the work of private companies, with buyers doing so voluntarily and providers self-regulating (hence the problems). Is that not the case?
Simple, effective, efficient, and boring. And hard to virtue signal one's way out of.
Also, be honest about how we're rapidly barreling toward the end of economic growth because the weather keeps destroying industrial and agricultural production.
Unless OP is just using hyperbole to make a point, in which case maybe they shouldn't.
You must have heard about the fires in California in the last few years, right? Look up what's happened to air quality on the west coast from the smoke.
Edit: Santiago in Chile seems to be close to such a case. Interestingly, 70% of the population want to see a return to public ownership of water rights. And it's pretty hard to find evidence having private ownership of water rights is helping ensure long term supply for all.
Increasing the price causes demand to drop. Increasing it so the demand matches the supply means no shortage.
Water usage is just as elastic as any other consumption behavior. Heck, I halved mine this year by simply selectively letting parts of my yard dry up in this hot summer. And enterprises can pass increased prices on to the final product.
Some rich people didn't want their lawns to go brown, so an entrepreneur rented some tanker trucks, filled them up outside the region, drove back to Seattle, and watered their lawns.
This caused a hue and cry about how unfair this was, and another ordinance was passed to make it illegal to truck water in.
However, it is exactly what you asked for - an example of the free market delivering when the price is high enough.
As for biological needs, I recommend reading "Empire of the Summer Moon" about how the Comanche were able able to survive in the desert. This included killing their horses and drinking the contents of their stomachs as an example of how far they would go to get water.
Besides, biological drinking water is only a tiny, tiny fraction of human water consumption.
Another example, when there are natural disasters, entrepreneurs would truck in bottled water and gasoline and sell it (until the government put a stop to that, too).
Some businesses die but the others adapt and find solutions. It’s where human creativity and innovation shines. An expensive item is a great motivator to find alternatives.
"The trend is clear: Emissions generally rise with wealth...The richest 1%—... earning $109,000 a year—are by far the fastest-growing source of emissions."[1]
And at least according to that article, it's not due to international disparities in wealth.
"people’s emissions within countries now overwhelms the country-to-country disparities."
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-wealth-carbon-emissi...
I think air flight is typically my largest source of CO2 emissions, and certainly will be this year.
Let alone moving around a building-sized yacht, building and maintaining mega mansions, or flying a private jet in the super-rich circles.
Poor people are generally emitting well below the average currently. They take fewer flights, have smaller houses and buy less stuff in general. With current levels of emissions, they would be getting paid without reducing emissions at all.
Eventually after the rest of society reduces emissions, they might have to reduce emissions, but that would only be after the rest of society sacrifices much more consumption.
You need to consider the downstream effects of the tax. The oil can only get taxed once, but the effects are compounded throughout the entire economy. For example, truck drivers would see dramatically increased expenses. For examples, truck drivers would have to pass on the cost of the fuel to transport freight. Meanwhile, other drivers will be forced to quit, which reduces our total freight throughput, which makes shipping even more expensive.
Either the customer pays the retailer who pays the truck driver with the exact money the truck driver paid, or the customer does something cheaper and there is more money to go around because the customer is not paying for all the harms trucking does (including their kid's asthma bills and several dollars per gallon in road upkeep).
The only way demand for freight transport would go down is by reducing inefficient dead space in product packaging - ie exactly the type of efficiency improvement we would want from a tax.
If the money in is proportional to carbon, and the money out gets distributed perfectly evenly by population then the net result is progressive.
The only way that can not be true is if emissions scale up faster than income scales down or if we listen to people citing fake concern for the poor to enact a means testing program that redirects 90% of the money to serco and other cronies for enforcement.
Monetarily, sure, but in practice the effect would feel regressive because income scales more faster than emissions. Someone who is 1000x richer than average isn't going to live in 1000 houses, eat 1000x more beef, or drive 1000 cars simultaneously. This means that they're in a much better position to simply eat the cost of a carbon tax while the poor and middle class will actually have to make the sacrifices to reduce emissions by carpooling, turning the heat down in winter, etc.
The tax is mildly regressive and the rebate is extremely progressive. The poor person who makes all those lifestyle changes in response to the tax is much better off than they were as the upper bound on their contribution sans rebate is less than what they were paying to begin with.
So stop your fake concern for the poor who would have more options, and more spare cash.
They would have fewer options. They already have the choice to reduce to emissions without a carbon tax, and now they have financial pressure to go down that path.
And no, it's not "fake concern". As I've said many times, I'm pro carbon tax. I'm explaining the real economic factors that make the carbon tax politically infeasible. All it takes is a particularly cold month in the north, where people are far more reliant natural gas heating, for the pro-carbon tax camp to completely burn all their political capital for the next hundred years.
If you have $200 in your pocket for heating and natural gas heating costs $190 (because you have an equal share if the rebate but a smaller than equal share of the tax burden), you're far better off than if you have $100 in your pocket and it costs $100. If there are other options that cost $150, you now have the freedom to choose them when previously your only choice was gas.
The poor don't have to sacrifice anything unless the average carbon emissions drop to below what the poor are currently consuming. Until that happens, the poor can continue to emit whatever they currently do and get paid for the fact that they don't consume more.
This is, in many ways, the ideal for most people. One can say "Climate Change is really important" while blaming "The Corporations" for what they're doing and simultaneously blaming the President for "raising the price of gas".
That way you can appear virtuous while not sacrificing anything.
Coal emits twice the CO2 per energy than natural gas does.
You still have an incentive to reduce emissions, because your dividend is the same regardless and you can reduce your fees. And since most people's net emissions are less than average, most people come out ahead.
But this year the penny finally dropped for me how demoralizingly futile it is to make rational carbon policy in the US by talking about its merits. The success of the Inflation Reduction Act ($370bn for climate) was entirely due to a cunning political hack: not taxing individuals (only corporations) and reducing the deficit at the same time (by staffing the IRS to enforce existing tax collection laws), so that it could be acceptable to the holdout conservative Democrats.
Let's say there is a wood stove that increases cooking efficiency by 2x, this means a lot less trees have to be cut down for cooking. However to a person for whom trees are free, they aren't going to buy a better stove just to save on emissions, they will only start once they run out of trees which is when it is already too late. By charging a fee per tree, even if it is a token amount, people will start calculating and weighing whether cutting down more trees or less trees and buying the stove is the better option. Once they have made the initial investment they may even tell their neighbours about it. A single person changing their mind, can change the minds of everyone.
You say that like it's not the goal.
Yes. People will do fewer polluting things. That's the point.
The harms from the externalities vastly dwarf any total economic reduction.
It's also true that a person with lower-than-average emissions will pay out less than they get back. They'll have a strong incentive to reduce emissions, but even if they don't reduce emissions they'll be better off than before. These people will be the majority.
The people who might feel worse off are those who emit a bit more than average without being rich. They'll need to modify their behaviors if they want to come out ahead. Of course that's part of the whole point.
A lot of people might actually be ok with changing their behaviors, if they know everybody's doing it so it will actually make a difference. Right now we have this public goods situation where the outcome is going to be the same regardless of what you personally do. Dealing with public goods situations is the main reason for taxes in general; it's hard to fund roads with voluntary donations, so most people are ok with paying taxes for roads.
The other benefit of fee-and-dividend is that it makes low-carbon energy sources more competitive. It's not just about getting people to carpool or whatever, it's about getting fossil fuels off the grid and the roads, because they just can't compete.
Of course if that works, the end result might be higher prices that don't get reflected in the dividend. But we don't end up in a apocalyptic nightmare, so there's that.
Wealthy people own businesses and those businesses have a strong incentive to reduce emissions, when they do, they end up reducing the tax burden on their consumers.
The average person wouldn’t have to organize carpools, though it’d certainly be incentivized - at least at the beginning, I’m assuming most wouldn’t, so not doing that, you’d still be a net recipient of tax money. But part of the whole point is that we can’t continue living exactly the same way, if we don’t want to destroy ourselves, and especially our children.
The entire point of a pigovian tax is to create a deadweight loss proportional to the harm an externality causes.
>The amount of money that gets distributed to you with a carbon dividend inevitably is going to be less than your additional tax burden or the consumer surplus from the goods and services you otherwise would have bought without the tax
As I already said, the difference between what you pay in and get out is an incentive to make you cease the activity that produces the harmful externality.
>Of course, you make very good arguments about why the dead weight loss is absolutely dwarfed by the negative externalities of fossil fuel emissions.
That is how a pigovian tax is supposed to work.
>Even if you don't consider climate change, air pollution is a contributor of over 100,000 deaths in America alone. However, this point is moot if people aren't willing to act on those externalities.
This is irrelevant, lots of countries have adopted carbon taxes. The benefits are obvious, less bureaucracy for businesses, more money to poor people, less shaming for a lack of personal action, mitigating climate change, less corruption and wasteful spending.
The alternative to carbon taxes isn't no carbon taxes, the alternative is more micromanagement by the government which is more likely to result in even bigger deadweight losses which are unlikely to be proportional to the amount of negative externalities that are being avoided.
But why would anyone voluntarily follow that? It's not like money is generated out of nothing.
That hasn't stopped taxes in a democracy.
Ideally, this would have the following effects:
* Make local manufacturing more competitive - introducing only local regulations gives companies a big incentive to produce in less stringently regulated areas. Correcting this could bring back manufacturing and be politically popular.
* Give companies an incentive to develop sustainable processes.
* Give companies an incentive to lobby other governments to introduce more stringent rules.
* Align cost of goods with actual externalities, motivating people to buy more sustainable products.
* The toll revenue could be used to improve carbon saving initiatives, such as public transport and sequestration.
And the next president will lose the election in a landslide for ending the free money.
Instead, they could tax gasoline at $1/gallon (and do similar things for other greenhouse gas sources, such as coal, meat and concrete), and use the resulting funds for carbon capture.
If you want a progressive tax, tax new cars at $2 * 200,000 miles / EPA combined miles per gallon. This will instantly make all new cars carbon neutral or negative at the tailpipe. Similarly, you could also tax embodied carbon on all new goods.
The $1/gallon of gas computation works like this:
Burning a gallon of gas produces 20lbs of CO2. (The O2 in the CO2 comes from the atmosphere, explaining why the CO2 weighs more than the gasoline.)
A ton is 2000 lbs, so 100 gallons of gas emits a ton of CO2.
Atmospheric carbon capture looks like it will cost roughly $100 / ton at scale, or $1/gallon of gasoline.
Taxing the C also properly accounts for different fuels having different energy per C atom.
I'm hesitant to think taxing gas at the pump makes any sense, I think maybe taxing diesel though could be a better thing because diesel is used more commercially by big rigs, which is a tax on commercial industries rather than consumers. Jet Fuel and such should have a very high tax, because that's something most people don't use, and isn't really a 'necessity'. Fuel at ports should also be taxed, and I think ports/airports should be under some global climate action 'congress' or something that ensures equal taxation and carbon offsets globally are being applied.
Though, if we were to use all the tax revenue or at least maybe 50% for UBI to say anyone with < 100k annual salary, I think it wouldn't matter if we taxed everything more evenly including gas at the pump, in fact that'd probably encourage more support for taxing carbon offsets since much of it goes to taxpayers as cash in their pocket.
seems fair without rewarding the people who drive clunkers.
But you know there's only one political party in america willing to spend money to help preserve the environment. And there's another party in america that actively works against any environmental policy for purely culture-war reasons. And if party A raises the price of gasoline, then party A gets immediately voted out and party B will find a way to push even harder in the opposite direction.
We need a way to offset carbon that is politics-neutral. And I'm afraid gasoline prices are front-and-center as a political arena these days.
I'm not saying your wrong, only that raising the price of fuel raises the price of everything else. Fuel prices go up, shipping prices go up, shipping prices go up, product prices go up, product prices go up, less people can afford to life. Company expenses go up, company looks for ways to cut expenses, often by lowering employment, etc...
VS coming up with cleaner and cheaper ways to fuel things, then everything goes in the other direction. Cheaper fuel = cheaper shipping = cheaper products = more poor people can eat. Companies make more money they can hire more people, etc...
I know that's easier said than done, just pointing out raising the price of fuel is not a simple solution beacuse it has extreme consequences.
There was a comic I read a while back during the 2008 financial crisis, describing the banking sector as a group of wizards building a massive tower in a town. Eventually, it grows too large, wobbling and nearing collapse. The wizards beg the townspeople for help. The townspeople say this is the natural consequence of their actions, but the wizards counter that should their tower fall, it is large enough to do significant damage to the town as well. Thus galvanized, the town gathers together and shores up the foundations of the tower, securing it. At which point the wizards promptly go back to making it even taller and grander, because no one ever learns a lesson.
People are extremely averse to direct negative consequences of actions, but are much more nonchalant about indirect negative consequences, especially of inaction (see; the trolley problem). There is always hope of a miracle cure. That is the thrust of your argument; strong action now may fix the issue, but cause widespread suffering in the short term. Whereas the status quo is a slowly boiling pot, and perhaps someone will find a way to turn off the heat while we languish here, but more likely someone won't and waiting will lead to an even worse economic outcome when global supply chains are disrupted even more forcefully than by a simple tax hike.
You can easily find tons of articles about how inflation hurts the poor most. A carbon tax has the exact same effect as inflation as it raises the price of everything. Vs say an progressive income tax.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1097966775/inflation-poor-inc...
The best way is to make the alternatives to anything you want to get rid of overwhelmingly more attractive to decision making entities (people, companies, etc.), who will then choose with their free will. Not easy to do, but some are working on it.
I don't think "virtue signaling" (or its lack) is the problem.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/03/01/americans-lar...
1. a job tied to fossil fuels
2. concerns that energy prices will go up without fossil fuels
3. lack of alternatives for things like trucks etc.
4. Religious beliefs.
5. Trolling the libs.
6. Belief that carbon taxation is a scheme to impoverish their nation for social justice.
7. Belief that global warming will be good for their community.Just like the US car manufacturers don't really want Democrats and Repbulicans raising and lowering emissions standards every four years, big corps (other than coal producers maybe) don't really want the carbon tax to go up and down on a political whim. This is basically them setting aside the carbon tax money, and applying the carbon tax pressure to themselves internally, so they end up in the same place as a carbon tax would lead them.
As with a pure cabon tax, in many ways it doesn't matter what the money is spent on. As long as there is a financial disincentive for people to burn carbon when there's an alternative, it all kind of works out.
The problem does become partly a tragedy of the commons though. If eg China doesn’t tax carbon at all internally, then we’d need to figure out how to appropriately tax the emissions of imported finished goods so as not to incentivize them to release CO2 as a competitive advantage. Even if we do that, they may still trade with another country that doesn’t tax imported goods either. One benefit for carbon offsets is they can in theory be used to incentivize cross-border emissions reductions without requiring the poorer countries to sacrifice anything.
Another way to think about it is the right price of carbon is (in steady state) is the cost to remove the equivalant amount of carbon if we dont want to worsen the situation. So a small portion of this revenue (carbon-tax) could be directed towards subsidizing properly vetted carbon removal techs. of course this number will be high initially so we'll have to taper in the change but it will also give chance for better public acceptance and maturity for carbon removal tech.
You have completely forgotten about import/export. If you tax only American fuel, then American exports become very expensive, while imports become cheap.
Guess what happens next?
Setting up a tax scheme for fuel that taking into account import/export is incredibly complicated, your system is probably the most complex solution there is!
I don't think there is the political will to jack up carbon costs and force consumers to decide between paying or just using less.
What next? Carbon emission futures? A thriving market where the futures are traded? All the while the emissions continue abated and even increase.
1. Two decades ago, the UN set up a program for selling voluntary carbon credits under the assumption that renewables would not be price-competitive for a very long time, if ever, and would therefore need a subsidy.
2. Companies started buying those credits, even though they didn't have to, just to look good to consumers. As a result, the subsidy didn't cost taxpayers a dime.
3. Renewable technology developed faster than expected (in part due to the subsidy). Now renewables are competitive with fossil fuels and projects would be built even if companies didn't buy the credits.
People should be absolutely thrilled by this outcome.
This isn't true. They might be competitive in a shallow sense (price per kWh) but in terms of benefit (specifically, reliability and output capacity), they're barely a sniff—hence the nightmare in Europe right now.
That doesn't even factor in the fossil fuels and emissions that need to be expended to create those renewables (which are greater than the individual renewable will ever offset in its lifetime).
How would being more reliant on fossil fuels help them now? The problem is they are struggling to import enough. If they had more fossil fuel plants and less wind and solar they'd have to import even more fossil fuels.
> That doesn't even factor in the fossil fuels and emissions that need to be expended to create those renewables (which are greater than the individual renewable will ever offset in its lifetime).
False. There have been dozens of lifecycle analysis studies they find a more than 10x advantage of solar and wind over gas per kwh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Right. That problem exists because they drew back their own fossil fuel production to switch to renewables which are not providing the commensurate energy required, forcing them to go to outside providers.
> False. There have been dozens of lifecycle analysis studies they find a more than 10x advantage of solar and wind over gas per kwh.
Now do the factories to produce the components in the renewables, the trucks to ship the components, the equipment to install the components, the trucks to get the workers to maintain the components, etc. Batteries? You need massive trucks that can only run on diesel to mine the metals necessary to make them work.
You're releasing insane amounts of emissions and wasting tons of energy just to say you're not on paper. It's absolute lunacy.
> The goal of such assessments is to cover the full life of the source, from material and fuel mining through construction to operation and waste management.
So the studies should already be including everything you mentioned.
For example, a quick check [1]:
> Peak power production for the coal power plant was in July 2020 (719GWh) which was also the month for the lowest output for wind (34.6GWh). In July, the wind turbines produced just 4.8% of the power produced by the coal power plant while operating at only 9.4% of rated capacity. In the month of July, it would require at least 3,764 similar sized wind turbines to replace the electricity generated by the coal power plant which was operating at just 47% of rated capacity.
[1] https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/08/19/clash_of...
I don't doubt that studies dealing in hypotheticals show that it's possible, but the reality doesn't match up. Solar is in the same boat.
Cost of net power with sufficient availability is the relevant metric, as that's how things are compared cost wise.
So if we take the figures from the article, you're comparing a 128MW net wind farm (which is around $30/MWh) to a 1681MW coal plant (which is around $60/MWh for existing plants) and then doing a shocked pikachu face when that specific wind farm spends some time producing 36MW.
Put another wind farm in an uncorrelated or anticorrelated area, and you are paying the same per MW on the worst month, but you have 100% surplus to export or incentivise storage development in the average month.
The North Sea was by far their biggest field for oil and gas and it is in sharp decline despite continued exploration. Even Norway is still exploring. The other big producer was the Netherlands, they closed their gas field because of earthquakes.
> Now do the factories to produce the components in the renewables, the trucks to ship the components, the equipment to install the components, the trucks to get the workers to maintain the components, etc. Batteries? You need massive trucks that can only run on diesel to mine the metals necessary to make them work.
As I said, dozens of life cycle analysis studies take all of this into account and come to the conclusion of a more than 10x advantage.
Ah yes. Everything that is not solar or wind had massive failures due to market and climate.
The small contribution from the solar and wind is operating about as per normal.
Must have been because we built too much solar and wind, not too little.
What a hilariously bad argument.
> That doesn't even factor in the fossil fuels and emissions that need to be expended to create those renewables (which are greater than the individual renewable will ever offset in its lifetime).
This is a strict multiple of energy payback time, which is somewhere between 6 months and 5 years with current generation panels, and 1 month to 3 years with wind. Depending on how far down the fossil fuel pipeline that goes up a bit, but you have to multiply your fossil fuels by the same factor. It's so far from equal that it's not worth considering, and it gets further from equal as the renewable portion of silicon refining and composite manufacture increase.
Is that what I said? No. They started turning off fossil fuel power plants—and ironically, nuclear—to precipitate the move to renewables and improve their emissions scores relative to in-country energy production.
That led to reliance on third-party producers like Russia for actual baseload energy (because they're well aware renewables can't/won't cut it) and then had the bright idea to place sanctions on Russia who promptly cut them off.
The whole thing is a giant circle jerk to fit into the PCA/ESG scams (which are low-key money laundering operations). The solution to climate change was/is nuclear power (and stuff like this [1]), which go figure, the same malthusian parasites who have found a blood source in government and NGOs continue to ignore in favor of less-viable solutions (wind, solar, and batteries).
The demise of the whole thing is all but booked and it's deeply enjoyable to watch all of the zealots backing it scramble. I only hope that their foolishness doesn't lead to people being hurt/killed.
Yes that's exactly what you said. You didn't say 'the total amount of slack in the system was reduced' or 'old powerplants were turned off before having a full replacement'. You framed it as a consequence of using wind and solar.
And keeping the nuclear power plants on wouldn't have helped during the heat wave because they were all failing too.
They weren’t failing. They voted to phase them out [1].
And France made a similar bonehead mistake: there were regulations put in place by the government after the 2003 heatwave regarding water temperature limits [2] and wildlife which forced them to be powered down. Hilariously enough, they chose to do this not just during a heatwave, but also when there was a massive maintenance backlog due to the pandemic.
So, yes, they would have helped immensely.
As per usual, the government and their zealots created the mess and blamed it on someone else. These people are halfwits and their destruction will be of great benefit and security to humanity.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/glossary/letter_n#nuclear_ph...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
You're really selling small modular power generation with fewer failure modes quite well here. You're making the other options sound less reliable with each comment. Do you work for the solar lobby?
It's just not working quite as well as it could, because offset companies cheat. Carbon offsets now don't really help with the climate, and their price doesn't reflect the real cost of the emissions. And in the process, companies can present themselves as "carbon-neutral" when they really aren't, and thus can avoid consumer or even further regulatory actions.
I've never seen a cost analysis that takes into account the unreliability of sources that rely on sun or wind. I don't know exactly how a proper model would account for these factors, but surely ignoring the unreliability isn't the right answer.
Since wind/solar is still a small part of the overall contribution, there is no need to model unreliability.
Ideally this would BECOME an issue in the future.
But if it makes you feel better, I guess that makes it all good, right?
The problem is that they have taken other more reliable sources offline. If the 25% you reference were more reliable they wouldn't have to warn people about power usage just in case it got cloudy or wasn't breezy enough. I read that they had to turn off a desalination plant because of the power crunch. That makes their drought even worse. Doesn't sound like winning to me.
Or for hydro? With dam work? Generator replacement (explosion at Hoover dam this year)
Or nuclear, for fuel rod changeouts?
While solar has more nightly downtime at non-peak demand, both wind and solar are often configured in volumes and geo distributions that reduce maintenance outage (a function of lower output per unit)
One of the reasons that solar projects are so easy to finance is because of their predictability and the fact they can be accurately predicted to correlate with peak demand periods years in the future.
You only hit problems when you are no longer burning fossil fuels and so have no more to turn off. And that's a good problem to have.
I'm referring to the fact that the wind is not reliable or even predictable. The sun is more predictable, but weather can greatly affect solar power generation.
It is nice that the sun is up during part of daily peak demand and is strongest during the season when AC is heavily used. But IIRC peak demand happens several hours after solar panels are generating peak energy.
> You only hit problems when you are no longer burning fossil fuels and so have no more to turn off. And that's a good problem to have.
The point is that if you are looking at the cost of building a solar or wind farm you have to account for the fact that you cannot shut down another power source one-for-one.
If you have to pay for the new source and keep the old source online then the new source is by definition not the same price as the old source.
No, peak 'net demand' happens later, because solar has reduced the actual demand peak. This is like saying "eating food just made my hunger peak later"
> If you have to pay for the new source and keep the old source online then the new source is by definition not the same price as the old source.
Yes, but the old source likely has high fuel costs, so when you stop burning the fuel, you not only save carbon and pollution, you save money.
This isn't particularly complicated.
Your second point doesn't make any sense because the cost of fuel is already factored into the original analysis that supposedly equates the cost of renewable and non-renewable energy generation. If you want to mention that cost again, then I would mention again that supply crunches raise the cost of construction of solar and wind farms. All of these costs were already accounted for so it doesn't make sense to bring them up again.
You can also choose when you want the peak to occur to some degree, by positioning your panels in both location and direction. Semi-random alignment combined with solar noon happening over a hour for a timezone means the 'peak' is often rounded and flattened, and shifted in the direction of the solar compared with the load.
e.g. if you have a coastal area with demand on the coast and utility solar mostly inland, then you get a different timeshift between load and supply depending on where the coast is positioned in a West-East direction.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue regarding price, but since renewables are cheaper than even running existing fossil fuel plants, I'm not sure it matters.
The benefit is that it will have a lower carbon footprint because the ISP's power is provided exclusively by wind and solar. The downside is that it will only run when there is wind power or solar power available.
Would you make the switch?
I think the actual number may be 90% (daytime; obviously more like 100% at night, for which you have some storage).
But at this scale you want multiple types of power anyway just to avoid correlated failures, cf. “all of our coal plants have had to shut down at the same time because the coal miners organised a national strike”.
Question then is: is the cheapest solution to this already green, and if not, what do we need to invent such that the cheapest solution is also green?
From what I’ve seen, batteries at this scale are currently on par with nuclear for cost, but that’s the easiest hurdle to pass given how expensive nuclear is. Global grid is theoretically fine, and the purchase cost isn’t ridiculous, but I don’t know anything about geopolitical issues so it could be anything from “a way to bring the world together” to “laughably naive”, and I don’t know anything about ongoing maintenance costs. Hydrogen is cheap, I don’t know the metallurgy issues. Hydro is great, but has its own issues.
1. A large state-owned African agricultural company is using satellite and soil-sample data to measure the carbon sequestration potential of agricultural land if certain farming techniques are used (no-till, etc). They use satellite and soil-sample data feeding into a biological model implemented in fortran (from some academic paper that may or may not be replicated) for the estimation. The plan is to go to farmers and ask them to switch the technique. The company would sell carbon credits, give the participating farmers a cut and keep the rest. This has great potential! but the large-scale implementation is very difficult manage. The company would at least need to randomly check in on participating farmers. It should also take soil samples over time to make sure the technique is working. Carbon credit sellers should be auditable, but the government relations and size of the company might make that difficult to do rigorously.
2. An analytics tool hopes to help large companies identify the parts of their supply chain that can reduce the overall carbon emissions of a product with the lowest price increase to the end-consumer. Think about BMW sourcing steel from China for example. If this helps companies actively manage their supply chain in order to lower emissions, then suppliers will adopt to low-carbon techniques over time. The problem is that it requires suppliers to disclose their emissions accurately. Many supply chains in carbon-intensive industries are global and fragmented. If a bad-actor supplier on the other side of the world lied and got caught, they could just change their name and carry on.
3. Global supply chains also present issues with carbon taxes at the drilling/mining site. You can't force foreign countries to tax this (and if you did they would be incentivized to cheat), and you can't force foreign companies to accurately disclose energy use. A domestic energy tax would make local manufacturing uncompetitive, which is something most countries are not willing to sacrifice.
The debate between carbon neutrality vs carbon/extraction taxes is the choice between inventing an entire new bureaucracy of enforcement (carbon audits, carbon disclosure, etc) or the impossible task of rallying and enforcing global action (every country imposes the same tax, no exceptions). As an engineer, I understand the seeming beauty and efficiency of the second option, but I think the first is ultimately going to be our best bet.
That's what tariffs are for? Products from countries that don't tax carbon could just get a carbon tariff added on import.
On the other hand, if the US and other high-consumption countries collaborated on this it would probably be effective.
Like I said, I go back and forth on it. Or better put, I think both approaches are valid albeit with big implementation challenges.
Ironically, Germany has a fuel tax https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/energiestg/__2.html that is 4 times as high as that of California https://www.foxla.com/news/californias-gas-tax-goes-up-july-... , which apparently has the highest fuel tax in the US.
Don't fight the market, act on the source and the market will adjust.
Which basically means that while you are still offsetting carbon by generating solar on your roof - since you've sold your share - that morally you are still responsible for your carbon footprint.
I opted not to sell mine. It wasn't worth a ton of money and part of the reason I got solar anyways is to reduce the carbon footprint. It also seemed crazy to me that this was even an option that existed.
Apparently, people are unwilling to do so in meaningful numbers.
Ergo: They do not see this as an actual problem, which means problem is solved. We just need to accept that.
I do think markets are a very useful social technology for allocating resources. But they can also be abused for distributing liability and they're slow. There's a reason most polities abandon the market model for urgent tasks like firefighting.
At some point, I think we need to decide if we want to continue the world trying to be democratic, or if we want more-or-less benevolent, eco-dictatorships.
We (Jasmine (YC-S22)) (https://www.jasmine.energy/) are building a RECs exchange. Governments handle REC verification. We handle liquidity, efficiency, and traceability.
They're arguing that giving money to renewables producers should only be done, if the renewable wouldn't otherwise be a viable business, and that some credits are from older renewable energy projects that got grandfathered in, before the offset organisations decided that they could spend their money more effectively elsewhere since the renewables would get built anyway.
RECs are supposed to be universal because they're about tracking the production/consumption of all renewable energy on the grid. That universality makes fraud much harder.
This quote on your site appears to confirm that:
> Most generators don't know they are accruing valuable credits they can sell. If you are a generator selling these credits you could off-set the cost of your system.
A guy was literally making up RINs (renewable identification numbers) in a spreadsheet and selling them to companies as renewable energy credits. The only reason he got caught is because he was buying a bunch of sports cars and leaving them parked all over his neighborhood, leading his neighbors to assume he was a drug dealer.
It's even dumber than that. You just have to promise not to chop down some existing trees that you would chop down in the absence of payments. Nevermind if you really would chop them down or not. Or if you've already sold the same promise on the same grove of trees to another buyer.
As for the certificates from Gold standard: They also have recycling projects, reforestation (yeah, i know that the discussion about this is ongoing as well!) and some programs where poor people are helped with appliances that are less environmentally damaging. Everyone can invest in whatever project one wants. We can argue about which of these programs help the most (especially since we don't really differentiate between carbon reduction, carbon sinks and carbon capture), BUT what counts is that we, as people of this planet, are trying and improving.
both counts. intent and efficiency (results).
the big problem is that there is no agency that would fine/sue the shit out of these scams.
There are toxic emissions laws that "prevent" companies from polluting too much. Or rather they limit the amount each company can emit. To get around that limit they just subcontracted to tons of smaller companies, each one gets it's quota of emissions.
It still incentivises building wind farms quicker, and the more wind farms we have the less dependent we are on gas.
At Sylvera, a carbon offset rating agency, we create very thorough analyses of all projects issuing offsets. Based on scores for carbon score, additionality and permanence we create ratings that buyers can trust to avoid being scammed. This transparency is fundamental to the functioning of this market.
I run https://carbonremoved.com/ for individuals and we're beginning to work with businesses too.
Email me at "ewan@" the domain above if you'd like to take real action towards net zero.
Is there some sort of reputable certification board in this space?
John Oliver had a great piece looking at the industry (linked elsewhere here already), but didn't provide much actionable advice. (Other than to never give The Nature Conservancy any money under any circumstances.)