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Comment by j_walter | Hacker News Reader

This has been known in the industry for years. Everyone is pushing companies to be carbon neutral, but that doesn't really mean money is going where it should...it just looks good on paper.

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.

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> are doing their due diligence

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.

Agreed. We just need to tax carbon or the externality of emissions more. It doesn't make sense for companies to figure out climate/energy science out on their own anyways. Its completely silly to expect that every mid-size company figure this out on their own and voluntary pay more than their competitors and lose any pricing edge.

The money equivalency is the problem, not sure taxing it will work either, only because will set the tax too low, or it will get raised too high and be used to do something unrelated. It doesn't matter if they pay enough to sequester equivalent carbon, it matters if it actually gets done. What if we tax, but in the form of stable or usable carbon? If you emit X tons of co2 then you have to bring Y tons of coal, diesel, crude, diamonds, graphite, preserved wood or whatever, to government sequestration sites, or pay someone else to do so. Laws to prevent the government from using the stuff, and you'd drive up the price of fossil fuels simultaneously to account for their externality as well.

> or it will get raised too high and be used to do something unrelated

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.)

> government sequestration sites

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?

Great point. I have a comment below that goes into some of the difficulty with this distinction.

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.

> tax carbon or the externality of emissions more.

Start first with usage of private jets or TV sets?

Start by taxing carbon by the pound, and let the market figure out how to optimize around it.

This can only be said bluntly: carbon trade schemes are and always have been about creating trillion-dollar money laundering opportunities. The problem is unspecified. Results are unmeasurable. The usual suspects are conspicuously present.

In theory a carbon trade scheme is more efficient, in practice governments don't shrink the quantity of emissions certificates fast enough, they give away free certificates to heavy polluters like coal power instead of running an auction.

...and it's all sanctioned by the government because they make boatloads of money in the process. All in the name of the greater good.

>You can thank the government for little oversight in the carbon offset process that they developed.

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?

Yes but companies who overly rely on carbon offsets are shooting themselves in the foot. With emission targets gradually lowering and regulations becoming more and more ambitious, offsets will become more expensive.

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.

> With emission targets gradually lowering and regulations becoming more and more ambitious, offsets will become more expensive.

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.

Good luck with that: https://www.theclimatewarehouse.org/

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