Sylvera response to The Guardian’s analysis of rainforest offsets

It doesn't matter that much if 70% or 90% of carbon offsets are flawed. In both cases the conclusion can only be that by default you shouldn't trust carbon offsets.

For me offsetting is the opposite of the Zeno's Paradox. I will emit today an amount X of carbon, so I will pay this company some amount of money so they over some time (years, decades?) will capture that amount of carbon back. The speed of emission is far faster than the one of capturing back, even if we assume that all emitters somewhat offsetting them (that is not true, specially for the worst offenders).

And if we had millions of years left that wouldn't be so severe, but we don't. Already a lot of positive feedback loops are triggered so the natural world is having its own share of emissions, and they don't buy carbon credits.

The other reason offsetting is wrong (at least for most used capture methods) is that they aren't taking out carbon from the carbon cycle. If you plant a tree, it still is in the carbon cycle, while the carbon that I'm emitting have high odds of coming from carbon that wasn't in the cycle (buried oil, coal or natural gas that were out for millions of years).

Back in 2006 I left a career in law because I was excited by the idea of carbon offsets. With a partner, I ran tests providing fuel efficient stoves to schools which used wood fuel from non-sustainable sources in southern African countries.

The logic was the new stoves used less fuel than old stoves, thereby creating offsets which we could sell to tourists. We folded after the pilot for the following reasons:

1. We couldn’t prove the schools didn’t plough the money saved on fuel into other items with a carbon footprint, eg fuel for buses.

2. We started to wonder what the availability of offsets did to offset buyers psychologically and whether offering our offsets may give people a sort of licence to continue over-consuming fossil fuels. As an example, I started justifying to myself taking flights because we were running the pilot. That wasn’t good!

I found the Sylvera analysis interesting because - obviously - they say that 70% of the offsets they examined did not achieve their intended effect. As a lawyer, that sounds like a massive misrepresentation problem and some class action lawsuits are incoming.

Secondly - because all the questions about legitimacy focus on quality of a limited number of model assumptions for the future. But not on whether modeling precise deliverables like offsets is possible at all at the interface of complex human and environmental systems.

It is my contention that offsets can’t accurately model their impact within these systems (eg Javons paradox is a potential issue for offsets never acknowledged in offset models) and the offsets as modeled reductions - sadly - will always be chimeric at worst and directional at best.

I think this is important because I think it's more economically productive to give 1% to offsets that are supporting the correct technologies than it is to give 100% that are just bullshitting (claiming trees that were already growing).

For those of us reading this who would like to genuinely and effectively offset emissions, is anyone able to suggest some really robust schemes where you can be confident the offsets are real? I'm especially interested in schemes where I can be confident buying additional credits has a marginal impact.

I've used an investment in the Solar Schools coop [1] for this in the past, which I'm confident is 'real', but there are probably much cheaper ways. One of the reason I liked the coop is that it (presumably) also helps kids to learn about renewable energy, and helps schools with their energy bills.

[1] https://schools-energy-coop.co.uk/

The headline is better than I expected, and it looks like the article also frames it that way - 30% are good estimates compared to the guardians claim that only 4% are.

The article claims 30% are top rated and only 25% are "junk", with others being in-between. So this headline is misleading.

Is there a list of the 30% that ARE effective? I notice GivingWhatWeCan has the "Climate change fund" as a top rated fund

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/founders-pledge-cl...

The only other place I can think of where a 30% success rate is considered good is baseball batting averages.

The big takeaway from these articles that are coming out should be that baseline estimates are really difficult to do. For any carbon project that is deferring harvest you need to be able to accurately predict what would happen if an area was not included in the project, that is, predict a future that will not occur.

Project developers may use one method to do this, rating agencies may use another method, but at the end of the day we can never actually know. There are so many unknown physical, social, and economic factors that go into whether or not some area will be harvested. This is why we see such huge ranges in estimates of impact.

Even 100% worthless offsets can be worthwhile, as a monetary expression of preference for less carbon intensive approaches.

But awareness that offsets aren't real is still good, to lessen the lure of moral licencing ("stop complaining that I killed your wife, I've got my letter of indulgence paid, signed and stamped, what more do you want!")

I take an optimistically cynical view of this pattern. As a rule, we tend to solve things wrong the first few tries. Carbon offsets and credits and the policy and technology and market pricing soup is going to be an absolute shit show before it can hope to get past that point, so on with the shit show. First the visionaries over promise, then the con artists do, then the marketers do, then sales, then product, then engineering does, and then it works.

Much like crypto currencies.