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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades.

Yes, it's not a perfect unicorn magic solution, but the basic idea of putting a price on carbon and letting the genuinely hard to decarbonise sectors pay for the low hanging fruit in other areas is deeply powerful.

If you think that market forces are a powerful tool, then carbon offsets are a similar thing.

In many ways it's "effective altruism" for carbon (though that movement is under a bit of a cloud lately).

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Unfortunately while carbon offsetting might in theory be effective, in practice they've been proven to be.. terrible.

E.g. see here, where 90% of carbon offsets turned out to just be offsets on paper. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

That's one type of offset, by one provider. And others dispute the 90% figure since in the study it 10% that are rated good and only a third "useless" (for carbon, they may have biodiversity co-benefits).

So yeah, not magic, just a boring bit of economics that lets people work together efficiently via a market based process, with the chance of waste and graft that entails if not regulated well.

"Not regulated well" is almost guaranteed when it's an invented market. There are bound to be infinite loopholes, as people aren't good at creating markets with no missing or unintended consequences.

All markets are "invented". That's why countries have regulations about how how much of various poisons you can put into baby food. Otherwise people will sell you poisoned baby food because that is sometimes cheaper than non poisoned baby food.

No, most markets are regulated, but they aren't all invented.

Private property is a regulation. You can't even barter if the other guy has no concept of ownership, he'll just take it from you. Markets are invented by regulations.

I think at this point we're talking about laws, not regulations. You can come down off a mountain with a couple of stone tablets and that's enough to get going with barter, as barter is individuals deciding how much things are worth to them.

Conversely, the carbon market is invented: there is no natural value of the negative externality of pollution, so we invent one. And, as it's invented, it's riddled with holes.

> Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades.

well i don't really understand how you can lump all those together but ok... they're still not the same.

as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem hard (or hard enough) to scam in this business sector - i.e. having the same assets accounting for different offset purchases, or just conflating assets bought for different puroses with offsetting. furthermore, it just deviates us from what should be the true goal: reduce fossil fuel consumption. not to mention how big business just offload this shady business cost to the end consumer.

i'm taking the chance to share some content by people that present their points of view on this issue much better than i do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw

Youtube clickbait is exactly the kind of thing where "Downside of thing you thought was good" is likely to thrive. It's practically a genre (there's also "positive aspect of thing you thought was bad" for balance).

Fundamentally, there's a paper trail. Disney has bought credits from The Nature Conservancy. If it turns out that those credits are a scam, then we know who sold them and who bought them. There's a whole business plan setting out the case that can be reviewed by independant third parties or governments as time goes by. There's an actual forest you can visit. We can see what a market price is, and be suspicious of people claiming to have a low price compared with anyone else. We can sue companies that claim to provide one thing but don't deliver.

This is all very boring and nerdy. But it works, after a fashion. Even the videos you link, they're only really able to exist because of that paper trail.

I was going to compare this with the "additionality" debate around buying "green" energy, and remembered that Google did some good work on making sure they were getting additionality from the renewables they purchased, here's their stance on the offsets they buy:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

If Google doesn't fit then there's probably some organisation that you trust to not mess this up that has done similar.

> Conclusion

>In addition to improving our efficiency and investing in green power, we will continue to purchase carbon offsets to bring our carbon footprint down to zero. However, not all carbon offsets are created equal and ensuring that a carbon offset represents actual greenhouse gas reductions can be a long process.

> Carbon offsets are still very new. In fact, it’s entirely possible that how we offset our emissions a few years from now will be very different from how we do it today. Our offsets may be more personalized, more local and rely on emergent technologies that have a global impact. Google hopes to be part of the evolution of these new offsets, and will continue to foster current offset projects through research, collaboration and investment

> If it turns out that those credits are a scam, then we know who sold them and who bought them.

This falls under the category of "not even wrong." The problem with carbon offsets is that they are irrevocable. Company A buys offsets from Provider Z. They do so because Z offers them for the lowest price -- say, alleged reforesting in the Brazilian Amazon. Years later, it turns out that no trees were planted, and Z was a scam from the beginning.

Company A doesn't care! Carbon offsets are irrevocable under every scheme. A got to produce about as much CO2 as they were going to anyway (not much less, because the fake carbon offsets they purchased were artificially cheap bc they were a fraud), and Provider Z gets away with it bc they live in a developing country with poor enforcement of regulations.

As long as offsets are irrevocable, there will be an inevitable race to the bottom to sell cheap, fake offsets. Carbon offsets are a great example of a fake solution that economists love but do nothing to solve the underlying problem.

(I personally favor a carbon tax.)

I see a danger that poor countries can't pay this price and fail to develop.

And I hope someone gets the money of this carbon certs and does something to reduce the impact?

Poor countries are more likely to find their transition to clean energy being funded by rich countries paying carbon fees and looking for impactful ways to cut carbon.

Less carbon, more green energy, everyone is happy.

It's insisting that rich people can't offset that leaves both the rich and the poor (both between and within countries) worse off, as in other situations without market pricing to allow trade.

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