Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

I.e. the value is determined at the time of delivered carbon offsets, and the instrument's price floats on the market before that time, including relative to how likely / valuable the delivery is

If company A buys a carbon offset from entity X, and it becomes increasingly apparent that entity X isn't going to be able to deliver the face value in terms of carbon, the instrument bought by company A should decrease in value.

Consequently, next time around, company A would not purchase from entity X.

Which is exactly what you'd want to happen!

Corollary: Verification by third party should be required, with less measurable schemes less valued.

Multiple satellites confirming forests intact? Proof. Direct air capture or weathering? Proof.

Some nebulous walk through how this might have influenced this other thing? Eh...

> Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on.

> The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota.

> Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emis...

I kindly disagree, and I think it is extremely important to understand that. This tech is fundamentally flawed and completely misses the point: climate change (hence CO2) is only a symptom of our biggest problem.

Our biggest problem is abundant energy:

1. Because we have access to a lot of energy, we transform the world in a way that is killing biodiversity: we are currently living a mass extinction (that's not a prediction, that's a fact, it's happening, we can measure it right now). We should do less with less, and preserve habitat for biodiversity. There is no high-tech solution to that, we should preserve life on Earth.

2. Because that abundant energy is mostly fossil based, it emits a ton of CO2. That creates climate change which threatens our very survival (now in the short term). Climate change will create global instability, mass immigration, wars, famines, etc. We don't want that, so we need to emit much, much less CO2. So much less, in fact, that the only viable solution is to do less with less. One could argue that we should "just" replace fossil fuels with better energies (good luck with that, we are not even remotely on that path), but that would not remove point 1 above.

3. Fossil fuels are not unlimited. The peak of conventional oil production was in 2008. The global peak for oil is around now, for gas it is soon. From the peak on, energy will become harder and harder to get (which will induce price instability). Whether we care about climate change and biodiversity or not, fossil energy is going down soon. We don't have viable replacements, so we will have to do less with less. Without abundant energy, we have the same kind of consequences as climate change: global instability, famines, etc. We need to prepare our society to live with less energy. Would you rather go to space on holiday, or eat?

Finally, CO2 removal requires a ton of energy. The only way it can ever possibly be useful is if we suddenly find a way to completely replace fossil energy with renewables (say with nuclear fusion). But it's really not clear at all if we will find such an energy now (nope, wind and solar are not viable replacements for all fossil fuels). Even if we did suddenly get fusion to work, it's already too late: it would take a lot of time to build enough plants everywhere and then rebuild the whole infrastructure to remove fossil fuel.

We need to act now, for our survival. It's high time we accepted that we failed to replace fossil fuels entirely, and even if we did we would still be in a mass extinction. We need to do less with less. Remove what's unnecessary, keep the essential.

It does not mean going back to how people lived in the Middle Age. We need a lot of clever technology if we want to do less with less. That's actually more challenging than what we are doing now, so we need clever people to rethink society and do less with less.

Almost the entirety of carbon emissions in cities comes from 1) home heating and 2) transportation, both of which could be significantly impacted by city policy from environmentalist municipal politicians.

For example:

* separated bike lanes (incredibly cheap in the grand scheme of things)

* pedestrianization of public spaces

* legalizing relatively denser apartment buildings everywhere.

* public transit improvements

All work to take CO2 emitting cars off the road

Political movement toward bans on gas for home heating (already occurring in many places) a further way to reduce CO2 emissions.

This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason.

When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear -- well... put it like this: If you want right-wing populist governments, that's how you're going to get them.

For stuff like direct air capture, not for afforestation.

Carbon credits are just nihlist virtue tokens that spread viral malignant bureaucracy. It's a made up thing to insert party faithful into organizations to "manage," this pretend virtue money.

There's also a shift to renewables - the public at large especially jumped on it because fossil-genereated electricity simply became expensive and there are government subsidies in place to to further sweeten the deal.

There's a law coming into force soon which will allow apartment blocks to produce more solar energy than they consume and sell it, which wasn't the case to date.

Overall the system is working as intended and the share of renewables went from a low point of 11% in 2018 to 20% in 2022 and the trend is likely to continue considering how many new solar projects are in the pipeline.

https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-...

Say Carbon-capture were at a point where we could actually say that my paying $100 caused an extra metric ton of CO2 to be extracted from the atmosphere.

Then it actually would work to reduce what I can and offset the rest. Carbon is fungible. If I release 100 tons and capture 120 tons, I've done the world a favor.

The issue is simply that the Carbon Capture schemes seem to be hot air.

This is true, but the low hanging fruit (in terms of cost) in terms of drawdown might be developing countries, where things like birth control, paying farmer not to cut down rainforest, etc can be done inexpensively.

The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?

Additionally, when you purchase a credit you're generally purchasing a prediction of how much carbon might be absorbed in the future. For a afforestation credit, you're often purchasing the amount of carbon that forest will absorb over 100 years. No rating agency can legitimately tell you that your forest isn't going to burn down or be logged in the next century. It's a pretty ridiculous idea - the seller, purchaser, and rating agency will all probably not exist after 100 years, and the government of whatever country the forest is in will probably have been overthrown.

I think contributing money to protect and rewild nature in the interest of increasing carbon sequestration is a great idea that should continue, but nobody should be receiving offsets that they weigh 1-to-1 against their actual real-world emissions. It just isn't a meaningful comparison. Even if your purchase actually makes an impact, it's like dumping toxic chemicals into a river and setting aside money to fund an organization that will gradually clean up the river over the next century, and then claiming that you've now achieved net-zero pollution.

Lots of opportunity here for entrepreneurs.

Existing carbon offsets are best thought of as an attempt. The opportunity is, what's next? What's going to actually solve this multi-trillion dollar problem?

My general sense is the models are good enough to tell us that a) things are headed in the wrong direction and b) we're really far off from a solution. Generally in agreement with you but I haven't researched deeply about what's needed on more modeling and how to prioritize.

It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?

I'm curious where you land on this.