The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets | Hacker News Reader

The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets

technologyreview.com

38 pointsBrajeshwar63 comments

How about a carbon offset credit where companies pool money into a big pot and start building nuclear powerplants? And then we 'offset' their carbon emissions by them buying electricity from the plant. Instead of people lying about planting trees or other opaque nonsense. We built our way into this problem, it makes sense to build our way out.

Why nuclear plants and not solar, wind or geothermal?

It works 24/7

Except it doesn't work for the 20 years that it takes to build a nuclear power plant.

Skill issue - overcome after we build a few and streamline the onerous permitting process.

That will still take at least 20 years.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit." Long term investment into the future is a good thing.

I agree with that sentiment but do we have 20 years to spend waiting to stave off climate change?

I'm not saying to only build nuclear, but it'll certainly help us out down the line, and not building it is almost certainly far worse than the potential of it being slow to build.

Oh, is it 20 now? Strange that the US does so much worse than the global average, which is 6-8 years. Is it a competency issue, you think?

It amazes me how we could do things so quickly in the past (e.g. build a nuclear power plant, get to the moon). Shippingport was built in 4 years.

It works reliably and predictably in all weather conditions. It is able to produce enough energy to meet all of our needs.

None of the other options satisfies both of these things. Some satisfy neither.

I bet you would see more, cheaper energy if you overbuilt solar and wind and strategically placed it across all the time zones of America.

> It works reliably and predictably in all weather conditions.

So they don't need to be shut down when it's getting too hot to cool them?

https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-p...

https://www.energylivenews.com/2012/08/14/us-nuclear-plant-s...

It’s highly ironic that fossil fuels might be creating a problem that cripples nuclear fission going forward. That being said, I’m hoping we manage to scale up direct energy transfer and bypass the need for turbines.

The real irony is that environmental activism using FUD against nuclear energy tech in the ‘70s through early ‘90s crippled it even more.

We have one on central Arizona that never needs to shut down due to heat and definitely does not rely on sea water for cooling. So no, they don’t need to shut down when it gets too hot if they are designed for the heat.

It seems like that's only a question of when it needs to shut down rather than if:

https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-plants-struggling-...

> In the US, the sole desert-based nuclear facility, the Palo Verde plant in Arizona, relies on municipal wastewater rather than rivers or seas, though the facility has struggled with rising costs as more industries compete for limited supplies.

Because French were cheapening out on cooling towers and water returning back to river would be too hot. It is not problem of fission in general. It is just construction defect of those types of plants.

And takes ages to build. Solar is here now not in 15 years.

solar - nuclear is always on

wind - nuclear has a small defined footprint and doesn't kill animals

geothermal - nuclear can be built anywhere

nuclear - is safe and effective

> nuclear is always on

When is peak energy demand during the day/month/year?

> nuclear can be built anywhere

Like Fukushima? How do you handle lack of cooling water during droughts (see France 2022)?

> doesn't kill animals

How many animals get killed by wind farms roughly?

> is safe and effective

What is the cost per MWh including building cost + waste disposal costs?

>How many animals get killed by wind farms roughly?

Half a million a year in the US. Maybe.

https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/

For complete context, that's out of 7.2 billion birds in the US [0]. So 7 per 100k per year.

[0] https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrea...

>> nuclear can be built anywhere

>Like Fukushima? How do you handle lack of cooling water during droughts (see France 2022)?

Fukushima had problems that were known before the tsunami, that TEPCO failed to address.

Likewise, EDF has (and still had) power-delivery in France during the summer of 2022; "summer" being an event that has happened with some regularity in southern Europe for some time.

> How do you handle lack of cooling water during droughts (see France 2022)?

As far as I know, it was not lack of cooling water, but water retuning back to river being too hot, because that specific French design does not have cooling towers and discharges water back to river.

Solar and wind are already being built almost as fast as they can (grid permitting).

We are already building those - at significant taxpayer subsidy. The companies actually creating most of the pollution should help deal with base load by building many large nuclear plants.

What we need is a fantasy football league, but for carbon offsets.

Then maybe, people would probably understand the vast majority of them are made up or stuff that we were "doing anyway" and aren't actually incremental.

Why don't the big accounting firms (KPMG) start doing auditing of CO2 along with finance? Either audit the corporations that emit CO2, or audit the "carbon credits" to make sure they're legit? they have decades of experience specifically in sniffing out accounting bullshit, it wouldn't be much of a leap to hire a scientist or two and start auditing molecules?

Because the average carbon credit is prima facie less legit than the average crypto token. You don’t need a deep investigation when almost the entire industry looks like junk when put under the slightest scrutiny.

"They shouldn't be audited because they're obviously not legit"? That doesn't make sense. If KPMG steps up and says "hey CC buyers, show me your operations and books", either

1) they refuse, and KPMG says "Green-n-Co refuses to be audited", and demand for CC (by your presumption, bullshit) goes down.

2) they get audited, KPMG reports "Green-n-Co is bullshit", and demand for BS goes down. or...

3) audited, report says "Green-n-Co met 93% of their stated goals, we found X areas for improvement", and (presumably) GnC only gets better, and demand for working CC services increase.

So you're either against (reduced demand for bullshit), or against reducing CO2? Help me understand.

Or 4) they switch to E&Y/PwC/Deloitte for their next audit, and all of KPMG's customers do the same in fear of the same thing happening to them

KPMG and the other big accounting/consultancy firms absolutely will sell you a carbon audit, if you ask.

But their incentives are going to be aligned with the client's, and if the client makes a case for some unusual treatment of its carbon footprint they will be very receptive. This differs from accounting, where there are external regulators who specify accounting practices, and the audit firm checks that the client is close enough to complying with them, at the risk of major reputational damage for both parties.

Who would pay for that? Carbon credits exist to white-wash the emissions companies have. Their real effectiveness isn't really a concern for most companies. Just like any other virtue signalling they do...

Well, ostensibly, "green initiatives" would do that to gauge the efficacy of their own endeavors. Either the CC company could pay for their own, independent audit, or a fellow "partner" or "foundation" would periodically pay for it.

I dont necessarily disagree with you that CC is bs, but why would anyone be against going MythBusters on it? And what better mythbuster than a big-name accounting firm?

If your position is correct, then the green movement has some explaining to do. Claiming to fight something, as a non-profit, and not having any auditing or accounting measures is deceitful to their cause and makes us question whether they in fact care about the environment whatsoever. Having one of the big-five blow their cover would help rip the bandaid off and redirect that money to an effective cause.

Let's say you're a saw mill that sells your sawdust to Charmin to make toilet paper (this is a real thing btw).

Now, Mr. Silicon Valley comes along and wants to sell Ford Motor company carbon credits. So you guys ink a deal where every time you sell sawdust to Charmin, Ford gets a green carbon credit.

Where is the net carbon negative? There is none because it was a process that was already being done... but this is how the vast majority of Carbon Credits work and why this entire made up market does absolutely nothing to solve real world problems.

The most upvoted HN'er has the correct answer: Carbon Credits should ONLY go to new construction of green energy projects like Nuclear Reactors.

To some degree it probably doesn't matter. If you send $ on carbon offsets that don't offset carbon, you're still imposing an extra cost on releasing carbon and thus incentivizing yourself to release less. Basically a self-imposed carbon tax.

Obviously it would be even better if the $ went to actual carbon sequestration, but the program would presumably work to some degree if you just gave the $ to some totally unrelated cause (which seems to be the solution UC has settled on).

Carbon offsets seem like a great comparison to the way recycling ended up working out for us. Instead of actually doing anything helpful, companies began trying to make money doing everything but actually recycling the stuff. The recyclable plastic became a product to buy and sell until it got far enough removed from the people initially tasked with recycling it that it was cheaper to dump it in the Ganges River or some other place companies don't care about.

Good on them for following up to try to do something that actually works or at least attempts to solve the issue rather than "We bought carbon tax credits and now it's someone else's problem to figure out how to offset that much carbon."

If you're still committed to technocratic market-driven solutions to climate change there's the interesting idea of Carbon Quantitative Easing, essentially directly paying people to not emit carbon (read: pay oil companies to not pump out the oil they're going to pump out) or to sequester carbon with various methods. It's thought of as a carrot along with the stick of carbon taxes adding a cost to emissions.

First learned about this in the excellent sci-fi novel The Ministry for the Future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_quantitative_easing

I'll never not upvote The Ministry for the Future. It was such an interesting book once I could get my mind in the space of what it was doing.

That’s never sat right with me. I don’t pump any oil out the ground personally now, but I’m thinking about starting. What area of the country would be best for me to decide to not pump oil and cash in on this program? Should I not pump oil from both Alaska and the Gulf, in order to diversify my non-operations? Or maybe start smaller and just not pump in the Gulf to get started, and only later expand to also not pumping in Alaska?

It seems far better to pay carbon dividends to people (only humans, not fictional people) and then charge for carbon emissions (not the extraction of fossil fuels; you’re welcome to pull it out and put it in a tank paying only the emissions of your extraction equipment, but when someone buys it to consume, they pay the carbon cost.)

Tweak the dividends and carbon costs as needed to achieve the balance of policy goals.

Go ahead and buy the land & oil rights to a large oil reservoir if you want to cash in on this hypothetical program.

Paying off the oil companies in this way means the end of the oil companies. They get a one-time cash infusion but that's it, no recurring revenue. Then no more oil companies to lobby against climate change. It's the only non-revolutionary route left, probably. Oil companies aren't just going to stop pumping oil and stop throwing the government around.

You think that bribing oil companies to not extract oil temporarily is a more effective financial lever than taxing emissions on an on-going (and escalating, if policy goals require that) basis? That seems as if we’d be prioritizing the needs of the oil companies and shareholders over those of the actual humans on the planet.

All modeling suggests that applying both of these tools together (incentives & disincentives) is multiplicatively more effective than applying either on its own. Taxing emissions means those emissions still happened.

If it works, it doesn't end up being temporary, it becomes economically unattractive to go drill.

At the cost of perpetually paying the oil companies to not extract that oil this year either...

No, if you get off carbon the oil likely becomes worthless, or at least, not worth the direct cost of extraction.

I think the arguments for leaving oil in the ground have more to do with path dependence than prioritizing the needs of oil company shareholders.

Markets have a limited ability to look ahead. It's like a greedy algorithm. You're finding a local maximum, but not necessarily a global one (or even one that won't melt the planet).

The most efficient choice at any given moment (even incorporating a correctly priced carbon tax) may be to continue drilling. But due to the very long term capital investments, investing in drilling today because it's the best option, also guarantees it will be the best option tomorrow. So maybe additional interventions are required to reset the path dependence?

I think a purely market based solution would probably figure things out eventually, but we should also consider ways to help the transient response be as minimally disruptive as possible.

Well, presumably you'd only get paid to not-drill if you otherwise had the drilling rights? So if you bought the rights to extract from an oil field in Alaska or the Gulf, you could get paid not to use them. That seems reasonably coherent to me, although maybe I'm missing something big.

That said, I think I also prefer the idea of achieving these goals by tweaking the price of carbon. But again, maybe I'm missing something.

I read an article that suggested the government buy oil companies in order to manage their decline. Obviously nationalizing an industry is a huge deal and a pretty drastic step, but the argument seemed reasonable and if more lightheaded attempts to solve the climate crisis continue to fail I don't think that should be off the table.

> Well, presumably you'd only get paid to not-drill if you otherwise had the drilling rights? So if you bought the rights to extract from an oil field in Alaska or the Gulf, you could get paid not to use them.

At least in the U.S., extraction operations are usually organized as LLPs--more specifically MLPs, where partnership stakes are publicly traded. This means anybody can easily acquire drilling or extraction rights with a simple online transaction, just like they can with corporate stock.[1] Whatever flaws a pay-to-abstain system has will be exploited at least as fast as any other easily exploited financial incentive scheme.

Even excluding publicly traded MLPs, the market for buying + selling partnership interests in drilling operations is remarkably liquid, at least in the U.S. and especially for long-established fields such as in Texas or California, which are perhaps the operations that could most easily exploit a pay-to-abstain incentive scheme by, e.g., overestimating their reserves. (New fields would be even easier to overestimate, but that could in large part be addressed by avoiding the scheme entirely and simply preventing extraction ahead time--e.g. by stopping the sale of Federal mineral rights, or using environmental laws to prohibit extraction, which is more easily done before an extraction operation is established.)

[1] The reason for this is various tax incentives which make direct ownership stakes and their passthrough income and deductions the most profitable investment structure. But the Schedule Ks are really annoying when doing your taxes. AFAIU an MLP is similar to an REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust), the purpose of which is also to provide an easily traded investment providing passthrough income and deductions. REITs have become notorious for effectively accelerating the exploitation of flawed real state regulations, policies, and taxation. They're not per se bad, but more efficient financial markets cuts many ways.

This plus many people own mineral rights that are impractical or likely non-economical to exercise if you have to actually do the work to get the resource out of the ground. If you take that obligation to zero, many more properties' mineral rights are valuable (which goes to the exploitable financial incentive scheme point you made).

I own the mineral rights to a plot that also has a house on it. It would suck for the house usage to drill for oil on that land and there might not be economically viable oil underneath (you only ever know statistically/via modeling until you drill)...

I'm sure there would be challenges. In a lot of ways, they seem like the same challenges that have always faced OPEC.

It does seem like a scenario where you don't really want the efficiencies markets discover, which is why I mentioned the nationalization option. Not to suggest that option should be taken casually, or wouldn't come with its own set of challenges.

His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”

-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Thanks! I knew my idea wasn't an original one, but I couldn't place the original reference.

This is a great passage but in a society taking climate change seriously carbon farming will unironically become a thing. Planting certain crops or using certain forms of composting to sequester as much carbon as possible on large areas of land that are not used to produce food or other cash crops.

I read up until about this point in the book, but frankly I stopped because I lost confidence that KSR had any idea what he was talking about when it came to central banks, and more broadly finance in general.

Maybe someone here can help me understand, what exactly is the point of "carbon quantitative easing" over a straightforward carbon exchange? Maybe the government buying and selling carbon allowances (out of thin air) on the exchange makes this "quantitative easing", but I would avoid implying it's monetary policy when it seems like it's clearly fiscal policy.

Even more confusing to me was how KSR's "carbon coin" plays into all this. It seems like dollars would work fine. Euros if you want. Introducing some new world currency just seems like it's throwing a huge wrench into an already controversial issue.

I think market-driven solutions to climate change are an exciting possibility, but I just didn't understand what he was going for here.

It's an actual published paper you can read, not something KSR made up.

I'm aware it's a "real" paper. I did try reading it, but I stopped since it didn't seem to answer any of my questions. I'm not an academic, and certainly not an academic in the field of economics or monetary policy, so maybe I'm just too stupid to understand it.

That said, I think my question is pretty basic and easy to anticipate, so I was disappointed I couldn't find it addressed in (relatively) simple terms.

As far as it being a "published" paper, my recollection is that it looked like the paper was self-published. I could be wrong about the self-publishing thing, but as far as I'm aware it's not published by any kind of reputable academic journal.

A recent article chronicling the rise and disillusionment of carbon offset trading:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231129175703/https://www.newyo...

UC Berkeley is deeply unserious about actually cutting its emissions, which it could very easily do by replacing its cogeneration plant with something else. Yes, it will be less efficient to generate steam from renewable electricity, but it will also be carbon-neutral. The cogen plant releases 100x more CO2 than the vehicle fleet but everyone wants to talk about a handful of EVs while whistling past the power plant.

No. UC Berkeley is already in the process of replacing its cogen plant: https://sustainability.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/fina...

That sounds deeply serious to me (specific plan with < 5 years towards projected completion). I award you victory and all the points.

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