Cambridge study says carbon offsets are not nearly as effective as they claim to be.
All I’ve seen since carbon offsets became a thing is how a lot of the projects were either ineffective or outright scams. The idea itself doesn’t incentivise the large carbon producers to actually reduce their emissions, but simply pay to say they are carbon neutral so they can slap it on their website for some positive pr.
I farm in Canada which has a carbon tax, $65/ton. We’re in the grip of terrible drought and I’ve sold all my livestock. Thought maybe I could do the world a little good and maybe make some money off my empty pastures by planting some trees or something.
After talking to the regulators it was obvious it’s a HUGE fraud. There’s so much red tape, and by the time you’re done talking to them you find out that you can make $1-5/ton for sequestering carbon. And due to flat fees in the regulatory structure, it’s really just designed to funnel this money to huge landowners and not to encourage anyone who cares to plant trees or do anything really.
So working Canadians are forced to pay $65/ton to heat their homes and drive to work, but big emitters buy bogus credits for under $5 and continue to pour out pollution while claiming to be “carbon neutral”. It’s the Canadian way
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In this particular case it’s “maybe”… I farm on the edge of the Palliser Triangle, famous for drought cycles over the centuries.
However climate change is definitely shifting the dynamics of the seasons here, with rainfall getting front-loaded into the “useless” months from February - May and scarcely a drop during the summer when we need it. It’s the same volume or possibly even more but it’s useless for crops or pastures.
I’ve pivoted to selling hay as it’s capable of growing decently off of the runoff pulse. Those with suitable land are going all in on irrigation as the spring runoff can be stored in lakes and reservoirs. It’s an odd situation here as the ground often stays frozen until after the snow melts, so very little snow water soaks in.
It’s the capitalist way. I assure you America is just as bad and any “western” nation. I hate conspiracy theories but all history linked through the first world countries is slavery and exploitation and they get to write the history books.
If you really want to to some good with that land, although it won’t make you any money, turn it back into a native natural habitat, or at least sell it to someone who will agree to do the same. The world is never going to improve without landowners who are willing to restore their developed land back to its natural state.
It already is! We’re proud to maintain our pastures in their native state and we grazed them rotationally with long rest to emulate the way the buffalo used to graze them long ago. They’re a mix of grass, brush, trees and slough. Even though my stock is gone we plan to background some steers or heifers occasionally just for the sake of the land as it needs grazing. However this will allow us to plan grazing around the grass instead of being forced to put our own animals out for need of feed.
That was part of the reason I initially thought I could get some carbon offset credits simply for maintaining them in that state, because we are supposed to be encouraging people to maintain wild prairie, and the land does soak up significant carbon every year just by doing its natural thing.
However as mentioned the system is a fraud. The only way to get carbon credits is to break it up and then rewild it after the damage has been done. They told me I could easily generate credits this way by destroying my native habitat and then replanting it… Which is absolutely a crime against nature.
Carbon credits are a racket, tell your friends
That sounds pretty cool. Too many people would just decide “this land isn’t profitable enough anymore, time to sell it to a developer.”
simply pay to say they are carbon neutral so they can slap it on their website for some positive pr.
and go further back, and the whole idea of “carbon footprint” was a scam from the get go.
It’s scams and distractions all the way down, anything and everything to make sure people don’t look at the real cause of the problem - those making all the money and the system that enables and encourages them at the expense of the rest of us.If the cost was actually enough to store the CO2 they emit (and offset the other environmental damages from the sequestration), then it would be fine. But it would be so costly for some industries, that positive PR wouldn’t offset the cost.
The most effective carbon sinks are peatlands. the approx. 3 Mio. km2 in Canada sequester 370 Million Tonnes of Carbon a year.
Canada alone emitted 679 Million Tonnes in 2022, with a population of just about 30 Million people.
There is simply no capacity to offset the emissions we have, even with radical land transformation. The only way is to drastically cut emissions and cut them fast.
Sure, but if costs scaled to reflect the limits of sequestration, people would be priced out of emitting.
Even if they worked, it’s like someone breaking your arm and then paying the hospital bill and calling it a day.
No, it’s nothing like that. Nature doesn’t care if a given gram of co2 was recently released or not. It only cares about the sum total. If the carbon capture schemes actually did grab a gram for every gram released, and then keep it stored for at least a century, that’d work fine.
It’s just that they almost certainly don’t. They’re way too cheap for the best capture systems we have, and they’re not necessarily sequestering that carbon to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few years.
We are almost certainly going to need actual carbon sequestration. We’re too close to emitting too much already.
When discussing carbon offsets with the regulator I asked if the buyers would get a refund if their chunk of carbon offset forest burned down in a forest fire.
He laughed and said they should but there’s not a chance, because the system only exists to legitimize emissions. In fact many of them have already burned. And that’s right from a government agent.
Kelp farming or ocean seeding are the only natural carbon capture that make sense, but we aren’t doing them. That and paying people not to destroy existing forests and grasslands, but that seems hard to sell as well.
Ocean seeding may not work at all. The nutrients available are already just right, and adding more will only increase local growth at the expense of sucking up nutrients that would have spread elsewhere. Total sunk co2 wouldn’t increase, and may even decrease.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/oceans-iron-not-impact-climate-change-0217
There’s a lot of unknowns with kelp farming. It may not sequester co2 for long enough. Needs more research.
What would work is a tank of algae, where we then siphon them off and throw them down a mineshaft. That’s too expensive right now, though.
All the IPCC models assume massive amounts of sequestration, I believe
It’s a necessity at this point, even if all fossil fuel use stops globally tomorrow
Offsets are a game of 3 card monte.
The carbon is still released. We’ll never win.
And the dealer gets the money.
And nothing that actively consumes co2 is added to the equation. They “preserve” something that is already there. It is literally doing nothing.
To surprise of no one… I thought it was clear that it is only a marketing fantasy to scam those who don’t understand how nature works
They are doing their job if that job is to make money for the people selling them.
…its been a scam the entire time. it was a way for rich people to pay the poor people to shut up about ruining the planet, and nothing more. Not sure why anyone ever thought this was going to be effective. taxing pollution does NOTHING to stop it.
Murder offsets:
I’m allowed to murder this guy because I opened a fertility clinic which is responsible for 20 new lives!
Carbon offsets are just as ridiculous.
Made me laugh, but strictly speaking, CO2 is fungible (interchangeable), but human lives aren’t.
Depends on your values.
If the overall goal is to increase the human population, it actually makes total sense
If the goal is to prevent murders, then no, it doesn’t make sense
Even if it’s just to increase the population, it doesn’t really make sense. Would a similar fertility clinic not exist without this person opening it? Would those babies not have been born otherwise?
A lot of carbon offsets are pretending that a forest was otherwise going to be cut down, when that was never a risk, or it’s selling the same trees to multiple people. Or the trees are actually cut down despite the offset.
To absolutely no one’s surprise.
What they’re designed to do and what they claim to do are verydifferent things.
Carbon offsets have always been a greenwash that allows the worst polluters to keep polluting while pretending to give a fuck.
Pretty much what I suspected. Just marketing and advertising BS to make companies seem to be doing more than they are.
Necessary to keep the populace calm, too. Keep it at a slow boil, that way the masses don’t freak out when they finally come to the realization that it’s going to hurt everyone, including them, and it’s not going to be long. And even the ones who ‘survive’ will have to accept their children growing up in a radically different ecosystem, if any remains.
If gen pop knew how fucked we are there’d be riots in the streets.
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The only reason why Tesla is a profitable company with an insane stock price, is that Elon Musk has been using it to sell scammy carbon credits to other automakers.
So yeah, the entire system has been a government mandated scam used to lower taxes on the worst polluters.
Instead of offsets, companies should be pursuing direct carbon sequestration like with https://climeworks.com/
No estimates, no accounting magic. Just a direct measure of physical, measurable tons of carbon directly removed from the atmosphere.
Except carbon sequestration is not ever going to work and it’s always going to be more expensive than having just burned that fuel in the first place.
Maybe you’ll get an advantage if it’s nearly free to do and you use exclusively solar power in areas with excesses of it.
But on average? Sequestration is not an answer. The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is just too rare to effectively pull out, and it’s never going to be capable of even reaching fractions of what we’re emitting right now.
We have one answer to this problem and one answer only.
Stop. Using. Fossil. Fuels.
Tax carbon.
Start getting ready to do geoengineering, because we are going to need it.
People like to bitch and say that we shouldn’t be changing the environment, but guess what, we’re changing the environment if we like it or not, it’s only a question of it it’s in our interests or if it’s an uncontrolled self-destructive form.
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Carbon taxes are getting the ball rolling which is the main point. We’re just seeing short term effects at the moment, its literally only been 4 years, so you can’t really yet say it didn’t work because it takes place on a larger time scale than just a couple years. Economically the policy makes a lot of sense.
It goes like this: Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their share holders, they legally have to make profit for the people who hold ownership shares. If something eats into their profit, they might raise prices in the short term, but in the long term, companies which innovate and can do similar processes without releasing as much carbon will be taxed less, and they will be able to offer services for lower than their competitors.
People see the lower prices and will try to go for the more cost effective service, And so the competitors selling for lower prices take market demand away from companies who refuse to innovate, leading to less profits for them, forcing the company charging higher prices, to adopt the new cost-effective method or go out of business.
High-prices are the short-term effects of the market-paradigm. Innovation really only comes if there is a need. Why would a company try expensive new ‘non-polluting’ methods, if the methods that pollutes will make them more money? You just can’t expect companies to make investments to change if they have no financial reason too. However if the older carbon producing methods become more expensive (like through a carbon tax) then companies are more likely to invest in the newer processes, often driving the newer way to become cheaper due to economy of scales effects.
Also btw regular people at least get money back through tax credits to help offset costs. Sure things are more expensive atm, but long term if our current economic system is to do what its ‘advertised’ to do, then we should allow the policy time. Entire supplychain changes don’t just happen in 4 years.
So yea maybe Carbon Tax isnt enough to affect quick change, maybe we need more serious policies aswell, but it’s a direction and a start. We can’t really claim yet it hasn’t worked.
Since we have no genuinely reliable public transportation infrastructure, we all still drive. And we pay the carbon tax
A carbon tax is designed to be placed on the sources of oil and then ramped up over time. If you haven’t felt the carbon tax it’s because the tax isn’t high enough yet.
The only problem with the carbon tax is that it’s going to be difficult to get people to support it. Otherwise it’s the single most effective way to actually produce change across the whole economy.
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There’s plenty of EVs with 300+ miles of range now. Shouldn’t be an issue.
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The carbon tax is supposed to (partially) go towards credits for EVs
At a certain point I guess I’d have to give up my car, which would make travel for recreation difficult
Yes. Ideally it would result in forms of recreation and travel that emit less.
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What the hell are you even talking about? I literally lived in rural BC where lots of people would go to enjoy outdoor recreation. I did just fine with a non-Tesla EV, and I was not the only one. The chargers in town got lots of use.
but if we don’t have transportation to get to these places I may as well live in London
Yes. These decisions are exactly what a carbon tax is designed to create. The people who really want to live a recreational non-urban lifestyle that is quite expensive in terms of carbon emissions are going to have to pay more to do it because that reflects the true cost of that lifestyle.
Ideally That extra expense encourages innovation in that space so that the area can become less carbon intense. Perhaps local authorities are encouraged to build trains or electric cars or some other system that lets you live your life without emitting carbon in those areas.
carbon sequestration is not ever going to work
I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s a thing that is currently being done. Not some future hypothetical tech.
But yes it is too expensive for now. Costs are coming down hopefully that continues to be the case.
And yes, the best, cheapest, most efficient way to reduce ghg is to eliminate fossil fuels.
It’s hilariously expensive and it’s expensive because physics. We measure carbon in the atmosphere in parts per million. The entire surface area of the planet is already littered with Caron absorbers and they don’t make a dent.
It’s never happening
It’s just a problem of energy. Which is an entirely solvable problem, from a physics standpoint.
Well sure, the entire global warming crisis is a matter of energy. Almost every problem we have today is a matter of energy.
The problem is, at any given point in time a more productive use of energy then carbon sequestration is going to exist, because it is incredibly difficult to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and it would require a project of herculan scales to make a difference in the global climate.
Imagine it’s 10 times as hard to carbon out of the atmosphere as it is to put in.
It has taken the entire world economy decades to get to the point that global warming is moving back a couple of degrees.
To offset that with sequestration you’re going to need something the size of the entire global economy, and you’re going to need to create that while the only possible input is through government programs and sequestration creates next to zero benefit in terms of profit for the people doing it.
It’s going to be hilariously difficult, nearly impossible, and you can’t wave that away with “it’s an energy problem”.
It’s only ever going to make sense inside of coal smokestacks.
It’s not a physics problem, is all I said
The need for a large amount of energy is a physics problem. You can’t undo it through any amount of innovation.
The problem with direct air capture is that it only is good if it exclusively uses renewables, and right now it would be much better to instead use that energy to replace fossil fuels. Only excess renewable energy should be used for it, maybe in places like Scotland that have too much wind power. Capture directly from the source is also better as the concentration of carbon is much higher in the output from a smokestack, and as such has more impact and is more energy efficient too
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The main message is that relying on [carbon offset] certification is not enough,” said the study’s lead author, Thales West, an interdisciplinary ecologist and assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and a fellow at Cambridge’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources.
The authors call for “urgent revisions” to the certification methods used to attribute avoided deforestation to these projects, pointing out major flaws in current practice.
Over the past few decades, carbon offsets have become increasingly ubiquitous, particularly in higher-income countries, where consumers can assuage their climate guilt by paying a little extra for a flight ticket or a rental car, with the understanding that their additional payment will go towards supporting a tree farm, for example.
Big, high-emitting companies like Delta, JetBlue, Disney, General Motors and Shell have all bought and sold huge amounts of carbon offsets in the name of climate action.
It’s an attractive business model for companies looking to “go green” without significant changes in their operations: purchase some carbon offsets to cancel out your emissions.
West said companies that are buying and selling carbon offsets that have been certified by third-party entities may not be aware that they’re misleading their customers—they might simply trust that the certification is legitimate.
The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The study looked at 26 projects in six countries: Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, Tanzania, and Zambia. Researchers found that only eight of the 26 projects selling offsets showed any evidence of reducing deforestation, and even those that did failed to achieve the extent of reductions that the projects claimed.
Only 18 of the 26 projects had sufficient publicly available information to determine the number of offsets they were projected to produce. From project implementation until 2020, those 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold in the global carbon market. But researchers estimate that only 5.4 million of the 89 million, or 6.1 percent, would be associated with actual carbon emission reductions.
Some actual information on the study and how the carbon offset is overstated.
TL;DR is pointless if all you’re trying to do is reduce the word count without retaining proper/important information
You tell that robot! Go fuck yourself, metal mouth!
I believe this is partly due to it no longer using ChatGPT to assist with making summaries
So, I actually read the article. It sounds like they could or should work, in theory, but because of fraud and/or marketplace incompetence, they do not. I bring this up only because I don’t think the discussion on the topic has been nuanced enough to distinguish between idea and implementation.
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“What do you mean just saying it’s fine doesn’t actually make everything fine?!”
working as intended
