this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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UN, Amnesty International and Indigenous Peoples Denounce Carbon Markets and IMF's Whale Offsets - Global Justice Ecology Project (globaljusticeecology.org)
submitted 5 months ago by solo@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Imho we have to distinguish between carbon markets and allowing carbon offsets. The EU emission trading scheme for example just issues a number of certificates and forces certain emitters to purchase them in an open auction. So you put a variable price on carbon and create an incentive to reduce emissions due to regular reductions of the certificates offered. The money is then used to invest into green technology or handed out to the general public. This works thanks to not having carbon offsets.

Carbon offsets do not really work, as they are often just fake and if not mostly just take land from the poor to put it under conservation. Usually that is just removing people, who treat the land well anyway, so it has not benefit for nature, but hurts poor people.

[–] solo@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The way I see things carbon markets cannot work either. I liked these 2 quotes from the article describing why not:

“Carbon markets provide the loophole the fossil fuel industry needs to continue extraction, combustion, and with a fossil extractive economy that is wrecking the harmony of Mother Earth and Father Sky.

“Carbon markets have been set up by the polluting industries. The premise of carbon markets as a good mitigation outcome or a good mitigation programme for the UNFCCC is in and of itself a flawed concept. And we know that because of who’s put it together.”

[Edit: Ooops looks like the quotes are from another article]

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, the oil companies "lobby" for a carbon tax and similar schemes, because they believe they are not going to happen. Here is an EXXON lobbyist explaining it in a fake job interview with Greenpeace pretending to be a Middle Eastern oil company.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, carbon markets and carbon taxes are two very different things. One gives you an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for your emissions by giving a pittance to a paper reduction, and the other gets promptly repealed once in danger of being finalized because oil and gas companies raise prices and then claim it’s due to said taxes despite said taxes never actually taking effect, see Australia.

I agree that the oil company support for carbon taxes are because they think they’ll either never get implemented and are easy to remove once put in place due to public outcry, but I suspect a carbon market is something that they want implemented because it allows for business as useful.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sure there are differences for carbon tax the price is set and for a carbon market like EU ETS the emissions are fixed. However I fail to see how $24.15/t in Australia in 2014 is a better policy then EU ETS at €74.9/t right now, which is $122.78/t. That is all in Australian dollar. EU ETS also had a lot of problems, but by now most of them are fixed. With the additional ETS-2, which uses the same systems, but covers road transport and heating it should cover most EU emissions soonish too. Australias system is in scope fairly compareable to EU ETS-1.

Please explain to me, why EU ETS is a pittance, when it is clearly more money, then Australias carbon tax, which you praise. If I wanted to be fair and compare both systems the carbon markets looks much better, as it is still in place and the cost per t are higher.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.

More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.

Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.

Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago

And this goes back to the first post I made, about the difference between carbon markets and carbon offsets. The EU ETS does not have offsets and does not allow for emitters promising to emit less to be paid for doing so. There are a capped amount of carbon credits auctioned by a government body, which companies emitting within the EU and some other member countries have to buy to be permitted to emit. The amount of credits is lowered every year towards zero by 2050. The money paid goes to the government to be used to support green projects or be paid out to citizens. To put it another way:

  • No private company benefits from selling any sort of carbon credits in that system
  • Companies who purchase credits have to do so, due to emitting, so no pretending to not doing that
  • It is raising in the long term depending on how much emissions decline, due to the cap being lowered
  • a clear path towards zero emissions within the system(unlike a tax for example)