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.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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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
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.
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.
They are doing their job if that job is to make money for the people selling them.
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
..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.
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.
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.
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
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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!
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
Carbon credits/offsets = bigger Ponzi scheme than nft + cryptocurrency!!! There's none environmental protection with capitalism ruling!!! Plain & simple!