Quick reminder that at least a decent chunk of the forests *still burning* in Canada were part of the "offsets" countries and companies pay for as credits in Carbon Trading schemes meant for them to keep polluting guilt-free.
The "offsets" are now in the atmosphere heating the planet. As well as the original emissions.
Good stuff. /s
That's part of why Emissions Trading Schemes are little more than fancy accounting and should never be accepted as Climate Action.
@pezmico wait
if the offsets are now burnt
are they deducted again from the companies / countries that used them?
@meena @pezmico Good question!
In some offset schemes, notably California's, growers have to contribute a small percent of their credits into a shared "buffer pool" that theoretically makes up for lost trees (on paper)...
...but in the 100-year program's first 10 yrs, credit reimbursements from wildfires have already depleted the pool by, um, 95%? and it's not clear what will happen if a grower just gets burned to the ground and walks away.
* https://phys.org/news/2022-08-california-climate-reveals-problem-forests.html
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2022.930426/full
Researchers have found that California's forest carbon buffer pool, designed to ensure the durability of the state's multi-billion-dollar carbon offset program, is severely undercapitalized. The results show that, within the offset program's first 10 years, estimated carbon losses from wildfires have depleted at least 95% of the contributions set aside to protect against all fire risks over 100 years. This means that the buffer pool is unable to guarantee that credited forest carbon remains out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years. The results, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, illustrate that the program, one of the world's largest, is likely not meeting its set requirements.
@meena @pezmico In short, carbon offsets are a scam. At best they provide some funding for forest protection programs, but there's no evidence they sequester carbon at anywhere near the rates necessary to offset the **actual carbon** being emitted up front by their buyers.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20859156/forests-fires-carbon-offsets-amazon-california
* https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/
Cool, thanks for sharing. That seems like a much less scammy strategy. It does still feel very wishful and indirect, and still lets air travelers feel less guilty even as they keep on polluting. But at least it seems they are actually replacing current and future carbon emitters with clean alternatives — which is good because the only way to stop burning fossil fuels is to stop burning fossil fuels!
@brocolie @hlabrande @meena @pezmico
Bummer! That’s an example of Jevon’s Paradox, which @sidereal helpfully taught me about on Mastodon a few days ago:
https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/110771529635815405
Oh well! Back to the drawing board. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@[email protected] In economics this is called the Jevons Paradox and discovering it in 2011 is the reason I lost faith in greenwashed tech and became a full-on doomsday prepper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Basically he noticed in the 1860's that more efficient steam engines didn't use less coal; people used the same amount (or more) coal to do more work.
@brocolie @alexch @hlabrande @pezmico @sidereal yes…
but all of this cuts at the heart of neoliberal capitalism, which seeks to divide us (into races, classes, nuclear families and self-sufficient individuals)
the slashing of unions, of public (third) spaces, and the incredible increase in time we spend at work, or otherwise running after "benefits" makes it really hard to organize from the bottom up.
We will need nothing short of a revolution for this cultural change to start happening.
@meena @alexch @hlabrande @pezmico @sidereal it's hard to get people to work together for a common goal in a society where it's normal for people to feel outraged and defensive when you tell them that if you have covid-like symptoms, you should try to isolate for 10 days from when the symptoms started
as long as people's first thoughts are to themselves instead of the groups they're part of, any kind of revolution will not be possible
@pezmico "Sequestration" is meaningless if it's not on a geological time scale, many millions of years.
We don't know how to do that and the not-obviously-crazy approaches (pull CO2 from the air, make graphite from the carbon, back fill a coal mine with the graphite) not only have immense energy costs, we'd have to be confident some capitalist wouldn't see it as an opportunity to mine the graphite as high-quality thermal fuel.
So, yeah, scam.
@clacke @pezmico Nuclear waste doesn't need to be in gas-tight storage for ten million years; one thousand is excessive. Sequestration is the harder problem.
Amazing how people are far more scared of spent reactor fuel than coal ash, isn't it? And how the "more radioactive" part of the coal ash has no cultural knowledge traction whatsoever.
Fossil carbon companies have spent money like water for generations to create very specific fears of anything that might alter the status quo.
@mansr @clacke @pezmico And here you would appear to make the same mistake those folks are making by using a moral frame of goodness.
Materially measured tangible objectives turn out to work a whole lot better. (Look at how much mammonite rage there is at the US EPA, which exists to reduce pollutants to within measured limits. Versus a willingness to express all kinds of moral statements about carbon footprint.)
"Fancy" accounting is presumably still at least "accurate."
Carbon offsets are just straight up fraud.
If we had an accurate carbon tax, we'd need no offsets, because the market could respond directly to costs!
@pezmico I’ve found exactly one place selling offsets that seems to be at least trying to refossilize airborne greenhouse gasses: https://climeworks.com/blog-co2-storage-solutions
(Of course, their offset prices are much higher than pretending with tree planting, enough so that they price per kg rather than per tonne)
@pezmico not all emissions trading schemes allow offsets (although I didn't realise so many still did).
Hopefully Québec will reconsider this now...
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