It's just like purchasing carbon offsets, if God were real and He was 100% coming to punish us. With indulgences, you at least didn't actually go to hell at the end I don't think.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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You seem to imply that carbon offsets actually work, and while I've heard some do, I also had the impression that most don't
Bro
- Indulgences
- Investment: Money
- Supposed impact: Escape hell
- Problem: They're a scam
- Actual impact: Nothing
- What you could do instead: Save your money
- Carbon offsets
- Investment: Money
- Supposed impact: Escape climate crisis
- Problem: They're a scam
- Actual impact: Climate crisis anyway
- What you could do instead: Save your money but also stop killing the planet
The comic, and my entire comment replying to it, wouldn't make sense if carbon offsets weren't a scam. IDK why Lemmy is so full of people who want to explain to me things that were the underlying basis for the very thing they're replying to, but yes, carbon credits are mostly a scam.
IDK why Lemmy is so full of people who want to explain to me things that were the underlying basis for the very thing they’re replying to
Let me explain this - that's how the internet has always...no, it's not even the internet, as people in general have been that way even before. It's just more apparent when you have many people all connected and discussing all at once. This isn't a Lemmy thing. Or a Reddit thing. Or whatever forum you want to use. It's people.
What it really is though - not everyone knows everything, so when someone misses the point, helping them understand it is more constructive than belittling their ignorance. Guaranteed that where there is one vocal of their confusion, there are many others lurking who can benefit. And you did at the end, that's a decent link to why offsets are a scam. Just could have started there instead.
I guess I could have done the same and just linked to XKCD's Ten Thousand which makes the same point quickly.
What it really is though - not everyone knows everything, so when someone misses the point, helping them understand it is more constructive than belittling their ignorance.
Yeah, maybe I was sorta rude about it. IDK, it's just an overall vibe I've specifically noticed on Lemmy that people tend to assume that the other people they're talking to probably don't know things. It's a really toxic feature in a community. I do it too, and I make a concerted effort not to, and when I see something that looks like that's getting pointed at me I get irritated about it. Probably for reasons of my own.
I think you're right that my message was a little more pointed about it than it needed to be. It would have been pretty easy for me to say "Oh 100% they're a scam in most cases, here's a video about it, that's the whole point of what we were saying."
The way carbon offsets currently are made available to people are often a scam. The concept is not (though it would likely be not feasible to offset all carbon everyone produces, so the comic still works bc better than offsetting is not producing in the first place).
I can for example donate money to restore a local bog, and that will have a very real climate impact.
Yah absolutely. Cap and trade actually has worked quite well for a while -- I think the difference being that the caps were being imposed from outside according to a specific finite limit, not just something anyone can make up and start selling. Carbon offsets basically go by Calvinball rules with no oversight whatsoever as far as I'm aware.
The internet is wonderful
I understand the comic wouldn't make sense, but it does seem I misunderstood your comment, so I'm sorry about that! When you write "if God were real" I just assume that you also meant indulgences would work in that case. But yeah with more context I see you didn't mean to imply that
Yah, that makes sense. In all honesty, the idea that God could be real, but also not disgusted by the Catholic church (i.e. the indulgences would work) just honestly had never even occurred to me. I feel like if God were real He would hate the indulgences-era Catholic church more passionately than any mere mortal ever could.
Anyway it's all good I hope, sorry about being sort of a dick in my response.
Yeah, I see what you mean. And no worries, I understand your frustration, it's all good!
Considering his son chased the money changers out of the church by whipping them with a rope, in possibly the only display of Jesus being angry in the entire Bible, I'm pretty sure God would not be happy about indulgences being sold for money.
Edit: in keeping with the theme of your original comment, I'm agreeing with you, not trying to explain to you that which is the underlying premise of your statement.
Indulgences do absolutely nothing without relying on a deity.
Carbon capture could work, and we'll probably need to do it in some form. It's just that the popular ways to do it are all scams.
It's the difference between investing in a perpetual motion machine, versus investing in a spray can that a guy in a commercial says can improve your house's energy efficiency, versus investing in actual new insulation and windows. The third one is expensive, but it's the only one we can take seriously.
Yes, but have you considered that both are scams? Curious! I am very smart.
If it doesn't work then it's not carbon offseting...
Seems like some people (I might be the misinformed one) are referring to specific policies, not the broader concept. Plant a tree and we can be fairly certain it will take carbon out of the atmosphere because that's what the majority of a tree is made of. Pretty basic stuff.
If politicians are trying to rought the masses with shitty policies then criticise that, not the very idea that there's more we could be doing about manmade climate change.
Only a handful of countries have carbon offset policies. It's mostly corporations "volunteering" for a carbon offset program as part of a greenwashing campaign. The whole thing can work in theory, but a lot of these programs are way too cheap for the current state of carbon capture technology.
That's if they're even bothering to implement a real solution at all. They may be planting trees only to pull them up again in a year and start fresh, but count 30 years of expected carbon capture for both sets. Trees aren't even the best carbon sink to begin with, but people like trees. That, in turn, makes them all the better for greenwashing. Cheap, get to count the same grove multiple times, and looks good for marketing. Tanks of algae are ugly, but they would work far better at this job.
All this said, I think threads like this give people the mistaken impression that carbon capture is entirely a scam. We will almost certainly need actual carbon capture to avoid +2C of warming.
Offsets means that you can emit that amount of carbon because it's implied somewhere else the carbon will be removed. Except we can't remove large scales of carbon, so that's the scam part.
As far as I've understood it, it's implied that the carbon offset is used to finance some of the polluting industries to reduce production some amount relative to the offset payment. But even then, the problem is that reducing the production will just result in increased production elsewhere, since the demand for their product isn't affected by the carbon offset payment.
Right. It's a big shell game made to look like things are getting done to appease any PR concerns. The very little bit that may go into actual reduction would be something like CCS for exhaust stacks, which in turn is used to increase production because, hey we're doing something about it (and using the CO2 gathered for products that end up back in the air). It does not balance out if you can get all the numbers. The annual world CO2 measurements are right there.
Don't trees offset carbon by being made of it? For a few decades anyways. A country like Australia has oodles of free land.
Yes, they do. The issues of why that's not a solution are complicated, but I'll touch on a few. Let's just say that we should absolutely be reforesting with multi-species forests everywhere we've taken away, but mostly to try and bring back some biodiversity we're killed, if possible. As a carbon sink plants of any sort, even fast-growing algae, have their limits, and we can't possibly plant enough to offset the millions of years of plant growth we've put into the air via fossil fuels. I can't speak for Australian land, who owns it, what it's used for or how arable it is for lots of trees.
So let's renew what we've taken, but for other reasons not the falsehood that it's a viable large-scale carbon sink.
"What offsets"?
"Ah, don't worry about it, it's just something we'll come up with next time this ruse runs out of steam"
Like selling insurance that never has to pay a claim.
I thought there was a bit more reasoning behind it, it probably depends on it being a mandatory thing: pollute less or you have to pay money. It’s trying to incentivize companies to produce less pollution, since the only thing they care about is money, you have to make them “feel” pollution through money. It seems like the whole “system” probably needs some more teeth to force countries to make harder decisions and not just using it as a form of indulgences, it should be used as a fine/punishment. We’re well past the point of no return, but we should be getting more serious about this.
100% - even as satire the cartoon in OP misses the mark. The only people I've seen paint carbon credits that way in the US tend to vote for the party of climate change denialism, so tend to be about as well informed and truthful as you'd expect. So it's a pretty good zinger if the person reading it doesn't actually know the intent behind carbon offsets.
Doesn't this mean a Reformation is on the way?
Reformation fixed nothing. When my grandpa died, his Catholic Church which he donated and volunteered for over two decades, charged my grandma money so that the priest would mention his name in a blessing during Sunday mass.
Right. The reformation also spawned the protestant church. Joel Osteen doesn’t exactly embody the anti-indulgence church either. If the reformation had led people away from the church, it would have fixed it. Instead there are multiple sides, each one pointing at the other and saying “well, we’re not like them though”.
Crux, Crux, et non est crux