Carbon offsets are a scam. John Oliver did a piece on them last year. Lots of it goes to existing forests (which doesn’t help offset new carbon usage) or to the development of mono-culture forests which have all sorts of issues.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Good to know. Link for the lazy.
I wish there were some effective way to invest in fighting climate change. God knows there's plenty of money invested in the opposite direction.
The way that I’m contributing is my reducing my own usage. I don’t drive a car (electric bike or public transport) I removed the gas supply from my house, signed up with a renewable energy supplier, insulated the ever living shit out of my house including triple glazed glass and installed a Heatpump. Cost a small fortune but I can say I put my money where my mouth is!
Blow up a coal plant?
I think the takeaway from that episode is that many carbon offsets are scams, not necessarily all. So don't take corporate claims that they offset their emissions at face value, and consider carefully before you buy offsets.
Take a look at my other comment about Wren and Wendover Productions. (This John Oliver episode happens to include an excerpt from the Wendover piece I mentioned.)
Forests do not offset carbon emissions unless the trees never decay. Unless you’re burying them underground after you cut them down, this method is not removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Why does it need to be underground? If it's processed into lumber (for houses, etc) the carbon is still removed from the atmosphere, it's it not?
Correct. As long as the wood is around, the CO2 is bound.
True, as long as that lumber never breaks down, it will be a carbon sink. You’d need to keep it from decomposing forever, however.
Yes. That's why they're a scam. They don't mean shit.
Second this, I recall reading up on mono-culture forests. I forget the source (maybe NYT) but the writer spoke of volunteering in Canada to plant trees and their practices basically planted incredibly combustible trees in very close proximity to one another. Those mono-culture forests are one of several reasons Canadian wild fires got out of control.
Wish I could the source, if anyone else remembers feel free to add.
Why? To ease your conscience by claiming that it is not as bad because you paid something extra? It’s the modern version of the selling of indulgences.
It’s worse than doing nothing because it gives the people the illusion that it’s not so bad - while in fact it is exactly as bad.
I am not against easing one's conscience, so long as that's not the only thing people do. It's a perverse turn in our culture that we've started to shame people for trying to act morally. We have a conscience for a reason: to motivate good behaviour. This reminds me of the right's claim that everything is "virtue signalling", as if moral action itself is undesirable. It coheres with a hyper individualistic and self-interested worldview.
My question is precisely whether "in fact it is exactly as bad". That is an empirical claim, not one that you can declare with a serene wave of the hand. That John Oliver reporting is useful in that regards, whereas your comment, devoid of argument or evidence, is not.
Fair enough!
The problem is: Once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, it’s there. It does damage. No money in the world will undo that, unless we build massive factories that extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make coal- or oil-like stuff that we put back in the earth. At the same moment your consumption blasts CO2 out in the atmosphere.
That does not exist. There is no system in place (except for some small but ludicrously expensive labs) that could do that.
Planting trees (or something similar) might help in a few decades, if the trees are still alive then and not being harvested. Until then the CO2 is in the atmosphere, doing its damage. Every day, every minute, every second.
Amen. Carbon offsets are currently being used as a marketing tactic to relieve the conscience of consumers so they wont slow down on their consumption, and keep buying stuff and funding industries that aren't really as critical as they'd like to think they are.
It's an excuse to delay trimming the fat for yet another couple years.
Carbon offsets are scam
It's a scam. I've looked into it as part of my climate justice advocacy. There's so so much fraud going on. Sometimes offsets pay for land grabbing of indigenous land even. It's fucked.
I pay for refrigeration destruction, but that's about it. It's strongly verifiable, additional, and as permanent as can be. It's through wren, which seems to be the most strict about credit quality since they removed all the other projects like cooking stoves and tree planting a while back leaving only refrigeration destruction and biochar, which also seems like a quality credit albeit many times more expensive than refrigeration destruction.
That said I don't treat carbon credits as offsets, just an additional charity that I do on top of doing my best to be sustainable, reducing, reusing / repairing, and responsibly disposing of things. At the end of the day you can only do so much individually so the only way to do more is to put some of your extra money somewhere that might do a little extra good.
You can do your part to lower your carbon footprint by eating the rich, who's status quo has been forcibly thrust upon us and make transitioning to better solutions unfeasible both fiscally and systemically.
Does being a plant mom count? My house is like a greenhouse it has so many plants in it. I am the plant equivalent of cheaper by the dozen.
It sequesters the carbon while it’s alive, but you’d need to bury the plant deep underground to remove it from the equation
Or do the exact opposite and launch it into space.
It doesn't have to be removed to that degree to be useful. Simply composting the biomass and then using the compost will create more biomass to create more compost, all the while sequestering carbon in a living system. Life is a good place to store carbon, and this type of life makes oxygen. A greater ratio of oxygen also offsets carbon in a different way, creating more overall atmosphere and lessening the percentage that is carbon dioxide.
Why would I have to bury it?
When plants break down they release CO2. It needs to never decompose to remove carbon dioxide.
How come the same doesn't apply to animals and oxygen?
https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/app/uploads/sites/17/2020/06/carbon-cycle-1024x1024.jpg
The issue is that we have artificially accelerated the return of carbon to the cycle by burning coal and oil.
Because we breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. The Oxygen is attaching to Carbon and leaving our body with every breath.
This is the opposite of plants, which breathe in CO2 and breathe out O2, storing that Carbon.
That said, I'm sure we also release a lot of CO2 when we decompose. Worst of both worlds, really.
That's what I mean. If mishandling a plant's death is bad for us, then handling an animal's death in the same way should be good for us, right?
Unfortunately not. While animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, both plants and animals release essentially the components upon death and decay, and these components, mostly carbon dioxide, are already overly represented due to fossil fuels consumption.
Considering the Earth has been around for a billion or so years, I can't understand how these two circumstances combined haven't turned Earth into a one gas system by now. I'm not a global warming skeptic, but this part just seems off.
Until we started burning fuels, it balanced itself. What we call fossil fuels is literally the buried carbon of life that came before. The stuff the natural process already dealt with once before. We brought it back, and now it all has to be reprocessed and put back in the ground or deep ocean where we got it or there's no balance in the system and it will take very long times for natural processes to bring it back to normal levels, maybe never.
Imagine a full bath tub with the drain open and the water running., Water is flowing in and out at an even rate, meaning the tub is draining but stays pretty much full. Now imagine somebody took the drain pipe and routed it back into the tub. Now the drain has to deal with that water again, and the new water coming through the tap.
Im going to piggy back off this - does anyone know of any reputable carbon capture schemes?
It seems like removing carbon directly should be completely measurable and auditable so we can be sure it's actually having an impact?
In answer to the post - offsets are a scam, even the well intentioned ones often have side effects and the market is set up such that the bad ones get all the money.
I don't think so. There even was an operating one in Saskatchewan Canada, but all it did was send the CO2 through a pipe across the US border for more oil extraction.
So... worse than doing nothing. 👌
Its not currently operating because even that was too expensive to justify.
Individual action cannot be a solution for the climate crisis. The whole idea of individual responsibility for climate impact is the divide and conquer strategy of big business as ultimate form of the collective action problem.
Global actions are the sum of individual actions. Just because one can not safe the world alone, one still should behave like one could.
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Yup we do. There’s a couple of certification schemes that are decent, but you get what you pay for in offsets. Most aren’t really offset, just planting a tree that’ll disappear in 10 years.
Geological storage of air extracted carbon is the only standard I’d fully trust to genuinely act as an offset. Bloody expensive though.
I used to be a big believer in cooking stoves, but there’s research that shows it becomes an additional stove, not a replacement to open fire cooking. So that ain’t really working then.
I would pay for it if it wasn't a total scam.
I would pay for it if exon did first and just passed the cost on like they'll eventually do anyway. This is just personal responsibility jujitsu and it needs to stop.
I live in the developing world. I would not be quick to trust this kind of institution if I saw it here. In any case, our petrol and power usage is pretty low per capita in Southeast Asia, and the average person doesn't have much disposable income, so I'm not sure it would survive well as an institution or be able to do much. In the West? I guess it depends what their track record is. If it's good, I might be willing.
I am very concerned about climate change though. It's just that I live in a threatened coastal region, and need to spend my money mitigating climate change directly with more expensive construction techniques for flood resistance, not giving it to a charity. I have no choice but to foot the bill, if you guys aren't going to do it. I've estimated this will cost me an extra USD 50k or so over the next 10 years. Of course, most people make less than that here, and just lose their homes. I'm one of the lucky ones.
On a more positive note, our oyster farms do quite a bit of carbon capture. It's becoming a thing!
Of course not. I live in America, where we pay corporations to add carbon, thank you very much.
Yes, I use Wren. The best endorsement I have is from Wendover Productions - after doing a piece on how many carbon offset programs are scams they later said that Wren seems to be better. But that statement did come in a message sponsored by Wren. My hope is that Wendover would not have accepted Wren as a sponsor if they thought it was garbage.
Here is the carbon offsets piece: https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY
Here is a comment from Wendover on their ads for Wren: https://www.reddit.com/r/WendoverProductions/comments/11ubsfu/is_wren_as_good_as_wendover_says/jcnlunq/
Edited to add links
Hmm, that does seem like a perverse financial incentive. I otherwise like some of the content on Wendover Productions, but I remain skeptical about this one.
I would like to see someone post some actual unbiased journalism or scientific studies that support specific carbon offset programs.
The level of zealous dogma in this thread is pretty sad. Carbon offsets are an enormous field - and definitely there are a lot of low effort scams - but simultaneously there are many opportunities for it to be an extremely valuable part of the climate response. We do need it to be highly regulated, and by itself it really isn't enough. But, for example, buying low value land that was never a real factor for climate change is not the same as, say burning biomass for biochar or removing refrigerants, or subsidizing renewable energy.
An alternative to direct carbon offsets is political contributions - you have an immense amount of power locally in particular. That can help drive more sustainable construction, cleaner transit, and renewable local generation.
Additionally, the claim that individual action is not important or valuable is also pretty pathetic and honestly just an excuse to not make any personal changes. The reality is systemic change follows personal change. Government needs a mandate to make important investments and regulations, but it cannot do it if people are completely unwilling to change their lifestyle.
...the idea of a carbon footprint was litteraly invented by oil company heads to push the heat off them and onto us. The very fact that we worry at all about it is playing into their hands
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