this post was submitted on 14 Apr 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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Inside the Controversy That's Divided the Carbon Offsets Market | Science Based Targets initiative, the world’s main verifier of corporate climate targets, faced pressure to relax their standards (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 6 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] hellothere@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

Say it with me everyone - you can't consume your way out a consumption crisis.

[–] dillekant 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I understand the problem. My only guess here is that the issue is that you buy a carbon tonne and it's meant to be sunk "forever", but that's not really possible to verify a-priori. So, why not just rent the carbon? Each tonne you put into the air, you just rent it from the forest or whatever, and if the forest burns down, you have to rent it from somewhere else the next year.

[–] silence7 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Forest offsets typically depend on a counterfactual — the idea that if you didn't buy the offset, the forest would be cut down. So a lot of people who wouldn't have cut the forest down sell offsets, resulting in no change to atmospheric carbon, but giving permission to others to burn fossil fuels.

And yes, you could rent in a different place from one time period to another, but CO2 concentrations remain elevated for hundreds of thousands of years when you burn fossil fuels, and firms don't bother with planning for forest-based sequestration over that time period, typically settling for a contract covering only a few decades. So there's an inherent mismatch between the offset contract and the duration of the damage they do.

[–] dillekant 1 points 6 months ago

Yes, that's why I'm saying, the companies just have to rent in perpetuity. Also, yeah you can't rent forest carbon unless it's sinking it that year.