[HN Gopher] Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing
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Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing
Author : boredemployee
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-08-07 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theartnewspaper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theartnewspaper.com)
| mhh__ wrote:
| Tax the fucking carbon
| xupybd wrote:
| To what end?
|
| Is taxing carbon going to avoid any climate problems, or is it
| just going to move money around and do little to change the
| amount of carbon emitted. I suspect the latter.
|
| We need to think about solutions from end to end not just ones
| that appear to punish the parties that we think need punishing.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Taxing carbon is the _only_ way the government can be
| reasonably confident of effecting any change while minimizing
| economic disruption.
|
| Markets work, use them.
| wonnage wrote:
| Directly regulating the amount of pollution emitted is
| effective too, look at how California's auto emissions laws
| have become a de-facto standard. The US is the #1 source of
| demand in the world, entire economies (e.g China's) have
| been built around suppressing domestic demand in favor of
| making more money exporting to the US. If we change our
| regulations, the rest of the world will follow.
| trothamel wrote:
| That's a very good way to get unelected.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I believe the best type of carbon tax would be an import tax
| on goods from countries that have more lax environmental
| legislation.
|
| Not only would that attack the problem of "embodied
| emissions", but if you spin it right it could be seen as
| protecting domestic industry.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| A proper carbon tax would only increase flight costs by about 8%,
| since there's lots of other costs than fuel.
|
| People don't seem to believe that though. Because a carbon tax
| high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally
| destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have
| a financial incentive to burn less of it, and there's
| alternatives for almost all uses. And so, a measure that would
| kill the fossil fuel industry, and not really bother any other
| industry, is portrayed as an impossible dream because the fossil
| fuel industry has a lot of money and power.
| indymike wrote:
| > a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry
|
| Increasing the cost of flights by 8%, and by doing so, killing
| the source of fuel for those flights sounds like economic
| Armageddon.
| tunesmith wrote:
| These kind of opinions are increasing in frequency and they all
| seem poorly reasoned to me. Yes, there are standards
| organizations to make sure that, for instance, tree farms aren't
| just logging their trees and selling the same plots for offsets
| again. The author makes the point that the timeframes are too
| long, but that just strikes me as thinking similar to "planting
| trees doesn't work, we need x instead!" When the point is that
| every little bit helps.
|
| Given good enough standards, it just means that while carbon
| offset opportunities are plentiful, they'll be cheap - and as
| they become more popular, the price will increase, and this is a
| _good_ thing.
|
| I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid
| responsibility by passing it on to the people!" argument, because
| it just seems a lazy argument designed to remove any personal
| agency. Corporations are made out of people. If people didn't
| exist, neither would the corporations. If demand for a
| corporations products or services dried up, the corporation would
| cease to exist. As corporations reduce their emissions, the per-
| person carbon footprint shrinks. In the US, the per-person carbon
| footprint is lower than it used to be. They're related.
| Communicating a per-person carbon footprint _increases_ people
| demanding corporations reduce emissions. If the per-person carbon
| footprint were a scheme developed by corporations to avoid
| accountability, it seems a very poorly-thought-out and
| ineffective scheme from those corporations.
| hgsgm wrote:
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid
| responsibility by passing it on to the people!"
|
| Oh come on... People like Leo Dicaprio and Taylor Swift fly on
| their private jets to tell Johnny Average here, that he should
| bike for 15 miles to his workplace. Organizations are the
| same... look at coca cola for example, some water, sugar and
| aromas, in a plastic bottle, plastic cap, plastic sticker,
| packed in a sixpack wrapped in plastic, on a pallet, wrapped in
| more plastic. Reusable glass bottles? Nope (atleast not in my
| country). Just look at packaging of most items.. clamshell
| packaging, toothpaste double or tripple wrapped, shrinkflation
| (less product, same amount of packaging, more packages bought),
| single peppers wrapped in plastic, bananas wrapped in plastic,
| electronics literally designed to be unrepairable, tractors
| going that way too, cars following, user replacable batteries
| are usually too expensive to replace on 2 year old devices,
| sotware updates slow down devices, big corps requiring
| computer-bound workers to come to office, instead of working
| from home, clothes companies replacing cotton clothes with
| synthetics, leaking microplastics everywhere, companies
| catchign fish in US seas, or even meat, shipping them to china
| to be cleaned, cut and packaged, and then shipped back to US,
| zero regulation on 3rd world, where corpos either mine raw
| materials or "recycle" stuff (and recycling copper means
| burning the insulation off first... literally burning heaps of
| plastic),... and lets not forget the "accidents" when companies
| like BP ignore safety and cause fucking huge oil spills and
| destroy huge areas with their carelessness, and they don't even
| get properly punished for that.
|
| But no... let's pass the blame on people, who have no
| alternative on the market, and let's ban straws, because
| "that'll surely help the environment".
| wonnage wrote:
| > In the US, the per-person carbon footprint is lower than it
| used to be. They're related. Communicating a per-person carbon
| footprint increases people demanding corporations reduce
| emissions.
|
| How much of that is simply a result of moving dirty
| manufacturing industries into other countries?
| smileysteve wrote:
| This seems like a no true scotsman opinion.
|
| The author is asking questions about life span or species of
| trees without doing any of the journalistic legwork.
|
| There are many reasons to say that credits aren't enough if we're
| still contributing carbon, because few people have been saying
| "don't plant trees" in the areas that have established credits.
|
| But it's not the same as green washing; it might be more similar
| to cancer awareness campaigns, but there is some action.
|
| And of course the answer is "do x less", but that's not an option
| most of the developed world will choose. Do Y more is much more
| achievable, especially if it benefits the end user.
|
| So new recycling campaign "Recycle aluminum cans, it'll save you
| 5% on your next 24 cans, reduce the trade deficit, and help build
| pontoon boats and airplanes"
| cowpig wrote:
| I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better
| job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and
| laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon
| offsetting creates:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY
|
| Here is the list of sources for that video if you're
| interested:
|
| [1] https://www.hawkmountain.org/news/special-projects/help-
| the-...
|
| [2] https://www.bluesource.com/demo/hawk-mountain/
|
| [3]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2020/03/18/jpmorga...
|
| [4] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-
| chas...
|
| [5]
| https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Haya-E...
|
| [6]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220605103102/http://apps.who.i...
|
| [7] https://eco-act.com/carbon-credits/cleaner-cookstoves-low-
| ca...
|
| [8] https://depts.washington.edu/airqual/Marshall_66.pdf
|
| [9] https://blogs.worldbank.org/energy/understanding-
| cookstove-a...
|
| [10]
| https://mediamanager.sei.org/documents/Publications/Climate/...
|
| [11]
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2019.006...
|
| [12]
| https://app.hubspot.com/documents/3298623/view/251152947?acc...
| TSiege wrote:
| This really misses the point of the claim. Carbon Credits are
| greenwashing because as it currently exists doesn't work. And
| almost every approach is based an unfounded schemes.
| Furthermore, carbon offsets are used to justify ecological
| damage; they exist for no other purpose.
|
| The problem with carbon offsetting is that almost none of the
| solutions work for long term. For example, if you're digging up
| oil and burning it, planting a tree wont help. The carbon you
| dug up from miles underneath our feet is removed from the
| global carbon cycle for millions of years, the carbon in a tree
| lasts as long as that tree is alive. Every living organism
| should be assumed to be decayed and returned to the carbon
| cycle unless specifically proven otherwise. For example, most
| of the carbon offset operations in California are being
| destroyed by wild fires
| [(1)](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wildfires-are-
| destroying-ca...)
|
| If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's not
| taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground. We will
| delude ourselves if we think any growing any lifeform to
| capture carbon will work unless humans directly put it into the
| ground in old oil fields. The only other possibly viable
| alternative is through mineral reactions with carbon, turning
| it into stone
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > If we want to be honest and about what is effective, it's
| not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the ground.
|
| I live in the UK. I think it's reasonable to visit my family
| in Australia every few years. Is it bad if I purchase carbon
| offsets?
| hgsgm wrote:
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Carbon offsets are just donations to environmental groups.
| There's nothing bad about either taking flights or making
| donations, but it's wrong in the "factually incorrect"
| sense to think that if you pick the right amounts to donate
| to the right groups you can make your flight
| environmentally friendly. It's like buying a "local
| business" offset every time you shop at Walmart - you can
| just do it if you want to or don't do it if you don't.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Is it bad? No. Is it worse than never going, in terms of
| global warming impact? Yes. Is it still reasonable to do it
| every few years? Yes.
| peyton wrote:
| > it's not taking that flight and keeping that oil in the
| ground
|
| I'm taking that flight. I can't imagine a geopolitical regime
| that keeps oil in the ground for tens of thousands of years
| and beyond. The oil is coming out of the ground.
| ralfd wrote:
| We need mineral based carbon removal (weathering) or direct
| air storage and capture:
|
| https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE.
| ..
|
| > More than 99% of the carbon removal volume we selected was
| from natural solutions with durability terms of 100 years or
| less, such as forest and soil projects. Looking ahead, we
| hope to increase the overall durability of our portfolio by
| helping to expand the market for long-term engineered
| solutions such as direct air capture and storage.
| amelius wrote:
| > For example, most of the carbon offset operations in
| California are being destroyed by wild fires
|
| Shouldn't the corresponding carbon contracts be bought by the
| state, in that case, to keep the accounting correct?
| Aunche wrote:
| Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about
| carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of
| carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver.
|
| https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY
| Comevius wrote:
| The problem with climate change is that it creates a reality
| distortion field. Anyone who would honestly try to think about it
| would give up on life, so instead we have this fake optimism
| accompanied by fake solutions, basically a fantasy not unlike
| Harry Potter. Those 2 billion new cars aren't going to help the
| environment, which is already on the fritz, but if they are
| electric that means we are on the right path to the unicorn to
| come and fix everything. Which is great because then we don't
| have to change our way of life.
|
| Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever.
| boredemployee wrote:
| this pretty much. i think the way we're living is so broken,
| from education to everything else.
| XorNot wrote:
| God what a tired useless take. Climate change brings out an
| endless parade of puritan morality dressed as
| environmentalism: nothing can possibly be helping if we
| didn't lower our quality of life getting it. LED lights? _Why
| do you have light at all? It would be more efficient if they
| were off!_
| boredemployee wrote:
| Please, highlight who said we need to lower our quality of
| life? Maybe avoiding waste is a great place to start.
| alar44 wrote:
| Anyone who is being realistic understands that we have to
| stop eat food out of season, keeping all buildings at 68
| degrees during the summer, getting rid of multi hour
| commutes in cars, taking vacations in cruise ships,
| buying new phones every year, shipping everything in
| multiple layers of plastic over 1000s of miles etc etc.
| We are so fucking far past "reduce reuse recycle." No one
| is changing anything about their lives and that should be
| more than obvious to anyone paying attention.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| If we had stayed on the path we were on, it was a path to over
| 5 degrees of warming.
|
| If we keep our commitments, like the ones various nations have
| made to ban gas cars by 2035, we'll limit our warming to about
| 2.5 degrees.
|
| The difference between 2.5 degrees and 5 degrees is the
| difference between a really bad time and an apocalypse.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But no one is going to keep those commitments, few if any
| countries are even close, and many are not even on any real
| path.
|
| Not to mention, we're taking about 2.5 degrees of warning by
| 2100. But the world didn't end there. If we don't go to 0
| emissions (and there is currently no realistic path to that
| that any country even remotely accepts - massive degrowth of
| the economy), we will eventually reach 5 or more degrees of
| warming, it will just be a little later than 2100.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| These are concrete commitments, which countries do have a
| fairly good track record of keeping. The 2.5 does not
| require the nebulous "40% below 2010 emissions" type of
| commitments which countries have a really bad track record
| of keeping.
|
| A country saying "We will do X" is much more likely to do X
| than a country that says "We will achieve Y" will achieve
| Y.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| To be fair, toddlers do the same with their incessant
| overconfidence, and yet in the end it is that overconfidence
| that helps them gain skills and achieve great things. Sometime
| blind optimism is optimal.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I mean, don't we already know the cheap, half-assed solution?
| (And therefore the one we'll take?) Eventually someone will
| start solar radiation management, and we'll plod along like we
| always do.
| jwilk wrote:
| See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw ("Carbon
| Offsets! Can't we just buy our way out of climate change?" from
| the Climate Town channel)
| aaron695 wrote:
| blueflow wrote:
| I find the whole framing of "stopping emissions" odd. Where
| burning charcoal and burning hard coal are treated the same. But
| in fact, they are different: charcoal is made from plants, who
| captured the carbon recently from the air. If the plants are
| given enough time and space to recapture, burning charcoal is
| carbon neutral. Hard coal, to the contrary, was isolated from the
| carbon cycles for like, 300 million years, thus re-adding it to
| the cycle is going to make a dent that plants probably cannot
| offset.
|
| Stopping digging out carbon (hard coal, oil, liquid gas,
| limestone) would be like the first thing to do, but it seems the
| focus was shifted elsewhere...
| cowpig wrote:
| This argument could make some sense if we were talking about
| designing a sustainable system in the abstract, but the climate
| issue is an emergency leading to catastrophic outcomes in the
| present, and so decreasing emissions by any means necessary in
| the short-term is what matters.
| blueflow wrote:
| Continuing to dig out carbon and inserting it into the carbon
| cycle is guaranteed to exceed what we can offset with plants.
| What you describe is still a trajectory to doom or whatever
| awaits us.
| btilly wrote:
| With plants that remain part of the life cycle? Sure. But
| growing plants can lock away carbon more permanently
| depending how it is disposed of.
|
| Consider https://charmindustrial.com/. They take bio waste
| products (for example corn husks and cobs), turn it into
| oil, then put that back into wells. So growing plants (in
| this specific case, food) winds up permanently locking
| waste away.
| blueflow wrote:
| > They take bio waste products [...], turn it into oil
|
| I was about to call bullshit because of the first law of
| thermodynamics, but their FAQ states:
|
| > Unlike crude oil, bio-oil cannot sustain a flame, bio-
| oil has much lower energy density
|
| Good!
|
| > are heated up to about 500degC in a few seconds without
| burning
|
| I wonder where that heat comes from.
| TSiege wrote:
| Not really aware of anyone against charcoal other than the
| industry where we destroy american forests to make charcoal
| that we ship to europe to burn. Which 1) wastes energy from
| shipping that almost certainly isn't green and 2) destroys
| ecosystems that we need to begin rejuvenating in order to
| stabilize the climate system
| epolanski wrote:
| Why is the elephant in the room, agriculture and cattle so little
| discussed compared to transport.
|
| A burger pollutes more than driving an suv for 50 miles,yet the
| enemy is always transport.
|
| Forget a family of 4 in a single lunch can easily pollute much
| more than they would with transport in a week.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Transportation is 27% of US carbon emssions vs 11% for
| agriculture.
| epolanski wrote:
| Cattle emission is severely downplayed, starting from the
| fact that cattle produces methane which is 200 times worse
| than carbon dioxide, it's also severely downplayed how much
| it impacts resources like land, water and the many disaster
| byproducts such as ocean dead zones.[1]
|
| Cattle is also the biggest reason for deforestation (Amazon
| being the most famous example), people want to greedily eat
| damn steaks everyday, put their head under the sand and
| pretend electric vehicles will change our fate. Consuming
| less will.
|
| Moving less is good for the environment but eating less meat
| has much more impact.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The methane problem is easily solved by feeding them a diet
| which includes seaweed, why this isn't mandated is beyond
| me.
| mbgerring wrote:
| tinco wrote:
| Carbon offsetting becomes effective when it causes less carbon to
| be emitted. It has to be so expensive that it makes the consumer
| of the carbon to think twice. This can only happen if the
| offsetting is mandatory. The further up the chain it is the more
| effective it is as well.
|
| We might be able to death by a thousand cuts the CO2 problem. The
| more sectors we inconvenience with "green washing" type extra
| costs, the more attractive greener alternatives become, and the
| more funding potential solutions get.
|
| The article suggests investing in a strategic fund instead, but
| it's really the same thing and has the same problem as the CO2
| offsetting which is that the calculation of the amount of offset
| CO2 is not realistically calculated. The charities might have
| unrealistic long term CO2 offset estimates, but making the amount
| dependent on how much your budget allows for doesn't really make
| things better.
|
| If you fly economy from LAX->AMS and back, you emit ~2500kg of
| CO2. Easiest way to capture that CO2 is by planting trees. Say
| you want to capture it within 5 years. That's about 50kg per
| tree, and about a third dies so you'll need to plant 150 trees to
| cover your flight, which is $150 on teamtrees.org. Provided of
| course they actually plant it within the next year (do they?).
|
| That's already $50 more than that GCC site suggested you spend if
| you've got plenty money. Trees grow somewhat superlinearly so if
| you give your tree 10 years you need maybe $50 worth of trees.
|
| Anyway, it still won't save the planet, that only happens when
| all of this is mandatory and not just for flights but for
| everything.
| Devasta wrote:
| If I pay for my friend to have a weekend away with his
| girlfriend, thereby strengthening their relationship, then he
| shouldn't be mad when I sleep with her too and weaken it right?
| mastax wrote:
| If you were going to sleep with her anyway that seems like a
| net good.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| I've been very careful to not wade into one of these threads too
| readily, as when I read them, I almost always find a huge range
| of variability around what people understand or don't understand
| about forests, soils, or ecosystem scale biogeochemical cycling.
| There also seem to be some very assertive, and often very
| uninformed claims around voluntary versus compliance
| marketplaces, and what role nature based mitigation efforts play
| currently or might play in the future.
|
| However, it's becoming increasingly clear that most authors in
| the pop science journalism space have a limited capacity for
| understanding the nuance or uncertainties associated with remote
| sensing models and principles of biogeochemistry. As well, the
| armchair analysts make many wrong assumptions about forests,
| forestry, or how carbon cycling works.
|
| Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and
| sinks. There are often claims made around what forests can or
| cant do with regards to carbon cycling, and almost always they
| tend to fundementally misunderstand how carbon cycling, and
| nutrient cycling work in relationship to long term carbon
| stability. Not used taking advantage of forests and their ability
| to represent both (relatively, 10's-100's yr) short term stores
| of carbon, as well as less labile longer term storage pools
| (100's-1000's yr). We've been basically mining the world's
| forests and haven't even remotely attempted using natural
| ecosystems ability to not only sequester carbon, but to provide
| significant opportunities for climate resilience.
|
| Granted, we have an extraordinary limited understanding of the
| upper and lower bounds of many of these systems, but that's
| hardly any argument that we can't engage with and begin learning
| about the potential of these systems.
| olivermarks wrote:
| The oceans - half the world's surface - create more than half
| the world's oxygen. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-
| oxygen.html
|
| Rainforests cover 2 percent of the Earth's surface. A forest is
| considered to be a carbon sink if it absorbs more carbon from
| the atmosphere than it releases. Carbon is absorbed from the
| atmosphere through photosynthesis. It then becomes deposited in
| forest biomass (that is, trunks, branches, roots and leaves),
| in dead organic matter (litter and dead wood) and in soils.
| This process of carbon absorption and deposition is known as
| carbon sequestration. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/climate-change-
| adapting-impacts-and-...
|
| carbon dioxide is needed for plants to grow.
|
| After 30 years of measurements, the ocean carbon community is
| realizing that tracking human-induced (carbon) changes in the
| ocean is not as easy as they thought it would be. It wasn't a
| mere matter of measuring changes in carbon concentrations in
| the ocean over time because the natural carbon cycle in the
| ocean turned out to be a lot more variable than they imagined.
| https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon
| user_named wrote:
| Okay, so you're saying that everyone but you is too stupid to
| understand the question. But you also don't understand that the
| question here is about carbon credits, not about carbon
| sequestration or any biological process.
| dspoka wrote:
| And yet research on this topic suggest the opposite. "These
| days everyone seems to thinks that "planting trees" is an
| important solution to the climate crisis. They're mostly wrong,
| and in this paper we explain why. Instead of planting trees, we
| need to talk about people managing landscapes." [1]
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/13062214459331297...
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Now take this Gell-Mann type observation and apply it broadly.
| The internet is full of highly confident people that, if you
| are lucky, skimmed a Wikipedia article.
|
| Sorting the gold from the dross is THE contemporary skill.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Carbon credits was invented to let billionaires fly private jets
| and use mega yachts without criticism from the public
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(page generated 2022-08-07 23:00 UTC)