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Carbon Credits always seem to me like the Ecological equivalent of buying Indulgences from the Church.
Good analogy. Carbon credits are, in fact and in practice, a lousy excuse to maintain BAU while contributing nothing to the overall problem. IOW, they are a sham solution to a very real and dire problem. The planet cannot afford the best intentions and failed promise of carbon credits. Period.
The idea of it is to make it more costly, it still could be useful but it needs to be a higher cost.
Carbon credits are a form of the ācap and tradeā strategy that has been effective with other types of pollution and, sure, it is very important to keep the bookkeeping honest.
I perused the article looking for the analysis and numbers justifying the headline and the specific claim:
Those ghost credits represent nearly one in three credits issued through Californiaās primary forest offset program, highlighting systemic flaws in the rules and suggesting widespread gaming of the market.
āOur work shows that Californiaās forest offsets program increases greenhouse gas emissions, despite being a large part of the stateās strategy for reducing climate pollution,ā said Danny Cullenward, the policy director at CarbonPlan. āThe program creates the false appearance of progress when in fact it makes the climate problem worse.ā
But what is reported is that the program generates 130 million credits, but only 20-39 million are claimed to be non-existent.
This is removing 91 million to 110 million tons of emission, not adding 20-39 million extra.
Sure the fake 20-39 million credits should be eliminated (taking the analysis as accurate), but the broad claim about the program - based on CarbonPlanās own numbers - that it is actually increasing emissions - is false.
And the assertion that the fake credits are nearly one in three is based on the assumption that the high end number is the accurate one. The actual range is 15-30%.
Itās a plausible interim idea that clearly wasnāt as well implemented as it should have been. The question is what to do next ā scrap the credits and go back to business as usual? Set hard caps for everyone? Carbon tax?
The thing that fascinates me about this story is what crap data people apparently had to work with. That part should be easy to fix.
So I just wasted 10 minutes reading a bullshit article.
Thanks TPM./s
TOO LITTLE TOO LATE
In a carbon budget context, a policy pledge to end sales of internal combustion vehicles in ten yearsā time categorically fails to address the urgency of the issue. 2030 is too late as the entire Paris-compliant carbon budget for the car sector is used up before the policies even kick in[1].
Iāve written elsewhere about why we must be clear on the difference between ānet zeroā and real zero. In short, ānet zeroā assumes the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere at unprecedented scale, allowing emissions from fossil fuels to continue well into the second half of the century.
Should we choose not to gamble and hand to the next generation the burden of developing and rolling out as-yet-unproven (at scale) negative emissions technologies, then we are forced to accept the hard logic of real zero.
In a world constrained by carbon budgets derived from the Paris Agreement, real zero invites a very different policy response to ānet zeroā. The PMās latest announcement is a case in point.
While a clear market signal to remove petrol and diesel cars is absolutely necessary, the timescale and ambition of the current plan are completely at odds with the immediacy of the climate emergency.
For a fair chance of staying below 2Ā°C, developed countries including the UK must bring about immediate and deep cuts in emissions from all sectors.
~ Kevin Anderson blog
Well just focus on what a better person
you are now.
Awareness was raised and in the end that is the most important thing
/s
Donāt worry, when the cap and trade fails to actually absorb any carbon, we can just eat carbon credits instead of food.
Conserve and capture now, or mother nature will implement her solutionā¦think Thanos.
Not really. The headline was misleading in that it applies only to a minority of credits generated by the entire forest offset program. I thought the article itself was a good dive into a subject I knew little about.
I was especially interested in this:
āWe disagree with your statement that landowners or project developers are gaming the system or that there are inflated estimatesā of greenhouse gas reductions, Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for the Air Resources Board, said in an email.
Thatās bullshit, and, worse, becomes an excuse for doing nothing to improve the effectiveness of the program. I care more about reductions in CO2 emissions than I do about what Gov. Newsom can brag about when he runs for the Dem nomination for President.
I also was interested in this:
Researchers and activists also worry about the close ties between the Air Resources Board and the groups that now profit from the program.
The potential conflicts of interest described in the article seemed like they would be worthy of some review.
OT: I made a huge mistake trying to read this article on a Kindle Fire without taking advantage of Reading View. It is a long article with many short paragraphs of 1-2 sentences. TPMās site was feeding me an ad after each paragraph for most of the article.
This is a long report, but it never gets to the point. What I understand of carbon credits, is that a company can offset its carbon foot print by supporting a forest that absorbs the carbon the company produces.
So if a company supports region that is listed as absorbing 130 tons of carbon, but because it is averaged that particular portion only absorbs 100 tons, the company can still produce 130 tons of carbon without penalty. That is an additional 30 tons produced and not charged.
Letās not forget all carbon absorbed will at sometime be released. At best this is only banking the carbon.
The carbon credits are too damn high guy:
Couldnāt resist.
Have a good evening. Iām outta here.
JFC, the original planners had to have known how landowners and logging interests could scam this arrangement. This kind of exposĆ© shows up again and again for so-called solutions to carbon reduction plans that it makes me think that the agencies that set them up are riddle with industry shills. We heard Biden talk about farmers planting cover crops to reduce COā and we know how farmers can be trusted not to cheat on arrangements like that, especially now that so much farmland in the U.S. is owned and operated by multinational or even altogether foreign interestsā¦