Okay here’s my alternate climate plan: we execute the richest person alive, and keep doing this until we get below a net worth of $10M, then we re-evaluate and see if we’ve solved the problem.
“I am going to start making money by cutting down trees. But in order to offset the amount of trees I cut down, I will also plant a tree every year”
“weird, why is the forest disappearing?”
Carbon offsets would only work if the sequestration strategy is permanent, which implies doing waaaaay more than any of these joke offerings can do. Like… plant entire new forests that will never be developed. Ever.
Like recycling, it’s also mostly a PR thing to take the perceived onus for addressing a problem that’s fundamentally caused by how industry is organized and shift it into individual consumers - who will never succeed at addressing the problem because the interventions are inherently inadequate.
They certainly should work at the power level. My utility is ~36% renewable in their power mix right now, but I pay for 100% and that extra money causes them to go out and buy extra renewables for the remaining 64% of my power. I'm not under any illusion that on a cold, still winter night that my power isn't coming from coal base load - but I have high confidence that they really are buying that extra power, and that in turn creates more demand for solar generation.
My employer does something similar, we buy the RECs from something like a third of the output of a local solar farm (under contract) and then also buy dirty power from the utility. That should ultimately wash out.
Though what I can't figure out is how that solar power is actually accounted for when it hits the grid. It's been severed from the renewable energy credits (that we bought) so presumably it must not count as a non-carbon power source when it enters the grid, but I can't find a category for "non-green solar power" on any of the utility reports. Anyone know where it goes?
And yet, in the US our politicians will still tout carbon offsets or carbon credits as if they are a solution to anything. The PR realizes that carbon-credits or carbon-offsets are bullshit the public has started to pickup on, so now they use “carbon capture” or “net-zero carbon.” But make no mistakes, there isn’t an environmental party that exists in the US, or anywhere else for that matter.
“President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act features substantial improvements to the federal Section 45Q tax credit for the capture and geologic storage of CO2, which provides additional incentives to help enable wide-scale project deployment.”
Carbon credits aren’t necessarily a bad idea. It basically sets a hard limit for the amount of carbon that can be produced, and the ability to produce can be sold. Now, the way it should be handled is every person is provided with a certain amount of credit, and they can sell them and make money off of them, bargain with them, or just choose not to give them up reducing the amount of carbon that is allowed to be produced. It should be up to the people.
Some amount of carbon will always be released. It should be handled in the way that best benefits the people, not the capitalists. Carbon credits may be part of that solution, but not in the form they usually take.
Also the argument we should be having in the US is whether we reach our climate goals through this kind of carbon-pricing model or the top-down regulatory model. In a sane world we'd probably expect republicans to be arguing for a carbon trading scheme and the democrats to be arguing for regulation.
Dear elites, please stop fucking around and just spend the goddamn money on building renewables before you find yourselves dragged in front of a people’s court. The longer this problem drags on, the more people will find themselves in desperate situations, looking for someone to blame.
Nitrogen oxide pollution was significantly curtailed using a credit based system. It was reasonable to think that it could have worked well for Carbon Dioxide emissions too but it requires that these emissions and their offsets be easily quantifiable. Much easier to do with nitrogen oxides but not so much with CO2. The fossil fuel industry doesn’t even want people to acknowledge that fossil fuels are responsible for global warming at all let alone support a Carbon credit system.
Funny, when the climate change deniers called offsets a scam, everyone dogpiled them. Now that they’ve been definitively outed as a scam and it is an acceptable narrative among the left, offsets were of course always a scam by the oil industry and politicians.
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