What an awful, dangerous headline. At the end of the day some economic incentive is needed to get people to put land back into forest, healthy pasture, wetlands. This is an in-depth look at the current challenges — the lack of accountability, the potential moral hazard of cheap offsets — that comes off as reckless due to the article’s overall framing.
If you believe in climate change and believe that it’s a civilization threatening crisis, then capturing carbon is critical. Healthy land is vital in that fight. What we don’t have yet — but are moving towards despite what it looks like here in the US — is more vigorous taxation of carbon to more accurately reflect the negative externalities. With high enough taxes on carbon, there would be a squeeze on the carbon credit market and prices would go up significantly. With more money on the line, people would get more serious about accurate measurement and accountability.
It’s currently the Wild West — the carbon market needs to mature and become more sophisticated along side more strict pricing on carbon emissions. A less reckless article would frame the challenges we need to solve rather than blasting that credits for reforestation is bad.
A less reckless article would frame the challenges we need to solve rather than blasting that credits for reforestation is bad.
I care a lot about environmental degradation, and I disagree. The point of the article is that the existence of carbon credits encourages people to continue their current unsustainable lifestyles rather than making deeper changes that actually work:
"In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last."
Yes, there are secondary benefits to landscape preservation, but if it is true that carbon credits are not offsetting the environmental damage that they claim to, I think it's fair to say that their existence causes harm. It is a problem if people are spending money on an expensive placebo instead of actually working toward a actual solution.
I think your disagreement with the author is that you feel current carbon credit system is already a partial positive, and that the system will naturally evolve toward being more effective. Rather than a placebo, it sounds like you think it's more like an aspirin that will eventually evolve to become an actual cure . Is there evidence that points in that direction?
Forests and sustainable land-use management sequester massive amounts of carbon. Full stop. They're up on the list of recommended actions by the IPCC. We need to be doing it. And landowners aren't going to do it for free; they need to be paid.
Like I said, there is a potential moral hazard with credits – companies think they can offset and continue emitting. Currently this is possible because carbon, in general, is still ridiculously inexpensive. Aggressive carbon taxes are ultimately what's going to bring down emissions.
Once economic constraints are in place, you still need to reduce carbon. And again, forests are one of the best ways to do this.
My problem with the article is that it's flippant towards carbon credits. It's highlighting problems with the current implementation, and using that to make a judgment about the whole idea of carbon credits.
We need a carbon tax, and we need better standards of accountability. These are solvable problems.
I don't know what the term for this is, but it's a common issue with trying to get people to stop doing something, if you make it a fiscal penalty, they're almost always more likely to do it because now you've made it OK as long as the penalty is paid. Best example I can come up with is child card services and care takers arriving late for pickup.
I've seen studies that show adding a monetary penalty, even per minute at pretty high rates, results in even later pickups because there's no guilt for being late, as long as their following the rules (pay money) vs just being late, where there's some amount of guilt for not honoring the agreed upon rules.
I'm guessing this has to be a similar situation. These companies can now comfortably play within the rules by just paying money. Until that amount of money is greater than any ongoing costs plus initial risks, I think we'll see companies just "paying the tax".
That seems like a pretty solvable problem - even for daycares. First time you’re late, 5$, second time 20$, n + 1 time = (n+1)*10. The incentive is not to make a habit of it at the very least because the costs will add up.
The other moral hazard is if you pay people to not cut down forests it encourages all the worlds forest owners to request payment for leaving them alone or threatening to chop them if not paid.
That's a good question, but I don't know that I have a good answer.
First, I would define "what is needed" as reducing the level of human impact on the ecosystem to a sustainable level. Implicit in this is that I think our current impact is ecologically unsustainable. Second, I don't think an approach that puts all the emphasis on "carbon" is appropriate. A system that narrowly focuses on canceling the negative effects of CO2 might be a necessary component, but is not sufficient.
I think a real solution requires large scale behavioral change that starts now. I don't trust that any "solution" that involves carrying on more or less as we currently are plus the addition of a small tithe for conservation efforts is workable. If we want progress, we need to actually cut back on on our consumption, rather than offsetting it with good intentions.
I may be overly pessimistic, but my current belief is that it won't be possible to have a sustainable earth with our current levels of population and the current first-world standard of living. Technology might eventually get us there, but not on the timescale we need. Since the world as a whole is unlikely to voluntarily accept such as step backward, I think it's likely that the next 100 years will involve a lot of strife and suffering when the reductions occur involuntarily. While we may not be able to completely avoid this outcome, our goal should be to minimize the trauma and depth of the disaster.
On a more optimistic note, I'd suggest that in the meantime we can support reforestation efforts on their own merits without suggesting that they are also a cure-all for the rest of our ecological ills.
reading "The State of the Carbon Cycle" 2018 USGCRP it is not so easy to sum up.. basically, there is "flux" which is the activity of both uptake and production.. the coastal zones have a lot of organic matter, so the flux is very active, while open oceans are different. Rivers carry carbon to the oceans and dump it in sediment, mostly.. do you count that ? and, the differences between anthropogenic sources, which are changing, and the base rates, which are changing more slowly, are hard to separate because we can only observe total activity as best as possible..
The author misses the point of these programs. It's already understood that there will be waste and failure and graft and corruption and people who just plain cheat; that's an inevitable result of ANY subsidy program.
The whole point of carbon credits and such (despite the touchy-feely PR speak on the surface) is to increase the number of people economically motivated to preserve trees, even if just for a little while, and less people to pollute, even if just a little bit. Technology changes quickly, but trees grow slowly. The idea is to preserve as many slow growing trees as we can while waiting for the technology to catch up.
The problem is that the economic incentive to exploit the environment will always outweight the economic incentive to protect it.
The article cited a ton of research that showed that carbon credits don't have a meaningful impact on carbon usage. It seems like what usually happens is that the carbon credits get shuffled around, but overall the carbon output stays the same.
Solutions like green technology or carbon credits seem to rest on this assumption that we can prevent environmental collapse without significantly changing our consumerist economy, standard of living, and energy consumption. This seems like magical, faith-based thinking. There are theoretical limits on how efficient any energy conversion will be, no matter how advanced our technology is. The more our economy grows, the more we consume and produce...the more energy we use and the more waste we create. We have to start thinking about ways to move away from an always-growing, consumerist economy.
Except that there a numerous examples in the past century where we’ve put the environment ahead of economic concerns: The Clean Water Act, a significant reduction in urban smog, the reversal of the Ozone hole through cap-and-trade.
As far as our overall economic system, the immediate problem is figuring out how to de-carbonize growth, first-and-foremost. And simultaneously reduce the carbon floating around in the atmosphere. I’m all for exploring alternatives and agree we don’t need so much “stuff”. But I don’t necessarily agree that that means we have to turn off economic growth either. We need to de-carbonize it.
An analogy I like to use is this: If you have a popular website and it’s becoming overwhelmed with customers, you have a couple of options. Turn everyone away and start kicking people off — or identify the bottlenecks and solve them. We’re running society on an inefficient algorithm, and that needs to change. We’ve built an amazing server that has drastically reduced conflict, poverty, and starvation, worldwide. Do we close the door to that, or do we find a more efficient algorithm?
> The problem is that the economic incentive to exploit the environment will always outweight the economic incentive to protect it.
That's quite literally why government exists. To solve coordination problems like these.
> Solutions like green technology or carbon credits seem to rest on this assumption that we can prevent environmental collapse without significantly changing our consumerist economy, standard of living, and energy consumption. This seems like magical, faith-based thinking.
On the contrary, thinking the opposite - e.g. that everyone could "just" reduce our consumption - is magical thinking, because it goes directly against the gradient of human nature. Humans want to improve lives for themselves and their children, which creates incentives for consumption, and utterly suck at coordinating at scale to achieve a long-term goal, which is why we had to invent governments and markets to provide necessary incentive structures. Any solution for the climate crisis has to work with these constraints, not against them.
> There are theoretical limits on how efficient any energy conversion will be, no matter how advanced our technology is.
We're nowhere near the limits of efficiency in technology.
> The more our economy grows, the more we consume and produce...the more energy we use and the more waste we create.
More energy is good. We need energy to fix the damage we've done to the climate. And waste is a waste management problem, only partially related to the issues that are critical now. Trying to shut down the economy won't help save us from upcoming climate issues, it'll only make a lot more people suffer. The problem of weaning off the growth-based economy is something we can handle later.
(It's also worth pondering, what exactly is it that we want to save here. The planet? No, the planet will be fine; we can't really do anything to hurt it. The animals? To the extent of our knowledge, animals don't care. They don't think. Human race? Humans as a species will be fine too, no expected climate damage scenario would wipe us all out. What we're trying to save here is ourselves, our children, our way of life. Which essentially boils down to technological civilization. Civilization that's dependent on the shape of the economy we have now. Trying to drastically alter it is as risky as climate change itself.)
> The idea is to preserve as many slow growing trees as we can...
We need to manage forests wisely. I'm in the Northern Rockies, so I only know about pines, but preserving as many as we can isn't healthy. When they are packed too tight they aren't healthy. Their growth and structure is weak from competition and they are more susceptible to disease and insects. I've seen whole forests wiped out by bark beetles.
On my own land, we selectively logged, removing some of the larger trees or infested trees, thinning many smaller trees and sometimes just pulling out many saplings. Since then I've noticed the remaining trees putting on more growth and looking healthier overall. What happened to the logs? All the larger ones went to a mill. Someone at a big box improvement store can buy some wood and build shelves. They can sequester some carbon right in their own home.
I see such a negative, almost knee jerk reaction (not you specifically, but in general) to cutting down a tree that I wish people could come live where trees are weeds. I love the forest, I live in it and want it to be healthy, but it takes management and that means some trees need to be put to use doing something besides storing carbon.
Carbon credits or not, increasing the number of acres of healthy forest is always a good thing.
Not just that: we need fast-growing trees that don't let the carbon back into the atmosphere.
For that, the trees may not rot, may not be used as firewood, and may not be processed into paper or other products that eventually get incinerated in a waste-processing plant.
Ideally we should play artificial Carboniferous, and let these trees sink in lifeless bottomless oxygen-depleted bogs where they get preserved for millennia, and turn eventually back into coal deposits, to replace the ones we've depleted for last 300-400 years, putting the carbon from them into the air.
This takes much more than just fast-growing tress, or more land allocated to growing them. We also need these carbon burial grounds, that likely won't look (and likely smell) as pretty as a nice pine forest. Drowning in a carbon burial bog would be a hazard for hikers, too.
We also need economic incentives to bury the carbon from these carbon-fixating trees, and not to use them productively in the economy.
A genetically engineered plant that grows fast, does not require a lot of water, accumulates lots of anti-microbial and anti-fungi substances that prevent rotting, and produces timber which is not nice and desirable timber, to avoid the temptation, which is also heavier than water to make drowning easier, could be helpful.
If that timber stays a wooden structure for several centuries, it would, for that time!
Maybe we should start to build more long-term things from timber, likely we would fire-proof them well. But steel, concrete, and plastics are still much easier to use for long-term structures like large buildings, bridges, roads, etc.
If it's used to produce paper, or wooden packaging, or for making chopsticks, etc, it would likely not. All these things are expendable, and most likely will end up either burned or rotted, releasing the carbon as CO2. Recycling helps this, of course.
I'm sitting here, half-way through Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", and I keep wondering - why can't we grow chloroplast in vats, force-flow CO₂ through them, and dump the resulting products into a mine shaft?
You would also need to dry up the product, and preferably burn out most of the hydrogen out of it, to form coke (the black, not the white powder), and then dump it. Else you'll quickly run out of empty mines' space, and likely contaminate the water table around them.
If technology doesn't catch up, then we're doomed. But that's unlikely; there's nothing like a crisis to spur innovation.
We're dealing with human nature here. People have their own problems to deal with, and tend to ignore things that aren't an immediate concern. So you need to adjust their environment in a way that aligns their goals with some environmental goals, all without destroying your economy. Do it too fast or hard, and your economy crashes, and all environmental incentives go out the window as your country's focus changes to getting out of bankruptcy.
A more accurate title would be “reforestation for carbon offsetting hasn’t worked so far”. I dislike this title because it implies the idea is flawed, when it’s the implementation. Maybe it is unworkable given human nature but that’s something else entirely.
Carbon credits seem too cheap. I just offset a round trip flight between California and New York with about $15 in carbon credits. If solving climate change was that cheap (about 5% the cost of that flight), I think the world have done much more by now. I can only think that solving climatate change is going to cost a lot more money and require a lot more lifestyle changes.
It would definitely involve lifestyle changes, but de-carbonizing our society really wouldn't cost much more than the 5% you mention. Estimates are it would cost between 1-4% of GDP by 2030, and 2-6% by 2050[1].
I think the main reason it's cast as expensive is that there are corporations that would basically have to shut down, e.g. oil & gas, mining companies. They are telling everyone who will listen how expensive dealing with climate change will be - see the latest Australian election for example. In a way, they are right - they are going to lose all their revenue when we finally get them to stop extracting fossil fuels for burning. But society has a whole won't notice that much - I remember reading somewhere that switching to flushing toilets and sewer systems cost about the same amount in terms of GDP.
Problem with planting or keeping trees is it is a future promise and a long term one and that just seems too easy to break. (either on purpose or due to other factors)
I buy them from Cool Effect. I try to pick energy projects because it’s easier to see the accounting ... and you get carbon sequestration faster (trees take a long time to grow vs erecting a wind turbine).
I spent some time researching carbon credit providers and what I found was the the only way they have to distribute credits is through online advertising. That means that they have to spend multiples of the actual wholesale credit costs on ads just to sell them.
By my estimate, Cool Effect spends around 3-4x of the actual credit costs on marketing related expenses. This is publicly available through their 990 filing.
I inquired from credit wholesalers about large volume pricing and found that the actual cost is less than $3/ton of CO2e. For an average US consumer with a 20 ton carbon footprint, that would come out to $60/year or $5/mo if sold at cost. To me this is a no-brainer for anyone that wants to be carbon neutral immediately.
I'm setting up a carbon credit buying club where we can get them at wholesale prices. My goal is to sell them right at cost in a radically transparent way where members provide all the marketing we need. If anyone here is interested in joining, you can email me at paul@carbonspace.com.
That's unsurprising in a way, but does it really make a difference between $180/year vs $60/year? Both of those are pretty in the noise.
CoolEffect seems do be doing a nice job of both marketing and explaining and verifying their projects. I have no problem paying a premium for that. (remember this thread started as surprise that it could be SO CHEAP)
A recent poll on the issue shows that while a rising number of people now believe in climate change, they are unwiling to put as much as $10 a month towards solving it. [1]
Carbon credits are essentially perfect in theory, if they're sold at auction worldwide and governments are compliant with them. They also seem to be perfect even if implemented within a single country.
What this article seems to be arguing is that credits are:
1) misallocated initially, presumably because they're allocated as opposed to being auctioned, and therefore there are too many,
2) not enforced or monitored well enough (if you sell credits promising to plant a forest and then don't plant it, or you cut it down later), and
3) particularly not enforced across international boundaries (because who's gonna check?).
The first two seem politically solvable within countries. The third, I think, is a decent argument as to why cross-border carbon credit selling should be disallowed, or allowed only between countries that can prove compliance (e.g. between countries like France and Germany). Rather, international treaties should set each country's overall permitted carbon output by year.
If the article is trying to suggest that carbon credits are a failure and shouldn't be pursued further, I think it's tremendously wrong, especially since it doesn't provide a better alternative. But if it's trying to point out implementation pitfalls so we can avoid them and create carbon credits that work, then I support that 1,000%.
So it's tricky because it's unclear to me what the author's actual agenda is.
Can someone explain to me like I am 10 why a carbon credit system is preferred over a straight carbon tax? Also, isn't most carbon produced by industry caused by burning fuel? Seems easy to tax fuel.
It's not preferred. All the leading economic models and experts are in agreement that a flat carbon tax is the way to go (on paper).
The problem is political feasibility and public acceptance. It is a lot easier to pass carbon trading schemes, emissions targets and caps, and renewable energy subsidies-- even though all of these end up costing consumers more than a simple tax would.
I recommend looking into the work of William Nordhaus for more on this topic.
Carbon tax discourages emitting carbon into into the atmosphere. Carbon credit encourages sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Both are needed.
One advantage to carbon credits is that anybody can pay them, whereas only the government can enforce a carbon tax. And when it comes to the Amazon, this means the Brazilian government...whose leader is a climate denier that wants to bulldoze the Amazon for agriculture.
Ah I see..I had thought that producing fewer emissions than target/allowance would be given a credit they can sell to others. That is different than Credits for Carbon capture. Thanks for clarifying.
I think a very promising model is getting people to pay monthly in accordance to their footprint and a non-profit taking care of spending it wisely: "We are constantly in a search for the most cost-efficient ways to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." https://compensate.com/
I wouldn’t trust a non profit to do the right thing. They need oversight and they need to have institutional turnover lest they become like the homeless advocate services in SF who in theory should do best for the homeless but have become political entities who are more aligned with themselves than the homeless or resolving the issue.
As Verchot says, REDD-mechanism was designed to offset deforestation and it is not designed to work as a carbon credit system. Both are important but maybe they should be kept separate. Money can be collected from consumers who want to compensate their use of products or services which use fossil raw materials. Follow-up should be rigorous and if money is wasted, it should be paid back.
I view 'carbon credits' as a way of manipulating perceptions ... doing something on paper, stalling on concrete action.
The laws of physics don't care what we think or the stupid mind-games we play, tickling the dragon's tail. So long as we refuse the necessary, massive response needed, dozens of coming generations will pay.
Are there any programs that buy up fossil fuels and put it in a place or state where it would be infeasible to consume in the future? Seems like the only way this will work is to keep the carbon in the ground.
That would just cause the price to increase, creating an incentive for more extraction. The practical, most economically sensible solution to climate change is also the most politically unfeasible: carbon tax
Increasing oil price beyond a certain point destroys demand [1] [2]. It would not be infeasible to buy oil fields and inject oil consuming bacteria to negate the ability to extract that oil in the future. The capital required would be substantial though. Either get a hat to go in hand with to billionaires to get support, or perhaps go to carbon tax markets to obtain funding.
In some jurisdictions, a carbon tax will never fly politically, so you'll need to make due with less efficient mechanisms.
I assume the byproducts of oil metabolism would be stable when consumed in situ. It would not make sense if emissions were still generated in the process.
If you believe in climate change and believe that it’s a civilization threatening crisis, then capturing carbon is critical. Healthy land is vital in that fight. What we don’t have yet — but are moving towards despite what it looks like here in the US — is more vigorous taxation of carbon to more accurately reflect the negative externalities. With high enough taxes on carbon, there would be a squeeze on the carbon credit market and prices would go up significantly. With more money on the line, people would get more serious about accurate measurement and accountability.
It’s currently the Wild West — the carbon market needs to mature and become more sophisticated along side more strict pricing on carbon emissions. A less reckless article would frame the challenges we need to solve rather than blasting that credits for reforestation is bad.