Cambridge study says carbon offsets are not nearly as effective as they claim to be.
Offsets are a game of 3 card monte.
The carbon is still released. We’ll never win.
And the dealer gets the money.
Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact
Submitted 1 year ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/study-carbon-offsets-arent-doing-their-job-overstate-impact/
Comments
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And nothing that actively consumes co2 is added to the equation. They “preserve” something that is already there. It is literally doing nothing.
djmarcone@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They are doing their job if that job is to make money for the people selling them.
Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
…its been a scam the entire time. it was a way for rich people to pay the poor people to shut up about ruining the planet, and nothing more. Not sure why anyone ever thought this was going to be effective. taxing pollution does NOTHING to stop it.
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To surprise of no one… I thought it was clear that it is only a marketing fantasy to scam those who don’t understand how nature works
chaogomu@kbin.social 1 year ago
The only reason why Tesla is a profitable company with an insane stock price, is that Elon Musk has been using it to sell scammy carbon credits to other automakers.
So yeah, the entire system has been a government mandated scam used to lower taxes on the worst polluters.
Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 1 year ago
Instead of offsets, companies should be pursuing direct carbon sequestration like with https://climeworks.com/
No estimates, no accounting magic. Just a direct measure of physical, measurable tons of carbon directly removed from the atmosphere.
bioemerl@kbin.social 1 year ago
Except carbon sequestration is not ever going to work and it's always going to be more expensive than having just burned that fuel in the first place.
Maybe you'll get an advantage if it's nearly free to do and you use exclusively solar power in areas with excesses of it.
But on average? Sequestration is not an answer. The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is just too rare to effectively pull out, and it's never going to be capable of even reaching fractions of what we're emitting right now.
We have one answer to this problem and one answer only.
Stop. Using. Fossil. Fuels.
Tax carbon.
Start getting ready to do geoengineering, because we are going to need it.
People like to bitch and say that we shouldn't be changing the environment, but guess what, we're changing the environment if we like it or not, it's only a question of it it's in our interests or if it's an uncontrolled self-destructive form.
NathanielThomas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Tax carbon
I agree with everything you’re saying except that carbon taxes, at least in Canada, do not seem to really have worked. Since we have no genuinely reliable public transportation infrastructure, we all still drive. And we pay the carbon tax just like we pay excise taxes on it, and provincial taxes, and federal taxes (and, ironically, transportation taxes). It’s why our gasoline in Vancouver is $2.10 per litre. Albeit, lower than Europe, but higher than America. Yet it hasn’t changed the fact we drive ICE cars.
The wealthier people have started driving Teslas. I would say there are times you’re driving and one-third are Teslas, but it’s really region-dependent. Outside Vancouver they’re all ICE, and not just cars but raised pickups.
astropenguin5@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The problem with direct air capture is that it only is good if it exclusively uses renewables, and right now it would be much better to instead use that energy to replace fossil fuels. Only excess renewable energy should be used for it, maybe in places like Scotland that have too much wind power. Capture directly from the source is also better as the concentration of carbon is much higher in the output from a smokestack, and as such has more impact and is more energy efficient too
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The main message is that relying on [carbon offset] certification is not enough,” said the study’s lead author, Thales West, an interdisciplinary ecologist and assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and a fellow at Cambridge’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources.
The authors call for “urgent revisions” to the certification methods used to attribute avoided deforestation to these projects, pointing out major flaws in current practice.
Over the past few decades, carbon offsets have become increasingly ubiquitous, particularly in higher-income countries, where consumers can assuage their climate guilt by paying a little extra for a flight ticket or a rental car, with the understanding that their additional payment will go towards supporting a tree farm, for example.
Big, high-emitting companies like Delta, JetBlue, Disney, General Motors and Shell have all bought and sold huge amounts of carbon offsets in the name of climate action.
It’s an attractive business model for companies looking to “go green” without significant changes in their operations: purchase some carbon offsets to cancel out your emissions.
West said companies that are buying and selling carbon offsets that have been certified by third-party entities may not be aware that they’re misleading their customers—they might simply trust that the certification is legitimate.
The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wollang@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The study looked at 26 projects in six countries: Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, Tanzania, and Zambia. Researchers found that only eight of the 26 projects selling offsets showed any evidence of reducing deforestation, and even those that did failed to achieve the extent of reductions that the projects claimed.
Only 18 of the 26 projects had sufficient publicly available information to determine the number of offsets they were projected to produce. From project implementation until 2020, those 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold in the global carbon market. But researchers estimate that only 5.4 million of the 89 million, or 6.1 percent, would be associated with actual carbon emission reductions.
Some actual information on the study and how the carbon offset is overstated.
TL;DR is pointless if all you’re trying to do is reduce the word count without retaining proper/important information
thefartographer@lemm.ee 1 year ago
You tell that robot! Go fuck yourself, metal mouth!
lemann@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I believe this is partly due to it no longer using ChatGPT to assist with making summaries
silentknyght@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So, I actually read the article. It sounds like they could or should work, in theory, but because of fraud and/or marketplace incompetence, they do not. I bring this up only because I don’t think the discussion on the topic has been nuanced enough to distinguish between idea and implementation.
b14700@lemm.ee 1 year ago
working as intended
aufheben@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No way
MisterChief@lemmy.world 1 year ago
All I’ve seen since carbon offsets became a thing is how a lot of the projects were either ineffective or outright scams. The idea itself doesn’t incentivise the large carbon producers to actually reduce their emissions, but simply pay to say they are carbon neutral so they can slap it on their website for some positive pr.
evranch@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I farm in Canada which has a carbon tax, $65/ton. We’re in the grip of terrible drought and I’ve sold all my livestock. Thought maybe I could do the world a little good and maybe make some money off my empty pastures by planting some trees or something.
After talking to the regulators it was obvious it’s a HUGE fraud. There’s so much red tape, and by the time you’re done talking to them you find out that you can make $1-5/ton for sequestering carbon. And due to flat fees in the regulatory structure, it’s really just designed to funnel this money to huge landowners and not to encourage anyone who cares to plant trees or do anything really.
So working Canadians are forced to pay $65/ton to heat their homes and drive to work, but big emitters buy credits for under $5 and continue to pour out pollution while claiming to be “carbon neutral”. It’s the Canadian way
NathanielThomas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Indeed. And the irony of it all is the drought that put you under is due to climate change.
RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If you really want to to some good with that land, although it won’t make you any money, turn it back into a native natural habitat, or at least sell it to someone who will agree to do the same.
DessertStorms@kbin.social 1 year ago
and go further back, and the whole idea of "carbon footprint" was a scam from the get go.
It's scams and distractions all the way down, anything and everything to make sure people don't look at the real cause of the problem - those making all the money and the system that enables and encourages them at the expense of the rest of us.
WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social 1 year ago
If the cost was actually enough to store the CO2 they emit (and offset the other environmental damages from the sequestration), then it would be fine. But it would be so costly for some industries, that positive PR wouldn't offset the cost.
tryptaminev@feddit.de 1 year ago
The most effective carbon sinks are peatlands. the approx. 3 Mio. km2 in Canada sequester 370 Million Tonnes of Carbon a year.
Canada alone emitted 679 Million Tonnes in 2022, with a population of just about 30 Million people.
There is simply no capacity to offset the emissions we have, even with radical land transformation. The only way is to drastically cut emissions and cut them fast.
jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Even if they worked, it’s like someone breaking your arm and then paying the hospital bill and calling it a day.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
No, it’s nothing like that. Nature doesn’t care if a given gram of co2 was recently released or not. It only cares about the sum total. If the carbon capture schemes actually did grab a gram for every gram released, and then keep it stored for at least a century, that’d work fine.
It’s just that they almost certainly don’t. They’re way too cheap for the best capture systems we have, and they’re not necessarily sequestering that carbon to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few years.
We are almost certainly going to need actual carbon sequestration. We’re too close to emitting too much already.