> 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.
It sounds like a massively fraudulent market with little actual oversight.
Curious about someone in the industry's opinion, but the problem sounds like carbon offsets should actually be treated as carbon offset futures.
I.e. the value is determined at the time of delivered carbon offsets, and the instrument's price floats on the market before that time, including relative to how likely / valuable the delivery is
If company A buys a carbon offset from entity X, and it becomes increasingly apparent that entity X isn't going to be able to deliver the face value in terms of carbon, the instrument bought by company A should decrease in value.
Consequently, next time around, company A would not purchase from entity X.
Which is exactly what you'd want to happen!
Corollary: Verification by third party should be required, with less measurable schemes less valued.
Multiple satellites confirming forests intact? Proof. Direct air capture or weathering? Proof.
Some nebulous walk through how this might have influenced this other thing? Eh...
That doesn't really match the way people are using offsets. If you buy offsets for a flight and ten years later you learn that that they were ineffective... what? The least effective offsets having the lowest price isn't a good incentive either.
I don't believe the majority of VCM offsets are being purchased by end users. Are they? I thought they're typically purchased by corporate entities to support "net zero carbon by X year" pledges.
Apparently this stuff has matured a lot in the last 10 years, and I haven't been keeping pace with it.
There's already a concept of "vintage" (i.e. year carbon reduction realized in), but I still don't think they're being traded in a floating price futures model.
It sounds like the international community is leaning on certification-first, then sale of only certified offsets.
... which, doesn't feel like it fully harnesses the power of market investment in new technologies.
If a corporate buyer finds a new technology that has promise, they should be able to plow money into it! (At a cheaper per-offset-CO2-ton price than alternatives)
If that new tech delivers, the company just saved money. (For the same amount of CO2 offset purchase)
If the new tech fails to deliver, the offset buying company should be forced to realize financial losses.
Ergo, companies will be incentivized to invest in the most effective tools for future CO2 offsetting.
The problem with carbon offsets is worse than that.
First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. You have an existing operation which is already cost effective to modernize because the fuel savings exceed the cost, so you were going to do it anyway, but now you get to sell credits even though the modernization would have happened regardless. So you have a significant amount of preexisting supply without motivating any real emissions reduction.
Second, not everyone is required to buy them, so the demand side is artificially low.
The result is that credits are available for less than $2/ton, or to put it another way, less than $0.02 per gallon of gasoline. This is obviously not going to provide any meaningful incentive to reduce emissions.
> There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can
What they're talking about is determining if you've paid someone to not burn down a forest and then they do it even after taking the money. Which you could conceivably verify.
The problem is when someone already intends not to burn down a forest, or do whichever other thing counts for credits. Then they can sell credits in exchange for proceeding with their existing intentions. Everyone already intending to do any of those things can profit from selling the credits, so they do and the market contains tons of credits that are not actually making any difference.
> Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2
Offset are worth less than $2. "Credits" in the EU are worth significantly more, because they use "cap and trade", which results in significant carbon pricing but is manifestly unjust because it directly rewards companies for having been the largest polluters.
The decarbonization game is extremely tricky. This whole notion of "were they going to do it anyway", how the heck do you build that in. And how the heck does demand happen, who wants to pay for invisible, mostly useless gas?
The key question at the root of this is this: do we need to win the decarbonization game? Or can we just set down the game and walk away?
To me it looks like we need to win the decarbonization game to maintain a stable climate. So then all these attempts, failures, and mind bending problems all become challenges to overcome. Not "if", but "how".
The prize is a stable climate, a thriving civilization, and the specific players that beat the game probably get trillions of dollars of prize money.
First off, yes, agree, fixed problem, open on solution, "how" could be anything, including doing a funny dance that inspires every person on the planet to just stop emitting so much.
Hmm, say more about this. I said this to another commenter, I'm pretty sure all a carbon tax does is solve for the "demand" side of the equation. Fundamentally you would still need an accounting system for carbon, thus carbon credits of different sorts. Or am I missing something?
With a carbon tax there is nothing to exchange with other people. If you buy gasoline or coal, you pay a tax and the money is evenly distributed to everyone. People who have existing coal-fired power plants don't get free credits to allow them to sustain their operations, they just pay the tax and then become uncompetitive with non-carbon generation methods. So they go out of business as fast as alternative generation methods can be constructed. In the meantime ordinary people have the refund to compensate for the temporarily higher price of electricity.
Oh I get it. You tax emissions with no way to lower the tax besides lowering emissions. That means there's an underlying accounting for carbon, but like you said there's not something like market or exchange. So in this model air travel for example would 2x in price, but 1x of that would go towards the carbon tax which is then redistributed to everyone. Sounds interesting, are there any particular strengths or weaknesses to this model?
The strengths are that it's simple, hard to game, and doesn't harm ordinary people because the average person gets a refund of 100% of the money. (It's also somewhat progressive because people with more money tend to emit more carbon and so pay more tax, but only get the same refund.)
The main "weakness" is that it imposes significant costs on existing fossil fuel operations. Oil and coal companies would lose billions of dollars in value because they would both have to pay the tax and experience a surge in new competition from alternatives that can now underprice them. I don't regard this as a problem -- the writing has been on the wall for a long time now and if you've invested in these industries you could have predicted this was coming -- but it is an inconvenience because it causes those industries to lobby against it aggressively, which makes it harder to enact. (But the same will be true of anything with near-term effectiveness, because the whole point is to put them out of business.)
The other weakness is you can game it with international trade.
Produce a good in a country without the carbon tax, repackage it in a country that doesn't keep good origin manifests, lie about doing that, then send it to your destination on a solar powered boat (or whatever has the lowest carbon footprint).
We see the same game being played with slavery and child labor. Pick a favorite brand, add "slavery" and you'll find decades of shocked outrage and "commitment to do better"
Mind you, I still support broad carbon taxes. But this is a predictable outcome.
Which is why you have to pair carbon taxes with some sort of carbon import tarrif. The EU/EEA (who have high and increasing domestic carbon prices) have now created the legislation to introduce one - though it will be phased in very slowly over the next decade:
A boarder tarrif helps, but I'm talking about the situation where a country hides the origin country to skirt the tarrif.
For example, imagine a company manufactured something in Qatar (which has the highest per capita CO2 emissions), then they ship their product to Greenland, which has the lowest emissions per capita. Then they repackage their stuff and upon import to the EU, report that "yup, 100% a product of Greenland". Which will almost certainly have low or no carbon tarrifs.
(Not saying any of these countries would actually participate in such a scheme, just an example).
This sort of wheeling and dealing is how companies skirted US and China tarrifs.
This is not really specific to a carbon tax though, is it? If the EU is using a cap and trade system or what have you, it still happens, because it's a problem of evaluating what is going on in someone else's jurisdiction.
My suggestion in another thread is to impose general tariffs on countries that don't have their own carbon tax, which, if it successfully pressures them to adopt one, avoids these kinds of games because now the high-emitting country charges the carbon tax itself regardless of whether its exports make a pitstop in Greenland, which it may do even if some of its exports were avoiding the tariff that way, so that all of them can avoid it.
But it's not obvious this is even necessary because if the largest economies (especially the US) did this, it would shift the economies of scale in favor of non-carbon energy sources to such an extent that they would become cost competitive on their own nearly everywhere else in the world anyway.
Fair point. There likely needs to be somewhat of a critical mass before it becomes super effective. This might be something that could be accomplished with an international treaty.
GP was speaking about the problems with carbon offsets today. You're talking about the need to decarbonize without acknowledging or addressing the points that GP made. Most are not stupid enough to say that we should set down "the game" of decarbonization and walk away. Many intelligent people are saying that carbon credits don't seem to be working to date as part of "the game". Rather than point out the obvious of how important carbon decarbonization is, it would be better to discuss what GP gets wrong about carbon credits or offer an alternative solution.
"Man, my weight and health are difficult to manage, there are all these challenges I find difficult to handle, many of which aren't even directly related to nutrition or physical activity."
"Having a physically healthy body is important, you should take your nutrition and exercise seriously."
In your analogy, yes, I'm the person that sees nutrition as exercise as the only levers, and so then my alternative solution is "well we need to get it right then". Open to other ideas for levers too.
You have completely missed my point and I am not sure how to get you to see it. My point is that you did not respond to what someone has said, you ignored it and went on your own tangent. And you did it again.
2. A stable climate is a ridiculously hopeless pipe dream in a world dominated by the capitalist mode of production. The anti climate change industry is a fraud by definition.
> 2. A stable climate is a ridiculously hopeless pipe dream in a world dominated by the capitalist mode of production. The anti climate change industry is a fraud by definition.
Ok so what are you claiming here? That preventing climate change is impossible so we should give up and pollute as much as we like without worrying about it? Because if your position is that we can't prevent climate change without overthrowing capitalism, then given the history of the last few centuries of trying to do that, that sounds like what it boils down to.
Capitalism has only been the dominant mode of production for approximately 2 centuries, and people made all the same excuses for feudalism yet here we are.
Capitalism has only been the dominant mode of production for approximately 2 centuries but feudalism lasted for ~6, so what if you want to do something about climate change sooner than ~400 years from now?
It's also not obvious what you propose to replace it with, because the world has seen communist governments and they do not have a sterling environmental record.
It is always the same argument: things are not perfect, ok, but what we replace it with? Noone know, so we keep the thing going.
I think this is what the parent commenter had in mind - we are just incapable of solving this problem, doesn't matter how we put it. Our climate will be gone and as a skeptic I would only ask: will we manage a slow degrowth or have a rapid system collapse?
You don't have to replace it with anything. The capitalist solution to climate change is a carbon tax. You price the externality and then the market takes care of minimizing it efficiently.
The problem is actually the governments failing to institute one. The problem isn't capitalism, it's democracy -- too many people work in the oil and coal industries to easily pass a law to delete them.
But degrowth is an even more ridiculous fantasy, because nobody is going to put up with that. It's probably the least palatable proposal to voters of any of the crazy nonsense people come up with. Not least because it isn't necessary -- it's just as good to install 100 GW capacity worth of solar panels or nuclear reactors than to reduce consumption by 100 GW.
Let's do the math here. The US power grid has about 800 GW of generating capacity from natural gas and coal. A 1 GW nuclear reactor, one of the more expensive methods at present, costs about $5.4B. So to replace the entire US fossil fuel generating capacity exclusively with nuclear would cost $4320B, amortized over 50 years this is $86B/year. By contrast, the COVID stimulus in one year was $5T, or more than the amount needed to decarbonize the entire US power grid. And mind you this is the total cost, not the incremental cost over the alternative (continuing to build and fuel carbon-burning power plants).
So the high end of that cost would be 0.3% of US GDP. There is no way you are going to eliminate 60% of US power consumption for less than that amount of money.
I think that's an acceptable conclusion. So then, what's next? We need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Current solutions aren't working great, so how do we do it?
Change zoning and a bunch of other regs to promote Netherlands style building and transport, rather than the ugly arse parking lot carbonized death culture we have now, invest heavily in developing cost effective nuclear (get that regulator out of the way of change), invest in fusion and reprocessing nuclear fuel research for medium to long term, start pumping out small nuclear plants from factories that can be put on the grid at strategic places to limit transmission build out need and limit losses of one of nuclear design we have now by going mass produced, not worry so much about our co2 outout for the next 3 decades it takes us to build all this, then start capping carbon out put hard
Any real solution would throw a wrench into the engine of our economy. The US is the biggest consumer, so the US gov could demand each product to be stamped with a manufacturer id, and charge the manufacturer for proper disposal of the thrown away items. Most of the manufacturers will leave the market and go bankrupt, because they produce junk, often intentionally. Think of all those washing machines with cheap plastic bearings that wear out precisely after the warranty expires. Whatever products are left will be rock solid and too expensive for most americans, who will join the manufacturers to end the "manufacturer id" law.
You have to end capitalism, and anybody taking this stuff seriously knows that, and they knew carbon offset nonsense was fraudulent the entire time. It was painfully obvious. So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism.
This right here. Either we collectively as a species take steps right away to correct course and achieve a sustainable now, or nature will do it for us; and the latter will occur cataclysmically. The former, too, except hopefully with less loss of life.
> You have to end capitalism, and anybody taking this stuff seriously knows that, and they knew carbon offset nonsense was fraudulent the entire time. It was painfully obvious.
1) This makes the axiomatic leap that *everyone* knows that carbon offsets are fraudulent. There're definitely *some* that think so, but not all. Extraordinary claims of "All X is Y" require a proof that X leads to Y in *all* cases, not just *some*.
2) Another axiomatic leap made is that carbon offsets are inherently fraudulent, which again *some* may be, but not all. Similar comprehensive evidence is required to establish that *all* carbon offsets are fraudulent.
3) What is "painfully obvious" to someone may not be to anyone not steeped deep into the subject at hand. Even after being through the subject itself, there is no guarantee that an incrementalistic viewpoint would not be adopted as a result of seeing the faults within the system.
> So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism.
Socialism is reductively state capitalism with the added façade that democratic consensus & redistribution alone allows for the best outcome. It doesn't take into account desires that may go against the beliefs of the majority, whose desires can run counter to minorities within such a system (e.g LGBTQ+ rights & drug criminalization). Modern tolerances towards them happen to be lucky circumstances that shouldn't be taken for granted, as it could be just as likely for the opposite to have happened.
Even in a dysfunctional state, niches are allowed to manifest within markets that can cater to them without the oversight of the State, for better or for worse. Denying the ability to create said pocket niches by enforcing the majority's views via the State invites levels of authoritarianism & Mother-Knows-Best attitudes that should be opposed from anyone seeking to preserve individual autonomy, which should include the minorities themselves.
In cases of a non-State-based socialism, markets will inevitably be created as a consequence of having to trade with unknown/untrusted parties. The egalitarianistic "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can only work in scenarios where parties know who each other are, & can consequently apply adjustments to prevent excessive misuse from exploiting parties. Markets arise due to the alternative requiring much more effort to establish & maintain relationships with all parties on all possible tradable goods & services, whereas only a neutral area is required for the former.
> I think that's an acceptable conclusion. So then, what's next? We need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Current solutions aren't working great, so how do we do it?
In the ideal sense:
- Standardize carbon offset measurements: Proper comparisons can only be made if there's a starting point to work from. Standardizing how much X amount of carbon is offset per action (using only the lower bound to deliberately underestimate the impact of an action) would make it harder to lie about the impacts of said offsets.
- Institute high carbon taxes on coal & coal only. Expect extreme friction from coal lobbies against this, & from environmentalists for not being extreme enough. Use incrementalism as an advantage to separate coal lobbyists from the other fossil fuel giants & reassure the others that they're excluded from this measure, & let them see the can be kicked, but not how far it has been kicked.
- Further subsidize battery & renewable deployments. This MUST be made separate from the next point to reduce political friction.
- Reduce subsidies for fossil fuel explorations & extraction. Lumping this & the above point together makes it much likelier that the lobbies will try stop both measures at once. Don't give them ammunition to do so.
- Subsidize EVs & battery-based home energy storage tech even further. The rollout of cheap solar consequently leads to a worsening of the duck curve, just due to how solar energy is reliant on the sun. Smoothing out the bump from solar into a consistent line via battery tech would reduce stress on the grid for massive ramp-ups & alleviate the need for infra upgrades, which is subject to NIMBYism.
This is just off the top of my head, but the main theme is to chip away at the problem rather than finding the Killer. As tempting as it is to try & find the One Solution, such a breakthrough is heavily reliant on luck, whereas the other more relies on consistent effort than luck itself.
This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason.
When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear -- well... put it like this: If you want right-wing populist governments, that's how you're going to get them.
The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations still pay the tax but only individuals get the checks.
It would also be a very informative trial run for a UBI (though in this case the amount would be smaller).
The "problem" with this is strictly politics: a) It would actually work, so the fossil fuel energy companies hate it; b) There is no opportunity for graft because the money is distributed to everyone and not just the politically connected, so there is no special interest lobby trying to make it happen.
This is a very interesting idea. Actually, it's also the only solution I can think of that would incentivise people to emit less carbon, using selfishness as a lever to achieve cooperation - similar to capitalism itself.
The cost would probably be similar to the COVID stimulus. Maybe they can require the dividend to be distributed using FedNow to drive down the cost somewhat.
We already collect federal excise tax on fuel. Changing the amount has a trivial cost. We already collect withholding tax from individuals. Changing the amount has a trivial cost (your boss adds money to your paycheck every week instead of removing it if your tax rate is now negative, retirees and people on disability/unemployment have the amount added to their existing social security/benefits check).
There would be a minor one-time cost for the small minority people none of that applies to, to fill out a form specifying where you want the money to be deposited or the check mailed. But the fundamental process of distributing the money would be a transfer of a fixed amount to each citizen with a social security number, which is easily computerized.
This misses embodied carbon in imports and much of the emissions from domestic agricultural and industrial processes, which are surely large enough to not be ignorable.
Obviously the administrative cost of taxing some other emissions source is going to depend on the nature of that emissions source, but if hypothetically evaluating emissions from certain sources turned out to be prohibitively burdensome, that would not be any excuse to avoid doing it for fuels at a minimum, which constitute the majority of emissions anyway.
And a more efficient way to handle imports would be to impose general tariffs on imports from countries that don't themselves impose a carbon tax, rather than trying to calculate the effects of something happening in a foreign country. Which would have a more significant effect anyway, because causing the entire country to reduce its own emissions would be a much bigger win than causing only their exports to do so.
This is essentially the Canadian model. The federal government mandates that every province must put a minimum price on carbon. If they don't the federal program puts a direct price on carbon and rebates the residents of the province directly. About 90% of the money goes directly to residents and the other 10% is directed by the federal government to programs within the affected province, for example in Ontario they used the money for energy retrofits of public schools.
All the money goes to the refund or every part that doesn't is a regressive tax and an opportunity for corruption.
It's also not clear what local deference is buying you here, because this is one of the very few cases of a national issue where the right solution is clear and simple and makes sense to implement uniformly at the national level.
The only sense of doing it at a local level is if the national government fails to act.
The deference to local levels here is simply pragmatic. Constitutionally the environment is a provincial government responsibility. The Federal backstop is only legal because of the "peace, order, and good government" clause of our constitution.
That actually makes sense in a way. If the local government is addressing an issue the national government shouldn't need to touch it. In the US it's basically the opposite (once the federal government gets involved with something the states can't override it), and it's basically terrible because there were originally meant to be limits on what the federal government can get involved in but they've been expanded beyond all reason.
And local control can still "work" even when the same solution should apply everywhere because they can each individually adopt the same solution, the same as different countries can. In theory a province could even counteract the effect of the federal government trying to get them to spend 10% of the money by just distributing it to the population as it should have been, though of course politicians rarely have that much willpower.
Why wouldn't people just use their UBI on buying more things, which, as rudimentary understanding of physics goes, yields more demand for production, which increases C02 output?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't understand how taxing and redistributing the money does anything besides shifts the consumer power a bit???
I mean, wouldn't a better solution just be to have a carbox tax and then destroy the taxed money?
You're neither creating nor destroying any new money.
Bob is average. Bob pays $100 in carbon tax and then gets a check for $100. He doesn't have any more or less money to spend than he did before. He is able to continue his existing behavior and make no change whatsoever, if he wants.
But now he has the incentive to make a change. Because if he installs electric heat pumps instead of heating his house with oil, now he is only paying $50 in carbon tax but still gets a check for $100. If he can get the heat pumps installed for a monthly payment of less than $50, that's what he's going to do. And that's the goal.
Ok, I follow now. I do remain skeptical it would work in practice though in any meaningul way to get people to reduce their carbon footprint. For that to work, the numbers would have to be truly significant. I'm not sure what those numbers would look like, but I imagine if people cant forsee the immediate economic benefit to them in the very near future, it wouldn't work.
They would foresee an immediate economic benefit to them. Many of these technologies are already close to breakeven. The numbers above are a simplified arbitrary example. Try this one.
Bob needs a new furnace. Heat pumps are more efficient and save on energy costs, but also cost more up front than a new furnace. That basically evens out, so maybe right now the heat pumps still cost $5/month more than the furnace, at least in the short term. Until the cost of operating the furnace goes up $50/month because of the carbon tax, in which case he wants to immediately save $45/month.
And Bob is average. Alice is a heavy user. She has a big old house that she likes to keep at 90 degrees all winter, so the carbon tax would increase her heating bill by $500/month, which she can save by switching to heat pumps and installing solar panels on her roof. So she's going to do that right away.
You really believe that a within a complex restructuring like this, there would not be any opportunity for graft? Would love to step into whatever fairy tale you're in.
If 100% of the money is evenly distributed to every citizen, there is not a cent left to fund any corruption. Ideally the minimal administrative costs should not even come out of the carbon tax, of which fully one hundred percent should be evenly distributed to every citizen.
Presumably there would be some wrangling about how to measure CO2 emissions in certain harder to objectively measure contexts, but they're still not getting any of the money, they might just sneak in a way to not pay their full share. And we know with low variance how much CO2 is emitted by a unit of motor fuel or natural gas or coal, which represent the bulk of emissions.
> "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear
This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY.
The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.
No, but I'd prefer not to have to deal with more and more extreme weather events, increased sea levels, etc.
The planet will survive, we as a species probably too, but it's going to get shittier for many of us.
no no, actually the sun will swallow the earth in a few million years so thats why we should do nothing.
(/s but there certainly is a strain of the media/public that blasted right past “it’s not real” to “welp it’s real and it’s too late to do anything about it, let’s do nothing”.)
My more colorful language is beating poor people and the middle class with a rubber hose and hope that solves the problem while ignoring the large frictions present in those people lives.
You want poor people to switch to an electric car? Do what California is doing with car buybacks and grants for new and used EV's. A low income person in some counties can get a couple of grand to trade in his old gas car for a used EV's like a Bolt. That's better because instead of feeling attacked people feel like they got a decent deal.
Many other countries already have excise taxes on things like gasoline though. Gasoline costs more per liter/gallon in Lithuania even though people earn 2-3x less money.
I think this is part of the reason why the EU economy is pretty stagnant, but it is livable. Unfortunately, it also shows that it doesn't make people cut back too much on gasoline use.
I would be happy to support a carbon tax, as long as the proceeds are held off-books and distributed annually to all citizens equally, with no income or other qualification criteria. Basically a carbon funded pure UBI.
So the guy working in a kitchen that makes $20k a year and bikes to work should be taxed the same as the ceo with a private jet when it comes to carbon production?
A carbon tax just puts a price on carbon emissions. So if the guy bikes to work and doesn't buy gas, he's not paying taxes on carbon emissions, while the CEO in a private jet pays more. If the carbon tax proceeds are redistributed, the guy in the kitchen comes ahead, actually.
Everything in the modern world has the oil/energy needed to create it baked into the price.
Implementing a carbon tax that increases that cost along every step of a supply chain increases the price of everything, not just gasoline.
See: Price of groceries (and all other CPG) in Canada. People will blame the retailers and lazy headlines about record profits, but if you look at their actual margins, the value of CAD, and the fact that the government is increasing the population faster than anything else can catch up… it’s not surprising that they’re posting record numbers. People need to eat. The oligopoly issue definitely plays a part but that’s another can of worms.
Which might work in other countries with a different climate, geography, and population density but until electric tractor trailers or teleportation become a reality it’s just increasing the cost of living for everyone who already can’t afford to “invest in green solutions”.
Unfortunately our current government doesn’t realize that they’re not comparable to California.
Carbon emissions produce externalized costs or they don’t. If they do, it’s the proper role of government to internalize them while ameliorating any inequitable transition costs.
That's the point, to get the market to react. At first the carbon tax is low, but increases steadily so market will have time to react. Just announcing it will get things going
Yes. The alternative is having politicians and beaurocrats fighting about all the little details of who gets what.
It’s not about being fair, it’s about keeping the politicians out of it as much as possible. It costs very little money to let the 1% get theirs, because by definition there just aren’t very many of them. Thats a tiny price to pay for the major advantage of less political football.
Most serious carbon tax proposals seem to be for revenue neutral taxes. Tax carbon at the source, distribute the tax equally among the population.
Under such a tax the distribution to that $20k a year bike commuting kitchen worker would probably be significantly more than the amount the carbon tax has raised their costs.
That CEO on the other hand would see the costs to operate their jet go up way more than their share of the carbon tax distribution.
One of the big problems seems to be simply getting supporters to agree on what to do with the money. There are plenty of supporters who staunchly insist the money must be used exclusively for miscellaneous social justice causes.
Give it directly back to the people. Do not allow them to spend it on anything, not even to fund the (hopefully small) beaurocracy necessary to implement the tax.
What this kind of proposal needs is a name the progressive and moderate left can rally around. Something akin to “living wage”.
Mandating a “living wage” makes some things noticeably more expensive: Burgers, rideshares, lawn care, …
A serious, effective carbon tax will make gas more expensive. Maybe 50 cents/gallon.
If the voting public felt the same way about gas prices as they do about the minimum wage—if you can’t afford it your financial model is immoral—an effective carbon tax would be a political slam dunk.
I'm pretty sure all a carbon tax does is solve for the "demand" side of the equation. Fundamentally you would still need an accounting system for carbon, thus carbon credits of different sorts. Or am I missing something?
You put the carbon tax on the makers of fossil fuels and the importers of fossil fuels. Everyone else just sees it indirectly due to the increased cost for fossil fuels. It shouldn't require a lot of accounting.
The thing which doesn't make sense with those is that it's always projects in developing and poor countries ... whereas the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries.
If you would conceive a scheme to reduce emissions, there's no way that it's going to be in any other place than the top emitting countries, where the emission is in the first place.
Those projects are kind of shifting blame onto people and places which aren't causing the issue.
> the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries.
This is true, but the low hanging fruit (in terms of cost) in terms of drawdown might be developing countries, where things like birth control, paying farmer not to cut down rainforest, etc can be done inexpensively.
There's also a lot of low hanging fruits in developped countries, better farming techniques, electric cars, heat insulation, financing renewables depending of the electric mix, making food products with less emissions cheaper for consumers to shift consumption...
It's true that the state has the upper hand but there's also things that an NGO or a private company could do.
> There's also a lot of low hanging fruits in developped countries, better farming techniques, electric cars, heat insulation, financing renewables depending of the electric mix, making food products with less emissions cheaper for consumers to shift consumption...
That's moderately hanging fruit, and all of it is being done in most EU countries and to a significant degree in the US.
Not really, because most carbon credits are based on counterfactuals - would this forest have been logged if you didn't protect it, would this farmer have used less efficient practices if you hadn't paid them, would this land have remained empty if you hadn't paid to plant trees, etc. No matter how reputable the rating agency is, they still won't be able to answer these questions very accurately.
Additionally, when you purchase a credit you're generally purchasing a prediction of how much carbon might be absorbed in the future. For a afforestation credit, you're often purchasing the amount of carbon that forest will absorb over 100 years. No rating agency can legitimately tell you that your forest isn't going to burn down or be logged in the next century. It's a pretty ridiculous idea - the seller, purchaser, and rating agency will all probably not exist after 100 years, and the government of whatever country the forest is in will probably have been overthrown.
I think contributing money to protect and rewild nature in the interest of increasing carbon sequestration is a great idea that should continue, but nobody should be receiving offsets that they weigh 1-to-1 against their actual real-world emissions. It just isn't a meaningful comparison. Even if your purchase actually makes an impact, it's like dumping toxic chemicals into a river and setting aside money to fund an organization that will gradually clean up the river over the next century, and then claiming that you've now achieved net-zero pollution.
I think you two are saying different things. Agree that the existing products for decarbonization have a lot of room for improvement.
Some solutions include:
1. Stopping the dumping
2. Pay the full cost of the impact of any dumping that does happen. In your analogy, this would mean the longer you leave the river polluted, the more you have to pay to clean it up.
I like this framing. That's because it seems like a working carbon market is a must have to hit decarbonization goals. Therefore it's a question not of "if", but "how". And a lot of the current "how" is probably best priced close to zero.
I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime but at some point we’re going to change our thinking from “fixing climate change” to dealing with the effects as best we can. The sooner the better IMO, even though it’s going to be a painful transition to be sure.
I would argue carbon offsets are exactly doing their job: allowing people and corporations to throw a bit of money at the problem and continue with business as usual.
The job we have to do is rapidly decarbonize our economy and also remove billions of tons of carbon already in the air. This pursuit is likely in the trillions of dollars in our lifetime.
Existing carbon offsets are best thought of as an attempt. The opportunity is, what's next? What's going to actually solve this multi-trillion dollar problem?
The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined/regulated and are therefore almost never "honest". The definition of "honest" here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere.
Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future", which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one's purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn't negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it's mitigated.
Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. If you find yourself "offsetting" for a few dollars / ton, you're just fooling yourself.
Same issue of "honesty" with afforestation-based credits. A ton of carbon removed during the growth of a new tree is not equivalent to a ton of carbon already removed today.
However, as these types of projects actually do remove carbon, one could probably compute an adjustment factor and purchase additional credits to achieve an "honest" offset.
That's assuming the afforestation is even helpful and not one of the various examples of incentives for planting trees leading to work that's actually doing more harm than good.
Out of all the nebulous carbon offset schemes that exist today, afforestation seems to be one of the least scammy options if ones adjusts for the fact that "future value" != "present value". Even the uncertainty of the long-term success of afforestation projects can be statistically modelled and incorporated into an adjustment factor. However, nobody is going to willingly do that, so even those types of offsets will remain dishonest.
Absent regulation, carbon offsets are a race to the bottom in producing the cheapest "offset" just hovering above the threshold of "fraudulent".
Direct air capture with long-term sequestration, performed prior to the sale of a carbon credit, is the only scheme that is remotely close to being fully honest.
I am very dubious that afforestation won’t be logged or burned at some future date, which I assume is what you refer to as the “long term success” of these.
From what I’ve seen people tend to be happy to take the money and they just burn it next year.
That's an interesting comment. I hadn't really ever considered that afforestation might be a bad thing - always just assumed "more trees = good". In what sort of examples would it be a bad thing? Trying to create forests in places that naturally weren't forests in the past?
Right. For instance, one story I read concerned disturbing grasslands in order to plant more trees — foolhardy because grasslands themselves are excellent carbon sinks and the trees would take a long time to be comparable. Others concerned trees being planted with little possibility of survival. I believe the first was in China and the second in Turkey if anyone wants to dig through news archives and try and find these stories again.
Obviously the problem here is people just setting “trees planted” as the metric because it’s easy to count and creating perverse incentives.
Factor in that the carbon is only captured so long as the forest survives. If the forest burns or the trees fall and rot, the carbon is returned to the atmosphere unless and until new trees grow.
Or perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be. It seems a bit like a modern-day version of indulgences.
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I feel like the biggest obstacle here is that any invocation of shared sacrifice or giving up forms of convenience, even fairly minor ones, prompts howls of indignation. Maybe we’re just doing some things we can’t do going forward even if it was comfortable to be able to do so.
If I were in charge I might institute rules controlling, for instance, how low one may set their thermostat, or banning new natural gas home appliances despite whatever boutique complaints people have about gas stoves. I doubt that goes far enough but the fact that this kind of stuff is so difficult/controversial feels like a massive obstacle.
"Okay," I say. "Carbon credits are a bit like beating someone up on this side of the world and sponsoring one of those poor starving kids on the other side of the world to make up for the fact that you're a complete shit at home."
....
"OK," the PFY says as we leave the building via the service entrance. "All we have to do to be nastiness neutral is to find a couple of people bound and gagged in a skip bin, take them out, give them a couple of wallets, unkick them a few times, unelectrocute them with a cattle prod and say 'clothing hippy on discount percent seventy look oh'."
The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following:
- Assuage guilt
- Virtue signal (personal, political, or corporate)
- Profit financially from government incompetence
- Profit financially from corporate PR efforts
We absolutely need a working market to meet decarbonization goals for a stable climate. The state of the current market means there's a lot of opportunity for improvement.
Many people say that markets fundamentally can't do that. If you think a market can, could you explain? (If they can, that would by far be the easiest coördination approach: we understand markets quite well.)
I don't see why a market can't do it. Carbon dioxide is invisible, mostly useless gas, and it's currently emitted by most cars, planes, trains, and factories. The accounting needs to happen somewhere, markets seem good at that.
Above I said "we absolutely need a carbon market", and I'm open to dropping that. It's possible markets are not the most effective option but I'm kind of short on how else to solve it. To someone who says that markets "fundamentally can't", I would ask them what solution they prefer instead, I'm open!
To maintain a stable climate we need to decarbonize rapidly. A carbon market is a potential solution for rapid decarbonization that so far is not working great.
both carbon offset and the business surrounding it (especially carbon sequestration) are mostly for the purpose of virtue signaling. it’s no different from the sunday confessions held mostly in catholic cathedrals, where one can sin all they want during the week and have it all forgiven in a couple minutes talk with a priest. if you can keep current operations as is, reap massive profits, and pay pennies towards carbon removal, which dumb business executive will refuse?
sure we may need to decarbonize. but an arms race between how much you can pump into the air and how much i can remove is a stupid strategy. if too much carbon in the atmosphere is net negative, maybe we should revise whatever processes cause us to release that much? but i think any attempt there will necessarily demand that we put brakes on the false progress march (powered by capitalist greed). men with tiny dicks and assortments of self-help sex toys need the ‘billionaire’ drug injected into their veins, to prop up their self-worth so any attempt to pause the certified dollar-churning processes will be defeated, easily. but i digress.
if too much carbon in the atmosphere is bad, stop putting too much into it. or maybe it’s not necessarily bad but we’re stuck with a global warming narrative that’s wrong, on net, but hard to recant? i don’t know. what i do know is that virtue signaling is a moth-gathering flame. see america.
You know what actually needs an investment? Climate models which are completely shit right now. It's actually preposterous that there are trillions of dollars worth of decisions in ESG and climate credits and government incentives while the science behind this is supported by old fortran code that has terrible quality and can't give reasonable predictions.
We have trillions of dollars chasing predictions of code barely worth a million dollar investment. That's absurd, it's a recipe for disaster.
Instead of useless government beaurocrats shuffling hypothetical CO2, should invest in climate models that aren't patched together by grad students in universities and old as hell code and a few NASA engineers maintaining an untested unreadable and unverifiable monstrosities.
Maybe there's no crisis at all. Maybe it's all doom and gloom, but the certainty that everyone's pretending that science gives is just not reflective of the reality of how climate models look right now. They are absolutely shit and I don't blame them given the resources they have, they did their best, but it's absolutely insane how much money is moving around on predictions coming out of that mess.
Say more about this! Let's say you had $100B to build better climate models over the next 5 years. Where would you spend it?
My general sense is the models are good enough to tell us that a) things are headed in the wrong direction and b) we're really far off from a solution. Generally in agreement with you but I haven't researched deeply about what's needed on more modeling and how to prioritize.
You need at least two completely independent teams who don't see each other's code so you'll have a rough idea how much developer bias is responsible for the signal. Right now they are all copying code from each other, a single error in these and all the climate models are effected. Replication here should mean different scientists writing different code arriving at the same estimates.
It needs to be open source, and it needs to be way more organized, no physical constants which aren't constant or which have bad precision or which have different values in different parts of the code.
Actual error modeling built in or at least a way to measure and quantify the accuracy.
Some models only use CO2 input for radiation and not for many other parameters that depend on CO2. Because the code is a mess and constants that shouldn't be constants are all over the place. And getting "constants" right is even more important than having high resolution to the simulation.
Getting real physical data to replace all the ad hoc constants is extremely important. And validating the correctness of the cloud modeling with real world data is also important.
And you can't write huge spaghetti code, it needs to be readable and comprehensible to someone other than original programmer so that people can validate the assumptions.
I think you need an expert team of software engineers, physicists and climate experts that will either build good climate models or decipher the mess that is the current models variability.
Honestly, looking at the code of some models I don't think there's much hope in understanding them to the point where you know where the deviations are coming from, it's probably easier putting together new models that are subject to much more strict testing, unit testing, evaluations against real world data than salvaging the current mess. And just throw out the models which fail the testing.
No mention of ESGs? Want to know why corporations participate in this idiotic charade, as well as other weirdly ubiquitous theatrics? It’s because paying lip service to this kind of stuff is a requirement for certain funds to be able to hold their stock: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_c...
So corporations have a big financial incentive to do the bare minimum to satisfy ESG requirements, and carbon offsets are an unregulated sham. No surprise, the market finds a way and delivers impossibly cheap “offsets” so that such environmental stewards as Chevron, and soon Phillips Morris, can be considered to be environmentally friendly and socially benevolent enough to be included in ESG funds.
In line with this, another comment someone said "perhaps they're doing exactly their job but their job is not actually what it purports to be."
It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?
I’m looking forward to the day where the problem is framed as “we need to learn how to control our climate” and become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization.
I’ve found when I’m around people on either side of the climate change issue, they agree it’s a worthy goal to try to control and harness all of earths natural phenomena.
It might take hundreds of years, thousands of years, or maybe we never get there, but it seems like a good goal.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadIt sounds like a massively fraudulent market with little actual oversight.
I.e. the value is determined at the time of delivered carbon offsets, and the instrument's price floats on the market before that time, including relative to how likely / valuable the delivery is
If company A buys a carbon offset from entity X, and it becomes increasingly apparent that entity X isn't going to be able to deliver the face value in terms of carbon, the instrument bought by company A should decrease in value.
Consequently, next time around, company A would not purchase from entity X.
Which is exactly what you'd want to happen!
Corollary: Verification by third party should be required, with less measurable schemes less valued.
Multiple satellites confirming forests intact? Proof. Direct air capture or weathering? Proof.
Some nebulous walk through how this might have influenced this other thing? Eh...
Apparently this stuff has matured a lot in the last 10 years, and I haven't been keeping pace with it.
There's already a concept of "vintage" (i.e. year carbon reduction realized in), but I still don't think they're being traded in a floating price futures model.
It sounds like the international community is leaning on certification-first, then sale of only certified offsets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#O...
... which, doesn't feel like it fully harnesses the power of market investment in new technologies.
If a corporate buyer finds a new technology that has promise, they should be able to plow money into it! (At a cheaper per-offset-CO2-ton price than alternatives)
If that new tech delivers, the company just saved money. (For the same amount of CO2 offset purchase)
If the new tech fails to deliver, the offset buying company should be forced to realize financial losses.
Ergo, companies will be incentivized to invest in the most effective tools for future CO2 offsetting.
Matured is not the word I would choose.
Now, it looks like there's non-trivial implementation work being done: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets_and_credits#P...
First, there is no real way to tell if someone was going to do something anyway. You have an existing operation which is already cost effective to modernize because the fuel savings exceed the cost, so you were going to do it anyway, but now you get to sell credits even though the modernization would have happened regardless. So you have a significant amount of preexisting supply without motivating any real emissions reduction.
Second, not everyone is required to buy them, so the demand side is artificially low.
The result is that credits are available for less than $2/ton, or to put it another way, less than $0.02 per gallon of gasoline. This is obviously not going to provide any meaningful incentive to reduce emissions.
There sort of is though, and both carbon off-setters and this study claim that they can
Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2
What they're talking about is determining if you've paid someone to not burn down a forest and then they do it even after taking the money. Which you could conceivably verify.
The problem is when someone already intends not to burn down a forest, or do whichever other thing counts for credits. Then they can sell credits in exchange for proceeding with their existing intentions. Everyone already intending to do any of those things can profit from selling the credits, so they do and the market contains tons of credits that are not actually making any difference.
> Also there is plenty of demand in this market, even dodgy credits are worth much more than $2
https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/
Offset are worth less than $2. "Credits" in the EU are worth significantly more, because they use "cap and trade", which results in significant carbon pricing but is manifestly unjust because it directly rewards companies for having been the largest polluters.
The decarbonization game is extremely tricky. This whole notion of "were they going to do it anyway", how the heck do you build that in. And how the heck does demand happen, who wants to pay for invisible, mostly useless gas?
The key question at the root of this is this: do we need to win the decarbonization game? Or can we just set down the game and walk away?
To me it looks like we need to win the decarbonization game to maintain a stable climate. So then all these attempts, failures, and mind bending problems all become challenges to overcome. Not "if", but "how".
The prize is a stable climate, a thriving civilization, and the specific players that beat the game probably get trillions of dollars of prize money.
[0] https://airminers.org
Sure, but "how" could be to abandon the concept of credits whatsoever and institute a carbon tax.
Hmm, say more about this. I said this to another commenter, I'm pretty sure all a carbon tax does is solve for the "demand" side of the equation. Fundamentally you would still need an accounting system for carbon, thus carbon credits of different sorts. Or am I missing something?
The main "weakness" is that it imposes significant costs on existing fossil fuel operations. Oil and coal companies would lose billions of dollars in value because they would both have to pay the tax and experience a surge in new competition from alternatives that can now underprice them. I don't regard this as a problem -- the writing has been on the wall for a long time now and if you've invested in these industries you could have predicted this was coming -- but it is an inconvenience because it causes those industries to lobby against it aggressively, which makes it harder to enact. (But the same will be true of anything with near-term effectiveness, because the whole point is to put them out of business.)
Produce a good in a country without the carbon tax, repackage it in a country that doesn't keep good origin manifests, lie about doing that, then send it to your destination on a solar powered boat (or whatever has the lowest carbon footprint).
We see the same game being played with slavery and child labor. Pick a favorite brand, add "slavery" and you'll find decades of shocked outrage and "commitment to do better"
Mind you, I still support broad carbon taxes. But this is a predictable outcome.
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/economics/2022/01/05/the-c...
https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme...
For example, imagine a company manufactured something in Qatar (which has the highest per capita CO2 emissions), then they ship their product to Greenland, which has the lowest emissions per capita. Then they repackage their stuff and upon import to the EU, report that "yup, 100% a product of Greenland". Which will almost certainly have low or no carbon tarrifs.
(Not saying any of these countries would actually participate in such a scheme, just an example).
This sort of wheeling and dealing is how companies skirted US and China tarrifs.
My suggestion in another thread is to impose general tariffs on countries that don't have their own carbon tax, which, if it successfully pressures them to adopt one, avoids these kinds of games because now the high-emitting country charges the carbon tax itself regardless of whether its exports make a pitstop in Greenland, which it may do even if some of its exports were avoiding the tariff that way, so that all of them can avoid it.
But it's not obvious this is even necessary because if the largest economies (especially the US) did this, it would shift the economies of scale in favor of non-carbon energy sources to such an extent that they would become cost competitive on their own nearly everywhere else in the world anyway.
"Man, my weight and health are difficult to manage, there are all these challenges I find difficult to handle, many of which aren't even directly related to nutrition or physical activity."
"Having a physically healthy body is important, you should take your nutrition and exercise seriously."
"Thanks a lot for the advice?"
Given your salary depends on it, I am hardly surprised.
1. Do we need to maintain a stable climate?
2. Do we need to win the decarbonization game to do so? And if not, how else do we maintain a stable climate?
2. A stable climate is a ridiculously hopeless pipe dream in a world dominated by the capitalist mode of production. The anti climate change industry is a fraud by definition.
Ok so what are you claiming here? That preventing climate change is impossible so we should give up and pollute as much as we like without worrying about it? Because if your position is that we can't prevent climate change without overthrowing capitalism, then given the history of the last few centuries of trying to do that, that sounds like what it boils down to.
It's also not obvious what you propose to replace it with, because the world has seen communist governments and they do not have a sterling environmental record.
"Up to its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times as much pollution per unit of GNP as the United States." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Russia)
I think this is what the parent commenter had in mind - we are just incapable of solving this problem, doesn't matter how we put it. Our climate will be gone and as a skeptic I would only ask: will we manage a slow degrowth or have a rapid system collapse?
The problem is actually the governments failing to institute one. The problem isn't capitalism, it's democracy -- too many people work in the oil and coal industries to easily pass a law to delete them.
But degrowth is an even more ridiculous fantasy, because nobody is going to put up with that. It's probably the least palatable proposal to voters of any of the crazy nonsense people come up with. Not least because it isn't necessary -- it's just as good to install 100 GW capacity worth of solar panels or nuclear reactors than to reduce consumption by 100 GW.
Let's do the math here. The US power grid has about 800 GW of generating capacity from natural gas and coal. A 1 GW nuclear reactor, one of the more expensive methods at present, costs about $5.4B. So to replace the entire US fossil fuel generating capacity exclusively with nuclear would cost $4320B, amortized over 50 years this is $86B/year. By contrast, the COVID stimulus in one year was $5T, or more than the amount needed to decarbonize the entire US power grid. And mind you this is the total cost, not the incremental cost over the alternative (continuing to build and fuel carbon-burning power plants).
So the high end of that cost would be 0.3% of US GDP. There is no way you are going to eliminate 60% of US power consumption for less than that amount of money.
1) This makes the axiomatic leap that *everyone* knows that carbon offsets are fraudulent. There're definitely *some* that think so, but not all. Extraordinary claims of "All X is Y" require a proof that X leads to Y in *all* cases, not just *some*.
2) Another axiomatic leap made is that carbon offsets are inherently fraudulent, which again *some* may be, but not all. Similar comprehensive evidence is required to establish that *all* carbon offsets are fraudulent.
3) What is "painfully obvious" to someone may not be to anyone not steeped deep into the subject at hand. Even after being through the subject itself, there is no guarantee that an incrementalistic viewpoint would not be adopted as a result of seeing the faults within the system.
> So what's next? Another fraudulent scheme, because the only other option is socialism.
Socialism is reductively state capitalism with the added façade that democratic consensus & redistribution alone allows for the best outcome. It doesn't take into account desires that may go against the beliefs of the majority, whose desires can run counter to minorities within such a system (e.g LGBTQ+ rights & drug criminalization). Modern tolerances towards them happen to be lucky circumstances that shouldn't be taken for granted, as it could be just as likely for the opposite to have happened.
Even in a dysfunctional state, niches are allowed to manifest within markets that can cater to them without the oversight of the State, for better or for worse. Denying the ability to create said pocket niches by enforcing the majority's views via the State invites levels of authoritarianism & Mother-Knows-Best attitudes that should be opposed from anyone seeking to preserve individual autonomy, which should include the minorities themselves.
In cases of a non-State-based socialism, markets will inevitably be created as a consequence of having to trade with unknown/untrusted parties. The egalitarianistic "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can only work in scenarios where parties know who each other are, & can consequently apply adjustments to prevent excessive misuse from exploiting parties. Markets arise due to the alternative requiring much more effort to establish & maintain relationships with all parties on all possible tradable goods & services, whereas only a neutral area is required for the former.
In the ideal sense:
- Standardize carbon offset measurements: Proper comparisons can only be made if there's a starting point to work from. Standardizing how much X amount of carbon is offset per action (using only the lower bound to deliberately underestimate the impact of an action) would make it harder to lie about the impacts of said offsets.
- Institute high carbon taxes on coal & coal only. Expect extreme friction from coal lobbies against this, & from environmentalists for not being extreme enough. Use incrementalism as an advantage to separate coal lobbyists from the other fossil fuel giants & reassure the others that they're excluded from this measure, & let them see the can be kicked, but not how far it has been kicked.
- Further subsidize battery & renewable deployments. This MUST be made separate from the next point to reduce political friction.
- Reduce subsidies for fossil fuel explorations & extraction. Lumping this & the above point together makes it much likelier that the lobbies will try stop both measures at once. Don't give them ammunition to do so.
- Subsidize EVs & battery-based home energy storage tech even further. The rollout of cheap solar consequently leads to a worsening of the duck curve, just due to how solar energy is reliant on the sun. Smoothing out the bump from solar into a consistent line via battery tech would reduce stress on the grid for massive ramp-ups & alleviate the need for infra upgrades, which is subject to NIMBYism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
This is just off the top of my head, but the main theme is to chip away at the problem rather than finding the Killer. As tempting as it is to try & find the One Solution, such a breakthrough is heavily reliant on luck, whereas the other more relies on consistent effort than luck itself.
https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-...
Or somewhere
This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason.
When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear -- well... put it like this: If you want right-wing populist governments, that's how you're going to get them.
It would also be a very informative trial run for a UBI (though in this case the amount would be smaller).
The "problem" with this is strictly politics: a) It would actually work, so the fossil fuel energy companies hate it; b) There is no opportunity for graft because the money is distributed to everyone and not just the politically connected, so there is no special interest lobby trying to make it happen.
What would be the cost of administering this tax?
There would be a minor one-time cost for the small minority people none of that applies to, to fill out a form specifying where you want the money to be deposited or the check mailed. But the fundamental process of distributing the money would be a transfer of a fixed amount to each citizen with a social security number, which is easily computerized.
If you want to only tax fuels, that's a start.
And a more efficient way to handle imports would be to impose general tariffs on imports from countries that don't themselves impose a carbon tax, rather than trying to calculate the effects of something happening in a foreign country. Which would have a more significant effect anyway, because causing the entire country to reduce its own emissions would be a much bigger win than causing only their exports to do so.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
It's also not clear what local deference is buying you here, because this is one of the very few cases of a national issue where the right solution is clear and simple and makes sense to implement uniformly at the national level.
The only sense of doing it at a local level is if the national government fails to act.
And local control can still "work" even when the same solution should apply everywhere because they can each individually adopt the same solution, the same as different countries can. In theory a province could even counteract the effect of the federal government trying to get them to spend 10% of the money by just distributing it to the population as it should have been, though of course politicians rarely have that much willpower.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't understand how taxing and redistributing the money does anything besides shifts the consumer power a bit???
I mean, wouldn't a better solution just be to have a carbox tax and then destroy the taxed money?
Bob is average. Bob pays $100 in carbon tax and then gets a check for $100. He doesn't have any more or less money to spend than he did before. He is able to continue his existing behavior and make no change whatsoever, if he wants.
But now he has the incentive to make a change. Because if he installs electric heat pumps instead of heating his house with oil, now he is only paying $50 in carbon tax but still gets a check for $100. If he can get the heat pumps installed for a monthly payment of less than $50, that's what he's going to do. And that's the goal.
Bob needs a new furnace. Heat pumps are more efficient and save on energy costs, but also cost more up front than a new furnace. That basically evens out, so maybe right now the heat pumps still cost $5/month more than the furnace, at least in the short term. Until the cost of operating the furnace goes up $50/month because of the carbon tax, in which case he wants to immediately save $45/month.
And Bob is average. Alice is a heavy user. She has a big old house that she likes to keep at 90 degrees all winter, so the carbon tax would increase her heating bill by $500/month, which she can save by switching to heat pumps and installing solar panels on her roof. So she's going to do that right away.
Presumably there would be some wrangling about how to measure CO2 emissions in certain harder to objectively measure contexts, but they're still not getting any of the money, they might just sneak in a way to not pay their full share. And we know with low variance how much CO2 is emitted by a unit of motor fuel or natural gas or coal, which represent the bulk of emissions.
This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY.
The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.
The world didn't end after the Black death and it did not end after WW2. And it will not end after a nuclear war.
So we should never do anything because the world is never going to end.
(/s but there certainly is a strain of the media/public that blasted right past “it’s not real” to “welp it’s real and it’s too late to do anything about it, let’s do nothing”.)
You want poor people to switch to an electric car? Do what California is doing with car buybacks and grants for new and used EV's. A low income person in some counties can get a couple of grand to trade in his old gas car for a used EV's like a Bolt. That's better because instead of feeling attacked people feel like they got a decent deal.
E-bikes and trains can save the world.
I think this is part of the reason why the EU economy is pretty stagnant, but it is livable. Unfortunately, it also shows that it doesn't make people cut back too much on gasoline use.
Implementing a carbon tax that increases that cost along every step of a supply chain increases the price of everything, not just gasoline.
See: Price of groceries (and all other CPG) in Canada. People will blame the retailers and lazy headlines about record profits, but if you look at their actual margins, the value of CAD, and the fact that the government is increasing the population faster than anything else can catch up… it’s not surprising that they’re posting record numbers. People need to eat. The oligopoly issue definitely plays a part but that’s another can of worms.
Ye, and CEO consumes more of everything, so anyone lower income will receive more from re-distrubtion than they wil pay in tax.
Unfortunately our current government doesn’t realize that they’re not comparable to California.
Everything else is green theater.
It’s not about being fair, it’s about keeping the politicians out of it as much as possible. It costs very little money to let the 1% get theirs, because by definition there just aren’t very many of them. Thats a tiny price to pay for the major advantage of less political football.
Under such a tax the distribution to that $20k a year bike commuting kitchen worker would probably be significantly more than the amount the carbon tax has raised their costs.
That CEO on the other hand would see the costs to operate their jet go up way more than their share of the carbon tax distribution.
Mandating a “living wage” makes some things noticeably more expensive: Burgers, rideshares, lawn care, …
A serious, effective carbon tax will make gas more expensive. Maybe 50 cents/gallon.
If the voting public felt the same way about gas prices as they do about the minimum wage—if you can’t afford it your financial model is immoral—an effective carbon tax would be a political slam dunk.
If you would conceive a scheme to reduce emissions, there's no way that it's going to be in any other place than the top emitting countries, where the emission is in the first place.
Those projects are kind of shifting blame onto people and places which aren't causing the issue.
This is true, but the low hanging fruit (in terms of cost) in terms of drawdown might be developing countries, where things like birth control, paying farmer not to cut down rainforest, etc can be done inexpensively.
It's true that the state has the upper hand but there's also things that an NGO or a private company could do.
That's moderately hanging fruit, and all of it is being done in most EU countries and to a significant degree in the US.
like can't you have different ratings for different carbon credit products - the more accurate ones are priced higher?
Additionally, when you purchase a credit you're generally purchasing a prediction of how much carbon might be absorbed in the future. For a afforestation credit, you're often purchasing the amount of carbon that forest will absorb over 100 years. No rating agency can legitimately tell you that your forest isn't going to burn down or be logged in the next century. It's a pretty ridiculous idea - the seller, purchaser, and rating agency will all probably not exist after 100 years, and the government of whatever country the forest is in will probably have been overthrown.
I think contributing money to protect and rewild nature in the interest of increasing carbon sequestration is a great idea that should continue, but nobody should be receiving offsets that they weigh 1-to-1 against their actual real-world emissions. It just isn't a meaningful comparison. Even if your purchase actually makes an impact, it's like dumping toxic chemicals into a river and setting aside money to fund an organization that will gradually clean up the river over the next century, and then claiming that you've now achieved net-zero pollution.
Some solutions include:
1. Stopping the dumping
2. Pay the full cost of the impact of any dumping that does happen. In your analogy, this would mean the longer you leave the river polluted, the more you have to pay to clean it up.
Lots of opportunity here for entrepreneurs.
I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime but at some point we’re going to change our thinking from “fixing climate change” to dealing with the effects as best we can. The sooner the better IMO, even though it’s going to be a painful transition to be sure.
They are the equivalent of medieval indulgences.
Existing carbon offsets are best thought of as an attempt. The opportunity is, what's next? What's going to actually solve this multi-trillion dollar problem?
Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future", which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one's purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn't negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it's mitigated.
Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. If you find yourself "offsetting" for a few dollars / ton, you're just fooling yourself.
For stuff like direct air capture, not for afforestation.
However, as these types of projects actually do remove carbon, one could probably compute an adjustment factor and purchase additional credits to achieve an "honest" offset.
Absent regulation, carbon offsets are a race to the bottom in producing the cheapest "offset" just hovering above the threshold of "fraudulent".
Direct air capture with long-term sequestration, performed prior to the sale of a carbon credit, is the only scheme that is remotely close to being fully honest.
From what I’ve seen people tend to be happy to take the money and they just burn it next year.
Obviously the problem here is people just setting “trees planted” as the metric because it’s easy to count and creating perverse incentives.
The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?
....
"OK," the PFY says as we leave the building via the service entrance. "All we have to do to be nastiness neutral is to find a couple of people bound and gagged in a skip bin, take them out, give them a couple of wallets, unkick them a few times, unelectrocute them with a cattle prod and say 'clothing hippy on discount percent seventy look oh'."
"On the other side of the world," I add.
- The BOFH
https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/01/bofh_episode_4/
The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following:
Above I said "we absolutely need a carbon market", and I'm open to dropping that. It's possible markets are not the most effective option but I'm kind of short on how else to solve it. To someone who says that markets "fundamentally can't", I would ask them what solution they prefer instead, I'm open!
To maintain a stable climate we need to decarbonize rapidly. A carbon market is a potential solution for rapid decarbonization that so far is not working great.
I'm curious where you land on this.
if too much carbon in the atmosphere is bad, stop putting too much into it. or maybe it’s not necessarily bad but we’re stuck with a global warming narrative that’s wrong, on net, but hard to recant? i don’t know. what i do know is that virtue signaling is a moth-gathering flame. see america.
We have trillions of dollars chasing predictions of code barely worth a million dollar investment. That's absurd, it's a recipe for disaster.
Instead of useless government beaurocrats shuffling hypothetical CO2, should invest in climate models that aren't patched together by grad students in universities and old as hell code and a few NASA engineers maintaining an untested unreadable and unverifiable monstrosities.
Maybe there's no crisis at all. Maybe it's all doom and gloom, but the certainty that everyone's pretending that science gives is just not reflective of the reality of how climate models look right now. They are absolutely shit and I don't blame them given the resources they have, they did their best, but it's absolutely insane how much money is moving around on predictions coming out of that mess.
My general sense is the models are good enough to tell us that a) things are headed in the wrong direction and b) we're really far off from a solution. Generally in agreement with you but I haven't researched deeply about what's needed on more modeling and how to prioritize.
It needs to be open source, and it needs to be way more organized, no physical constants which aren't constant or which have bad precision or which have different values in different parts of the code.
Actual error modeling built in or at least a way to measure and quantify the accuracy.
Some models only use CO2 input for radiation and not for many other parameters that depend on CO2. Because the code is a mess and constants that shouldn't be constants are all over the place. And getting "constants" right is even more important than having high resolution to the simulation.
Getting real physical data to replace all the ad hoc constants is extremely important. And validating the correctness of the cloud modeling with real world data is also important.
And you can't write huge spaghetti code, it needs to be readable and comprehensible to someone other than original programmer so that people can validate the assumptions.
I think you need an expert team of software engineers, physicists and climate experts that will either build good climate models or decipher the mess that is the current models variability.
Honestly, looking at the code of some models I don't think there's much hope in understanding them to the point where you know where the deviations are coming from, it's probably easier putting together new models that are subject to much more strict testing, unit testing, evaluations against real world data than salvaging the current mess. And just throw out the models which fail the testing.
So corporations have a big financial incentive to do the bare minimum to satisfy ESG requirements, and carbon offsets are an unregulated sham. No surprise, the market finds a way and delivers impossibly cheap “offsets” so that such environmental stewards as Chevron, and soon Phillips Morris, can be considered to be environmentally friendly and socially benevolent enough to be included in ESG funds.
It's possible they're doing exactly their job but that it's not a job we need done. The job we need done is rapid decarbonization. So how do we do that?
I’ve found when I’m around people on either side of the climate change issue, they agree it’s a worthy goal to try to control and harness all of earths natural phenomena.
It might take hundreds of years, thousands of years, or maybe we never get there, but it seems like a good goal.