Cambridge study says carbon offsets are not nearly as effective as they claim to be.
…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.
Offsets are a game of 3 card monte.
The carbon is still released. We’ll never win.
And the dealer gets the money.
They are doing their job if that job is to make money for the people selling them.
To absolutely no one’s surprise.
What they’re designed to do and what they claim to do are verydifferent things.
Carbon offsets have always been a greenwash that allows the worst polluters to keep polluting while pretending to give a fuck.
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.
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.
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carbon sequestration is not ever going to work
I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s a thing that is currently being done. Not some future hypothetical tech.
But yes it is too expensive for now. Costs are coming down hopefully that continues to be the case.
And yes, the best, cheapest, most efficient way to reduce ghg is to eliminate fossil fuels.
It’s hilariously expensive and it’s expensive because physics. We measure carbon in the atmosphere in parts per million. The entire surface area of the planet is already littered with Caron absorbers and they don’t make a dent.
It’s never happening
Pretty much what I suspected. Just marketing and advertising BS to make companies seem to be doing more than they are.
Necessary to keep the populace calm, too. Keep it at a slow boil, that way the masses don’t freak out when they finally come to the realization that it’s going to hurt everyone, including them, and it’s not going to be long. And even the ones who ‘survive’ will have to accept their children growing up in a radically different ecosystem, if any remains.
If gen pop knew how fucked we are there’d be riots in the streets.
Carbon credits/offsets = bigger Ponzi scheme than nft + cryptocurrency!!! There’s none environmental protection with capitalism ruling!!! Plain & simple!
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“What do you mean just saying it’s fine doesn’t actually make everything fine?!”
working as intended
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!
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
You tell that robot! Go fuck yourself, metal mouth!
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.
Murder offsets:
I’m allowed to murder this guy because I opened a fertility clinic which is responsible for 20 new lives!
Carbon offsets are just as ridiculous.
If the overall goal is to increase the human population, it actually makes total sense
If the goal is to prevent murders, then no, it doesn’t make sense
Even if it’s just to increase the population, it doesn’t really make sense. Would a similar fertility clinic not exist without this person opening it? Would those babies not have been born otherwise?
A lot of carbon offsets are pretending that a forest was otherwise going to be cut down, when that was never a risk, or it’s selling the same trees to multiple people. Or the trees are actually cut down despite the offset.
