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Comment by RyJones | Hacker News Reader

Carbon offsets were always a very lightly disguised scam. Who knew?

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially on divisive topics. It's flamebait, and we're trying for curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Saying carbon credits are a scam is like saying phones are a scam — they both come in different qualities. (If one phone model’s battery explodes, do all phones explode?)

There are various ways of offsetting emissions that aren’t vulnerable to leakage. For example, you can capture methane from landfills and burn it. Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, burning it has a net greenhouse reduction. And there’s no chance of leakage — water, CO2 and oxygen aren’t going to spontaneously turn back into methane in the atmosphere.

In addition, in some cases it’s more cost effective to make a mostly reliable system and correct errors than to build perfectly reliable systems. Would you rather plant 2M T of trees and have none burn down or 10M T and have 20% burn down?

yea.. not a very good idea to invest in forests unless someone is going to actively log, graze or manage them, otherwise its just destined to burn and there goes your carbon. as we are learning now.

guess the downvotes are from folks that dont understand how forests work? :)

Most forests do not burn.

Over what timescale? Forest fires were a regular occurrence in North America before fire suppression was the standard policy. Now it looks like they're happening quite a bit despite that policy.

Pretty long time spans. There are a lot of forests where fires are not part of the life cycle.

Large scale forest fires have never been a large part of the lifecycle of the moist northeast. That might change, but around the great lakes region at least our forest type is entirely different than the western half of the continent. Rain is fairly consistent here.

The first nations did practice controlled burns for the sake of wildlife management (to increase open grazing land) for sure, and smaller scale forest fires did/do happen. But nothing like out west.

Agreed. The eastern forests don’t burn like the western ones do. I guess my original posts were more aimed at the western coniferous forests, which is what this is related to.

Is this northeast enough: https://vocm.com/2021/08/10/forest-fire-burning-east-of-chur... ?

Forest fire are sufficiently cyclical that some trees, like the pitch pine, depends on them for the seeds to open.

That's an entirely different biome, boreal/northern conifer forest on the Canadian shield. What does that have to do with the great lakes and atlantic northeast? Forest here is composed of oak beech maple and some white pine and rainfall is consistent.

Over the course of time, most forests do burn.

Recently, there was a story about how when we keep the forests from burning we are causing major issues.

Some. Not most.

forests go in cycles. averaged over time, any given acre of forest contains some carbon.

>otherwise its just destined to burn and there goes your carbon

It depends on what you're comparing it against. A forest contains more biomass (and therefore more carbon) than a grass field or a corn field. If before tree planting a plot of land had 100 Tons of biomass, and after planting + growth it had 200 Tons, then you sequestered 100 tons of carbon. If it goes up in flames some of that biomass will get released, but it will eventually grow back, recapturing all the lost carbon.

With that in mind, I don't see anything fraudulent about selling carbon offsets during the initial planting. Sure, it's not as good as burying carbon deep underground, but you're still sequestering carbon.

Agreed, but it’s only temporary because the tree will burn at some point releasing carbon dioxide. At least in any coniferous forest in the western half of North America.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s much better than nothing. I just think they should probably pick locations that aren’t as prone to burning as the colville forests. So the carving stays locked a bit more long term.

>I just think they should probably pick locations that aren’t as prone to burning as the colville forests.

Or apply a discount factor. eg. for a simple model: if a forest has n Tons of sequestered carbon when fully grown, but every 40 years it gets burned bare for 4 years, then it's really only sequestering 0.9n tons of carbon over the long run.

> So the carving stays locked a bit more long term.

I think you got the adjectives flipped. If anything the sequester is long term, but there's cyclical short term release/recapture.

> If before tree planting a plot of land had 100 Tons of biomass, and after planting + growth it had 200 Tons, then you sequestered 100 tons of carbon.

Trees are pure carbon?

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