'Worthless' – Chevron carbon offsets are mostly junk and some may harm: research | Hacker News Reader

'Worthless' – Chevron carbon offsets are mostly junk and some may harm: research

theguardian.com

31 pointsrntn9 comments

It's not well-known that carbon-trading schemes (introduced in the 1997 Kyoto Protocal) were based on a previous US program intended to reduce sulfur dioxide contamination (from dirty diesel and coal) in areas with bad air quality, and to combat acid rain pollution issues. Sure, it's been good for reducing local sulfur air pollution in some zones in the USA:

> "Beginning in 1995 and over the subsequent decade, the SO2 allowance trading program performed exceptionally well along all relevant dimensions. SO2 emissions from electric power plants decreased 36 percent—from 15.9 million to 10.2 million between 1990 and 2004."

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.27.1.103

However, high-sulfur coal and diesel fuels were simply exported abroad to zones with no pollution regulations. Dirty sulfur-rich diesel fuel was moved to the shipping industry, aka 'bunker fuel', and coal mines with the most sulfur-rich coal (Appalachia, mostly) began exporting more and more of their product overseas, with West Virginia now being the top USA coal exporter. See (1991):

> "The new law will be a boon for areas producing low-sulfur coal, such as Wyoming, Montana, and eastern Kentucky. It will be a blow to high-sulfur coal areas in Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and western Kentucky."

https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/0517/17091.html

It didn't reduce global sulfur emissions, as the high-sulfur coal is now exported to China and India etc., rather than being burned domestically. Globally, all it did was to move pieces around on the playing table.

Of course, if the issue is global emissions of air pollutants, this doesn't make any difference where they're emitted, and that's especially true for carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. If you're taking geologically stable carbon out of the ground and pumping it into the atmosphere, you're adding to the total atmospheric burden.

The only way to 'offset' fossil fuels is to remove the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere in the form of something stable like limestone, diamond, etc. - and nobody's doing that. The only realistic solution is thus to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix entirely.

interesting background! but the overview analysis lacks some parts. "multi-scale" modelling gives some clues.. let's think about connected systems more.. water is the profound example, with weight and essential for basically all life. Water collects into rivers and flows, or seeps into the ground, in a way that is geographically connected always. Electrical energy has a connected nature. Not all electrical generation effects all other electrical generation, especially across continent scale. Put an ocean in the middle? mountain tops? vast desert? you have localized systems, not one big one. Now, think of activity hot-spots. The challenge is overheating from generation, and excess waste products from generation. Does a hot spot of activity in Ohio directly connect to activity in India? or Poland? no. only in the pooling of the waste in the air, not the direct outputs of power or physical forces. So you need an intermediate scale to think about multiple active hot-spots with a common waste pool.

Next, there is no universal jurisdiction, nor universal will in practice. It is clearly a sociological and political challenge to change hot-spot creation and use globally. It is not "directly connected" when one part of the world decides to build or continue a coal operation, versus another. Skipping the middle scale in analysis leads to "doom loop" declarations like "China is doing it more so our efforts mean nothing" .. plus, local air is a real thing! It does have a positive effect locally, just not sufficient to deal with the global excess.

Please continue critical thinking and analysis -- more intelligence needed.

> "This fossil fuel trade, which has soared under President Barack Obama, threatens to undermine his strategy to reduce the gases blamed for global warming. It also reveals a little-discussed side effect of countries acting alone on a global issue. As the U.S. tries to set a global example by reducing demand for fossil fuels at home, American energy companies are sending more dirty fuels than ever to other parts of the world, exports worth billions of dollars every year."

Ultimately, there would have to be something like steep tariffs or an outright ban on the international fossil fuel trade, which is pretty hard to imagine in today's economy. The two-faced posturing of certain politicians on this issue is kind of irritating, and is not any different in substance from the outright denialism promoted by other politicians.

This is true about nature-based schemes in general. It makes no sense that somebody has to change their land use forever to offset carbon emissions from something you did once, like taking a flight.

"Changing land use forever" could easily be "restoring destroyed ecosystem," which is an unequivocal positive if done correctly.

In principle yes, in practice it is less clear.

CO₂ in the atmosphere is not quite as long-lived as nuclear waste but should be contained for 10,000 years or so. It's plausible you can inject CO₂ underground and it will stay put for that long but not that a forest won't burn up or that people will change their land use again. Also you can measure the amount of CO₂ you injected into a hole and can only guess about the CO₂ that a natural ecosystem absorbed, never mind will absorb. In a developing country there is frequently weak governance and it is not so clear that promised land use changes will happen at all.

We should be doing ecosystem restoration and finding ways to pay for it, but I am categorically opposed to carbon offsets for land use changes as they are primarily good for greenwashing and will crowd out effective and measurable carbon credits. (e.g. it only addresses "Scope 1" but Chevron really should be capturing CO₂ from its refineries and storing it underground)

ok "Natural Climate Solutions" Griscom et, al 2017 PNAS

... seems to be a respected-among-scholars starting point.

Really? I'm shocked, SHOCKED I tell you. In unrelated news, Al Gore becomes world's first "Carbon Billionaire".

But the billionaire owners of the corps in their private jets said we are responsible for the destruction of nature!

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