Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

&gt; “These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction.&quot;<p>I struggle to think of an expletive that works here. The people of the UK are providing welfare to companies for what? Not cutting down trees that don’t exist?<p>The article later goes in to say researchers found evidence that 6% of the credits are having the intended effects.<p>The malignancy of the authors of this program is astonishing.

&gt; 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.<p>It sounds like a massively fraudulent market with little actual oversight.

If you had $5000 that you wanted to use to fight climate change, and you wanted to have it have a bigger multiplying effect than your own personal consumption (install heat pumps, get electric car, etc.), where <i>would</i> you put that, given that most carbon credits seem to be scams?<p>That is, what&#x27;s the least-scammy carbon credit, and&#x2F;or place of concrete change?<p>Places I donate to, but wonder how much the effect of each is:<p>* Climate charities focused on legislation (EarthJustice, Clean Air Task Force, EDF, NRDC)<p>* Direct CO2 removal (Climeworks). Seems like a drop in the bucket, but feel like this tech needs to grow.<p>* Goldstandard.org Carbon Credits. May be just as scammy, but appears to be direct gifts to green energy projects in developing world. (Of course, maybe they would have gotten the money anyway.)<p>What are other people&#x27;s thoughts?

The money going towards carbon offsets would be better spent on lobbying in favor of carbon taxes, and establishing Enhanced Weathering: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Enhanced_weathering" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Enhanced_weathering</a>

The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined&#x2F;regulated and are therefore almost never &quot;honest&quot;. The definition of &quot;honest&quot; here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere.<p>Instead, we have &quot;offsets&quot; that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an &quot;expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future&quot;, which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one&#x27;s purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn&#x27;t negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it&#x27;s mitigated.<p>Today&#x27;s cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars &#x2F; ton. If you find yourself &quot;offsetting&quot; for a few dollars &#x2F; ton, you&#x27;re just fooling yourself.

&quot;Okay,&quot; I say. &quot;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&#x27;re a complete shit at home.&quot;<p>....<p>&quot;OK,&quot; the PFY says as we leave the building via the service entrance. &quot;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 &#x27;clothing hippy on discount percent seventy look oh&#x27;.&quot;<p>&quot;On the other side of the world,&quot; I add.<p>- The BOFH<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;bofh_episode_4&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;bofh_episode_4&#x2F;</a>

Every corporation that has advertised itself as being carbon neutral should be accountable to class action suits for false advertising. I’m sure most are careful enough to specify exactly what they mean by carbon neutral in fine print though, so they’re probably safe.

Cynical take:<p>The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following:<p><pre><code> - Assuage guilt - Virtue signal (personal, political, or corporate) - Profit financially from government incompetence - Profit financially from corporate PR efforts</code></pre>

I get similar a similar vibe about carbon credits than I got with crypto currencies &#x2F; NFT. I am wondering if the SEC is going to look into them at some point and treat them a unregistered securities fraud.

It&#x27;s interesting, because there is indeed a system in the EU known as carbon allowances. While everyone and their dog can buy offsets, allowances exist in the EU and California (I think?) which are a legal mandate that firms must purchase which are necessary to pollute. There&#x27;s even tradeable products based on this, and the market seems healthy enough. Offsets are definitely a scam, but I&#x27;d love to hear anyone else&#x27;s opinion on allowances.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;climate.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;eu-action&#x2F;eu-emissions-trading-system-eu-ets_en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;climate.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;eu-action&#x2F;eu-emissions-trading-...</a><p>Allowances<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sparkchange.io&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;SparkChange-CO2-Product-Guide-FM01_2dBrk2-1.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sparkchange.io&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;SparkChang...</a><p>Guide on allowances from a firm that sells a physically backed allowances product

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.

I was looking through the Alabama property records one time because I was wondering who owns all these huge tracks of land with nothing on them. They all traced back through a series of shell companies to Wall Street investment banks.

Carbon credits are the only financial instrument that is scammier than crypto.

Carbon credits; Indulgences dressed to serve modern sensibilities

The thing which doesn&#x27;t make sense with those is that it&#x27;s always projects in developing and poor countries ... whereas the overwhelming majority of emissions is actually in developed countries.<p>If you would conceive a scheme to reduce emissions, there&#x27;s no way that it&#x27;s going to be in any other place than the top emitting countries, where the emission is in the first place.<p>Those projects are kind of shifting blame onto people and places which aren&#x27;t causing the issue.

Or perhaps they&#x27;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.

&gt; “Potential buyers benefit from consistently low prices created by the flood of credits. It means that companies can tick their net zero box at the lowest possible cost,” he said.<p>Basically, the companies only care about the being able to tout their green initiatives at the lowest possible price, so this is exactly what they want.

doesn&#x27;t this just mean they&#x27;re priced incorrectly?<p>like can&#x27;t you have different ratings for different carbon credit products - the more accurate ones are priced higher?

jon oliver did a great episode about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0</a>

Carbon offsets never made sense from the start. Obviously just a way to continue polluting, maintain a clean image, and line somebody’s pockets.

I once worked in the sector, and left once I realised that the scam is that sellers of offsets characterise a complex system as a simple system.

Well yah, anyone could have told you that. Relying on consumers to change the world through &quot;market forces&quot; is hardly going to work, because &quot;market forces&quot; are dictated by major market players. Not to mention that if these credits are transferrable then the government is essentially subsidizing companies for being polluters under a certain threshold. Meanwhile the companies that can afford a lot of credits buy them up and offset the cost via consumers, thus the pollution is still made, it just becomes more focused. Plus, they can no doubt hide exactly where that money is going, since they have all this capital to invest in these offsets in the first place.<p>The only way to fix climate change is with real legislation. Not through governments attempting to manipulate the market.

I still don&#x27;t get why govts are bot offering carbon offsets by sponsoring public transport like trams, trains and electric busses. This will contribute to its development in terms of quality and funding and hopefully reduce car dependency if dedicated lanes are provided to this new transport

The tree planting business is harmful too. In one case they just cleared an area in africa of natural brush, planted millions of monoculture trees in rows. The people lost their farmland. Run by people in suits of course

Great moment to plug Climate Town&#x27;s video from a couple years back on precisely this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EIezuL_doYw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EIezuL_doYw</a>

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.<p>They are the equivalent of medieval indulgences.

You can expect this kind of dishonesty and self-serving politics for as long as we tolerate climate change induced disasters and its consequences on the human kind.

Misleading title; the study is very specifically about carbon offsetting <i>by slowing deforestation</i>. There are other incredibly common methods of carbon offsetting, e.g. renewable energy projects in developing countries. This study does not cover those. It&#x27;s been known for a long time that tree-related carbon offsetting is one of the least reliable ways in general.

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.<p>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.<p>It might take hundreds of years, thousands of years, or maybe we never get there, but it seems like a good goal.

Pachama (YCW19) addresses this problem<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;sustainable-business&#x2F;carbon-credit-platform-pachama-raises-55-mln-latest-funding-round-2022-05-05&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;sustainable-business&#x2F;carbon...</a>

You know what actually needs an investment? Climate models which are completely shit right now. It&#x27;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&#x27;t give reasonable predictions.<p>We have trillions of dollars chasing predictions of code barely worth a million dollar investment. That&#x27;s absurd, it&#x27;s a recipe for disaster.<p>Instead of useless government beaurocrats shuffling hypothetical CO2, should invest in climate models that aren&#x27;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.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s no crisis at all. Maybe it&#x27;s all doom and gloom, but the certainty that everyone&#x27;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&#x27;t blame them given the resources they have, they did their best, but it&#x27;s absolutely insane how much money is moving around on predictions coming out of that mess.

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Environmental,_social,_and_corporate_governance" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Environmental,_social,_and_c...</a><p>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.

This feels like an extension to Goodhart&#x27;s law that should be obvious. A measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure, especially if it is financialised and traded.

So funny. The poeple on this website like to seriouly talk about climate change but does not blame the Canana fire burning for months.

What we need are measured carbon credits that are past-looking... i.e. this device or plant captured x tons of carbon

I am going to auction off urine credits. Save the world and pay me in advance for every time you take a leak.

Carbon credits and offsets of all flavors are a scam.<p>I just searched Google[1] for &quot;carbon credits scam&quot; and the first several entries were from Vox[2] (it&#x27;s complicated), WaPo[3] (it&#x27;s a scam), GreenPeace[4] (it&#x27;s a scam), the Guardian[5] (scam), and Center for American Progress[6] (we need new oversight to curb fraud).<p>These are hardly right-wing or climate skeptics. I am very inclined to believe them; I believe that con artists are gonna find a way to game any new financial system to their own advantage.<p>Personally, as the market is so abstract and as verification is often difficult, I don&#x27;t see an effective way to remove the fraud from such systems. Granted, I am no expert in carbon trading, but the abstractness seems like a fraud magnet.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=carbon+credit+scam" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=carbon+credit+scam</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;23817575&#x2F;carbon-offsets-credits-financialization-ecologi-solutions-scam" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;23817575&#x2F;carbon-offsets-credits-financia...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;travel&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;carbon-offsets-flights-airlines&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;travel&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;carbon-offs...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greenpeace.org&#x2F;international&#x2F;story&#x2F;50689&#x2F;carbon-offsets-net-zero-greenwashing-scam&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greenpeace.org&#x2F;international&#x2F;story&#x2F;50689&#x2F;carbon-...</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2022&#x2F;mar&#x2F;23&#x2F;australias-carbon-credit-scheme-largely-a-sham-says-whistleblower-who-tried-to-rein-it-in" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2022&#x2F;mar&#x2F;23&#x2F;australi...</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanprogress.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-cftc-should-raise-standards-and-mitigate-fraud-in-the-carbon-offsets-market&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanprogress.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-cftc-should-rai...</a><p>[ed] added line feeds to fix run-ons

Good luck trying to offset Popocatepetl...

At this rate, we&#x27;ll be able to make every company carbon neutral by 2030 without making any actual changes to the environment! Go capitalism!

This should be news to exactly nobody.

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?