Why They Are Still Spewing the ‘Off Setting Carbon’ Stuff
Among the many frail reeds bundled together into the authoritative solution to climate change.
One is to put a price on carbon so you can buy someone else’s proclaimed lack of it to offset your continuing to spew the stuff.
Which seems a bit like getting clean by not doing laundry while someone somewhere does so much of it that the whole planet is robed in shimmering green at least rhetorically.
Or paying someone else to forgo demon rum so you can keep sozzling. But as with many solutions to the supposedly apocalyptic, planet-shattering impact of person-made climate change, it appears insufficient in scope even if it were working smoothly instead of being an unconvincing kluge.
Thus when The Economist asks “Can the voluntary carbon market save the Amazon?” surely the answer is a tart no, of course not. But hope springs eternal, apparently.
The Economist’s “Brazil correspondent” starts with a passionate declaration that:
“Covering the Amazon can be gut-wrenching. Since I started reporting on Brazil last year, I’ve visited the jungle four times.
On each trip I’ve felt a sense of rage and impotence that I rarely experience when writing about other subjects. Driving on the roads that criss-cross the rainforest, you see smoke rising from areas that have been set alight to clear the land for cattle.
In the dry season these roads are strewn with the charred bodies of wild animals caught in the fires or beasts that were run over as they tried to escape the flames. As I write this newsletter, Brazil is choking from gigantic wildfires, many lit on purpose.”
How dare the Brazilians clear forest for agriculture. She then waxes lyrical briefly, before waning disillusioned, about how:
“South America was the last continent to be inhabited by humans, and that isolation helped the Amazon become the most biodiverse place on Earth. I doubted that anyone could make much headway in rebuilding a forest that developed over millions of years.
And I knew that, worldwide, the voluntary carbon market – on which the carbon sequestered by such projects can be sold as ‘credits’ that offset buyers’ greenhouse-gas emissions – had repeatedly been at the centre of scandals, undermining its credibility.”
Well yes. Big government schemes to redistribute wealth in the name of zealotry tend to attract grifters and projectors, don’t they? As The Economist once knew. But that was then. (It’s not even obvious that South America was the last continent to be inhabited by humans, even if you don’t count Antarctica.)
Still, there is something to be said for the projects she visited, which instead of planting monoculture to grab a quick buck (or just faking it) seem to be taking a more holistic approach. Alas, also something to be said against, and she says it:
“much of the market is not yet fit for purpose – there is hardly any transparency about pricing and quality, and no common standards around how sequestered carbon is measured.
Really starting to rebuild the Amazon and other biomes will require solving these problems, and many more. But I left feeling grateful for the new shoots of hope I saw on my trip.”
Um yeah. But since we’re all meant to reach Net Zero in barely a quarter of a century, and most of us haven’t budged, they’d better “solve these problems, and many more” at a dazzling pace. If only someone knew how.
They don’t. We won’t get distracted here by the parallel enthusiasm for “carbon capture and storage” except to note that if that technology worked.
We wouldn’t have to pay people far away to do something we can’t check on to offset our rampant emissions because we’d be stuffing our own carbon into disused mines, tanks, trees or something.
And if we can’t do it, in the most technologically advanced and wealthy societies the globe has ever seen, it’s a bit hard to believe poor people in places with shaky government structures including the rule of law, including honest accounting, are pulling it off on a scale to suck in all of ours.
Still, what of this notion that they are? If you take this stuff seriously, the complexities of how to understand what is happening are enough to daunt you, let alone what should be happening.
Mind you it is dawning on a lot of people, and not just the usual suspects on our side of the debate, that something fishy is going on. The New York Times “Climate Forward” noticed a problem earlier this year, while trying not to:
“The White House announced guidelines this morning to strengthen the market for carbon offsets, otherwise known as the voluntary carbon market.
Offsets allow companies or individuals to buy credits tied to emissions reductions created by projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, many of which are in the developing world.
But… carbon offsets have been heavily criticized and a ‘growing number of studies and reports have found that many carbon offsets simply don’t work.’ So why has the Biden administration moved in to help fix a market that has drawn so much criticism?
Carbon offsets, however imperfect, are a way of getting billions of dollars to developing nations that doesn’t involve the tricky politics of foreign aid. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hinted at that in a statement about today’s announcement.”
It’s kind of odd to ask why they’re trying to fix it when it’s so central to their plans. And it would be very hard, nearly half a year after this story ran in May, to detect any evidence that the fix worked or that anyone even remembers it was attempted.
But the big picture is that they’re leaning heavily on something that doesn’t work to accomplish something voters don’t want that wouldn’t help if they pulled it off. So what could go wrong?
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