Tough but fair criticism

BBC program on Kyoto offsets

Posted by Gar Lipow (Guest Contributor) at 1:37 PM on 06 Jun 2008

Read more about: carbon offsets | climate | climate change mitigation

The idea behind offsets is that you pay someone else to reduce emissions on your behalf when they can make the reductions more cheaply than you can. The leading offset method use to fight climate chaos is the Clean Development Mechanism. This is an extremely controversial topic, with many (including me) contending it does not work. The BBC has an excellent radio broadcast covering both sides of the controversy. The broadcaster concludes that offsets don't make sense. But he gives leading intelligent pro-CDM experts plenty of time to make their case. It is an example of a program that is, while not the least bit objective, still being fair.

For story: Tough but fair criticism
4 Comments | Post a Comment

Indeed

Bogus offsets in general make me wonder if offsets and permits should be separate.

Otherwise there would be a lot of leeway to create counterfeit offsets, and thus the equivalent of counterfeit permits.

Which would make the whole thing rather pointless.

-David Ahlport

by GreyFlcn at 3:28 PM on 06 Jun 2008

Offsets only OK if time travel included

After several years of consideration (including having given money to TerraPass and then Carbonfund.org before stopping to reevaluate) I have concluded that offsets are indefensible because, even granting every benefit of the doubt, they still don't address the issue of carbon retention in the atmosphere (a huge fraction remains after 100 years and a significant fraction remains up to 1000 years).

We need a broad upstream carbon tax that is fully refunded. No offsets, no games, no accounting overhead, just reductions. NOW.

The only offsets worth supporting would be the ones that come with time travel, enabling those people making the reductions in the future to remove the CO2 supposedly offset before it is emitted.

The 5% Project

by JMG at 5:01 PM on 06 Jun 2008

Yes JMG

Yes JMG, but the problem with that is you don't know what price to set the tax at.

So one tweak to your system, have a capped number of auctioned permits to set the price.

And ditch the offsets all together.

Say something like this:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/6/5/183343/3839

End result, you got a big pile of money which you can use to buy votes to get the thing passed.

-David Ahlport

by GreyFlcn at 5:14 PM on 06 Jun 2008

Now the real catch being

How would we communicate such an idea to influential people like say, Al Gore.

If only I had an influential environmental website which he's has interviewed at before....

-David Ahlport

by GreyFlcn at 5:22 PM on 06 Jun 2008

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