Excellent news! I initially found myself quite skeptical about the idea of carbon offsets, but have more recently come around to the concept, though still with a healthy dose of salt. This episode...
Excellent news! I initially found myself quite skeptical about the idea of carbon offsets, but have more recently come around to the concept, though still with a healthy dose of salt. This episode of Let's Know Things is a very thoughtful discussion about carbon offsetting, and well worth a listen if you have time.
I have traveled the opposite direction. I previously was cautiously optimistic about carbon offsets, but now I think they are at best a distraction and at worst a way to funnel money to the worst...
I have traveled the opposite direction. I previously was cautiously optimistic about carbon offsets, but now I think they are at best a distraction and at worst a way to funnel money to the worst polluters.
Conventional approaches to carbon offsets like planting trees have been shown to be ephemeral by the increasingly out-of-control wildfires burning down offsets at an alarming rate. Also, tree monocultures are not nearly as resilient as actual forests, i.e. not something humans can quickly create. Your best bet is preserving existing forests, which can't scale up. New technology is unproven and I don't believe it can scale enough to matter before 2050. It's not that direct carbon capture couldn't be beneficial to humanity, it's that we'll have to solve the climate crisis without it, or we won't have a chance to deploy it.
But before we can even address the practical problem of how one offsets carbon, we must solve the systemic problem of incentives. Offset markets are a market for lemons, where meaningless cheap offsets will drive out good meaningful offsets, because it is much cheaper to do nothing and play shell games than to actually offset emissions. I discovered a local eco-friendly shop was offsetting their emissions with the specific fraudulent offset covered in this article: https://bloomberg.com/features/2020-nature-conservancy-carbon-offsets-trees/ TL;DR: The Nature Conservancy has been corrupted to sell carbon offsets for forests on land that were already nature preserves and were never going to be logged. I told my local shop this. They are still offering the same fraudulent offset in their shopping cart today, perhaps because they do not have the time to research and find an offset that isn't a lemon, or perhaps because plausibly non-fraudulent offsets would be too expensive.
It's too bad that the only sustainability strategy DuckDuckGo discusses in this announcement is carbon offsets. I'm sure they mean well, but I'm not convinced that this accomplishes anything at all in the absence of other efforts to dramatically reduce emissions. Everything about our society must change, carbon offsets aren't a silver bullet.
I do recall reading somewhere that new-growth forests sequester carbon far faster than old growth. Pruning the largest trees from an old forest makes room for a lot more growth.
Your best bet is preserving existing forests, which can't scale up
I do recall reading somewhere that new-growth forests sequester carbon far faster than old growth. Pruning the largest trees from an old forest makes room for a lot more growth.
Excellent news! I initially found myself quite skeptical about the idea of carbon offsets, but have more recently come around to the concept, though still with a healthy dose of salt. This episode of Let's Know Things is a very thoughtful discussion about carbon offsetting, and well worth a listen if you have time.
I have traveled the opposite direction. I previously was cautiously optimistic about carbon offsets, but now I think they are at best a distraction and at worst a way to funnel money to the worst polluters.
Conventional approaches to carbon offsets like planting trees have been shown to be ephemeral by the increasingly out-of-control wildfires burning down offsets at an alarming rate. Also, tree monocultures are not nearly as resilient as actual forests, i.e. not something humans can quickly create. Your best bet is preserving existing forests, which can't scale up. New technology is unproven and I don't believe it can scale enough to matter before 2050. It's not that direct carbon capture couldn't be beneficial to humanity, it's that we'll have to solve the climate crisis without it, or we won't have a chance to deploy it.
But before we can even address the practical problem of how one offsets carbon, we must solve the systemic problem of incentives. Offset markets are a market for lemons, where meaningless cheap offsets will drive out good meaningful offsets, because it is much cheaper to do nothing and play shell games than to actually offset emissions. I discovered a local eco-friendly shop was offsetting their emissions with the specific fraudulent offset covered in this article: https://bloomberg.com/features/2020-nature-conservancy-carbon-offsets-trees/ TL;DR: The Nature Conservancy has been corrupted to sell carbon offsets for forests on land that were already nature preserves and were never going to be logged. I told my local shop this. They are still offering the same fraudulent offset in their shopping cart today, perhaps because they do not have the time to research and find an offset that isn't a lemon, or perhaps because plausibly non-fraudulent offsets would be too expensive.
It's too bad that the only sustainability strategy DuckDuckGo discusses in this announcement is carbon offsets. I'm sure they mean well, but I'm not convinced that this accomplishes anything at all in the absence of other efforts to dramatically reduce emissions. Everything about our society must change, carbon offsets aren't a silver bullet.
I do recall reading somewhere that new-growth forests sequester carbon far faster than old growth. Pruning the largest trees from an old forest makes room for a lot more growth.