Inside the Controversy That's Divided the Carbon Offsets Market
www.bloomberg.com
Science Based Targets initiative, the world’s main verifier of corporate climate targets, faced pressure to relax their carbon offset standards.
  • dillekant
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’m not sure I understand the problem. My only guess here is that the issue is that you buy a carbon tonne and it’s meant to be sunk “forever”, but that’s not really possible to verify a-priori. So, why not just rent the carbon? Each tonne you put into the air, you just rent it from the forest or whatever, and if the forest burns down, you have to rent it from somewhere else the next year.

    • silence7OPM
      3·
      2 months ago

      Forest offsets typically depend on a counterfactual — the idea that if you didn’t buy the offset, the forest would be cut down. So a lot of people who wouldn’t have cut the forest down sell offsets, resulting in no change to atmospheric carbon, but giving permission to others to burn fossil fuels.

      And yes, you could rent in a different place from one time period to another, but CO2 concentrations remain elevated for hundreds of thousands of years when you burn fossil fuels, and firms don’t bother with planning for forest-based sequestration over that time period, typically settling for a contract covering only a few decades. So there’s an inherent mismatch between the offset contract and the duration of the damage they do.

      • dillekant
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yes, that’s why I’m saying, the companies just have to rent in perpetuity. Also, yeah you can’t rent forest carbon unless it’s sinking it that year.