Can you convince me about Carbon Offsetting & Carbon Trading?

Question

There are many supporters of carbon offsetting & carbon trading, however I'm not one of them, because after doing even just a superficial investigation of these industries for a charity that's researching these topics I've found your ideas/concepts & 'truths' to be unsubstantiated by valid scientific facts, & that your public information is utter 'greenwash', which I'm angry about, because you're blatantly conning our entire society & getting VERY rich in the process. So PLEASE you supporters of carbon offsetting & carbon trading what can you tell me here that will DEFEND your concepts, & what genuine scientific evidence should I add to my damning report against you that in any way might actually support you? Thanks.

PLEASE don't bang on about how we need to plant more trees - we ALWAYS need to plant more trees, it's an ongoing process regardless of the CO2 agenda, because for many decades we've been unceasingly deforesting our planet - ironically, we've now increased this process to create fields for growing biofuel crops to fulfil the CO2 agenda! My question here is about the CO2 AGENDA INDUSTRY & the greenwash of spin & lies it tells us, such as if you buy one sapling, or sponsor a wind turbine, you can now fly to Australia with a guilt-free conscience, etc. Defend & support this & your offsetting/trading agenda with valid evidence. Thanks.

BELLADONNA - I have no idea what you mean by calling me a "tree nutter"? Never heard that insult before - if it means I'm passionate about trees and have been campaigning against deforestation for over 20 years, then I guess I'm a "tree nutter".

TREVOR - If I was so closed-minded about these issues then I wouldn't have asked for supporters like yourself to please convince me otherwise. But like yourself all they do is get ultra defensive (and usually quite aggressive too) when challenged. I'm still waiting to see real evidence, and you tell me nothing I don't know already, but thanks for trying.

Answer 1

I looked into the "Offsets". I find them to be nothing but another way for the elite in our society to "Buy" their way out of having to do what they want everyone else to do to save the planet. Simply calculate you carbon footprint and then send the appropriate amount of money so you can continue your trashing of the earth. The money is to be used to support CO2 and other pollution saving projects

It allows Al, Hollywood, and other wealthy elites to have several huge homes, SUV's, airplanes, etc., and a clear conscience as well.

With that kind of logic, all we have to do is everyone pay a calculated tax and global warming simply goes away.

Answer 2

There is a recurring pattern here: one person gives a reasonable answer and the nutz and 2ITs come out of the woodwork to twist it to their own agenda.

Carbon trading is just an insurance policy for polluters, yes, but if it didn't exist then do you think ANY money would be set aside to mitigate their actions? I definitely would like to see proof that the money flows through these trading organizations to the people who make a measurable difference; but at least its's better than nothing, for the moment. It is possible now to do something good for the environment and get paid for it, for a change.

Think of it another way, it is an expense that CO2 producers will not like to pay. Even at $.15/TCO2 it is still an added expense which makes them less competitive. The cost per Tonne may not be high enough, but it is an incentive to reduce. Effective when the do nothing option + carbon tax costs more than the alternative.

Answer 3

Well, they've done a bang up job with the carbon credit scheme. You can currently get credit for a metric ton of CO2 for a little over a TENTH of a Euro (about 15 cents). A major manufacturer can lay off a janitor and pay their carbon penalty for a few years.
http://www.euets.com/index.php?page=marketdata&l=1
http://green.itweek.co.uk/2007/02/emission_tradin.html

http://green.itweek.co.uk/2007/02/emission_tradin.html

Oh, I'm sorry. You wanted someone to defend carbon trading/offsetting.

Never mind...

Answer 4

You've made the question hard to answer by effectively stating that you don't want to hear the answer - that's a bit close minded isn't it.

One of the best ways to offset carbon emissions is through the planting of trees and this is what many carbon offsetting programmes concentrate on. The problem is that a lot of the companies offering this service are doing so more out of concern for their bank balances than out of concern for the environment.

Let me give you an example. A typical offsetting company will charge $10, $20 even $30 to plant a tree on your behalf. The actual cost of planting a tree can be less than $0.10 - I know, I planted 50,000 of them last year at a cost of $5,000. Fair enough, I did go to Africa and organised the planting myself but all the same, the costs of getting a company to do the planting for you are certainly nothing like $9.90 per tree let alone $29.90. That said, there are some companies which charge as little as $0.20 to plant a tree on your behalf.

Another problem, with tree planting is that it only offsets carbon emissions if it's done correctly and than means planting the right type of trees in the right place. A tree in your back yard might look nice but the carbon it sequesters as it grows is the same as that which it releases when it dies, effectively it's a temporary carbon store. Trees planted in hotter, tropical regions have a positive impact, a good tree resulting in a net reduction equivelant to approx 40kg of CO2 per year.

Done correctly the system works. So too does the carbon trading system but again, there are people involved who are seizing the opportunity to make money out of it.

Carbon trading should mean there's a cap on carbon emissions. Organisations reducing their carbon output can sell their surplus credits to the more polluting organisations. In this model the polluting organisations pay a financial penalty and the less polluting ones earn a financial bonus. At the end of the day the financial losses are the same as the financial gains so the system is balanced. Overall there are no winners or loses, just a redistribution of the wealth.

However, people have set themselves up as traders, middlemen, brokers. They take a percentage fee for negotiating the sale and purchase of carbon credits and in doing so are taking money out of the system and creating an imbalance.

Again, if the system performs correctly then it works but as is always the case, people are exploiting the system for their own financial benefit.

My advice - if you want to offset or trade credits then do it yourself or use only the services of people and organisations that aren't profiting from the schemes.

By and large the system does work - look at the European and some Asian models for example. Here emissions have been cut and billions of tons of pollutants have been prevented from entering the atmosphere. If the world followed the European example there would be a worldwide reduction in emissions at very little cost.

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Edit. Belladonna (below) has picked up an a very important point and it's my mistake for saying that trees lose their carbon content when they die. As she correctly points out it's not when they die but when they degrade by being allowed to rot or are burned. Trees that were used to make oak beams in houses hundreds of years old for instance are still storing carbon that was captured centuries ago.

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Answer 7

Can I just talk about trees for one minute ..... pretty pretty please

In Trevor's amazing monologue, whilst he points out that carbon trading is a good idea, he also counters this by saying it has an inherent risk of mismanagement and exploitation. However, he also suggests that trees are a temporary carbon store they loose it when they die. I had to stop what I was doing because I was leaping up and down shouting NO... NO...NO... Trees DO NOT loose their store of carbon when they are chopped down. They retain it unless they are burned. Even then, they only give back the same amount as they took out in the first place. So being carbon neutral. .........

Sorry, I AM A Tree Nutter, please get back to your very interesting responses.

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Answer 9

did you know that cattle in the uk leave a larger global foot print than us by giving of methane gas , if all the cars in the uk were on the go all day we still could match there out put . footprints are left not just by us , there is a cash rich society springin up around carbon footprint reduction and very little filters down to actual problem . we must no realise that wat created this planet may ultimatly destroy it . and jumping on the foot print band wagon will make no difference ,we need to change all your habbits from the dripping tap to a sunday drive if we are to leave ant thing for mine and your grandchildren

Answer 10

Please bear with my way of writing this as i'm cr@p at putting whats in my head into words, but i read this week in the paper that 3/4 of the crops that america grow go to poor countries but now they want to use these crops for bio fuel, so the poor countries will only now get about 1/4 of those crops grown, so we make bio fuel to save planet but starve the poor people, in the process