The issue is that carbon offsets are poorly defined/regulated and are therefore almost never "honest". The definition of "honest" here, is that a purchased offset should represent a unit of carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere.
Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future", which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one's purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn't negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it's mitigated.
Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. If you find yourself "offsetting" for a few dollars / ton, you're just fooling yourself.
Same issue of "honesty" with afforestation-based credits. A ton of carbon removed during the growth of a new tree is not equivalent to a ton of carbon already removed today.
However, as these types of projects actually do remove carbon, one could probably compute an adjustment factor and purchase additional credits to achieve an "honest" offset.
Factor in that the carbon is only captured so long as the forest survives. If the forest burns or the trees fall and rot, the carbon is returned to the atmosphere unless and until new trees grow.
That's assuming the afforestation is even helpful and not one of the various examples of incentives for planting trees leading to work that's actually doing more harm than good.
That's an interesting comment. I hadn't really ever considered that afforestation might be a bad thing - always just assumed "more trees = good". In what sort of examples would it be a bad thing? Trying to create forests in places that naturally weren't forests in the past?
Right. For instance, one story I read concerned disturbing grasslands in order to plant more trees — foolhardy because grasslands themselves are excellent carbon sinks and the trees would take a long time to be comparable. Others concerned trees being planted with little possibility of survival. I believe the first was in China and the second in Turkey if anyone wants to dig through news archives and try and find these stories again.
Obviously the problem here is people just setting “trees planted” as the metric because it’s easy to count and creating perverse incentives.
Out of all the nebulous carbon offset schemes that exist today, afforestation seems to be one of the least scammy options if ones adjusts for the fact that "future value" != "present value". Even the uncertainty of the long-term success of afforestation projects can be statistically modelled and incorporated into an adjustment factor. However, nobody is going to willingly do that, so even those types of offsets will remain dishonest.
Absent regulation, carbon offsets are a race to the bottom in producing the cheapest "offset" just hovering above the threshold of "fraudulent".
Direct air capture with long-term sequestration, performed prior to the sale of a carbon credit, is the only scheme that is remotely close to being fully honest.
I am very dubious that afforestation won’t be logged or burned at some future date, which I assume is what you refer to as the “long term success” of these.
From what I’ve seen people tend to be happy to take the money and they just burn it next year.
Instead, we have "offsets" that claim to remove carbon at some arbitrary point in the future, or worse, are an "expected reduction of carbon output of some nebulous projects in the future", which is how a lot of offsets actually operate. Even if valid, and one's purchased unit of offset carbon is actually mitigated at some point in the future, this doesn't negate the impact of the carbon that was emitted today until that point in the future that it's mitigated.
Today's cost of atmospheric carbon capture is several hundred dollars / ton. If you find yourself "offsetting" for a few dollars / ton, you're just fooling yourself.