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Carbon offsets
Does anyone know of a carbon offset scheme that allows you to spend your money on carbon credits?
There's lots of schemes out there, but they seem to fall into:
1. Planting trees. (This is good in some ways, but the trees will take 50 years or more to grow to a size where they soak up enough carbon to offset all that you want them to offset - and in 50 years, the damage will already have been done)
2. Funding renewable energy schemes. (This is also partly good, but it's a myth that renewable energy is carbon-neutral. Just building the wind turbine/whatever will generate a fair bit of CO2 and if the turbine is built on a bog, then, in some areas at least, the release of methane from the ground disturbance may wipe out all the gains of the saving in fossil fuels) And renewable energy sources are often in remote areas which means that transmission losses have to be taken into account.
3. Funding energy reduction schemes by giving away low-energy light bulbs and the like. (This is potentially flawed. If you give a low-energy lightbulb to someone who isn't seriously trying to keep their CO2 down, then they simply leave it on for longer and we end up where we started)
Carbon credits - the pieces of paper that allow industry to emit CO2 - are the only items that you can actually, hand-on-heart, say have saved the amount of CO2 that you emitted. And I can't (on a quick search) find a scheme that promises to do that with your cash. And that rather suggests to me that many carbon offset schemes may not really be doing what they promise.
There's lots of schemes out there, but they seem to fall into:
1. Planting trees. (This is good in some ways, but the trees will take 50 years or more to grow to a size where they soak up enough carbon to offset all that you want them to offset - and in 50 years, the damage will already have been done)
2. Funding renewable energy schemes. (This is also partly good, but it's a myth that renewable energy is carbon-neutral. Just building the wind turbine/whatever will generate a fair bit of CO2 and if the turbine is built on a bog, then, in some areas at least, the release of methane from the ground disturbance may wipe out all the gains of the saving in fossil fuels) And renewable energy sources are often in remote areas which means that transmission losses have to be taken into account.
3. Funding energy reduction schemes by giving away low-energy light bulbs and the like. (This is potentially flawed. If you give a low-energy lightbulb to someone who isn't seriously trying to keep their CO2 down, then they simply leave it on for longer and we end up where we started)
Carbon credits - the pieces of paper that allow industry to emit CO2 - are the only items that you can actually, hand-on-heart, say have saved the amount of CO2 that you emitted. And I can't (on a quick search) find a scheme that promises to do that with your cash. And that rather suggests to me that many carbon offset schemes may not really be doing what they promise.
no subject
No
Most of the schemes actually benefit us all by raising awareness as well. The more wind turbines, solar panels etc. that people see, the more they will accept them as "normal" and then the benefits of established technology and mass production will reduce the impact of new units (cross fingers!)
Buying carbon credits will only really work if companies and countries start having to cut back on things because they've run out of credits ... at the moment I don't see that happening, so all you've got is a happy piece of paper :-( it's a bit like demanding that your home electricity is provided by renewable sources. At the moment (picking totally random numbers from thin air!) let's say 5% of the UK's electricity comes from renewable/low-carbon sources (because the government have mandated a percentage). If you select "environmentally friendly" electricity you may have to pay 10% more on your electricity bill (the money theoretically being used to pay for the more expensive friendly electricity) ... however at the moment less than that mythical 5% of electricity is being bought at that higher rate, which means two things
1) even if you don't pay the extra for friendly electricity, you will be getting some anyway
2) if the electricity company could get me to sign up tomorrow, then they'd be getting more money from me without having to spend that extra cash on *anything*!
One of the biggest problems in the next years is not going to be how much we use, but how much more the developing world will be using (e.g. the growth of China, greater prosperity and industrialisation in 3rd world countries etc.) and I've heard of organisations that will take your money and use it to provide better/cleaner technology to third world countries so they start off on the right foot ... so organisations like Climate Care (http://www.climatecare.org/) spend part of the money on things like reforestation in Uganda, and cooking stoves that use local agricultural waste rather than fossil fuels, part on things like the low energy bulbs, and part on CO2 education so that people will learn to switch off those bulbs.
But you know all that!
Re: No
Developing countries are going to want to reach the level of developed countries. If we can adopt a lower level of CO2 emission, then they will aim for that level rather than our current level. TEchnology transfer will be important.
no subject
2. Obviously, renewable energy is carbon positive, although some will be used in construction. Of course they are in remote areas but hey, the nearest power station to here is Snowy Mountain Hydro at Jindabyne, about 200 km away. Most of the electricity comes from the coal stations in the Hunter Valley, about 400 km away. When I lived in Melbourne, 85% of the electricity came from the Latrobe Valley, about 120 km away, where there was a mine with over 4,000 years' supply of brown coal. There are indeed transmission costs but they are easily offset by the benefits of location.
FWIW, at one point I was studying a proposed project at Ford for building ZEVs in Australia. There was fear that they would just move the pollution to the Latrobe Vally but it turned out that the amount of carbon (and indeed pollutants) was much less due to the efficiency of the single, humungous plant, even though it was burning brown coal, about the dirtiest fuel there is. (The project did not go through. Had been carbon trading, it might well have.)
3. A number of guys at work have looked at replacing their hot water heating with solar but the economics are that it pays for itself in 30 years. A carbon-trading scheme is required to make it worthwhile. I thank the ACT government for the free light bulbs, btw. The ethic here was always to turn off lights to save electricity, even at the cost of bulbs, so I doubt if anyone is changing their habits, since switching no longer costs bulbs.
no subject
When I talk of carbon offset, I mean an attempt to reduce a specific amount of carbon to counterbalance an air flight or some other event. Lots of firms now offer to sell you these. This is separate from the general intent of reducing carbon emissions. (In essence, I feel that carbon offset schemes promise more than they may deliver in terms of actual carbon)
In Australia, trees may well be lost to fire within 50 years (though they at least act as a reservoir in that time). Here, if they aren't cut down, they can live for hundreds of years, and when they do die, the decomposition process is slower and some of the carbon will remain in the soil.
I also agree that renewables are carbon positive and highly desirable (what I was trying to say was that an offset scheme that claims to save 'x' carbon by generating 'y' kWh from wind will often fudge the figures) (the same thing is happened with bio fuel schemes - they're fudging the figures as American farmers can already smell the possible subsities)
What I want to see, and haven't seen, is figures on the carbon cost of installing and maintaining solar hot water systems and the like. Actually, I suspect they probably do come out ahead, but I'm a lot more suspicious of photovoltaics. Anything that expensive to make must be using a fair bit of energy in manufacture.
Solar hot water systems, especially in countries with a lot of sunlight would make excellent sense with a carbon trading scheme.
I think carbon trading is a very important part of the future, but it must be cradle to grave. I was shocked when I read a recent article on bio fuels. They really didn't come out well at all. The energy required to produce them - artificial fertilizer, tractors, extraction of fuel from crop, etc. was a lot higher than I'd expected.
no subject
Canberra tends to be sunny, with mean daily sunshine of 7.6 hours per day. In summer mean daily sunshine is around 9 hours/day dropping to around 5 to 6 hours per day in winter.
A considerable amount of research on solar technology is ongoing at the ANU.
no subject
"Programs for the recycling of plutonium were developed in the 1970s when it appeared that uranium would be in scarce supply and would become increasingly expensive. It was proposed that plutonium would be recycled through fast breeder reactors, that is, fast neutron reactors with a uranium 'blanket', which would produce slightly more plutonium than they consume. Thus it was envisaged that the world's 'low cost' uranium resources, then estimated to be sufficient for about 50 years' consumption, could be extended for hundreds of years." http://www.world-nuclear.org/
That "hundreds of years" isn't pie-in-the-sky. In the 70's, when I worked for the nuclear industry, it was estimated that there was enough depleted uranium sitting uselessly in storage in Britain to meet our energy needs for the next 500 years. And that's with no more CO2 emission than wind power. See, from 2001, http://www.fellsassociates.com/
Isn't it time that people woke up to the danger of tipping the UK into a new ice age http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/publication.asp?id=3866 and, moreover, reducing the threat of annihilation by nuclear weapons by using radioactive material safely and usefully in power stations?
The perceived problem is waste. Yet the problem of global warming is now, and urgent. The waste problem will be solved. Perhaps this http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19225741.100 is a non-starter, but all waste disposal needs is a little lateral thinking. It's a niggle that can easily be solved given commitment and proper financial backing
no subject
I would back nuclear for the next 50 years in spite of the long-term waste problem. Global warming is now. If we don't solve that, then the problem of nuclear waste will be pretty academic in any case.