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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
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.