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Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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No, it's nothing like that. Nature doesn't care if a given gram of co2 was recently released or not. It only cares about the sum total. If the carbon capture schemes actually did grab a gram for every gram released, and then keep it stored for at least a century,, that'd work fine.
It's just that they almost certainly don't. They're way too cheap for the best capture systems we have, and they're not necessarily sequestering that carbon to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few years.
We are almost certainly going to need actual carbon sequestration. We're too close to emitting too much already.
When discussing carbon offsets with the regulator I asked if the buyers would get a refund if their chunk of carbon offset forest burned down in a forest fire.
He laughed and said they should but there's not a chance, because the system only exists to legitimize emissions. In fact many of them have already burned. And that's right from a government agent.
Kelp farming or ocean seeding are the only natural carbon capture that make sense, but we aren't doing them. That and paying people not to destroy existing forests and grasslands, but that seems hard to sell as well.
Ocean seeding may not work at all. The nutrients available are already just right, and adding more will only increase local growth at the expense of sucking up nutrients that would have spread elsewhere. Total sunk co2 wouldn't increase, and may even decrease.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/oceans-iron-not-impact-climate-change-0217
There's a lot of unknowns with kelp farming. It may not sequester co2 for long enough. Needs more research.
https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/can-kelp-farming-fix-the-planet-experts-weigh-in-on-promises-and-pitfalls/
What would work is a tank of algae, where we then siphon them off and throw them down a mineshaft. That's too expensive right now, though.
All the IPCC models assume massive amounts of sequestration, I believe
It's a necessity at this point, even if all fossil fuel use stops globally tomorrow