“ClientEarth lawyers have developed a legal briefing that unpacks the problems with carbon offsets and why businesses relying on them should prepare for legal action.”
“… ‘quality’ in the unregulated carbon credit market can be hard to come by, and harder still to verify…. Another issue is there simply isn’t enough room on the planet to plant the number of trees needed … without harming food supply.”
A recent article in ClientEarth, Why carbon offsets don’t work, and the legal risks of marketing them, should send chills down the spine of corporations (and others) that are trying to be “green” despite their natural dependence on fossil fuels. The charge? … “so-called carbon ‘offsets’ hide a massive climate problem and pose a significant legal risk to the companies marketing them.”
The September 30th article begins:
If you’ve bought a flight lately, or filled your car with petrol, you’ve likely been offered a product to ‘offset’ the climate impact of your purchase.…
“… very little carbon is absorbed [by tree planting] in the early years. In fact, it will take 50 years for the carbon from this one [plane] trip to be taken up by the trees. The 20-year-old [flyer] will be 70 by the time the trip is fully ‘paid’ for in carbon terms. “
The crusade against carbon dioxide (CO2) has many here-and-now costs. And CO2 mitigation is futile given energy density in favor of oil, natural gas, and coal -and intermittency against wind, solar, even hydropower.
Carbon offsets are a tool in the mitigation toolbox. Corporations like it, but environmentalists fuss about business-as-usual emissions and “greenwashing.” Bottom line: planting somewhere to allow CO2 emissions is iffy. What about the accounting where the trade is a dud? What if the tree gets sick?…
“… communications between different regulatory agencies as the event approached were inadequate. Transparency regarding the location of natural gas supply infrastructure was atrocious.”
“Currently Texas is #1 in the nation in terms of existing wind capacity. It is also #1 in terms of planned capacity additions for wind and solar, and #2 in the nation for planned battery capacity additions. However, there is little-to-no planned capacity addition for other forms of dispatchable generation. This could become an issue for reliability.” (Baker Institute, study, below)
There is not only government failure in the quest to address market failure. There is analytic failure in identifying market failure that government is empowered to correct. Restated, problems attributed to markets are often the result of prior government intervention on close inspection.
This is true with some classic examples in the energy field, from the origins of public utility regulation of electricity to oil overproduction under the ‘rule of capture’, stories for another day.…