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Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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Cambridge study says carbon offsets are not nearly as effective as they claim to be.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.