Real zero vs net zero

The original idea of net zero was that we would cut emissions as close to zero by 2050 as we could, and what was left over we would try to offset.

This was greeted with cries of glee by big oil, airlines and others.   They decided not to wait until 2050, but to start immediately "reducing" their emissions by buying carbon offsets.   So, for example, an Ozzie petrol (gasoline) company started selling its "zero carbon" petrol.  How did it achieve this miracle?  But buying carbon offsets.  Qantas "offset" the emissions from its flights.   An electric utility announced its "green" credentials.  Zero emissions, it trumpeted, thanks to offsets.

But these offsets were dodgy.  For example, a farmer who had been paid not to clear scrub off some of his land admitted that he was never going to clear the land anyway.  The payments for the "offsets" were a handy increase to his income, but had absolutely zero effect on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.  

Peasants who promised not to clear some jungle near them were paid for these "offsets" and then, when this was checked up on 10 years later, were found to have cleared the jungle anyway.  Did they give that money back?  What do you think?  

CCS (Carbon capture and storage) projects used the carbon dioxide sucked from the atmosphere to increase the oil that could be pumped from underground.  And the CO2 likely escaped back into the atmosphere anyway.  

Forests planted to "remove CO2 from the atmosphere" burned down in one of Oz's periodic and ever more frequent bushfires thus putting all that carbon back in the atmosphere.  Meanwhile, of course, emissions kept on rising.

Net zero is irredeemably sullied.  It's a nonsense.  A lie.  A way to let hoi polloi believe that something is being done, when nothing is.  A way for carbon polluters to pretend they care.

So we need real zero.  We need to cut emissions by some minimum percentage each year, year after year, no phiffing and phaffing around with accounting book entries.  Real cuts to emissions.  Real reductions.  Real progress.

Also:  none of those blithely promising net zero by 2050 will be around in 2050 to explain why we haven't achieved it.  So we need annual targets, not so far-away airy-fairy promise.

If we all cut our emissions by just 3% a year, we would cut them by a cumulative 53% by 2050.  If we could increase that by 1%, to 4% a year, annual emissions would fall by 64% by 2050.

Both of these targets are feasible.   Together, electricity generation and land transport are responsible for ~50% of total CO2 emissions.  Given the fall in solar, battery and EV costs, which have made these cheaper than their fossil fuel alternatives, we will be able to cut emissions by 50% over the next 25 years as we replace coal power stations with zero-carbon alternatives and petrol cars and lorries with EVs.  We can replace gas heating by heat pumps, which will cut emissions by another ~8%.  

That still leaves air travel, steel and cement.  Yet here, too, we are making slow progress.  Then there's agriculture.  We might be saved despite ourselves by the growth of vat meat and milk, which will slash emissions and allow cleared land to be reforested.  

We can do it, but we must be alert to the scams fossil fuelists will try to fob us off with.  Let's start by banning the term net zero.

Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating

 From The Guardian

The failure of carbon offsets to cut planet-heating pollution is “not due to a few bad apples”, a review paper has found, but down to deep-seated systemic problems that incremental change will not solve.

Research over two decades has found “intractable” problems that have made carbon credits in most big programmes poor quality, according to the study. While the industry and diplomats have made efforts to improve the system, it found much-awaited rules agreed at a UN climate summit last year “did not substantially address the quality problem”.

“We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale,” said Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Smith School and co-author of the study, in Annual Reviews. “We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.”

Carbon offsets are a tool to cut emissions efficiently by crediting rich polluters for financing cheap climate action abroad while pumping out the same amount of planet-heating gas at home.

In theory, the practice could lead to lower levels of global heating by funnelling money to the places where it will do the most good as soon as possible. But voluntary carbon markets have long been plagued by “junk offsets” that overstate their impact.

The researchers said the worst problems were with issuing additional credits for “non-additional” projects, such as building a windfarm that would have gone up anyway; impermanent projects, such as planting trees that later burn down in a wildfire; projects with leakage, such as protecting part of a forest but effectively pushing loggers elsewhere; and double-counted projects, such as restoring a peatland but letting the seller and buyer claim the drop in emissions.

“An offset may be robust on three of these four dimensions, but if it lacks in the fourth, it may represent a far lower emissions reduction than was credited – or no real reduction at all,” the study warned.

A meta-analysis published in Nature Communications last year found that less than 16% of the carbon credits investigated showed real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The lead author, Benedict Probst, founder of the Net Zero Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, who was not involved in the new paper, said it provided a “valuable high-level overview of the well-documented problems plaguing existing carbon crediting projects”, despite not providing a critical appraisal of the underlying studies.

“This study echoes the main conclusions of our own research, but it provides a broader picture across the carbon crediting landscape,” he said.

Probst added that the study identified some of the root causes of over-crediting, such as information gaps, but warned of other systemic factors such as the small constituency advocating for high-quality projects, conflicts of interest when drafting standards, and “chronically understaffed” regulators.

Carbon offsets are a furphy.  A scam.  A distraction.  And they've been seized upon by governments and companies keen to pretend they're doing something about the climate.

We really aren't going to achieve 1.5

From David Ho

A constant reminder that even if CO₂ emissions decreased annually as much as they did during the pandemic lockdown from now to 2030, we still wouldn't meet our emission target to keep global warming below 1.5°C.

To get to real zero (let's stop calling it "net zero" because we all know that carbon offsets don't work) by 2050, emissions would have to fall by 9% per annum.  Actually, that's not even to real zero; that's to a 90% reduction from today.  Calculating a cumulative decline involves using exponentials, and they don't work to zero.  What about if we target a 99% decrease by 2050?  We'd have to cut emissions by 17% per year.  

Just a reminder:  emissions are still rising.  And the rise in temperatures is accelerating.

How good is the market

 By David Pope

Even our climate "solutions" are delusions

Composite: Alex Mellon for the Guardian: Getty Images/Tetra Images RF/Alamy

From The Guardian

We now face, on all fronts, a war not just against the living planet and the common good, but against material reality. Power in the United States will soon be shared between people who believe they will ascend to sit at the right hand of God, perhaps after a cleansing apocalypse; and people who believe their consciousness will be uploaded on to machines in a great Singularity.

The Christian rapture and the tech rapture are essentially the same belief. Both are examples of “substance dualism”: the idea that the mind or soul can exist in a realm separate from the body. This idea often drives a desire to escape from the grubby immanence of life on Earth. Once the rapture is achieved, there will be no need for a living planet.

But while it is easy to point to the counter-qualified, science-denying fanatics Donald Trump is appointing to high office, the war against reality is everywhere. You can see it in the British government’s carbon capture and storage scheme, a new fossil fuel project that will greatly raise emissions but is dressed up as a climate solution. And it informs every aspect of this week’s Cop29 climate talks in Azerbaijan.

Here, as everywhere, the living planet is forgotten while capital extends its frontiers. The one thing Cop29 has achieved so far – and it may well be the only thing – is an attempt to rush through new rules for carbon markets, enabling countries and businesses to trade carbon credits – which amount, in effect, to permission to carry on polluting.

In theory, you could justify a role for such markets, if they were used only to counteract emissions that are otherwise impossible to reduce (each credit purchased is meant to represent a tonne of carbon dioxide that has been reduced or removed from the atmosphere). But they’re routinely used as a first resort: a substitute for decarbonisation at home. The living world has become a dump for policy failure.

Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years.

Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders selling both kinds of carbon market products: official “credits” and voluntary carbon offsets. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.

We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. 

Here are the reasons why.

First, tradable increments of soil carbon are impossible to measure. Because soil depths can vary greatly even within one field, there is currently no accurate, affordable means of estimating soil volume. Nor do we have a good-enough test, across a field or a farm, for bulk density – the amount of soil packed into a given volume. So, even if you could produce a reliable measure of carbon per cubic metre of soil, if you don’t know how much soil you have, you can’t calculate the impact of any changes you make.

A reliable measure of soil carbon per cubic metre is also elusive, as carbon levels can fluctuate massively from one spot to the next. Repeated measurements from thousands of sites across a farm, necessary to show how carbon levels are changing, would be prohibitively expensive. Nor are simulation models, on which the whole market relies, an effective substitute for measurement. So much for the “verification” supposed to underpin this trade.

Second, soil is a complex, biological system that seeks equilibrium. With the exception of peat, it reaches equilibrium at a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 12:1. This means that if you want to raise soil carbon, in most cases you will also need to raise soil nitrogen. But whether nitrogen is applied in synthetic fertilisers or in animal manure, it’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which could counteract any gains in soil carbon. It is also one of the most potent causes of water pollution.

Third, carbon levels in agricultural soils soon saturate. Some promoters of soil carbon credits create the impression that accumulation can continue indefinitely. It can’t. There’s a limit to how much a given soil can absorb.

Fourth, any accumulation is reversible. Soil is a highly dynamic system: you cannot permanently lock carbon into it. Microbes constantly process carbon, sometimes stitching it into the soil, sometimes releasing it: this is an essential property of soil health. With rises in temperature, the carbon sequestration you’ve paid for can simply evaporate: there’s likely to be a massive outgassing of carbon from soils as a direct result of continued heating. Droughts can also hammer soil carbon.

Even under current market standards, in which science takes second place to money, you need to show that carbon storage will last for a minimum of 40 years. There is no way of guaranteeing that carbon accumulation in soil will last that long. But as a new paper in Nature argues: “A CO2 storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralising remaining fossil CO2 emissions.”

The only form of organic carbon that might last this long – though only under certain conditions – is added biochar (fine-grained charcoal). But biochar is phenomenally expensive: the cheapest source I was able to find costs roughly 26 times as much as agricultural lime, which itself costs too much for many farmers. There’s a limited amount of material that can be turned into biochar. While making it, if you get the burn just slightly wrong, the methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon you produce will cancel any carbon savings.

There is a kind of substance dualism at work here, too: a concept of soil and soil carbon entirely detached from their earthly realities. This bubble of delusion will burst. If I were a devious financier, I would short the stocks of companies selling these credits.

All such approaches are substitutes for action, whose primary purpose is to enable governments to avoid conflict with powerful interests, especially the fossil fuel industry. At a moment of existential crisis, governments everywhere are retreating into a dreamworld, in which impossible contradictions are reconciled. You can send your legions to war with reality, but eventually we all lose.

[Read more here]

90% of carbon credits/offsets are a furphy.  A lie.  Greenwashing.  So our companies and our politicians can pretend that they're doing something about the climate crisis.  One carbon capture and storage process seems to be genuine, provided all the energy used is green, and that's turning Co2 to rock.

Gab, gab, gab --- but do nothing

 Updating this chart by O=C=O  (updated for 2023 data)

Gab, gab, gab.  All talk but no action.  Solemn promises to do something, followed by doing nothing.  Greenwashing, which persuades an increasingly anxious public that something is being done, when in fact it isn't.  Fake carbon offset schemes.  Lies, obfuscations, distractions.  While climate dissent is criminalised.   Meanwhile, right wing parties, in the US and Australia, want to stop deployment of renewables altogether.

And to make ourselves feel better, we gab, gab, gab.  And when I say 'we', I mean almost all of us.  For example, at no extra cost to ourselves, we could give up meat, cutting our emissions by 25%.  But we do not.

Globally, 80% want more climate action

It's tempting to rail against ordinary people when it comes to climate action. To blame mankind as a whole for its stupidity and greed. After all, we know that temperatures are rising, that heatwaves, droughts and floods are becoming much worse and more common.  So why is there not enough action? But ordinary people do want action. It is the politicians, the rich, the owners of oil companies, directors of companies who, while pretending to want action, do their best to stop it.


From Al Jazeera

Four in five people want their countries to ramp up efforts in the fight against climate change, according to a United Nations survey billed as the largest yet on the issue.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) published the poll on Thursday, finding that a majority of people in 62 of the 77 countries surveyed said they supported a quick transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.

These included the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, with 80 percent in China and 54 percent in the United States supporting the move, though respondents in Russia were notably less keen, with only 16 percent approving.

“As world leaders decide on the next round of pledges under the Paris Agreement by 2025, these results are undeniable evidence that people everywhere support bold climate action,” said Cassie Flynn, UNDP global climate director.

Conducted in collaboration with Oxford University and GeoPoll, the survey posed 15 questions by randomised telephone calls to 75,000 people in 77 countries, the populations of which represent 87 percent of the world’s total – making it the biggest poll of its kind.

Overall, 80 percent of those polled wanted to see stronger commitments to addressing the problem, the clamour for action rising to 89 percent in poorer countries feeling the brunt of climate change.

Climate anxiety was higher in poorer countries like Fiji, where 80 percent are more worried about the problem compared to a year ago, followed by Afghanistan (78 percent) and Turkey (77 percent). Saudi Arabia saw the lowest increase in climate fears, with 25 percent more concerned.

Overall, the survey found 56 percent of respondents said they think about climate change at least once a week. Over half of those surveyed said they were more worried about climate change than last year, compared with 15 percent who said they were less worried.

Climate change is also changing people’s lives, with 69 percent of respondents saying that global warming had impacted major decisions, such as where to live or work and what to buy.

But Achim Steiner, head of the UNDP, said these concerns do not necessarily translate into electoral and consumer decisions.

He pointed to what he called a “perception gap” when it comes to climate action, summing up people’s typical reaction as: “I would do more. But the others won’t. So I will not do anything."

There are things you can do.  

You could eat less meat, especially beef and mutton, and drink less cow's milk.  The less, the better.

You could buy an EV or a plug-in hybrid (PHEV).  Yes, that can be expensive in the USA, because it’s just placed a penal tariff on imports of Chinese EVs and Chinese EV batteries, which are the cheapest in the world.   But in the rest of the world, EVs are plummetting in price.  As are electric 3-wheelers.   An EV will soon cost the same as a petrol car, outside the USA, anyway.   Make your next car an EV.

You can put solar panels on your roof (if you own your own property.)   If you don't, and can't, buy your electricity from a green supplier.   If we all insist of buying renewables from a green electricity utility, they will be forced to build more solar and wind farms.  Don't buy from a so-called green electricity supplier which claims its green credentials because it buys carbon offsets.  These are (mostly) a furphy, a scam. 

You could switch your heating from gas/oil to electric.  There's been some opposition to heat pumps because they supposedly don't work.  That's piffle; they do.  They cost more up front than gas or oil boilers/heaters, but they're cheaper to run.  Some polities provide subsidies to encourage the switch.

Together, all these steps will cut your personal emissions by 80%.  

And, most important, you can vote.  Don't be distracted by other policy issues.  Vote for the Party which is going to do most to cut emissions.  Even if in other ways they are imperfect.

It's up to us, and most of us want to do something.  You can make a difference.  Start today.

Greenhouse gas emissions per 1000 calories

 Here, I talked about greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram.  This chart shows greenhouse gas emissions per 1000 calories.  The chart is from Our World in Data.

The conclusion is the same:  even without becoming fully vegetarian, by avoiding beef, fish, lamb and mutton, you could significantly cut your emissions from food, which makes up ~30% of total greenhouse gas emissions.  Becoming fully vegetarian would cut your emissions even more.  And becoming vegan would be even better.  Don't say tofu is just as bad as beef---in the chart from my previous post, tofu produces 3.2 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per kilogram vs beef's 99 kg CO2-equivalent.

Purity is not essential.  Going from eating meat three times a day to once a day reduces your emissions and animal suffering and forest clearing.  Eating meat once a week instead of once a day, ditto.  You get the picture.

Not eating meat is something we can do personally, individually.  So is buying our electricity from a green supplier* and driving a hybrid or EV.  Together, taking these steps could reduce your emissions by ~70%.  

* Many so-called "green" electricity providers use carbon offsets to "reduce" the carbon emissions produced by burning fossil fuels to generate their electricity.  Most carbon offsets have turned out not to reduce emissions, i.e., to be fake, and many of them are out-and-out scams.  Choose a provider that generates all its electricity from its own wind, solar, nuclear, hydro or wave/tidal electricity, or from contracts it has with wind and solar farms.

The environmental impact of different foods

 From Visual Capitalist

Click on graphic to see it more clearly

Food and agriculture have a significant impact on our planet, particularly in terms of carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use.

To visualize how different food items contribute to this environmental impact, the above graphic ranks foods based on their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water withdrawals, using data from Poore and Nemecek and Our World in Data.

Based on carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) measurements, beef comes in first place as the food with the largest carbon footprint, emitting an astounding 99 kilograms of CO₂e per kilogram of the final meat product.

CO₂e emissions are a standardized measure that express the warming impact of various greenhouse gases—such as methane and nitrous oxide—in terms of the amount of CO₂ that would have the same warming effect.

The production of beef is extremely resource-intensive, demanding substantial land, water, and energy resources. Cows also produce methane during their digestive processes, a gas that has a warming potential 27–30 times higher than that of CO₂ over a 100-year time period [and 82 times higher over a 10-year period].  (See data table in the article)

Following beef on the list is dark chocolate, albeit not very closely.

Most of dark chocolate’s emissions come from land use changes—such as deforestation— which alters the balance of GHG emissions and reduces the Earth’s capacity to absorb CO₂.

All in all, however, the data shows us that animal products are generally more emission-intensive than plant-based foods.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that more than two-thirds of the world’s freshwater withdrawals are used for food production.

Interestingly, the trend that we saw when considering the carbon footprints of foods also applies when it comes to water use. Among the top 10 most water-intensive foods in the world, 70% are of animal origin, highlighting that animal products aren’t only more carbon-intensive but also more water-intensive than plant products.Peanuts, rice, and nuts (which include hard-shelled fruits such as hazelnuts, chestnuts, and walnuts) make up the plant-based outliers in the list.  (See data table in the article from Visual Capitalist)

Eating locally sourced foods is often posed as a solution for lowering our ecological impact, leading to the growing popularity of concepts such as “The 100 Mile Diet.”

An analysis done by Our World in Data, however, shows us that what we eat makes more of a difference in lowering our environmental footprints than where our food comes from.

More specifically, the data highlights that transportation accounts for just 5% of global food emissions. Land use change and farming activities, on the other hand, account for a much more significant portion.

As such, redirecting our attention from the distance food travels to the emissions associated with its production can yield better outcomes in our efforts to make more sustainable food choices.

26% of global emissions come from food, skewed heavily towards beef, dairy and mutton.  By comparison, ~30% come from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, and ~20% from land transport.   The biggest single step you can take to reduce your emissions is to stop eating beef and mutton, and to minimise your consumption of cheese and milk.  Become vegetarian---it's better for your health, and for the planet's too!     If you can, buy your electricity from a green electricity provider (and not one that uses dodgy "offsets" to "reduce" its emissions) and, if you can't afford an EV, buy a hybrid.  They only cost a couple of thousand dollars more than the petrol-only version, but will reduce your emissions from driving by ~40%.

Carbon offsets hit by fresh scam allegations

Headline from Bloomberg 15/09/2023 

Carbon credit speculators to lose billions

From The Guardian

Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets.

Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market, according to market analysis.

From Apple to Disney, Gucci to Shell, many of the largest companies in the world have used carbon credits for their sustainability efforts from the unregulated voluntary market, which grew to $2bn (£1.6bn) in size in 2021 and saw prices for many carbon credits rise above $20 per offset.

The credits are often generated on the basis they are contributing to climate change mitigation such as stopping tropical deforestation, tree planting and creating renewable energy projects in developing countries. Proponents say they need to massively increase in size and scale to help meet the Paris agreement to limit global heating.

But repeated scandals about their true impact and a crackdown from regulators on claims of “carbon neutrality” have meant that demand and prices for offsetting have slumped, with signs that some carbon credit traders are writing off investments that would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars as recently as last year.

In the US, the derivatives market regulator has issued a whistleblower alert relating to fraud and misconduct in carbon markets and has created a new environmental fraud taskforce.

“It’s currently a buyer’s market and buyers are, rightly, prioritising quality. There are over a billion tonnes of issued but not retired credits in the market – this suggests lots of credits can be written off, and there will remain a large supply for buyers to tap into,” said Anton Root, head of research at AlliedOffsets, who said buyers were waiting for the final results of initiatives to improve carbon credit quality.

“A correction like that could help to orient the market toward fundamental supply-demand dynamics, which we don’t currently tend to see, and drive up the price for credits that are deemed to be above the quality threshold,” he added.

Hannah Hauman, a former oil trader who is now global head of carbon trading at Trafigura, the world’s largest trader of carbon removal credits, said the current uncertainty was inherent in carbon markets.

“Coming from oil trading, it is strange to see units in carbon markets become invalid overnight. But I think it is in their nature to be constantly evolving with science. It is inherent in the asset class. As much as commodity traders want static, consistent policies for the long term, it is not what the energy transition actually requires. The carbon market needs to be progressive and contracts need to anticipate that,” she said.

A new study in the journal Science has found that millions of forest carbon credits approved by Verra, the world’s leading certifier, are largely worthless and could make global heating worse if used for offsetting.

The research by scientists and economists at the University of Cambridge and VU Amsterdam was one of the three studies used in a January investigation into rainforest offsets by the Guardian, Die Zeit and Source Material. The Science study was used in a pre-print form while awaiting peer review, which it has since passed.

The analysis, published on Thursday, found that 18 big forest offsetting projects had produced millions of carbon credits based on calculations that greatly inflated their conservation impact. The schemes, which generate credits by avoiding hypothetical deforestation, were found not to reduce forest loss or to reduce it by only small amounts, far less than the huge areas they were claiming to protect, rendering the credits largely hot air.

The findings follow a 2020 study of 12 projects in the Brazilian Amazon by the same group, which found they had a negligible impact on stopping deforestation despite generating credits on the basis they were preventing large areas from being destroyed. A 2022 study of 40 Verra-approved projects led by University of Cambridge researchers found that while some projects did stop deforestation, most stopped none or small amounts.

Australia's dodgy carbon offsets

From The New Daily.

July 5 was a big day. As well as being the planet’s hottest day ever, it was when the Bureau of Meteorology put the chance of an El Niño at 70 per cent this year, so it’s going to get worse, soon, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated that it will cost the world US$196 trillion to achieve net zero by 2050.

As you contemplate that trio of troubles, you might want to make yourself even more miserable with a website called the Carbon Integrity Explorer, as I’ve been doing.

It lets you examine in detail the regeneration projects in Australia that are behind the Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) issued by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER). These native forest regeneration projects are the largest project in the scheme, accounting for around 30 per cent of all ACCUs issued to date.

Buying ACCUs allows companies to offset their carbon emissions to meet emission reduction obligations under the Labor government’s new carbon pricing scheme without reducing their emissions.

I spent an absorbing, increasingly dismal few hours over the weekend clicking on random abatement projects, trying to find any in which the tree cover had materially increased, and is therefore responsible for removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of these projects were registered in 2015-16 but a large proportion of them claim they started in 2010-2012, so plenty of time for trees to have grown.

I found one, and only one, on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. It’s called the Arbon-Tooligie Human Induced Regeneration project, and covers 7863 hectares, which is very small. Tree cover has increased, and 148,397 ACCUs have been issued to its promoters, currently worth $29.75 apiece, or a total of about $4.5 million.

For every other project I clicked on, the tree cover had either decreased, or the increase was “negligible”. Yet they had all also been issued with ACCUs, hundreds of thousands of them, worth millions of dollars.

A group of academics at Australian National University led by Professor Andrew Macintosh has gone through all the projects on the Carbon Integrity Explorer so you and I don’t have to.

Here are their results:

To summarise: 27.5 million ACCUs, worth $825 million at today’s spot market price, have been issued for projects where the tree cover has decreased, or the increase has been negligible.

And to qualify as an “increase”, the trend in tree cover only has to be an increase of 0.25 per cent per year, which is hardly going to save the planet.

Two questions arise: First, what happens when the regulator eventually gets around to inspecting the projects to see whether they genuinely reduced atmospheric carbon? And second, what the hell is going on?

As to the first question: The rules require that by the 15th year of the project, 90 per cent of area that has been credited must have regenerated and have forest cover. If the credited area doesn’t have forest cover by then, proponents might have to hand back the ACCUs they have received.

To choose one at random – the 24,806 ha Wapweelah Regeneration Project near Bourke in New South Wales, which was registered in August 2015 and has produced a healthy crop of 441,526 ACCUs for its promoters, currently worth $13.2 million.

Yet its tree cover has decreased, and its integrity is assessed as “high risk” by the Explorer because most of the credited area has never been comprehensively cleared, its tree cover has gone backwards and the trends in tree cover in the credited areas are worse than those in the area surrounding the property.

Most of these projects are owned by farmers who have been persuaded by ACCU brokers like the firm called Climate Friendly to supplement their income by regenerating native forests in areas that have never been comprehensively cleared by reducing grazing pressure from livestock or feral animals like goats. They call it carbon farming.

According to the CER website, the “contractor” for the Wapweelah project is Phillip Ridge, who I learn from Google is the owner of the “iconic” Jandra Station near Bourke with his wife Di and four kids.

Phil and Di Ridge have until 2030 to get forest cover on this project from its current levels, of around 22 per cent, up to 90 per cent, even though it has been essentially static since the project was first registered. If they can’t, they might have to hand back their ACCUs.

The Ridges would be just one of dozens of farming families in a state of extreme “regulatory risk”. The CER doesn’t have to demand the return of ACCUs if the abatement of a project doesn’t measure up, but it can, and the farmers have no way of knowing whether they will.

In any case, the carbon abatement that was supposed to have happened largely doesn’t appear to exist. This means the steel manufacturer (or other emitter) who bought the ACCUs has been allowed to continue to emit but there has been no offsetting reduction in emissions elsewhere.

Meanwhile the brokers who organised the deal for the farmers and took their cut are long gone.

As for the bigger question of what the hell is going on here, I really have no idea, but I suspect it’s called politics.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen happily promotes the government’s emissions reduction credentials but given the amount of offsets that are being doled out for regenerating native forests in the desert that either aren’t regenerating or would have regenerated anyway without the projects, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the appearance of doing something is a lot more important than actually doing something.

And with an El Niño on the way, a lot of the trees that have been counted up to now will either die when Australia burns or die in the drought we’re about to have.

Apart from anything else, the CER, and therefore the government, is going to have some tough decisions over the next few years – either demand that drought-stricken farmers like the Ridges spend millions on ACCUs so they can hand them back or let the non-existent abatement stand.

Meanwhile, the government is facing a very awkward shortfall in its emissions reduction target.

The chairman of the new Net Zero Authority, Greg Combet, has the task of making net zero happen by 2050 by cajoling, bullying or paying the companies in the safeguard mechanism to cut their emissions by 4.9 per cent per year, as promised by the Prime Minister.

For airlines, cement and steel manufacturers and other big emitters still waiting for a technology breakthrough to rescue them, it will be all about buying ACCUs to offset their emissions rather than actually reducing them, because they can’t. And of course they’ll be passing on the cost of the ACCUs to their customers.

But what if the offsets don’t offset?

According to Carbon Integrity Explorer, 27.5 million – or about half of the ACCUs issued so far – don’t offset.

This is going to be one of those train crashes that everybody involved can see coming, but they are hiding their eyes, hoping to make it through till tomorrow.

Everybody --- almost everybody --- now pretends to believe that we need to slash emissions by 2030.   Yet, as the Ozzie offsets furphy shows, they don't really care, and they're not in fact going to introduce policies or take actions which will achieve this.  The ALP (Labor Party) is supposed to be a progressive party, "committed" to cutting emissions and reaching net-zero by 2050.  But Labor is still authorising new coal mines and gas fields, whose emissions, even in Australia, will dwarf existing emissions from all other sources.  Meanwhile, the purported fall in emissions as a result of offsets is in fact not happening.  

Greenwashing.  Lies.  Hypocrisy.

Fungi store one third of all CO2 emissions annually

From The University of Sheffield

The vast underground network of fungi beneath our feet stores over 13 gigatons of carbon around the world, roughly equivalent to 36 per cent of yearly global fossil fuel emissions, according to new research.

It is widely believed that mycorrhizal fungi could store carbon, as the fungi form symbiotic relationships with almost all land plants and transport carbon, converted into sugars and fats by the plant, into soil, but until now the true extent of just how much carbon the fungi were storing wasn’t known.

The discovery by a team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Sheffield, that fungi are storing over a third of the carbon created from fossil fuel emissions each year indicates that it could be crucial as nations seek to tackle climate change and reach net zero. Work is now being undertaken to see whether we could increase how much carbon the soil underneath us can store.

Mycorrhizal fungi have been supporting life on land for at least 450 million years and make up vast underground networks all around us - even forming beneath roads, gardens, and houses, on every continent on Earth.

The international team of scientists, including experts from the University of Sheffield’s School of Biosciences, conducted a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies looking at plant-soil processes to understand how much carbon is being stored by the fungi on a global scale.

Their findings, published in Current Biology, revealed that an estimated 13.12 gigatons of CO2 is transferred from plants to the fungi annually, transforming the soil beneath our feet to a massive carbon pool and the most effective carbon capture storage unit in the world.

The amount of carbon stored equates to roughly 36 per cent of yearly global fossil fuel emissions - more than China emits each year.

Researchers are now calling for fungi to be considered in biodiversity and conservation policies, given its crucial role in cutting carbon emissions. At the current rate, the UN warns that 90 per cent of soils could be degraded by 2050, which could be catastrophic for not only curbing climate change and rising temperatures, but for the productivity of crops and plants too.

Professor Katie Field, Professor of Plant-Soil Processes at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the study, said: “Mycorrhizal fungi represent a blind spot in carbon modelling, conservation, and restoration - the numbers we’ve uncovered are jaw-dropping, and when we’re thinking about solutions for climate we should also be thinking about what we can harness that exists already.

“Soil ecosystems are being destroyed at an alarming rate through agriculture, development and other industry, but the wider impacts of disruption of soil communities are poorly understood. When we disrupt the ancient life support systems in the soil, we sabotage our efforts to limit global heating and undermine the ecosystems on which we depend.

“More needs to be done to protect these underground networks - we already knew that they were essential for biodiversity, and now we have even more evidence that they are crucial to the health of our planet.”

The researchers are now investigating how long the carbon is stored by the fungi in the soil, and are seeking to further explore the role that fungi plays in Earth’s ecosystems.

Dr Heidi Hawkins, lead author of the study from the University of Cape Town, said: “We always suspected that we may have been overlooking a major carbon pool. Understandably, much focus has been placed on protecting and restoring forests as a natural way to mitigate climate change, but little attention has been paid to the fate of the vast amounts of carbon dioxide that are moved from the atmosphere during photosynthesis by those plants and sent belowground to mycorrhizal fungi.

“A major gap in our knowledge is the permanence of carbon within mycorrhizal structures. We do know that it is a flux, with some being retained in mycorrhizal structures while the fungus lives, and even after it dies. Some will be decomposed into small carbon molecules and from there either bind to particles in the soil, or even be reused by plants. And certainly, some carbon will be lost as carbon dioxide gas during respiration by other microbes or the fungus itself.”

Professor Toby Kiers, senior author from Vrije University Amsterdam and co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, said: “The paper is part of a global push to understand the role that fungi play in Earth’s ecosystems. We know that mycorrhizal fungi are vitally important ecosystem engineers, but they are invisible to most people.

“Mycorrhizal fungi lie at the base of the food webs that support much of life on Earth, but we are just starting to understand how they actually work. There’s still so much to learn.”

One of the projects which is now investigating the role of mycorrhizal fungi in soil carbon and other nutrient cycles in more detail is being led by the University of Sheffield’s School of Biosciences. Using simulated future climates in specialised outdoor field experiments, the NERC-funded study aims to improve our understanding of the critical role of soil fungi, alongside other microbes, in moving carbon belowground and how this will be impacted by future climate change.

If we reduce the land we use for agriculture, then we'll not just store carbon with vegetation but with fungi too.  Become vegetarian!

Many conspicuous fungi such as the fly agaric form ectomycorrhiza with tree rootlets.
(Source: Wikipedia)

Too right, Olivia

 I'm very depressed about global heating and the climate catastrophe.  

The rise in temperatures per decade is ±0.2 degrees C, and that increase is proportional to the level of emissions, not the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.  That's good news, because if we (the world) halved emissions, we would halve the rise in temperatures per decade.   And if we halved them again, well, temperatures would only be rising by 0.05 degrees per decade.  Which gives us much more time to cut the emissions in really difficult sectors like cement and agriculture and air travel.

The first 50% cut in emissions is in principle relatively easy, even though it is a massive task.  New wind and solar are cheaper than new coal, and as coal power stations age, they will be replaced by renewables (with overcapacity and short-term and long-term storage), and petrol/diesel cars will be replaced by EVs.  Together, these changes will reduce emissions by about 45%.  

Sounds good, right?   Well, not quite.  China is *still* building new coal power stations, hand over fist.  China is responsible for >25% of world emissions.   Yes, I know they're building them as backup, after last year's record drought crushed hydro.   All the same.  And again, a third of new cars sold in China are EVs.  But this is just new cars.  It'll take 15 years at least for the entire car/light truck fleet to transition--a calculus which applies to all car fleets across the world.

So with the best will in the world, it's going to take us (the world) two, maybe three decades to halve emissions, not one.  Which in turn means that temperatures will rise by about 0.4 degrees over the next 20 years, and another 0.3 over the 20 after them.  1.2 degrees since pre-industrial times has been bad enough and is obviously already causing catastrophic climate variation.   And that's assuming no disastrous doom loop feedbacks.  What will 2 or 2.1 or 2.2 degrees do?

Meanwhile, in dear old OZ, the Labor Party (at state level) has punitively criminalised peaceful climate protest, while still subsidising coal and gas production.  The denialist Republicans will prolly get back into power at the next US election.   China is still building coal power stations.   Completely useless carbon offset schemes are flavour of the month.  Companies piously promise to achieve net-zero at some far off, mystical date while not changing their actual behaviour at all.   Why bother to actually do something when we can pretend so well?

So I give thanks for First Dog.  He made me chuckle ("Too right, Olivia").  And now for my first glass of wine.   I'll feel better soon.

Source: First Dog on the Moon

90% of carbon offsets worthless

From The Guardian

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation.

The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies – some of them have labelled their products “carbon neutral”, or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the climate crisis worse.

But doubts have been raised repeatedly over whether they are really effective.

The nine-month investigation has been undertaken by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, a non-profit investigative journalism organisation. It is based on new analysis of scientific studies of Verra’s rainforest schemes.

It has also drawn on dozens of interviews and on-the-ground reporting with scientists, industry insiders and Indigenous communities. The findings – which have been strongly disputed by Verra – are likely to pose serious questions for companies that are depending on offsets as part of their net zero strategies.

Verra, which is based in Washington DC, operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its voluntary carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than 1bn carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves and was launched before the Paris agreement with the aim of generating revenue for protecting ecosystems.

Verra argues that the conclusions reached by the studies are incorrect, and questions their methodology. And they point out that their work since 2009 has allowed billions of dollars to be channelled to the vital work of preserving forests.

The investigation found that:

Only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions, according to two studies, with further analysis indicating that 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.

The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study.

Gucci, Salesforce, BHP, Shell, easyJet, Leon and the band Pearl Jam were among dozens of companies and organisations that have bought rainforest offsets approved by Verra for environmental claims.

Human rights issues are a serious concern in at least one of the offsetting projects. The Guardian visited a flagship project in Peru, and was shown videos that residents said showed their homes being cut down with chainsaws and ropes by park guards and police. They spoke of forced evictions and tensions with park authorities.
[Read more here]

Reducing your personal emissions

The big sources of CO2 emissions: electricity generation (±30%); land transport (±20%), agriculture & land clearing(±25%, but agriculture much worse than that because of methane); iron and steel (±7%); cement (±8%).   These are global totals; your country's might differ.  Canada, e.g., has plenty of hydro.

So, to reduce your personal emissions by at least 50%:

1. Become vegetarian
2. Buy your electricity from a genuine green supplier, not one that uses offsets to 'reduce' their emissions, which are mostly (alas) scams
3. Replace your car with an EV, but if that's too expensive, a simple old hybrid still reduces emissions (urban driving) by 40-50% and costs only $2 K more than a petrol car
4. Put solar panels on your roof if you can
5. Use trains instead of planes to travel long distance

and ... 

Vote for a party with a real emissions policy, as opposed to parties which are just greenwashing, which will :

1. Push steel companies to produce steel using green hydrogen/methane. 
2. Subsidise EVs and electric buses/trains
3. Eliminate fossil fuel subsidies
4. Introduce a price on carbon
5. Tax imports from countries which don't cut emissions.

The only emissions which will be very hard to reduce will be from cement.  But there are ways around that too.

 

Source: BBC
Note that only the CO2 emissions saved by a vegan diet in this chart are given.
Methane (a greenhouse gas 80 times as potent as CO2) is excluded.

Greenwashing

Pakistan floods, 2022

It's perfectly obvious to everybody except a few nutters and half-wits that we are facing a climate emergency right now. We don't have to wait until 2030 or 2040; we are already seeing record droughts, record bushfires, record heatwaves, and record floods. The extraordinary floods in Pakistan, after an equally extraordinary heatwave, are just the latest manifestation of a climate spiralling out of control. It is abundantly obvious that the climate emergency isn't in 2030 or 2040. It's now: record heatwaves and droughts in Europe, China, the USA, record floods in Pakistan. After similar records last year ... and the year before ....

But despite claims about how 'concerned' and 'committed' everybody all is, emissions keep on rising.  And rising.  And rising. 

For example, the ALP (Australian Labor Party) says it wants to cut emissions by 43% from 2005 (which is a measly 23% from now). It won an election on this policy.  But it will continue to allow expansions in oil and gas exploration, the emissions of which will vastly exceed the planned 23% cut.

Westpac (an Ozzie bank) has touchy-feely ads on its home page about buying an EV. But has still lent ±$2 billion to fossil fuel projects recently. Macquarie Bank, another Ozzie bank, has been running ads for EVs  (how good are we?) while still lending to fossil fuel companies.  Ampol (one of Oz's largest petrol retailers) has introduced a 'carbon-neutral' fuel. But it's going to 'achieve' that by using dodgy offsets, not by actually producing carbon-neutral petrol. Powershop (a major Ozzie electricity utility, owned by Shell), is allegedly 100% carbon-neutral, but achieves this by using offsets.  

And these are just a few examples.  Companies and governments know we are frightened and respond by pretending to care, and pretending to cut emissions.  But actually nothing effective is being done.

But it's not just companies, alas.  When I suggest to someone that they can cut their personal emissions by 25% by becoming vegetarian, because they’ve just told me how concerned they are about climate change, they say 'I'm not interested in that vegetarian rubbish'.  We all pretend we care, but we're not actually prepared to take the steps need to slash emissions.  (For the record, I'm vegetarian, I have solar panels on my roof, and I buy my electricity from a genuine green utility which does not use offsets to 'reduce' its carbon footprint.  My next car will be a hybrid or an EV)

Meanwhile, emissions keep on rising. And temperatures keep in rising. And the climate emergency keeps on getting worse. Nothing *effective* has been done. But ppl in power pretend they care, and proudly point to their 'plans'. Greenwashing. Lies. Hypocrisy. As we race towards catastrophe.

The carbon offset scam

This very interesting video from Deutsche Welle, Germany's equivalent of the BBC (don't worry, it's in English) explains what carbon offsets are, and how many of them are scams.  For example, you buy a carbon offset which funds protection of a natural forest.  And 10 years later the forest has been cleared.   Does the offset scheme get its money back?  Fat chance.  Or a planted forest gets burnt down, and all the embedded carbon is re-released into the atmosphere.   Or offset money is used to build new wind and solar farms, but they were going to be built anyway.  Something like 85-90% of offsets actually do not reduce emissions at all.

But some are good.  The rewilding of marshland that the video starts off with is a real offset.  The scheme in Iceland for turning carbon into rock is real:  carbon dioxide is permanently removed from the atmosphere.  But most are fake.

The video concludes with 3 useful points.  First, if it's a real carbon offset, it'll prolly be expensive.  Second, we will need real carbon offsets in the future to keep temperatures from rising past 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Third, we can't offset our way to zero emissions.  We have to actually cut emissions, by replacing petrol/diesel cars and light trucks with EVs; by switching to renewables electricity generation; and by using green hydrogen or methane in industrial processes. 

De-carbonisation via carbon capture is a mirage

From The Conversation.

Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.

The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.

The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.

This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.

We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.

 

To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.

On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.

By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

If we had acted on Hansen’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.

Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.

It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.

Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.

Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.


Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.

It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.

That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.

But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.

This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.

First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.

The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.

Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.

 

With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.

So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.

With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.

As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.

The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.

But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.

Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.

Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.

Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.

Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.

The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.

Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.

It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?


Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.

And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.

As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.

Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.

[The article continues, here]

There is only one plausible way to cut CO2 and methane emissions.  And that's to actually cut them.  Offsets won't work.  Negative emissions won't work.  BECCS won't work.  It's no wonder emissions continue to rise.  We are heading towards a 3° C rise, not 1.5°.  And that will be catastrophic for our civilisation, the world's people and the environment.