Re: A Short History of Energy (in the US)

Hello Ben,

I have another topic that is close to my heart: Carbon offsetting schemes. I have had a hunch for some time now that these offsetting are at best SLIGHTLY beneficial and at worst fraudulent and dangerous.
- Fraudulent since it is almost impossible to control.
- Dangerous since it creates a general public feeling of lack of urgency to change their behavior. "I have already offset my CO2 footprint so why should I have to suffer even more...".
An analogy might be the indulgence letters the Catholic Church sold to people who had "sinned" in the 16th century. (Indulgences involved payment in coin to a priest for the purpose of relief from guilt of sins, release from purgatory and assurance of a place in heaven.)

Look for instance at www.vw.com on how Volkswagen tries to make people feel good about buying one of their gas or diesel drinking cars(be it with less drinking ability then most American brands). Their online calculator suggests that I can offset a VW Passat with a v6 driving 15'000 miles per year creating 6 tons of CO2 with a yearly offset fee of only 33 USD. This scheme just makes VW look greener then they actually are(by the way: What about the CO2 it took to produce the car?). It sounds too good to be true. It is not mandatory, and it is highly unlikely that they can really offset all CO2 at this cost for many people (say millions) and that it will really bind this CO2.
Summary:
1. Offset does not reduce emissions.
2. It is difficult to calculate. Dan Welch wrote: CO2 credits are “an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.” 
3. There is often a significant time lag. Burn today and hope that a tree planted today will absorb my today’s emission in many years from now.
4. It reduces the political pressure to change and makes people go in the wrong direction.
5. It does not address the issue of taking inactive carbon below the surface to become integrated into the active biological carbon cycle. This is not a zero sum game. The more carbon you inject into the active system the more you have in it in total. I guess that the only way to counter this it to either:
- Pump CO2 deep into the ground (not into the sea: a-The sea is already showing signs of being saturated of CO2, b-It make the sea more acid and thereby kills off extremely sensitive planktons and small shellfish that is the foundation to all life in the sea. Ref: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017102133.htm )
or
- Take full grown trees, plants etc. and dump it deep into the ground to take it out from the normal biological cycle. (Would that work?)

My whole point of this, rather long, text was to point to a very interesting document that I came across: http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf . It analyses some key issues associated with Carbon Offsetting Schemes. The bottom line is that we should be extremely carefully letting these “scams” or schemes grow without seriously question them and let people understand that this does not solve the issue of CO2 emissions!

Cheers
Daniel