Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum New Carbon Offset Company - Anyone Interested

G'day all

I'm back! Groans from some, I'm sure. I've finished a bit of research and will post my findings over the next few weeks for some discussion but I thought I'd run something a little different by those that are regulars on this forum for a moment.

Carbon Offset Company that Actually Helps Those that Are Being Hurt by the Climate Change Debate

Summary

[list]
There are a number of private companies getting rich off the idea of carbon offsets.
The actual carbon offsets are often dubious or actually will in the end show no net reduction in carbon.
An example is tree planting. Trees certainly do absorb carbon while alive but unless they are buried at the peak of their growth in an aneorobic environment, the net carbon sum is zero over the life of the tree. So where is the carbon offset in planting a tree for instance?
No matter what your views on climate change are, most people are able to recognise that the global warming movement is having a very negative impact on the very poor.
The most noteable examples are African countries where they are unable to obtain electricity generation from coal fired stations because of the lobbying against the carbon impact this wolud have, condeming the poor to dung fires that cause appalling disease.
Without agreeing that Carbon has anything to do with warming, since people are willing to throw vast sums of money at achieving a zero carbon footprint, without actually doing something like turning off their own lights or reducing the size of their houses or heated pools or globe trotting in aircraft (such as Mr Gore, guilty on I think all of these counts), why not create a company that actually does reduce the carbon footprint at the same time as contributing in a very real way to assisting those that are being harmed by the global warming debate?
[*]null

Ethical Dilema

I personally do not agree that atmospheric carbon is causing global warming. It never has in the whole history of this earth. It hasn't in the last 200 years. It hasn't in the last 1,000 years. It hasn't in the last 650,000 years or the last 40 million years so why is it suddenly going to do so now?

There is a great deal of evidence that shows atmospheric carbon dioxide follows warming on the earth by a lag of a few decades out to about 600 years but never the other way around. There has been periods in the earth's history where the carbon has been ten times what it is now and yet cooling has occurred.

So if I don't agree that carbon is the likely culprit in global warming, how can I suggest a carbon offset company? I thought about this and actually decided that I couldn't. While I could create the company easily enough and I'm sure there would be scientists even on this panel that would be willing to contribute to ensure that the carbon footprint really was being reduced, the problem is the hypocracy. I was going to say that it would be unethical and not look at it further until I was accosted in a shopping centre and offered low energy light bulbs free providing a signed a document to say that I would use them in my house. I was horrified to find this was for a major energy company in Australia that actually charges a premium for people to select "green" energy rather than nasty but higly efficient hard coal power stations.

With our droughts it would seem that hydro has dropped a few percentage points and the energy company's "green" energy is not covering the energy they are selling as being green. Hence the light bulbs as an "offset" equivalent to green energy production. Given the energy requirements in China to produce these globes, plus the transport (the cheaper globes are still made in Australia to some extent), the actual reduction in the carbon footprint is infintesimal but, hey, they apparently can get away with it because it fits within the legal definitions they have created for themselves.

So this is my thought. Offer carbon offset credits to anyone that wants to buy them and blatantly use the money to help those that are directly harmed by the global warming debate. To assage my ethical dilemma, so that I'm not doing a slight of hand or just lying, the only other requirement would be that there was a real carbon reduction. Now a CO2 reduction isn't necassarily a bad thing because where CO2 is reduced often a great deal of really nasty pollantants are reduced too.

My first idea would be to supply very poor villages in remote areas that cannot easily be electrified with solar or wind generation but only where it replaces some extremely inefficient form of cooking or lighting such as the use of dung fires. The result is a huge reduction in the carbon footprint because there is no need for energy usage in the installation of a power grid to an area that is just too remote to do this without vast amounts of energy being needed; a huge reduction in other greenhouse gases bacause burning dung for instance releases a whole bunch of unpleasant pollutants along with "greenhouse" gases. But the real benefit! A massive rise the the living standards of the villagers plus a health benefit which is really huge.

Conclusion

This idea should appeal to anyone on this forum. It actually would reduce a carbon footprint and the reduction would be measurable and very very large for the actual financial outlay involved. It has a huge "feel good" factor for those that are buying the credits because it is doing more than one thing. It could be set up to be very transparent and monitored by anyone concerned with such things as whether the carbon offset industry are basically a bunch of frauds.

It is something that can be done NOW, that helps real people using money that people are willing to spend anyway to make themselves feel better about global warming.

Anyone interested in the idea, feel free to email me. Any thoughts as to why this is not a good idea or any flaws in the logic etc, feel free to discuss it here.

The idea might be a commercial one and thus might breach the rules of this forum but since I have no money and cannot do this myself anyway I've put it up as a suggestion of how a real contribution could be made no matter what your climate change views are, given that carbon offsets are real and are in demand.


Regards


Richard

G'day,

If anyone can tell me how to fix the list function and my automatic quote at the end of my posts, that would be much appreciated.


Regards


Richard

Cool Richard!

I couldn't agree more (except for the part about CO2). It makes me feel a bit sick when see these commercials for green products and green oil companies (and our out-sourced pollution).

I'll write more later -about CO2 and Corporations. There are many sides to both issues; but I like your idea. Do you know about Envirofit? [google; i checked!]

I also don't think the focus should be CO2 as much as sustainable productivity (in order to feed ourselves). I usually add that point parenthetically at the end of my rant about CO2, but sustainable food (and healthcare) for the future population seems as if it should be wrapped up with environmental considerations if it is really going to be sustainable (or vice versa).

More Later; lots of reading to do here today after a busy day.

Thanks for the post....
& G'day yourself.

~~SA

Samwik wrote:

"I also don't think the focus should be CO2 as much as sustainable productivity"

You may have already read this on the editorial page. I was going to start a new thread but it fits fairly well with what you said:

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/pops.shtml

Hiya Terry!
Thanks for commenting on my point about sustainability. re:
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/pops.shtml
It's funny, when I read that link about Persistent Organic Pollutants, it made me think of the Lupus Thread (mercury, pristane/phytane all sound like POPs).

But you're right, the article does address some of those problems with sustainability:
"During this time, Visser was exposed to knowledge gleaned from various Great Lakes environmental campaigners, who, he claims, revealed to him that: "chemicals in the environment were devastating the gulls, cormorants, eagles and trout of Lake Superior."
Visser's team discovered that POPs used for agricultural and industrial purposes in developing countries were traveling north and dispersing themselves across the globe.
....POPs in Western nations is obviously critical, but unless we can tackle their widespread use in the developing world, our efforts may be for naught."

It's an interesting mechanism that these POPs (or VOCs) use to "travel north." It's just because of the physics of volatility, I guess; but POPs get airborne during the heat of the day and "condense" or adsorb to things as the nights cool (differentially, not absolutely). Or you could think of it as 'the POPs getting "boiled off" from the warmer areas.' It's like the Earth is a giant fractionating column, pulling the POPs to the Arctic. Hence the high concentrations in marine life, of volatile, fat soluble, POPs!

On the bright side, as the Poles warm, the fractionation effect will lessen and the pollutants will disperse less.

These kind of problems are why it's important to consider (regionally tailored) global solutions that address poverty, health, and environmental concerns as interconnected, [or words to that effect] as Richard has pointed out above.

I've been pleased to see some efforts already underway along those lines. I mentioned Envirofit already, but just today learned about Green Mountain Coffee. I saw an interview with Jane Goodall, and she's found a new way to help (and she made a point about how much this was helping the local farmers too). Most of these web articles only talk about JGI or the coffee.

http://www.rootsandshoots.org/
Dr. Jane recently introduced Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to members of the Kalinzi cooperative, a coffee-growing community of 2700 small-scale farmers who live on the border of the park.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/green_mountain.php
A collaboration with the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), an international nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental conservation, the organic, shade-grown, and "chimp-friendly" coffee is designed to create awareness about environmental degradation in western Tanzania- and the toll it's exacting on both humans and chimpanzees.

...and speaking of humans and chimpanzees....

~Later,
~~Samwik

Bio diesil...that is susstainable...the ultamate solution...here is another extract...

Professor Herman’s guest weblog follows.

After reading all sorts of statements from a wide range of scientists during the past few months, I am totally surprised at how knowledge and expertise must have been accumulated during this time period. I refer to predictions that most, or all warming during the past 50-100 years is due to greenhouse gases with 90% certainty. I had always been told that the models being used had considerable uncertainty so that I wonder how this degree of certainty has now been achieved.

I am, myself, not a climate expert, but rather a scientist who has spent most of his career working on problems of atmospheric radiation science and remote sensing, I have been reluctant to speak out on the climate change subject. However, I think I have to at this time. The recent IPCC summary report has just informed me, and the rest of the world, that there is little doubt but that the global warming we are experienced is due to greenhouse gas emissions into our atmosphere. That conclusion was really surprising to me, it having come from a world wide group of supposedly outstanding climate experts.

Let us first of all, settle what we can say with reasonable confidence. If we add infra red absorbing gases to our atmosphere, two things must result:

1. So long as the absorption of incoming sunlight does not change ( and the addition of the so-called “greenhouse” gases does not significantly effect the absorption of solar radiation) then the radiative equilibrium temperature of the entire earth atmosphere will not change

and

2. Due to the addition of IR absorbers ( the greenhouse gases), the lower atmosphere should warm and the upper atmosphere should cool. Now the next steps are where the questions arise. How much will the lower atmosphere warm? The very act of changing these atmospheric temperatures sets into action numerous feedback effects, one of the most important being the increase in water vapor as a result of the increased temperature. This feedback is of course, well known. Now, when I ask the question as to what changes in cloud cover, cloud height, etc. will result from the increased temperatures and the increased water vapor, there seems to be a unanimous agreement that “we don’t really know”. In fact, even if we did know, the models still can’t accurately predict the resulting temperature changes as a result of changes in cloud parameters. Yet, this feedback could substantially alter temperature predictions.

Now, the models also predict that the mid tropospheric warming should exceed that observed at the ground, but satellite data contradicts this. We have been looking into this problem here at the University of Arizona, and have concluded that the satellite temperatures from the UAH group are the most accurate, and these, after being corrected for stratospheric cooling, orbital drifts, hot target changes, etc. still show less tropospheric warming than do the ground temperatures. A paper addressing this will be submitted for publication shortly. If the models cannot accurately predict the temperature trends in the mid-troposphere, how accurate can they be at the ground?

I am also puzzled by the local area predictions that are becoming almost a daily happening. Here in Arizona, we are told we will experience severe drought, unbelievably hot temperatures, etc. If the climate warms enough, we would expect the global weather patterns to migrate poleward. While this would likely diminish our winter rains here in Arizona, it would also advance the Monsoon easterlies further north in the summer, likely producing more summer rains and a longer summer rainy season. It would also cause cooler summer temperatures as the sub-tropical high would be further north and we would not be exposed to the subsidence that results in our high temperatures now. The increased cloud cover due to the increase in monsoon rains would also help cool daytime temperatures Whether the net result would be a decrease, an increase, or no net change in rainfall I can’t say, but the models can’t predict this either. Yet the forecasts of what will happen are being made.

Another point I would also like to make is with respect to the rather rapid increase in temperatures that we have experienced over the past 10-15 years. Can the models explain this by the addition of greenhouse gases? I don’t believe the increase in CO2 has taken on a similar shape.

The above are but a few examples of uncertainties that exist. There are others. I point them out only to raise the question as to how statements about our past warming, and even our future weather can be made with 90% certainty while such important questions still exist.

remainder of article at: http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/04 (4/6/07)