We've been railing against considering carbon offsets as anything other than a scam for a long time. Here's a snip from a 2007 post that cuts to the heart of the matter (emphasis in long-ago original):
...Even Vinod Khosla, a very, very smart guy, putting his money into cellulosic and Brazilian cane ethanol, said on the Charlie Rose Show that he flies around carbon neutral.
C'mon Mr. K., in the first place it's not the same as changing your lifestyle! Secondly and more importantly, it either takes a whole bunch of tree's one year to suck up the carbon from one Heathrow-LAX or it takes ten trees 40-50 years. And then you have to guarantee that they never burn or rot, or you've accomplished nothing but a temporary salving of the conscience.
And that's the problem. After sucking up the CO2 and turning it into plant material, the plant dies. And it either burns or rots and either way, the CO2 that you sequestered is un-sequestered and nothing was accomplished in the real world.
And the headline story from Nautil.us, April 17:
How Can We Stop the CO2 That Plants Store from Leaking Back Into the Air?
One question for Eli Yablonovich, an applied physicist and professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the director emeritus of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science.
We’re putting a lot of carbon dioxide in the air. It’s very worrisome. We need to solve the problem. Some people think there is no solution, but in engineering, everything can be solved. To say there is no solution is to say it costs too much. So, this will get solved at a cost, which we show in our new paper. We can actually remove the old carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere 10, 20, 30 years ago. How do we do that? You grow plants, and plants pull the carbon dioxide out of the air. If you have enough plants, you’ll pull out more than what is generated every year. To cover the burning of petroleum and natural gas, it will take about an extra one-fifth of existing row crops—which are corn, wheat, rice, and things like that. It’s a totally carbon-negative solution. Carbon neutral is yesterday’s news.
But the key question is: How can we stop sequestered carbon from leaking back into the air? The answer to the leaky CO2 problem is to keep the sequestered biomass very dry. In modern landfills, they actually seal everything off with polyethylene. If they use four millimeter polyethylene, that’ll keep the water out for thousands of years. So this is an extension of what is already being done in landfills today. If we take away the water, microbes can’t decompose the plants, which would send CO2 back into the atmosphere. I think the emissions from all of the petroleum and natural gas we burn can be stably sequestered for thousands of years.
People underestimate what you can do with engineering.
Everybody’s heard of relative humidity, and how tough it is on a humid day. Relative humidity applies inside food. This was first promulgated by the Food and Drug Administration. If it’s dry enough, they’ll say, “OK, it’s safe to put on the shelf.” So there is an internal relative humidity inside biomass, food, plants, and so forth. Inside the plant, we use the term “water activity,” but it amounts to the same thing as relative humidity. As you pull water out of biomass plant matter, or food, it’s more and more difficult for the microbes to live in, because they all need some water vapor to live to have enough internal water activity so that they can move the nutrients around the cell.
This has been greatly studied for food preservation, but also by NASA to try to think of what forms of life can be out there. And what was discovered is that below 60 percent relative humidity, life—metabolic processes—comes to a halt. Nothing can live.
Is there evidence that a polyethylene seal lasts that long? Yes. It turns out there’s a natural experiment—one with a great backstory. It’s so fascinating. In our paper, we show a picture of a tree. To understand where this tree came from, you go back to before the Romans conquered Israel. Israel had a king called King Herod, and like most kings, Herod was afraid of being overthrown. So he built a very highly defensible castle or palace on top of a mesa, called Masada. It is a very dramatic mesa. But Herod never had an insurrection that he had to deal with. It’s a very difficult location to get to, and was not excavated until the mid 1960s. Researchers excavated the site and found some seeds, and didn’t know what to do with them. They were in one of these Greek pots, and the seeds were left in a drawer from 1965 until 2005....
....MUCH MORE
Some previous posts on the subject:
Global Warming: Credit Suisse On You Being Responsible For CO2 Emissions (plus carbon sequestration)But as a long term answer to the CO2 issue, trees don't work. Trees die, and when they die they release the stored carbon which gloms on to atmospheric oxygen and turns into CO2. Or the trees get burned, again releasing the carbon which combines with oxygen to make CO2.
The British have been working on this problem for centuries and have come up with a very clever solution: cut the trees down and then store them so they don't decay. Here's an example:
That's Westminster Great Hall. Here's a close-up of the hammer-beam roof:
Samantha Tan, “Westminster Hall's (detail of hammer-beam roof),” Medieval London, accessed November 19, 2021, https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/items/show/222.
According
to Samantha Tan at Fordham University's Medieval London exhibit the
timbers weigh 660 tons and have sequestered the carbon in this form for
over 700 years.
The British use this type of storage throughout the land and people
visit from around the world to marvel at the secrets of carbon sequestration
We'll be back to the Credit Suisse report tomorrow or you can see it here, 29 page PDF
Wall Street Firm Makes a $1.8 Billion Bet on Forest Carbon Offsets
"Dutch reforestation company responsible for massive forest fire in Spain"
Huh.
Irony can be pretty ironic.
Climate/Energy: "Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won't be pleasant"
"Deadwood Releasing 10.9 Gigatons of Carbon Every Year – More Than All Fossil Fuel Emissions Combined"
Hence the futility, or folly, or fraud of "plant a tree" carbon offsets.
However....people with an interest in insect farts may have a solution.
More Carbon Credit Shenanigans: The Massachusetts Audubon Society
Following on the sordid tale of the Nature Conservancy's racket.
"A Top U.S. Seller of Carbon Offsets Starts Investigating Its Own Projects"
"Norway, Sweden, and Finland Evicting Ugandan Farmers For Carbon Credits"
One
of the worst approaches to carbon capital there is.The folks who,
fifteen years ago, were likening carbon credits to the old skool
Catholic church selling indulgences to absolve rich parishioners of
their sins were not that far off. The credits basically allow you to
continue doing what you were doing or, as US climate czar John Kerry
said when jetting off to Iceland in his private plane to receive a
climate change leadership award....
