Carbon Indulgences
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 09 Feb 2009 01:21:00 GMT
In the late thirteenth century, the church came up with the idea of indulgences, which was paying someone else to do the good works demanded of you. Church officials argued that clergy were doing more good works then they needed to, so why not sell them to raise money?
Are carbon offsets like these medieval indulgences? Just reducing our guilt without really helping the planet? Let’s look a little more closely at them.
Additionality
When you pay $30 for a ton of CO2 offsets, do you expect this money is the full amount needed to safely sequester one ton CO2? Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Most carbon offset funds look for projects that are already underway, and then give the developer a little more money to buy the CO2 offset rights. This is providing "additionality" which means the carbon credit payments are designed to tip projects into going ahead, not to pay for the whole project.
Example: TerraPass
Take a look at the TerraPass projects. Most of these projects are aimed at reducing methane emissions. Others are wind projects that will reduce the need to burn more fossil fuels. None of these projects are actually capturing any existing CO2. And none of these projects are being paid for entirely by carbon credits, but instead they just provide a little extra revenue to make the projects feasible.
TerraPass carbon offsets are cheap too. You can offset carbon for only $12 per ton of CO2. You also get a bumper sticker and fridge magnet too! What a bargain!
Plant Trees
But what if we really want to pay the full cost to actually take CO2 out of the air? How would we do that and how much would it cost?
One way is to plant trees. TWP estimates that each tree removes 1 ton of CO2 over its productive lifetime. However, to take into account sapling mortality and variability in biomass, they plant 5 trees to offset 1 ton of CO2 at a cost of $10. Another bargain. Needless to say, forests provide lots of other benefits besides just CO2 capture.
Coal-Fired Power Plants
However, the big problem with CO2 is coal-fired power plants. Like it or not, coal will continue to be the main source of power for electricity generation for many years. If we don’t get a handle on coal CO2 emissions, no other reduction efforts are going to matter much!
To understand this, assume that the developing world actually reaches it’s Kyoto targets. In that case, CO2 emissions would be reduced by almost 500 million tons by 2012. Not bad. However, in the same time period, the 850 new coal plants planned by the US, China and India will generate 5 times more CO2 than was saved – about 2,500 million tons! (Reference)
So why don’t we just sequester CO2 from coal-fired power plants? The problem is that the technology is not yet considered to be commercial due to its higher cost and questionable reliability. The most promising technology for capturing CO2 from coal-fired power plants is integrated gasification and carbon capture (IGCC). Yet there are only 2 IGCC power plants in operation in US, and it won’t be until after 2015 when the first few projects demonstrate reliable performance that IGCC will become more attractive. The technology is also expensive, costing between $30 – $80 per ton of CO2 sequestered.
Systems Perspective
Finally, let’s first look at carbon offsets from an earth systems perspective.
Extra CO2 comes from just one source: fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, including oil, natural gas and coal, are just carbon deposits that have been in the ground for millions of years and we are now pulling them out and burning them which creates an imbalance of CO2. It is not practical – or even possible – to reverse this process and stuff all that extra CO2 back underground. And even if we did find a way, burning fossil fuels (especially coal) emits all sorts of other nasty pollutants like sulfur, NOx, VOC, mercury, arsenic and lead. So from a systems perspective, burning fossil fuels causes an imbalance in the earth system.
Bottom Line
Many people that buy carbon offsets are already making big efforts towards reducing their carbon footprint, and that is commendable. However, carbon offsets don’t pay for the total cost of reducing GHGs and, except for planting trees, don’t remove existing CO2. So people should not use carbon offsets solely to indulge their consciences while continuing careless consumption. Instead, carbon offsets should be used for short-term mitigation while we continue to look for ways to reduce our impact and work towards a world that uses clean sources of energy and sustainable systems of production.
Your negative comment about carbon credits being used to reduce methane emissions is off target. With a little digging, you will find that methane’s effectiveness as a greenhouse gas is something like 20 times that of CO2, so that each ton of methane avoided is the equivalent of 20 tons of CO2 as far as GHG effect goes.
It could that the use of carbon offsets to decrease methane emissions may be the most effective use of such ‘indulgences’. It could be why some very knowledgeable companies are going into the business of using such offsets in that manner.
Hi Harry, I am glad that you brought up the fact that Methane (CH4) has 25 times more global warming potential (GWP) than CO2, because some people might not know that there are other greenhouse gases (GHGs) with higher GWP potential than CO2 based on their radiative forcing and lifetime in the atmosphere.
Some of the other GHGs that have a higher GWP than CO2 are Nitrous Oxide (N2O) – 298 times, Triflouromethane (CHF3) – 14,800 times, and Sulfur Hexaflouride (SF6) – 22,800 times! (Reference: EIA Global Warming Potentials)
However, the IPCC AR4’s radiative forcing analysis does make it clear that CO2 is still the predominant GHG.
My point of this post, however, is that putting in more CO2 into the atmosphere and then supporting an effort that causes less CH4 to be released is not equivalent. While this might balance the radiative forcing, you still end up with an atmosphere with more CO2 and less CH4.
Thanks again Harry, for bringing up this point.
Hi Max,
Erik from TerraPass here. You’ve got a better grasp of additionality than most, and I appreciate your helping everyone understand the concept.
On the indulgence topic, though, you might be interested to know that our customers are by and large folks who decide to buy carbon offsets after making huge efforts to lower their carbon footprints through direct reductions. I’m not aware of anyone who has successfully lowered his or her footprint to zero, and am appreciative of the folks who make the decision to balance their remaining footprints using carbon offsets. You can make fun of them if you like, I guess, but the reality is their actions and purchases are making a difference.
In terms of which offsets are most helpful, the reality is that we need offset projects that prevent greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere AND offset projects that attempt to sequester greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. All that matters is the total carbon concentration, and both sides of the effort are important in getting it down.
For those intersted, the TerraPass customer profile is posted on our website at http://www.terrapass.com/images/blogposts/terrapass-survey-2008.pdf.
Thanks for your comments Erik. You bring up a good point that people that are buying carbon offsets are usually already making big efforts to lower their carbon footprint. I wasn’t trying to make fun of people, and maybe my post was a little harsh, so I will try to re-word it to acknowledge these efforts while still encouraging everyone not to use carbon offsets to indulge needless consumption.