Carbon offsets

Jeff commented on a previous post ... "My favorite quote is..""Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.".. I must say I agree.. Carbon offsets just make people feel better and someone else takes makes money.. We need to stop burning stuff.. we're not very good at that.. I don't want to conceded that we lost all hope though either.. I just think we're wasting alot of time with "feel-good" easy fixes that make corporations money. When we need serious people to sit down and plan out serious solutions.. Those serious solutions need to be implemented..."

These are quotes from the interview with Dr Lovelock ... and I guess I kind of agree - we've got to think very carefully about how this carbon offsetting thing works... it's hard enough to measure the amount of C taken up by an intensively measured forest - I'm afraid I don't believe that Carbon Offset companies have any clue how much CO2 is being taken up by any of their projects and what's more ... there is nothing to stop them from inflating their claims or even lying outright about the amount of C offset. I've always thought of them as ecological indulgences .... I'm not an economist but carbon offset ventures strikes me as a way to exploit people who care about the environment but don't think too critically about it. So why does Al Gore do it?

We'll stop using fossil fuels... when every last lump of coal is burned

I was listening to the Nature Podcast this week and I heard a commentary by George Monbiot.
He argued all climate mitigation strategies every where will fail because we only focus on reducing demand for carbon based fuels and not the supply; we have policies which favor low carbon fuels, hybrid cars, greater efficiency but none that dissuade us from finding new carbon based fuels.
(see transcript here Nature Podcast transcript)

I've been thinking about biofuels this week and so I tried to put his thoughts into the context of low carbon fuels.
All bio-fuels result in a net input of CO2 into the atmosphere - the CO2 released per unit of energy produced is lower than when we produce energy from fossil fuels. So if we stop burning fossil fuels and start relying on sensibly located, truly low carbon bio-fuels (marginal cropland, zero input sustainable ecosystems and waste burning) we will slow the increase of atmospheric CO2 and perhaps ameliorate the magnitude of climate change. But there is no suggestion that we will stop using fossil fuels.

Low carbon fuels will be used not instead of but in addition to high carbon fuels. This is a truth that needs to be changed.

Dave