The Carbon Offset Problem

[Music] in the summer of 2018 western pennsylvania birders ornithologists biologists field tripping teachers appalachian range romantics and trail loving hikers all had reason to celebrate the nature conservancy one of the nation's largest environmental ngos had partnered with the hawk mountain sanctuary to preserve these 2 380 acres of wooded bird habitat some 80 miles or 130 kilometers outside of philadelphia in the grand scheme of things the move wasn't anything major by itself a massive environmental organization preserving an area the size of a small ski town didn't move the needle but the deal was bigger than local interests alone the benefits were global to fund the preserve's protection the nature conservancy partner with bluesource began selling carbon credits and in an effort to offset emissions jpmorgan chase purchased over 96 000 of them it wasn't just corporations buying in either at just 15 a ton individuals bought credits to account for their summer vacations too while smalling scale hawk mountain seemed a perfect project a pragmatic effort that saved important habitat and refuge for local birds and people and provided means for the environmentally conscious to address their own impact on the planet the only problem was as one intrepid investigative journalist would expose it was all built on at best a massive oversimplification and at worst one big green lie at the simplest level forest carbon offset projects work by comparing the amount of forest preserved versus the assumed deforestation had it not been saved this means that calculating a hypothetical baseline really informs the entire project and how many credits they can actually sell and here lies the issue all the carbon offsets sold to jpmorgan chase and guilt-ridden individuals alike were calculated against a faulty baseline this is the project's planning document submitted in 2018 to the american carbon registry and this is the baseline the projects built upon that if it weren't for intervention the forest would be subject to aggressive clear cutting and high grading the problem was hawk mountain preserve as its name would suggest was already a preserve since the 1930s after lane was purchased by avid birder rosalie edge and the hawk mountain sanctuary association was set up this area has been closely looked after managed and protected the forest didn't need saving it wasn't under threat a fact worn out by the preserve's history and its own contemporary staff saying as much of course if the forest wasn't under threat then there wasn't much carbon dioxide here to save from entering the atmosphere and thus there wasn't many real carbon offsets it's these very carbon offsets cheap for the buyer but ultimately meaningless that allow corporations like jpmorgan chase the very institution that invested more money in oil and gas than any other bank from 2016 to 2020 to make claims like this that they offset all company travel through projects like hawk mountain carbon credits provide major companies an incredibly cheap green screen to hide behind while their faulty offsets continually under deliver and this is hardly a problem unique to a bird sanctuary in pennsylvania not far down the road from hawk mountain is bethlehem pennsylvania here the nature conservancy brokered a deal to protect 22 000 acres and establish an offset market in 2011. first it was chevrolet that bought into the project but in 2014 it was disney who agreed to fund the area's protection through 2022. while the project helped disney establish itself as an industry-leading offsetter it did little to actually offset carbon emissions as the baseline again assumed the area was threatened by aggressive harvesting in reality though recognizing the importance of the forest to their municipal water bethlehem had only actually harvested about 0.4 percent of the watershed's acreage in the prior two decades the same thing happened here in albany new york where offsets from watershed forests that hadn't been harvested in decades went up for sale in 2019 and here too in a swath of forest known as pennsylvania ridges where the nature conservancy began selling carbon credits in 2019 even though the institution itself had purchased the land in 1999 and preserved it ever since uninformed of or undeterred by the faulty logic disney bought 180 000 credits from the project across all of these meaningless offsets actively undercut their own mission and these issues extend well beyond the east coast and well outside of the nature conservancy's purview california's cap and trade program uses forest carbon projects so that heavy emitters can purchase offsets rather than lower emissions and this program too has holes of the 193 million carbon offsets sold in the state 156 million are force credits and of those 156 million 131 million are called improved forest management credits or ifms these ifms provide credits by implementing best practices to maintain maximum carbon storage basically they commit the project area to minimal harvesting for the next century now in order to quantify the amount of credits each project produces like with voluntary programs there needs to be a baseline or an average common practice to judge the ifm against california calculates this common practice number by breaking forests into regions generally informed by tree species and forest density each region in turn has an average carbon carrying capacity and it's these averages that are the problem take this wealth of forest here in northern california it's relatively wet it's heavily wooded it's composed primarily of large dense tanolac and douglas fir and according to the state it sits in the southern cascade supersection because this supersection is so large it encompasses according to carbon plans research three sub-regions of different ecological makeups where the two inland regions are relatively drier more sparse and able to store less carbon therefore when creating a baseline for this project plot acr 189 the state used an average informed by data that doesn't represent the local environment and thus is artificially low in their own analysis which used more accurate and specific tree species data carbon plan estimated that the section was over crediting acr 189 by 50 and while this example sits on the upper end of over allocation by the state their research showed that of the 65 ifm projects they studied 53 had over allocated leading to an over crediting percentage of 29.4 by using such broad force classifications california's program had unintentionally created meaningless carbon credits that quietly undercut their own emissions goals and this issue isn't confined to national borders either around the world project upon project is failing to live up to expectations in brazil the pietro surai made history by becoming the first indigenous tribe to sell credits to protect their own forest most visibly to fifa in 2014 to offset emissions from that year's world cup the next year however diamonds were found in the protected land and the forest was quickly ripped to shreds by those looking for a quick profit rendering the already sold credits meaningless in a protected area of cambodia that sold credits as forest coverage sat at 88 independence analysis by propublica and descartes labs found that coverage had since dropped to 46 percent as state-sanctioned logging and population influx accelerated deforestation far faster than the project promised in indonesia carbon offsets were sold to protect a span of forest for conversion into acadia plantations despite the fact that the government had placed a moratorium on plantation development in the area among myriad other issues nikkei asia found that three times more carbon was sold as credits than the project was likely to actually offset time and time and time again projects are making their money up front and then failing to live up to the long-term promise that encompasses the entirety of their value these forest projects fail to address all three vertices of the carbon offsetting triangle the trio factors that make for theoretically effective crediting it makes intuitive sense for example that a proper carbon offset must be permanent or that the rate of decline must be accounted for what makes this difficult though is monitoring illegal harvesting in remote areas or projecting future fire losses or anticipating what climbing temperatures will do to the ecological makeup of a forest the project also needs to ensure that the carbon they sequester isn't just leading to increased emissions elsewhere that the co2 isn't leaking out it's one thing to protect a swath of forest in the developing world but it's another to ensure that that doesn't lead to more aggressive clear cutting elsewhere beyond the reach of state authorities or even roads finally and perhaps of most difficulty it's crucial for an offset project to prove that the force protection wouldn't have happened otherwise a naturally speculative effort with so many shades of grey that the nature conservancy for example can justify an offsetting project on property that they themselves had already preserved at the core of this triangle though and largely the reason it isn't heated at every turn is the need for dogged monitoring and accounting two management mechanisms in a field defined by price points and expedience that require time and money and therefore plague offsetting projects well beyond forestry theoretically though if an offset scheme can verifiably determine a baseline verifiably account for or assure permanence verifiably account for or prevent leakage and verifiably prove additionality then it might actually work under these constraints well-intentioned actors have aimed to innovate more advanced more effective systems of carbon offsetting perhaps the most promising of these alternatives stems from one surprisingly specific process this is the kopel district of india's karnataka state roughly 1.4 million people are spread across its dry rocky landscape making a living largely by growing ground nuts and grains of this population 99 rely on traditional cook stoves more often than not that means they're using three stone fires where trio of rocks is used to elevate a pot over a fire fueled by wood coal dung or other biomass fuels the kobel district is in good company globally 3 billion of us rely on similar traditional stoves for cooking they can be built and fueled simply by gathering what exists around us but the advantages pretty much end there the thermal efficiency of three stone fires as in the percent of heat created that actually makes it to the pot is just 10 percent that's colossally low especially compared to the 75 thermal efficiency of the typical electric stovetop therefore the average household that cooks on a three stone fire uses between 11 and 26 pounds or 5 and 12 kilograms of wood per day burning such a quantity of wood every single day clearly has a sizeable environmental impact in fact some 25 of global black carbon emissions a damaging pollutant stems from this style of cooking of course those using three stone fires do so out of necessity they either can't afford or don't have the infrastructure to support gas or electric stoves but there is an intermediate alternative it's called the improved cook stove essentially this is a catch-all term to describe biomass field stoves with higher thermal efficiency often around 20 or 30 percent with higher thermal efficiency the fuel need is lower and so a household switching from a three stone fire to an improved cook stove is estimated to eliminate between one and a half and four tons of carbon emissions per year this is a hefty amount roughly equivalent to the average annual carbon footprint of a whole person in one of these households or to flying between new york and singapore five times so replacing these with these would go a long way to reducing emissions but the problem is that improved cook stoves are expensive their 1400 rupee cost is equivalent to a week of income for the average copal district resident however 1400 rupee is only 18 american dollars a minuscule amount to pay to offset such an amount of flying for example therefore cookstove replacement was a prime candidate for financing through carbon credits a perfect solution where certain individuals value an action above its cost simply for its environmental benefits on top of that the math was simpler the higher the thermal efficiency the lower the emission should be having identified that ngos globally started distributing improved cook stoves to households reliant on the three stone fire including the copal district where 43 000 stows were distributed to 21.5 000 families in exchange for the organizer selling 43 215 tons of carbon offsets per year for a decade now what takes the system of cook stove replacement carbon offsetting from theoretically good to great is its myriad co-benefits the advantages stretch beyond just environmental to start with gathering those huge quantities of wood to fuel traditional stoves takes time an average of 18 hours a week in fact researchers have found that overwhelmingly the task of gathering wood for cooking is left to women and girls and it takes time that would often otherwise be spent on education for example therefore the use of improved cook stoves which require an average of only five hours of wood gathering per week could help close the education gender gap observed in many poorer regions on top of that cooking is typically completed inside one's house so the smoke inhaled by users of traditional cook stoves is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day improved cook stoves do not eliminate smoke but they do lessen it so their distribution works to eliminate some of the 4.3 million annual premature deaths attributable to household air pollution improved cook so programs can also create local jobs manufacturing and maintaining stoves they can reduce unsustainable local deforestation the co-benefits stretch on and on and so it's no wonder why in the face of compounding stories of disastrously ineffective forest protection programs cook stove replacement was heralded by everyone from the united nations to hillary clinton as the next big innovation in carbon offsetting the math was simpler the additionality was indisputable the co-benefits were myriad and the costs were low these programs had the potential to finally offer carbon conscious companies and consumers a truly verifiable way to actually offset their impact on the world so long as theory translated into reality to test their program's effectiveness researchers put hundreds of households in the cobalt district into a test group half were given the improved cook stoves immediately and half had to wait a year to act as the control group the researchers then tracked the various households wood consumption to see how well it lined up with the predicted decline with stoves increasing from 10 to 30 percent thermal efficiency offsets were sold based on a theoretical 67 reduction in wood consumption what the researchers found was that when actually used on the ground in the copal district the improved cook stove households averaged 7.9 pounds or 3.6 kilograms in daily wood consumption however crucially the control group used 9.3 pounds or 4.2 kilograms improved cook stoves only led to a 15 decline in wood consumption so little that it couldn't even be considered statistically significant by the study that's to say according to these results hundreds of thousands of faulty carbon credits were sold to individuals and companies who believed they were genuinely eliminating carbon from the atmosphere individuals who paid a premium over the forest protection alternative to finance the purportedly more effective form of carbon offsetting what happened on the ground is that individuals actions didn't conform to the optimistic beliefs of the program's designers almost half of the subject households didn't exclusively use the improved cook stoves they kept using their three stone fires simultaneously this is a phenomenon so common that it has a dedicated term stove stacking and a whole subset of research into its causes broadly stove stackers say they do so because it saves time the more burners the better that means the main solution to stove stacking is giving each household more stoves but less carbon is going to be offset by the third stove as opposed to the first given less frequent use so achieving the more verifiable version of a cook stove replacement program comes with additional cost per ton offset another core co-benefit of improved cook stoves is that they make cooking easier but unsurprisingly making cooking easier often means people cook more there is almost always suppressed demand among traditional cook stove users and so this makes accounting for the carbon saved by the switch all the more difficult given this difficulty not all programs confront real world conditions in their design united nations clean development mechanisms certified cook stove replacement programs are not required to test the stoves and the extent of their fuel savings in the field program designers can base their math off laboratory tests the tests that led to the failed assumptions of the copal district program such as measuring how much wood is necessary with each stove type to boil a given unit of water alternate independent certifiers such as the gold standard require real-world kitchen performance tests measuring actual wood consumption in the actual project location by actual users over a span of days but not all experts agree that the more stringent path is the correct one water boiling tests are quick cheap and easy kitchen performance tests are slow expensive and complicated that cost has to be passed on to the ultimate purchaser of carbon credits and so this opens up a broader more subjective question is it really worth it to increase cost to increase accuracy many cookstove replacement programs including those based on less precise water boiling tests are genuinely effective but more of the kitchen performance test-based versions are effective so is it worth increasing cost is it worth risking fewer carbon credits sold to be more confident that those credits are actually effective right now the market seems to say no the least accurate type of carbon offsetting programs forest protection programs are generally the lowest cost and hold a majority of the carbon offsetting market meanwhile the theoretically most accurate type of carbon offsetting direct air capture where complex machinery literally sucks carbon out of the air is the most expensive and barely exists at commercial scale consumers in the carbon market are making their purchasing decisions as they always do if it costs 10 to offset a ton of carbon through one program and 15 through another why would they pick the latter the public overwhelmingly has neither the ability nor the desire to analyze the particulars of individual carbon offsetting programs so the cheapest option presented to them almost always wins but that cheapest option is the one with the greatest uncertainty over whether it will actually work it's the one with the greatest potential for the numbers to be fudged by nefarious players looking to turn a profit all the stories are about projects where the carbon offset was overstated none are about carbon offset being understated if people are given the opportunity to turn a profit by fudging the numbers people are going to turn a profit by fudging the numbers not only is the market enabling this action it's incentivizing it by funneling the vast majority of money into the cheapest least verifiable most exploitable projects and this isn't one of those situations where perfect is the enemy of good carbon offsets are a form of syntax individuals and companies buy them to alleviate the cognitive dissonance that stems from doing something that accelerates climate change therefore if a person decides to take that transatlantic flight because they can negate their emissions concerns simply by checking the offset box at checkout that offset has to be 100 effective to not do harm if that offset is just 90 effective if the offsetting potential is just slightly overstated if families cook just slightly more than expected due to the convenience of their new and improved cook stoves the environment is in a worse place than where it started due to carbon offsets any behavioral economist would agree that carbon offsetting does lead to at least some individuals or companies emitting more than they would if it wasn't an option so this scenario is not a fantasy therefore carbon offsetting a practice presented as an innovative solution to the world's carbon problem has an extremely high risk of actually raising emissions whether it does that is an entirely different unanswerable question given the complexity of just accounting for the carbon offset by an individual program entering that industry wide would be entirely impossible but the potential is there it's not that every carbon offset program is a scam there are plenty of extremely well-managed programs run by people genuinely trying to make the world better that have truly verifiable offsetting impact and truly advantageous co-benefits carbon can be truly offset but that's not what the market incentivizes the market incentivizes the scam the market incentivizes a race to the bottom the market incentivizes the scenario where carbon offsetting as a cohesive phenomenon has genuine potential to accelerate our march towards climate catastrophe if you've made it to the end of this video you've clearly realized that believe it or not talking climate policy can actually be interesting the world is changing faster than ever and as catastrophic as that is it's also fascinating to watch unfold in real time i've certainly realized that over the years especially as i produced two documentaries about the subject one profiling the marshall islands the country that's expected to be the first to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise and another looking at the colorado river the primary water source for the american southwest which uses more water than the environment provides each year putting the region on the path towards an imminent water shortage disaster each of these projects was produced on location with a rather big budget thanks to the funding provided by nebula and by extension all the nebula viewers so you can watch both of these over there of course nebula is the streaming site that i and a bunch of other smart creators started to act as the best possible home to the stuff we make we post our regular videos over there early and ad free exclusive videos we call nebula plus and high budget nebula originals we also release videos from our new channel jet lag the game an entire week early on nebula most of the channels with the highest audience overlap with wendover are also on the platform so chances are you already watch plenty of nebula creators but what makes this the best deal in streaming is that you can get two streaming sites for less than the price of one signing up via curiositystream.comwendover bundles the two platforms together for just 14.79 a year with the current sale price and of course that also means you get access to all of curiositystream's great library of non-fiction shows and documentaries like their fantastic show engineering the future signing up for the best deal in streaming gives you the best possible viewing experience of the creators you already know and love gets you access to a huge catalog of new content you'll probably love too and it even helps support this channel so click the button on screen or head over to curiositystream.comwendover to sign up for the bundle deal today

Channel: Wendover Productions

Views: 1,798,747

Keywords:

Id: AW3gaelBypY

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022