Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

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Woodchopper
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Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Jan 20, 2020 12:16 pm

Is it a good idea to buy carbon offsets for air travel?

On the face of it they look like a good deal.

Over at Momondo a direct return flight from London to Los Angeles is advertised as costing USD 383. The flight lasts on average 11 hours.

Cool Effect, which has been mentioned favorably by several news articles, calculates that an individual taking that return journey would be responsible for circa 1.89 tonnes of carbon. Cool Effect offer to offset that carbon for USD15.20, or about 4% of the price of the ticket.

If an investment of 4% of the ticket price is enough to prevent the damage caused by releasing all that carbon, it seems like a good deal.

I also read that there is a UN agreement to bring in offsetting on international flights.

But I've got some questions.

Does carbon offsetting actually deliver the advertised carbon reductions elsewhere?

Is it a good idea overall, perhaps not if it encourages people to fly rather than cut down?

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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by lpm » Mon Jan 20, 2020 1:00 pm

It's a nonsense idea.

There is no offset.

There is a carbon budget that we can use over the years 2020-50. After 2050 us rich westerners will need to be in negative CO2 territory.

Spending some of our carbon budget on our flight means we can't spend it on something else. Such as spending it on burning coal to generate electricity of a school in rural India. It's a finite thing we are running out of, which means offsetting has no reality.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by lpm » Mon Jan 20, 2020 1:30 pm

Suppose you have a finite £1,000. But you are spending £50 a day and only earning £10. In 25 days you are going to be out of money. You will be made homeless and unable to buy food.

You decide to treat yourself to a nice Starbucks coffee for £3. But you offset this, by not spending £3 on a pint after work. You tell yourself your coffee has made no change to the situation, for good or bad. You feel superior to those people who buy themselves coffee and buy the usual pint as well.

What's needed is to actually change the situation, by making a genuine reduction. Suppose you cut your spending by £1 a day, each day. Spend £49, tomorrow spend £48, the day after £47. Spreadsheet shows by day 25 you still have £300 left, and by day 40 you reach neutrality - spend £10, earn £10. Afterwards you switch into positive territory, earning more than you spend.

Even better if you both reduce spend by £1 a day, every day, and simultaneously earn a bit more, an extra 10p a day, every day. You hit positive territory earlier and have more of your savings to spare and start rebuilding your capital earlier. But it's bad if you think it means you can blow £3 on the treat of a Starbucks today. What happens if you fail to reduce your spending from £50 and rely on the increasing earning alone? You go bust after 26 days instead of 25.

In carbon terms, we need to both cut our spending fast (easy), and increase our earnings fast (hard). Our carbon budget is finite, so we need to cut out that flight this year, next year still avoid that flight and insulate our home, the year after avoid the flight, keep the insulation and get an electric car, the year after that... Increasing our earnings is much more problematic. We can plant a bunch of trees each year, for a relatively modest improvement in the planet's drawdown of CO2, but pretty soon you run out of appropriate land. Plant trees in an imaginary offset of emissions and you simply run out of appropriate land faster.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by science_fox » Mon Jan 20, 2020 2:57 pm

Does carbon offsetting actually deliver the advertised carbon reductions elsewhere?
Sometimes with caveats. If this is a genuinely new scheme, rather than extra cash for trees* that would be plated anyway, and the safeguards are in place to keep the trees for the entirety of their projected growth, (and beyond for example as books), then yes it can be.

As lpm says: not flying is the better answer. Planting trees and not flying is the best answer. but flying without offsetting is the worst answer.


*not always tree planting but all schemes suffer similar issues of multiply selling existing projects and too early closures.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by lpm » Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:08 pm

science_fox wrote:
Mon Jan 20, 2020 2:57 pm
Does carbon offsetting actually deliver the advertised carbon reductions elsewhere?
Sometimes with caveats. If this is a genuinely new scheme, rather than extra cash for trees* that would be plated anyway, and the safeguards are in place to keep the trees for the entirety of their projected growth, (and beyond for example as books), then yes it can be.

As lpm says: not flying is the better answer. Planting trees and not flying is the best answer. but flying without offsetting is the worst answer.


*not always tree planting but all schemes suffer similar issues of multiply selling existing projects and too early closures.
The point is that they are not new schemes and cannot be. There will all be done anyway. They must all be done anyway.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Martin_B » Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:22 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:08 pm
There will all be done anyway. They must all be done anyway.
I'm not sure I agree that they would all be done anyway, and while I applaud the sentiment behind the second statement, I doubt they would be (probably until it's too late).

If a carbon offset scheme pays for a new pine tree plantation, that's OK, but hardly great. If a carbon offset scheme paid for the purchase of landbridges between stranded sections of old-growth forest and the re-planting of a variety of different flora which encourages the proliferation of fauna, that'd be worth investing in (it's worth investing in anyway). I've not found a carbon offset scheme which does this, though.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Matatouille » Tue Jan 21, 2020 8:42 am

The more I come to understand it in its real-world usage, the more wary I become of the term carbon offsetting. That said, I'm currently looking for a scheme that I can invest in to absorb those carbon emmissions that I cannot avoid now and in the future, and over time (say a decade or so but I need to find the figures to see if that is feasible, or if a more ambitious timescale is do-able) to absorb those of my 32 years on this planet to date.

I think that the best option that I've found to date is peatland restoration. As I understand it, healthy peatland in the UK climate sequesters carbon at approximately double the rate of healthy woodland, but as most here presumably are readily aware, degraded peatland can tip into a point where it releases the sequestered carbon (potentially at quite a high rate). Restoration therefore seems to me the best avalaible option for offsetting (preventing future releases elsewhere to "forgive" those I can't yet personally avoid), and remedial carbon removal.

With most of the UK peatland degraded to a greater or lesser degree, I've come to the view that peatland restoration projects are likely to be amongst the strongest projects based in the UK, and they have many of the significant biodiversity benefits Martin is thinking about, plus flood reduction. That said, I'm having a devil of a time trying to find projects an individual can donate to which give figures in terms of carbon emmissions eliminated per £ invested, or carbon sequestered per year per £ etc.

Thoughts? Am I barking up a wrong tree?

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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Ben B » Tue Jan 21, 2020 9:28 am

Matatouille wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 8:42 am
With most of the UK peatland degraded to a greater or lesser degree, I've come to the view that peatland restoration projects are likely to be amongst the strongest projects based in the UK, and they have many of the significant biodiversity benefits Martin is thinking about, plus flood reduction. That said, I'm having a devil of a time trying to find projects an individual can donate to which give figures in terms of carbon emmissions eliminated per £ invested, or carbon sequestered per year per £ etc.

Thoughts? Am I barking up a wrong tree?
Found this on the first page of results for "donate to peatland restoration project"
https://www.ywt.org.uk/give-peat-a-chance

Haven't looked into it past the first page though.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Matatouille » Tue Jan 21, 2020 9:40 am

This is the one I'm most likely to bung my money at. I've found some others I'll post later if anyone is interested, but figures of cost/benefit are hard to come by.

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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by lpm » Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:22 am

Sounds good. My comment would be that CO2 isn't the only goal in town. There's other good things the project might do - such as better habitat for an endangered bird or employment for local people.

Underlying problem is that only a tiny fraction of people will fork out cash for these voluntary offsetting. If only you on the plane is paying 4% extra it's silly. The answer is of course to make everyone pay 4% via a compulsory tax. Use the funds from every air passenger on global initiatives - like peatland restoration. And while you're at it, make everyone pay 4% on everything else. These voluntary offsetting things divert pressure from where it actually needs to be applied.
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Ben B » Tue Jan 21, 2020 11:05 am

lpm wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:22 am
Sounds good. My comment would be that CO2 isn't the only goal in town. There's other good things the project might do - such as better habitat for an endangered bird or employment for local people.

Underlying problem is that only a tiny fraction of people will fork out cash for these voluntary offsetting. If only you on the plane is paying 4% extra it's silly. The answer is of course to make everyone pay 4% via a compulsory tax. Use the funds from every air passenger on global initiatives - like peatland restoration. And while you're at it, make everyone pay 4% on everything else. These voluntary offsetting things divert pressure from where it actually needs to be applied.
Totally agree that a proper carbon tax should be brought in to every industry.

In the meantime, that being unlikely to happen for a while, we can only do what we can
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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by plodder » Tue Jan 21, 2020 2:18 pm

It's worth also keeping an eye on the new farming bill which is apparently going to adjust farming subsidies in favour of more useful environmental outcomes. Don't know if peat restoration is covered.

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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Matatouille » Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:07 pm

In case anyone has any interest, here is a rundown of the useful stuff I've found on peatland restoration projects in the UK:

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's Give peat a chance, as Ben also found, here. They appear to be the funding behind the Yorkshire Peat Partnership here, or the funding organisation that one can directly donate to at least. Neither website goes into specifics of cost/benefits. The YPP website has several pages under construction, but the website doesn't seem to have been updated in at least a month so I don't think there are any dedicated bods on that side of it.

Natural England has a blog here listing a few participants in a DEFRA peatland restoration pilot. The links go to the organisations doing the projects rather than anything on the project themselves, and I haven't found any way to directly give to any of them in a way that would be earmarked for the peatland projects, nor cost/benefit figures.

Then there is the IUCN UK Peatland Programme which has a Peatland Code Carbon Unit purchase scheme here for projects they accredit, and these units can presumably be traded. It looks definitely set up more for companies wanting to do offsetting and carbon trading than for individuals. It does have a list of schemes accredited and seeking accreditation here, but I've yet to see whether any of these have websites giving cost/benefit figures or can be directly donated to.

There were a couple of others that I found elsewhere in the UK that are similar to Give Peat a Chance/YPP, but not having any more info than any others I binned the tabs.

As mentioned up-thread, in the absence of cost/benefit I'll probably bung a couple of hundred quid at Give Peat a Chance, because it is at least local to me so I can feel some of the benefits myself directly. I'll then contact them to say I donated and why, and that my main motivation was to offset unavoidable carbon and absorb for previous carbon, that it would be really great if they could publish any figures they have on what their projects could achieve in CO2 emission reduction/sequestration (and any other benefit metrics) and projected costs/timescales. I'm sure there are others thinking like me who would be interested in these figures to convince them to voluntarily donate for the same reasons. Plus it would help me determine an appropriate ongoing donation level for my goals and circumstances.

There are also a load of solid projects elsewhere in the world, but I didn't want to get into them as it was more complicated to do the due diligence.

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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by plodder » Tue Jan 21, 2020 11:27 pm

The important thing about carbon offsetting now is that it buys us a little more time.

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Re: Carbon Offsets for Air Travel

Post by Chris Preston » Wed Jan 22, 2020 4:22 am

Only if it offsets the carbon emissions. Some of the schemes I have seen do lots of good stuff with conservation and impoverished communities, but it is hard to see that the carbon has actually been offset by the program. That is taken out of the atmosphere and permanently put somewhere else.

I have made up some of my travel emissions by reducing energy use elsewhere.
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