I’ll freely admit to not being the smartest sandwich at the picnic. But can someone please explain to me just how buying carbon offset credits changes anything other than putting your money into the pocket of someone else?
Suppose I have a huge 8 MPG gas burning SUV that puts all sorts of bad things into the air. How can buying a batch of carbon offset credits change what my big SUV did and clean up the air one little bit?
To me, it just looks like one huge gigantic fraud. Or am I missing something?
You’re missing something. It’s debatable how effective such schemes are, but they certainly aren’t fraudulent.
To give an example using a common and very simple carbon offset scheme, the money you spend on carbon credits is used to purchase degraded grazing land in the tropics. That land is then planted with trees. As the trees grow they literally suck CO2 out of the air. They don’t remove precisely the same CO2 molecules that your SUV put into the air, but they do remove the same amount.
That’s why it’s called an offset scheme. The CO2 your vehicle emits is offset by the CO2 that your trees remove. If you don’t invest in the scheme the land remains grazing land with no trees. If you do invest the trees are planted and that offsets your personal emissions.
Of course there are lots of other more complicated methods by which these offset schemes work. Many of them don’t actually remove atmospheric carbon, instead they pay other industries to reduce their production of carbon. So for example they might use your money to pay a factory to use natural gas electricity rather than the less efficient coal. It’s more complicated but the effect is still the same: by spending your money the scheme is reducing the amount of CO2 in the air.
Since the average global temperature is actually falling, not rising, I suspect “huge gigantic fraud” is a good explanation.
Someone who has made a hundred million dollars promoting global warming is likely set to make billions from his offset trading company overnight if offset trading becomes mandatory.
Only if you cherry-pick your data in a way that’s basically lying. If you take the hottest day of the year last year and compare it to the coldest day of the year this year, and just look at those two dates, then you’ll conclude that global temperatures are falling. If you adhere to even bare standards of intellectual honesty, though, you’ll see that temperatures are rising.
Let’s not hijack this thread into a discussion of whether or not global warming, or global climate change, is occurring. Please restrict discussion to the specific question in the OP, that is, how carbon credits work. Those who wish to debate more general aspects of global climate change are invited to open a thread in Great Debates.