I got into diving a year ago and have been doing more dive-related travel, which also happens to put me up close to bleached reefs that I know I’m contributing to by being there. What do you folks think? Is this promising? Worth watching and waiting to see what comes next, or maybe worth getting on board?
Well, international aviation accounts for about 2% of all CO2 production worldwide. Even if everyone fully offsets all of their air travel or avoided it altogether the savings are swamped by the increase in emissions from *just *China in *just *the last 12 months.
So by all means do it if it makes you feel good but the money is probably better spent in mitigating the effects of the warming that is definitely coming no matter what we do now.
That doesn’t make sense. Mitigation is important; but what we do now will contribute to climate warming in about 40 years, IIRC. Reducing our carbon imprint, as a society, is crucial to keeping things from getting even worse. Abdicating this responsibility is incredibly, well, irresponsible–and working to reduce current carbon footprint is hardly a feel-good action.
Depends if you think harmful climate change is avoidable or not. I don’t think it is and certainly not with the increasing emissions from the developing world projected to rise and rise.
Something far, far more drastic is likely required to avoid major climate change and aviation reduction probably ain’t it. It is a distraction, it runs the risk of representing an easy and comforting option, an opportunity for rich westerners to pat themselves on the back.
*Really *easy to forgo an international flight and feel smug, more of a challenge to not buy Chinese stuff they don’t need and even more of a challenge to get people to start making more fundamental infrastructural decisions to deal with the changes that are, at this point, pretty much guaranteed.
So fine, make the choice not to fly if you like a. It may have a tiny beneficial effect and all is welcome I suppose but I think it is a sticking plaster more than anything. A subscription of hundreds of dollars to a carbon offset company would be of far more immediate benefit in helping communities in the developing world adapt to changing circumstances.
Novelty Bubble, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, since I wasn’t asking about not flying but about giving money to this company that’s trying to sequester carbon, in part because I fly when it isn’t strictly necessary (and that flying is making the effects of climate change more obvious to me), but in a larger sense because I don’t want the planet to die. So? Thoughts on the effectiveness of this technology vs. its costs (financial and otherwise), and compared to alternatives such as planting trees?
Absolutely not. Your $X will buy just $X worth of mitigation, even assuming Climeworks is non-profit and honest.
Your $X is better spent helping to elect politicians who think as you do on remedies for climate change. Will that $X provide leverage, i.e. more value than $X of mitigation? I can’t guarantee that it will. But if it doesn’t, then we’re doomed.
Septimus, why do you assume $x of mitigation is worthless? Serious question, not rhetorical.
My general impression of the climate crisis is that we’ve stepped back from the brink a couple times already. Had we continued burning wood at the rate we were doing it in the middle ages while our population continued to grow, we’d all be dead by now. Similar thing with coal in the industrial revolution. Yet environmentalism as a movement didn’t seem to gain much traction until the 1960s, and even then it was pretty fringe. We still managed to make some positive changes that likely postponed the day of reckoning. Today there’s a lot more widespread acceptance of the idea that we need to do something, and a lot of new technology to help move us in that direction. We certainly need big-picture, top-down solutions. But we also could stand to buy ourselves some time to get there. Do you think smaller, individual changes are not worth making? Or just that this particular venture doesn’t offer enough bang for your buck?
@Esprise Me – The Uninhabitable Earthby David Wallace-Wells answers those questions. Basically, we’re all screwed unless major worldwide changes are done immediately.
I did NOT say it was “worthless;” to the contrary I said it was worth $X.
But my recommendation is to find a way to get MORE than $X of value for your $X. That’s Leverage. (As a simple example, I can spend $X on avocados at our supermarket. Or invest the same in watering our avocado tree sproutlings and hope for a much bigger return.)
For example, suppose that you replace a U.S. Government that would waste $500 billion on a foolish war, with one that will instead spend that $500 billion addressing climate change. Suppose that government can be elected with $500 million of political donations. The $500M investment is leveraged into $500B. Your share of the campaign — $X — is leveraged into $1000X.
Septimus–fair enough. I do already donate to political candidates who are pro-environment among other things, and I could give them more instead of giving to things like this. I do wonder how much my political contributions matter, and it’s hard to quantify the impact of something like that. When my candidate loses, it feels like a complete waste; when my candidate wins, I can’t help but wonder if they would have won without my support. Lately I’ve been trying to focus my donations on candidates for smaller offices in close races, where I can tell myself that my $100 might actually help Shirley O’Liberal edge out Clive McChangedenier for dog catcher of Yonkers. But she probably won’t be able to do much on the national, let alone international scale, even if she wins. If you have specific ideas on candidates who could really leverage a contribution, feel free to share here or PM me.
RatatosKK–not sure why you keep responding if you’re not going to make a sincere effort to answer the question. I’m not a climate change denier or minimizer. I already conceded we need to act on a much larger scale than this. But I also pointed out that we’ve stepped back from the brink before without actually solving the problem. We’re getting closer to mustering the political will to make these big changes. The question is whether we’ll get there in time. How much time do we have? I don’t think there’s any expert consensus on that question beyond “not nearly as much as we’d like.” But some think we might have a little more time to put together the necessary collective action if we all do our part as individuals. I’m always happy to add another good book to my reading list, but I’d appreciate it if you’d actually engage in the discussion.
This is an either/or fallacy (or a false dilemma) - climate change is happening and unavoidable, but the real question is how much climate change you want with the actions you can take. Do we want 400/500/600/700 ppm CO[sub]2[/sub] in 2100 and the associated temperature rise associated with each concentration?
Climate change is not a switch at an on or off position, it’s more like a light with a dimmer - a certain amount of brightness is built-in already, but above that each setting has consequences.
Several years ago, the estimated rate to capture and sequester a ton of CO2 directly from the air was estimated to be $600. That was too much for it to be anything more than a research project. However, there’s been some really great news in the past 12-18 months on the topic: several organizations - ClimeWorks, Global Thermostat, etc - have been advertising that they can do direct air capture (DAC) for ~$100/ton. That’s huge. Suddenly, you’re in the range where the US could capture its entire CO2 output for a year for less than $1 trillion. It doesn’t mean the problem is solved, but $100/ton DAC is a huge arrow to have in our collective climate change quiver.
So how much is ClimeWorks letting you capture and sequester your ton of CO2 for with this program? $1129!
So look, I’m very interested in using a program like this - which is really much, much more than an offset - but, first, you gotta get that price down to around where the buzz is. At > $1000/ton, this is still in the ballpark of the Bill Gateses and governments of the world to fund as a research project. It’s not a real solution to anything at that price.