Slashdot Mirror
The Inexact Science of Carbon Neutrality
snydeq writes "Sustainable IT's Ted Samson raises questions regarding the purchasing of carbon offsets, a practice growing in popularity among tech companies such as Dell, Yahoo, and Google in an attempt to achieve 'carbon neutrality.' Essentially financial instruments, carbon offsets enable companies to invest money in sustainable endeavors in an attempt to counteract the carbon footprint they incur conducting their business. But as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal shows, measuring the value of these carbon offsets is tricky business, as some recipients of offsets say the results of their sustainable efforts would be achieved regardless of any one company's investment. 'The question of whether carbon offsets hold value just scratches the surface of the overall carbon-neutrality question,' Samson writes. 'For the time being, there isn't even a consistent approach to measuring an organization's carbon footprint in the first place. And if you don't know how much CO2 you're responsible for, how do you know how much offsetting is necessary to become neutral?'"
The whole concept is junk science. It's basically saying that you can urinate in someone's swimming pool if you filter an equal amount of salt out of the ocean.
The real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, local effects are just as bad as global effects, and there's no guarantee that opposite local effects in two places will ever actually cancel each other out. It's a nice way to help people feel good about themselves, but in the grand scheme of things, it is naive to think that carbon offsets, no matter how large, can undo the damage of the carbon you shouldn't have emitted in the first place....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Bought by companies who want a good image. That's about all they are good for.
Now THAT is how the real world works. Congratulations on making a sound investment. Carbon trading is so obviously a useless bullshit scam. The real damage done is in the fact that people think it actually works and hence ignore other actually beneficial measures.
I'd love to do a parody website about the environmental benefits of obesity. After all, human fat is a fairly dense hydrocarbon. The fatter you become, the more carbon is sequestered. Imagine the environmental benefits if everyone in the US gained 30 lbs! A billion pounds of carbon sequestered! Woo-hoo!
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Plants consume CO2 during the day, and release CO2 at night, in a process called respiration.
They are truly carbon neutral : )
Nope. They don't release as much as they take in. The carbon they absorb from the air gets combined with water and nitrogen and ends up as sugars and proteins.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No more than I think that the ones paid by governments and environmental cultists will be.
So to evaluate the arguments one must go further than looking at the fact that research takes money and the provenance of a researchers budget tends to correlate with their opinion on the issue. You have to take a look at the actual scientific merits of the work done.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
The endless repetition of fallacious arguments such as those referencing 'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not, is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method) by those on one side in particular stands out like a sore thumb. So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists. A real scientist in such a situation has no option but to go to the private corporations for funding or retire from the field entirely.
This doesnt mean either side is wrong. If you have multiple funding sources with multiple agendas, each is naturally going to tend to fund researchers that tend to support their agenda. The researchers themselves, if they are good scientists, will simply do the research properly and if it displeases their funding source they'll go to a different source who DID like their results for their next grant - this is much easier said than done, it's inconvenient at best, and runs the risk of failing and leaving the scientist and her family in deep difficulty, but still, if you want to be a scientist that's what you have to do.
If they're NOT good scientists, they'll just play ball and make sure that their reports favour the right side to avoid the issue. To see which one is happening in any individual case, there's no substitute for a critical review of the work itself. Simply correlating results with funding sources doesnt mean anything.
Frankly I dont doubt that human pollution is having and will continue to have consequences on the climate of the planet - I cant think of anyone that does. But that fact tells us nothing about whether the affect is large or small, beneficial or damaging, let alone what, if any, actions would actually moderate or reverse the affects (assuming that doing so is desirable.) Despite that global warming enthusiasts are constantly making policy prescriptions which, just coincidentally, always wind up being that we should do what environmental cultists have always wanted to do for their own religious reasons.
The logical conclusion is that these people are full of %*!&, particularly when they claim to be scientists (to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title,) and if they happen to be getting anything right in their predictions at all, it's an accident.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Ok, most comments are heavily critizising carbon credits, so, risking being bashed, I will write a little about the goods of carbon credits, from a perspective of a peruvian citizen. First, of course its not the ideal solution. Many in slashdot want either ideal or nothing. The best solution is for factories to stop polluting. However, in the real world, this is not currently achievable, as most of us continue to buy products that we ask those factories to make for us. Factories are just the intermediaries, we are the ones that demand more stuff. if you really want *factories* to stop polluting, *stop buying* their stuff, reduce, reuse, and recycle, and have less kids. That said, the Kyoto protocol is at least a starting point, which formalized the mechanism for carbon credits. its a way for factories to continue polluting, BUT with two new advantages: 1) Some countries now put a price on that pollution, and factories now must pay for that, or must reduce their pollution. The best incentive is always money. In Europe this does work. And 2) not only do they have to pay, but that money goes towards projects that are good for the environment. As an example, here in Peru where I live, its actually a good business to plant and maintain a forest, because we get $ from carbon credits. This would have been impossible before Kyoto, and I can tell you first-hand that nobody gives a crap here about forests unless they receive some money in exchange, and the government does nothing to stop deforestation, so its left to private business to do something. In fact our rainforest is being heavily devastated mostly by coca plantations that destroy it. At least the carbon credits offset that a little bit. Hopefully as the cost of a carbon credit goes up, so will the business of making and maintaining forests. I also have a lot of criticism for carbon credits, but nobody was saying what its good for, so I had to.
One doesnt need any particular knowledge of a given field to check whether or not fundamentals of scientific method are being applied and whether arguments are logical and supported or not.
Oh really? Are you competent to evaluate controversial issues in high-energy physics? Synthetic organic chemistry? Structural bioinformatics? Or is it only in regards to climatology where you think you have some magical insight which people who have worked and studied in the field for years lack?
'scientific consensus' (which, even if it did exist on this issue which it clearly does not,
A vast majority of the world's working climatologists isn't a consensus? I'm curious as to what you would consider constituting a consensus. 99%? 99.9%? Would you insist that there is no consensus so long as there is one dissenting voice, no matter how much of a crank that dissenter might be?
is still an entity with precisely ZERO place in the scientific method)
With regard to the methods of science, you're partly right -- obviously it's true that science isn't done by consensus, else no new science would ever be done at all. (I say "partly" because all scientists in the modern world build on the knowledge gained by their predecessors, and that knowledge is passed on by, yes, consensus in the field.) But with regard to the body of knowledge we call "science," you're dead wrong. Politicians aren't scientists. Lobbyists aren't scientists. Activists, as a rule, aren't scientists. Hell, when it comes to dealing with fields outside their expertise, scientists aren't scientists; my opinion as a bioinformatician is of absolutely no more import to the climatological debate than any other reasonably well-informed layman's, which is to say, not much. Which means that when it comes to setting policy based on science, it is the responsibility of those who do not work in the field to shut up and listen to those who do -- and when scientists in a particular field overwhelmingly agree, those outside the field have absolutely no credibility arguing with them.
So does the way that political control of funding is exploited to silence skeptical scientists. It is certainly true that most funding for skeptical scientific research on the subject comes from organisations that have a clear vested interest in minimising the issue - but equally clear this is a natural consequence when public funding is provisioned only to those researchers who play ball with the envirocultists.
Do you have any evidence for these statements? At all?
to be a scientist is to understand and implement the scientific method, not to wear a lab coat and have a 'sciencey' job title
To refer to "the scientific method" as though it were a single thing is to show that one's understanding of science is limited to half-remembered lessons from high-school "science class." And to imply, as you strongly do, that working scientists aren't really scientists because their results disagree with your politics is to show that you are an ideologue with no interest in science beyond how it can serve your agenda.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
No it isnt.
Which is why that phrase is one which only tends to come out of the mouths of people who can't distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey.'
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Why do people continue to link to the IPCC? When the scientists themselves continue to leave because data is being rubber stamped instead of being peer reviewed. My personal favorite is when scientists from different fields do research on non-specific areas and it's rubber stamped. Well I suppose it makes for good money, well that and it's lovely circus effect. We all love a good circus.
Lets not forget that global warming is an industry now, don't support it? You're not going to get tenure, funding and you're just going to be a broke sucker working out of your garage if you're lucky.
You want sources do your own research. It's out there, stop looking for the rubber stamps.
Om, nomnomnom...
The problem with this issue is that a great number of people fundamentally misunderstand the methodology of Science. The fact that so many have referenced "The Scientific Method" as if it is some sort of hard-and-fast rule that applies to the daily lives and work of research scientists in any field is quite telling. That notion is naive and absurd. The Scientific Method is merely a grade school-level thinking exercise meant to exemplify a systematic approach to understanding the world. Saying you can't trust the work of a scientist who doesn't follow the Scientific Method would be like saying "You can't run a football without an I formation." Neither of those statements makes any sense. The only difference is that most Americans know a thing or two about football and would laugh off the latter as sheer ignorance but, when it comes to the former, because they themselves are ignorant, they silently nod their heads in agreement.
This is the essence of the problem, the modern form of anti-intellectualism at its most narcissistic. To the poster, the "Scientific Body of Knowledge" is just an informal opinion poll of eggheads, so where should his opinion come in? And what do eggheads know anyway? Why, the problem is probably in their arithmetic somewhere... If only someone with commonsense, such as himself, were to look at it, they would spot error immediately, but he has better things to do. Climatologists should just go back to chasing butterflies in fields or whatever is they do and leave him and his way of life the hell alone.
-Grym