The Problem With Carbon-Cutting Programs

Med-trump writes "Alberta's $60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: 'the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure — and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question.'"

Comments

Offsets are problematic

[Goonie]

For those that don't bother to read TFA, the one-sentence summary is that "offsets", where rather than paying the tax companies pay for credits obtained for emission-cutting programs in agriculture or in developing countries, are often dubious because the "offsets" are not properly audited and often just pay for activities that would have occurred anyway without the subsidy This is relatively easy to fix. Just tighten up the rules on offsets. It doesn't damn emissions trading in general.

Re:Offsets are problematic

[SoftwareArtist]

Here is what the article actually says about it:

What are the problems with the credit methods?

Lax verification for carbon-offset projects has been a problem for several schemes. For the credit-creating projects to be effective at reducing overall greenhouse-gas emissions, the scheme operators are supposed to approve only projects that would otherwise not have gone ahead. The auditor-general criticized the Alberta Department of Environment and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.

The Alberta report found a lack of standards for how agricultural credits were verified — not one of the credits the auditors checked could be confirmed. It also pointed out that there was no standardized, accurate method for measuring the emissions from oil-sands tailing ponds, which store contaminated water, clay, sand and bitumen from oil-sands processing.

Many opponents of emissions trading programmes also argue that companies are likely to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions by adopting new technologies or changing their operating practices.

Re:Alberta tar sands

[compro01]

Dirtiest source??! I'd say they'd have to work really hard to be dirtier than deep sea drilling has been.

Oil sands extraction produces massive quantities of contaminated (lead, arsenic, mercury, ammonia, naphthenic acids, and other fun things) water which is stored in tailings "ponds" (they're really more like lakes) which currently cover about 170 square kilometers.

Re:It's Alberta...

[schnikies79]

You can do a fractional distillation on crude and separate it into it's various types, tar, diesel, octane, propane, etc. You can also take long chains and "crack" them (break the chains) and create more of whatever you want, as long as it has a smaller chain.

Most refineries crack now and can get up to 50% octane from a barrel of oil. Without cracking it is less than 10%.

Re:Alberta tar sands

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Alberta and I can assure you that tailings ponds are still in use.

Re:Alberta tar sands

[Rary]

We don't use tailings ponds anymore.

Bullshit. The Government of Alberta's own tar sands propaganda site backs up GPs claim of 170 square kilometers of tailings ponds— that's about two Manhattans. It goes on to state that "(e)fforts continue to develop new tailings performance criteria, management technologies and practical solutions to reduce and potentially eliminate tailings ponds as we know them today." Still, tailings ponds are expected to expand to about 250 square kilometers— almost three Manhattans— by 2020.