Carbon offsetting, and other accounting tricks
Carbon offsetting -and other accounting tricks.
The scariest thing about post-apocalyptic games such as The Last of Us II is not the zombies, not the senseless violence between humans, but rather the landscape. What is scary is how much closer we are to a world of hurricanes and floods that resembles a post-apocalyptic game.
In this article, we will talk about accounting , time, and entropy as a way to explore what the future might look like, and paths we can take to shape it and avert the worst environmental catastrophes of our time.
Consider the dimension of time. When you open a 3D software you can generate noise in 2D, 3D, or 4D. The fourth dimension is time, meaning it moves, it's based on pre-existing conditions and keeps evolving. Entropy means that it requires energy to reverse heat dissipation, the dissipation of gasses, or in more simple terms, if you throw a bag of sand or flour in your living room, it will take a lot of time to clean up the mess. We learn to voluntarily slow down when we carry things that have a potential for dissipation; water, sand, flour are either packed with a lid, or we move slowly to not spill it over. We spend time to avoid increasing the entropy; it took a lot of energy to take all the grains and grind it into flour, so it would be a double waste to have it spilled on the floor.
There is however, a few ways which humans unleash the power of entropy and time upon themselves on a daily basis. I am of course talking about greenhouse gases, mainly Co2 (carbon dioxide) and CH4 (methane).
If oil and gas were stored for million of years underground, that's great, it makes sense to put a tight lid on it.
The problem is that civilization developed by tapping little holes into these reservoirs, then oil companies lied to the public repeatedly about the risks. Not only did they blew up the lid, it's now leaking methane from open wells and pipes all over our pale blue dot known as the Earth.
Now obviously the hardcore denial is no longer trendy, and the oil industry therefore had to switch to delay tactics. Making your brand seem cleaner than it is (greenwashing) is how they went about it. The main source of greenwashing is carbon capture and storage, and offsetting by afforestation. Now don't get me wrong, we DO need to plant a shit-ton of trees. However it's extremely important to know why we're planting them, where, and what industrial behaviors are enabled by the concept of offsetting not being challenged repeatedly.
The idea is simple, pollute a little bit, clean up a little bit. Put a ton of carbon in the atmosphere, store a ton of carbon in soil or rock formations. The problem is that we're on so many levels comparing apples to oranges, or rather a fruit to a tree, which has completely different embedded time.
Here's why; The ideal methods of storage for that carbon is by definition right where it has been for the past millions of years, and any attempts to store it underground will be at best a downgrade from the lid that was there before. Promising carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects include for example converting it to solid waste so that the gas doesn't dissipate (it wants to, that's entropy), or making into bricks combined with lime rocks. All of these storage methods will give us at best 300 years before they leak. Everything breaks down, the earth's crust breaks down the slowest. So when we say a ton of carbon (global pollution) is "offset" by a carbon and capture project, what we're really doing is passing the hot potato along to the future generations, who in 300 years will have to deal with the problem again. If you take a bottle of butane and let some gas out, there's no way you will be able to compress it back into the bottle, it's dissipated and left your house trough the windows (even if they're closed) within minutes, sometimes seconds. We're comparing 300 years band aid to a high quality million-years storage. The answer is obvious; keep.it.in.the.ground!
The classic explanation for entropy is a pool of water, with clear water on one side, and colorful, dense ink on the other side. There is a gap in-between, and we can slide that gap out and we see that within a closed system, the entropy will increase, meaning the two liquids will mix until they become impossible to separate. Oil spills methane leaks interact with the atmosphere in the same way. When the oil industry instead of plugging old wells, decide to open new ones, they're removing the gap between ink and water. The added co2 will stay in the atmosphere for 3000 years and we don't have storage methods guaranteed to work for that long.
So what do we do? Plant trees, right? Sure, but not trees to enable waste, it's very important. Trees use the law of large numbers to reproduce, most nuts from a chestnut fail to grow, one out 1000 survives and ever becomes a mature tree. Similarly one out of many forests will still be there 3 millenias from now. The number of old growth forests today is rapidly dwindling, and I don't know what makes you think this will somehow get better over time without unprecedented action. Yet even if humanity decides to get together and never again log an old growth forest such that the carbon sink can get deeper, there are still the increased hurricanes and wildfires that are threatening (for example) sequoias in California. Existing co2 and methane gets us at 1.1 degrees of warming at the time of writing this article in 2022
Source: europa.eu global temperatures.
Greenhouse effect means more wildfires, but also more energy in the system, which in a closed system (earth's gravity well) means more rapid mixing of hot and cold zones, ie tornadoes and hurricanes system forming more often. The law of large number is not working in favor of forests -at all. To make matters worse, if the trees are planted in boreal region, the albedo effect of tree's dark foliage even contributes to an earlier melting of snow (which is albedo 0.9) compared to tundra. Oops.
Source: Norsk Polar institute.
Note: Afforestation as a climate solution is not a bad idea though, for example expanding and restoring mangroves in tropical regions has many environmental and economic benefits. mangroves grow fast and can tolerate sea water while providing heating and insulating material.
Art by Harry H. Johnston, 1906
To make matters worse, we're also double-counting in so many places because everyone wants to pat themselves on the back (me included). As an investor in sustainable shipping for example, I could claim I decarbonized my airplane travel (which I should minimize, yup), but the ship operators will claim the same thing, and so will the clients, and maybe even the customers of the products in the end. The order of magnitude is way off, especially as we get down the logistics chain. Everyone wants to feel good and claim to have done the decarbonization work. But with half of my savings invested in regenerative agriculture and green shipping, I know I've got a lifetime of work ahead of me still.
All of this points to a social moment when we collectively decide that blowing up the lid of geological gas storage in the 2020's is a nonsense idea. Some countries already reached that point, while others seemingly compete at being the worst possible partners on this spaceship we call Earth. As more countries reach this point, there will be more supply chain shortages. If we're idealistic, this is a good thing; we should not be hauling things with gas-powered vehicles all across the globe, we can consume resources locally, use products made in your city, in your region, etc. If we're materialists however, it's a disaster as millions if not billions of people are kept in a state of dependence to this supply chain. So the urgent need is to decarbonize and decouple standards of living from fossil fuels. This means giving the land back to the communities who can best steward it into the most troubled era, often times indigenous nations who have already survived an apocalypse or two.
"climate change will never affect me in my lifetime" A 20-something years old Lyft driver said to me in 2019.
Additional sources: Understanding climate change