I think the distinction you're overlooking is marginal price vs true price. It could easily be the case that reducing carbon on the margins is cheap.

Going from 100% of current levels to 99% may involve giving up some very low value activity. Especially because in most of the world the cost of carbon emissions is zero to begin with. But going from 1% to 0% could be extraordinarily costly, because it involves the highest value usage of carbon.

Another way to think about it is that carbon offsets may be very cheap, because so few people buy them. If the practice became more widespread, either because of social norms or government regulation, then the demand could easily push up the price to where it does become a significant cost.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-foc...

In other words, if the whole world were trying to offset its carbon emissions, the price per offset would rise dramatically.

Say now the reason people still burn coal is because it's cheap and you can offset it cheaply, once offestting becomes more expensive, you may as well spend the same total amount, but buy green energy instead of coal+an offest.

I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700.

A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For this cohort, it simply doesn't matter what the math says.

I have to add though, while carbon taxes would have challenges to implement, adding a carbon tax to fuel specifically is not hard to measure at all! We know exactly how much carbon is in the fuel. A $40/ton carbon tax means +$0.36 per gallon of gasoline.

P.S. The US federal fuel tax ($0.18) was last increased in 1993, and was not indexed to inflation.

Now don't get me wrong, I am in favor of carbon taxing as it's probably one of the best tools we have to fight climate change. But the only way something like this is going to see widespread approval is if all of the proceeds are guaranteed to be paid back to the people and not disappear into the ether of government bureaucracy.

Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or cleaner-burning cooking gases. Prices are as low as 10-15 USD per tonne of CO2.

If we ever make a serious attempt to decarbonize the entire economy, we will run out of cheap/easy options and be forced to make harder, more expensive tradeoffs.

Yeah, that the trick. To put it boldly: What they offer is not sustainable. This means that these green initiatives hide the real price of CO2 or at least give a very wrong impression.

Well asymptocially it is. And then the real intersting stuff happens, because economy becomes aligned.

> But currently there's still an absolute glut of fairly-cheap CO2 reduction methods that just aren't being done, or wouldn't be done without the offset pricing, so it's still a net benefit to do them.

There also is a net harm if people get the wrong impression of what the real cost of CO2 is.

Like you can fund an already-built wind turbine plant - the capital is already built, so even without your funding this is going to stay open...

But even if we forget that, the people buying energy from these plants will be buying a 'green megawatt' - so surely that means each megawatt will have been both offset and sold as 'green energy'?

And then to add to that - these power plants are also claimed against national emission reduction targets (at least the one in Indonesia is) and were actually built as part of a government fund - so then it's kind of triple-counting too!

(i.e. well for every green megawatt we sell, the company we sell it to gets to say they have a green megawatt, the offset company gets to say that they offset a megawatt, and the government gets to say it's generated 1 megawatt of green energy! In reality no actual carbon was saved other than the government intervention)

Contraception.

The poor people by definition are resource strapped and will use any means of energy available, just for different purpose.

On the cynical side: clean water -> less mortality -> more population -> more carbon use to sustain said population.

Wealth is a far larger source of pollution than life.

It's both. Wealth drives down the birth rate (as does empowerment and higher education of women [1]), but it also drives up the rate of pollution [2]. You need "Clean Wealth" (high quality of life with low or zero CO2 emissions, pollution, etc) if you want lower birth rates (which we do, we're on track to hit 10 billion people by the end of the century) and less pollution.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=chart&xScale=li...

Way I see it, any help or financial aid to 3rd world countries (with high birth rates) needs to be coupled with comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives that is overseen by independent 1st world entities such as the WHO with the intent on lowering mortality rates and birth rates. And if these countries' birth rates don't start following a downward trajectory after a short period, then stop giving fancy aid and switch to bare-bones humanitarian aid. Seems way better than "lending" them the money they need and then making them dependent on the 1st world in perpetuity.

Starts to sound a lot like eugenics.

All the evidence suggests that if you raise standards of living and give women control of their own fertility, then birth rates drop naturally (and fairly rapidly). Turns out, when given the choice, most women prefer to have one or two children. This trend has been replicated across (all?) developed countries with very different cultures.

There's no reason to believe the kind of coercion you're proposing is necessary, if you could even justify it ethically.

"comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives"

You make it sound like like I'm saying people need to be forced to use contraceptives. Guess the phrasing is not great. Maybe 'program' would have been better? But the mandatory modifier was on the drive/program, not the usage of contraceptives.

If you were serious about a programme like this, you should at least phrase it in terms of carrots, not sticks: if you embrace feminism, educate and empower your female citizens, we'll reward that with increased foreign direct investment.

The flight in question was a roughly 1500 km + 1500 km = 3000 km roundtrip. I remember the airline offered to make my flight CO₂-neutral for about €20 or so. ICAO's emissions calculator [1] put my total contributed CO₂ emissions at about 280 kg. An economically very very inefficient baseline for counteracting CO₂ emissions is just extracting it from the air and storing it [2]. This is hard and expensive because the concentrations are so low in the atmosphere in general (away from emissions sources), but even in that case, numbers from pilot projects come out at $94-$232/ton [3]. Taking the optimistic estimate, that would mean my emissions could be undone for as little as roughly $26. Things seem to work out in roughly the right ballpark.

Of course the airline doesn't use direct air capture for this offsetting, but I looked into it and seem to recall the money going to sane projects. Another comment points out some of the much lower-hanging targets for emissions reductions out there, and they are of course much more effective per buck spent than direct air capture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438

[1] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture

[3] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

I think you can probably trace that information source back to someone who makes their money pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Committed is not the same is doing. Everyone was more "committed" for Kyoto too.

Consider: if you don't do that, you're emitting a lot of CO2. You could wait until everyone upgrades to electric cars but it takes several decades for the vehicle fleet to turn over, so even if everyone started buying nothing but electric now, it would take decades to phase out the old vehicles. And they're not all buying electric cars now. So on the kind of timescales that governments are making these "commitments" the only way to stop people driving petrol powered cars, given how useful they are, would be to seize and destroy them.

As for why they're committing to it, well, they still think academic models are accurate for COVID and are acting as if that's true. Climatology is mostly a modelling based discipline. 2+2 = ...

Given that electric cars require new factories and supply chains to scale up, the chances of this being achieved by 2030 is minimal. Not only can't the cars be built fast enough short of some Manhattan-style program (very expensive for all but tiny countries), but neither can the factories that build the cars.

And this evades the whole question of people who like or want ICE vehicles for whatever reason.

I bet this is something that isn't regulated properly so we have Airlines straight up misleading customers about how much offsetting does cost.

For one, yeah, those offsetting companies calculate very generously. E.g. I once looked a bit into this and they make arguments like "we don't consider construction of the airport, because it's already there". The calculations for the offsets are also often calculated very generously, e.g. they often use the same mechanisms as the so-called Clean Development mechanism (which is part of the european emission trading system), which is known to overcalculate savings enormously.

The other thing is they offset things the cheapest way possible. That works as long as there are cheap ways to save carbon. It doesn't scale.

https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...

[1]https://www.lufthansa.com/am/en/offset-flight [2] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/...