How does that work in practical reality so it doesn't just turn into a money making scheme with no real impact akin to Catholic indulgences?
> Also, it's a little bit rich to listen to any sort of climate talk from anyone in cold countries¹. They emit so much carbon just to be warm. Well, I don't, because I live in California.
How many emissions in the US come from the use of AC and heating due to basically zero federal building standards for energy efficiency? [0]
Afaik AC is generally considered way more inefficient, heating can be captured as a side-product from a lot of processes, cooling not so much.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328701132_A_compari...
As a matter of policy? Universal carbon-tax with increasing fee schedules. Everyone pays for their carbon emissions. The sum is then distributed back to everyone evenly as a Green Dividend minus admin costs. Net zero cash to the government, whopping undirected green energy subsidy possible by tuning amounts. It already worked for Sulphur Dioxide.
As a matter of personal preference? Well, I get nothing from this except the right to brag I'm carbon negative so really it could totally be equivalent to indulgences. As it so happens I do care to be doing my part, but you're right in that there's no incentive for that.
> How many emissions in the US come from the use of AC and heating due to basically zero federal building standards for energy efficiency?
Right, but I live in California and have no AC.
You are in denial about the destruction you do. No, you can't offset emissions. A single short flight will release as much as 400kg CO2 to the atmosphere. This amount of carbon was bound by huge forests about millions of years. It is not possible to undo that release by planting a tree. Ask a geologist if you do not believe me.
And I am not saying it is not good to protect forests. Of course it is. But if you have any rational choice between offsetting and not flying, offsetting and flying, not offsetting, not flying -- not flying is always the best option.
Coal is just carbon that is in the ground. Grow a tree, convert most of it back to carbon, and bury it. Roman-era technology.
This is completely tractable, the fact that we aren't doing enough of it is a matter of will, not feasibility.
If any planting even happens; trees for CO2 whitewashing is like the perfect scam opportunity because nobody cares if you deliver.
Of course, you still have to discount but it makes things much more feasible.
That's why you usually don't plant trees. You can do other stuff that wouldn't otherwise get done.
Chemically, it is the same. The difference between CO2 bound in coal or oil to the CO2 bound in a tree is that the former would very probably remain bound for millions of years while the carbon bound in a tree will, with an overwhelming probability, will be released back in the atmosphere when the tree dies and its organic matter decomposes. And this will also happen if you bury the tree in the ground. It might not happen if you make charcoal from the tree and place the coal thousands of meters under the ground, where no oxygen is present. But this process is itself so energy-intensive, and therefore carbon-intensive, that it will not reach a net reduction of carbon.
Yes, in the case of a tree, it is theoretically possible that a vanishingly small fraction of the carbon it contains gets fossilized. But, there are at least two major problems.
Fossilization is very, very, very rare, and it is very, very, very slow. Told plainly, it normally does not happen.
The first is that you would have to plant so many trees that you would retain, as an extremely small fraction of the biomass of the tree, the amount of carbon released by your flight in geological deposits. This would take millions of trees and also millions of years, and is clearly infeasible. Nobody is even promising that, and suggesting that by planting a tree you could bury carbon permamently is just self-deception by people who buy such schemes.
And by that account, carbon-offsetting is just a scam. You pay money to extract the carbon you released by taking the plane from the atmosphere, but you can't permanently extract the carbon you released, at least not at a price that anyone is actually going to pay. It is a scam.
> Coal is just carbon that is in the ground. Grow a tree, convert most of it back to carbon, and bury it.
There is another factor which I find at times even more shocking. You suggested trees as a means to bind carbon. In fact, the fossil fuel from your plane flight is from oil and this is in large parts formed from marine sediments, also formed over geological times. What can be formed from trees is coal. Now, much of the large coal deposites we used today were formed in the carboniferous geologicial period, which was 358 million years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
Now, the thing is that the geological conditions in which these coal deposits were formed do not exist any more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal
Basically, trees use lignin. At this time, lignin was something new on our Earth and there were no fungi which could decompose lignin, so the biomass of the trees could not decompose. Only later, lignin-eating fungi evolved.
That means that these coal deposits can never be re-created, even over a time of millions of years.
But that's hardly necessary. I can just pay you the minimum necessary to get you to shift off fossil and I make some good savings.
Air travel is easily replaceable by low-carbon alternatives that exist today. When you do the accounting of carbon offsetting/carbon sinks capacity, it becomes quite obvious everything unnecessary must go.
Intercontinental and cross continental travel are a bit harder to replace with low carbon alternatives.
Europe has a functional high speed rail system due to its high population density, but the distances between some city pairs in the are hard to replace with rail or other low carbon alternatives. Think of Los Angeles to NYC, or San Francisco to Paris.
Many of these flights could be replaced by video conferencing, but if one really has to travel that distance, rail is a hard sell. It's not unpleasant to take Amtrak across the continent, but it's not fast either.
2) Again, fast travel across the globe is a luxury, not a necessity. More than 80% of the world's population has never been near an airplane.
And that's for a single pair of cities, with no cost overruns, no tunnels, straight line distance. It also excludes things like stations, rolling stock, and maintenance.
It's not impossible to build, but having high speed rail throughout the US is an investment that would be a multiple of the costs of building the entire interstate highway system.
Mind you, I'd love it if that were to happen, riding high speed rail is much more pleasant than flying. Speaking as someone who has gone across the continent a few times on Amtrak and enjoyed riding high speed trains in Asia and Europe, it's just hard to see it happening. Recent US infrastructure projects have had massive cost overruns, and there is a seemingly low political appetite for building large infrastructure compared to the 20th century.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/764486/cost-construction...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+between+los+a...
Great, that's about 2 thirds of the yearly US defense budget! You have the workforce, the discipline, and as a bonus the defense industry can be repurposed for building rails and trains. Once the transition is achieved, you can build such a line every year at no added cost to the taxpayer.
(I know, that's completely unrealistic... it shows the priorities of the US government...)
But much of it is either for leisure or can be replaced by videoconferencing while saving money.
Regarding leisure, it might feel great to do fast intercontinental travel. But realistically, it is not something which will make you a happy person. Most people who are living today could not afford that luxury and are still living a happy life. Maybe even happier than the average American if their culture is a bit less materialistic.
In the light that it is going to devastate our planet, travel for leisure is not necessary at all.
All of which will be released again when the oak dies.
Net effect: Zero.
Heating is a large factor in emissions but if you fly several times a year, it is without doubt the largest source of emissions.
I'm having a hard time understanding this sentence.
Also, it's a little bit rich to listen to any sort of climate talk from anyone in cold countries¹. They emit so much carbon just to be warm. Well, I don't, because I live in California.
¹ Between 14% and 30% of total emissions are from heating in Germany for instance https://www.bmu.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Klimasch...