(Roughly) Daily

… So what we do and how we do it matters. Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain warn that one of the most popular current approaches is unfair and could be a dead end…

Carbon offsetting injects market logic into thin air. It demands that certain activities become measured and standardized, reduced to the single dimension of the carbon dioxide molecule. The goal is fungibility—to assert equivalence between activities by people or environments so that emissions created over here can be traded and (theoretically) compensated for by actions removing or reducing carbon over there. The means is, of course, commodification. Offsets privatize planetary metabolism.

Offsetting is the logic behind “net zero.” “Think about it like a bath,” suggests National Grid. “The amount of water in the bath depends on both the input from the taps and the output via the plughole. To keep the amount of water in the bath at the same level, you need to make sure that the input and output are balanced.” Or, as McKinsey & Company puts it: “Net zero is an ideal state where the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the earth’s atmosphere is balanced by the amount of greenhouse gasses removed.”

Policymakers and corporations around the world have embraced the concept of net zero as a pathway to address the climate crisis. Nation states, corporations, public institutions, and even art exhibitions purchase offsets as financial assets (called carbon credits) in an attempt to compensate for their emissions and reach a state of carbon neutrality. Traded as financial commodities on carbon markets, offsets are supposed to represent either carbon dioxide reductions—via avoided emissions that would have otherwise happened in a business-as-usual scenario—or carbon dioxide removals—where some of the carbon already hanging about in the atmosphere is drawn down. Offsetting projects range from tree planting and conservation to changes in energy infrastructures, jet engine cleaning schemes, and programs for reducing methane emissions from cows. The carbon fluxes produced by offsetting projects are measured, quantified, priced, abstracted, and finally sold via carbon registries to emitters looking to claim a lower carbon footprint. What is counted as an offsetting project, however, and what is not, is left to the discretion of these registries.

The assumption underpinning offsets is that paying to compensate for emissions creates a powerful economic incentive for emissions reductions. In practice, however, it risks doing exactly the opposite. The logic of offsetting suggests that carbon intensive activities can continue as long as someone else, somewhere else, cleans up the mess…

Lavigne and Brain recount the history of the offset and explore it in practice, exposing its failings; they then turn to possible remediation…

… To foster an appreciation for some of these oversights—what current carbon markets are not counting—we have built a more inclusive carbon registry. We have developed new methodologies for how political actions that contribute to a program of carbon savings and radical change can be counted, measured, and transformed into offsets. What if we were to take the proposal of net zero seriously and apply carbon accounting to a wider range of human activities?

Our first carbon offsetting methodology, titled “Industrial Sabotage as Temporary Carbon Storage,” enables actions by groups like Blockade Australia, Water Protectors, and the Tyre Extinguishers to be analyzed with a carbon counting technique that was originally developed by the forestry industry. Called “temporary carbon storage,” this method provides a way of calculating the carbon benefit of delaying the release of emissions, like the harvest of a plantation forest. Although this approach has never before been used to calculate the benefits of production delays caused by activists who block fossil fuel infrastructures from producing emissions, we have rigorously undertaken this work, holding ourselves to the same standards as the offsetting industry. A marketplace for the resultant carbon credits is under development, where all proceeds will be donated back to support the groups responsible for these actions.

A second methodology further explores the carbon savings of sabotage and efforts to slow productivity. “Time Theft as Avoided Emissions” quantifies the carbon savings of immobilizing corporate executives working in the energy and extraction industries We applied this approach in a new offsetting project titled Cold Call, in which participants are invited to work in a call center and make calls to distract the oil and gas executives from their jobs for as long as possible.

To return to the words of [Australian activist] Max Curmi, sabotage reveals a system functioning exactly as it is meant to:

[The system] is actually not broken. It’s performing exactly the way it was set up … For the climate movement to actually start to engage with this in an effective way we have to acknowledge the situation that we are currently facing. It’s not a couple of bad politicians or a couple of bad corporations, it’s an entire economic and legal framework that prevents change from happening and that locks in an extraction-based economy that is fundamentally about exploiting people and the environment for as much profit as possible for the rich…

Eminently worth reading in full: “All that is Air Melts into Air,” from @sam_lavigne and @tegabrain.

Pair with: “Words Versus Words, Fire with Fire” on climate change denial (and deflection) propaganda and how to counter it.

* Barack Obama

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As we ruminate on remediation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that the term “global warming” appeared for the first time in print, with the publication of Wallace Smith Broecker’s paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in the journal Science. 

Five years earlier, in 1970, Broecker, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, published a study of ocean sediment cores that revealed the Ice Age had seen rapid transitions in its Broecker argued that there was an increasingly likely scenario for this to happen: the ongoing rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide content created by fossil fuel emissions would soon begin to warm the planet, in turn warming surface waters in the ocean and melting ice into fresh water. This would reduce the waters’ density, thereby preventing cold water from sinking, altering ocean currents and effectively shutting off the conveyor belt. If that were to happen, he postulated, Europe would grow cooler as it did during the Ice Age. The more disruptive effect would come from unpredictable “on-and-off flickers” in global temperature. As Broecker put it in 1998, “the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”

Broecker built on this discovery in his 1975 paper, which hypothesized that the Ice Age’s rapid fluctuations had been caused by changes in “thermohaline circulation”: the ocean currents and wind systems that move heat from the equator up north towards the poles and transport cold water toward the equator. Broecker later named this the “Great Ocean Conveyor.” He believed that rapid changes in climate were once again possible if this conveyor belt were changed or “turned off.”…

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