I wrote about how Trump is making America's terrible biofuel policies even worse - and how most Democrats and environmentalists are too afraid to fight back. @canarymedia.com www.canarymedia.com/articles/foo...
"Finding the ways that work"
Earlier this week, AB 1911 passed the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, which amended the bill to create a rebuttable defense (rather than an automatic defense).
But don't be fooled.
A rebuttable defense that applies to the entire carbon crediting industry is a massive loophole.
Assembly Bill 1911, from California Assembly Member Chris Rogers, would provide an affirmative defense to any buyer of carbon credits from:
1. California's offsets program;
2. The airline industry CORSIA program; and
3. **Any** third-party standard that meets standard industry practices.
Climate policy and consumer protection update:
The Environmental Defense Fund is promoting a bill in California that would practically eliminate greenwashing liability for carbon-credit buyers.
They are also making the same arguments in court.
Long-term studies are vital to understanding how species and ecosystems are responding to climate change and other environmental stressors, but difficult to sustain under typical short-term grant cycles. LTER has been funding these since 1980.
This is breaking something that can’t be replaced.
The biggest problem with the food system is that it is no longer a *food* system.
More than half the calories we grow on croplands aren't food; they're lost in inefficient feedlots or to biofuels.
Project Drawdown scientists highlight this disturbing trend:
sentientmedia.org/more-crops-g...
Ahh, thanks for that detail. I couldn’t remember how or why but that tracks.
I don't mean to suggest they all do it differently, just that there really isn't a mechanism for coordination or consistency in implementation. Some states and NGOs were working on that, funded in part by federal money (if memory serves), but that was in The Before Times™ — not sure if it continues.
Not off the top of my head, I’d have to look it up. Also note that every state that has an inventory (and I think most do now thanks to IRA-era funding?) implements things differently.
please forgive Dave, he is from the south and knows not the manners of his northern neighbors
errr …
gonna sidestep this and clarify I mean I think I'm de jure 🇨🇦 and not (merely?) de facto 🍁 Canadian
speaking of which, I think I might be Canadian?
like it's not specifically related to this show, and I wasn't even aware of it when I first started watching it, but … you know, in retrospect it makes a lot of sense
Yeah. I think we should have policies that target individuals sectors or strageties. It's okay to have CO2e when it's ancillary to a goal, and it's necessary to capture the full spectrum of some impacts. But when optimizing for CO2e is economically encouraged (e.g., in markets) you can get problems.
Tradeoffs. I get the case for broader coverage of sectors, and the benefit of capturing other GHGs that are ancillary to fossil fuel combustion. But go too far, and one encourages mitigation of short-lived GHGs at the expense of slower/less mitigation of CO2.
Appreciate all your good work and especially the years of writing for Real Climate, which taught me so much in grad school (and continues to be useful for me).
I am very confident that there are lots of real-world examples where CO2e calculations justify more CO2 in the world than would be the case if CH4 offsets were not considered fungible in CO2e terms. That's bad!
I also agree we should cut CH4 wherever and whenever possible, that's great!
I don't think the problem needs to show up in national inventories in order for it to be a significant issue and a misallocation of (overly scarce) resources.
Frankly, very few policy instruments show up in jurisdictional GHG inventories, which are highly uncertain as a general rule.
I guess I'm not sure what specific concern you're trying to evaluate.
I see the problem @climatebook.bsky.social identifies manifest regularly at the scale of individual policies and corporate actors. I think that's highly relevant.
I don't see it manifest in jurisdictional inventories.
Policy practice is even harder because with offsetting practices, typically the CH4 reduction is external to the inventory setting, while the CO2 trends are internal.
And again, in mitigation frameworks, one typically expects a reduction in CO2 reductions (rather than a net increase).
One nuance to add is that policy incentives typically reduce the rate of CO2 emission reductions in exchange for greater CH4 reductions.
I'm not aware of any examples where at the level of a jurisdictional inventory CO2 goes up but CO2e goes down due to CH4/SLCP mitigation.
There was a huge risk that the Biden administration might have adopted California's emissions accounting for avoided methane crediting, which would have allowed new fossil steam methane reformation (H2 production) to claim zero CO2e emissions through methane offsets. Worst case was mostly avoided.
Sure, California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard is my favorite example.
There are plenty of individual examples where companies claim to offset ongoing fossil CO2 emissions with CH4 offsets.
Methane offsets. They are common in mitigation policies at the international, national, and subnational levels.
I completely take your point that CH4 reductions are unalloyed goods. But in policy practice, CH4 reductions are often offered with permission to continue or even increase CO2 emissions.
That's an understatement! I'm sure this one is already on her list, but if not, please have her take a close look.
Long story short, carbon accounting assumptions are often inconsistent with physical climate science / global carbon budgets.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
hey thanks! (+ please call me Danny, we are Internet Friends™)
yeah I am all about the biogenic accounting loopholes these days, will hopefully have some writing on that soon
here's a gem of a paper that explains some history www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Have been meaning to find time to develop a peer-reviewed manuscript, if anyone knows any other climate mitigation philosophers out there :)
Small aside: a lot of the problematic approaches to equating temporary carbon storage with the near-permanent harms of CO2 pollution are similar to multi-gas GWP issues. Tonne-year accounting is just GWP applied to temporary carbon scenarios.
I did a little here. My big takeaway is that people are conflating *economic* equivalence arguments (e.g., discounting, where one can be internally consistent) and *physical* equivalence arguments (which are generally false).
carbonmarketwatch.org/publications...
We are still feeling the effects of some of the carbon dioxide from the Titanic, from the first Model-T, from the first steam engine. This chart is the most important chart in climate policy and yet most folks don’t know about it. Carbon dioxide is forever.