Comment by c7b
1 day ago
How would non-permanent credits even work? You purchase the carbon-offset option on a flight, a tree gets planted somewhere, ten years later it burns in a wildfire. Then what?
1 day ago
How would non-permanent credits even work? You purchase the carbon-offset option on a flight, a tree gets planted somewhere, ten years later it burns in a wildfire. Then what?
I suggest an adjusted value taking burn into account. E.g. you use 20% or whatever of the value. Theory: it ain't 0 if you plant a tree and it is not the whole tree. There has to be a % that represents on average the effectiveness of the plant over 200 years say.
This also addresses the tree death issue.
So 20% of the trees get planted later or maybe never? How is that better?
If you want a credit you need to plant 5x the trees under this system.
Then the area should have to be replanted without granting new credits. It's perfectly natural that trees die and are replaced by new ones in a forest. The unusual thing is just the entire forest dying at the same time.
Yes, it would be very unusual for an "entire forest" to die off, because forest fires are a natural phenomenon, and many plants and animals can survive fires, sometimes becoming more resilient afterwards.
Pyrophilic species can even benefit from forest fires with reproduction being triggered by them.
It would also be quite unusual for accountant teams to follow individual trees around throughout their lifecycle, ticking little boxes when they die or something, in order to follow through on carbon credits. Think about this realistically.
Sure, the point is that carbon credits are issued for a certain area of land to be and stay forested.
You claim a new tree on your insurance.
Yet another problem of carbon credits. Just an accounting trick which ignores reality. Reality is catching up either way, even if it’s not convenient in excel.
Here's the thing you missed: "A tree gets planted".
There's no guarantee that a tree planted to "offset" a flight will grow to any kind of maturity, let alone survive three months. Some saplings just die.
Or maybe that tree got planted in a tree plantation for timber, or wood pulp, and 20 years later, it's framing timber or newsprint.
(I am someone who does revegetation projects and have planted a large number of trees)
If the program works as advertised (big if), the money should flow into projects like yours, with the success rate that those projects generally have. So far ok I'd say. Just pointing out that trying to adjust for fires would tie up capital and create a whole new layer of middlemen. Whatever you think of those programs in the first place, that doesn't sound like an improvement to me.