The second climate outcome: protecting natural carbon sinks, while fostering biodiversity and wildlife and supporting the communities that live in and around them.įor this we need “protection credits.” They would give credit for preventing the release of one metric ton of carbon from an existing natural sink. Building the right incentives around reduction credits could direct money where it is most needed to help transform global infrastructure from fossil to clean. The countries that have done the least to cause climate change are already the most damaged by its impacts and have the least resources to develop a resilient low-carbon infrastructure. However, reduction credits can help reduce overall fossil-fuel-related emissions by funding clean infrastructure, especially in the Global South. What’s more, because these are typically cheap (less than $20 dollars a metric ton), they can be a license to keep polluting-a company can be tempted to just buy a load of credits rather than investing in reducing its own emissions. These are cheap ways for a company or organization to to claim “carbon neutrality,” by essentially funding the reduction of someone else’s greenhouse gas emissions.īut from a climate perspective this has only a partial effect if I emit a metric ton of CO2, and pay someone not to emit their ton, my ton is still in the air. This is the world of many traditional offsets-converting cookstoves from coal to solar or developing a wind power plant to replace one burning coal. This June, The Clean Energy Regulator released a press release that said Macintosh and his colleagues did not present robust evidence of a lack of integrity in the system and that they based their analysis on incomplete data.Reduction credits involve figuring out how much CO2 is going to be emitted by someone burning fossil fuels, then paying them not to do it. The second problem they saw was that the Clean Energy Regulator had too many roles and was possibly conflicted, and called for other agencies to take its role to advise the government and prepare carbon generation methods.Īnd finally, they said the current model that estimates how much CO2 was stored in regenerating forests was not accurate and that it could lead to overestimation of emissions cuts. The first one, they said, was that the legislation overseeing carbon offsets did not guarantee high integrity standards for all methods to create carbon credits. While both parties in the joint statement supported the use of carbon offsets, they found three “fundamental problems” with the current system. “We don’t agree with it all, but we agree with a lot.” “We’ve agreed with a lot of the criticisms and we were on the record on most of this stuff before,” he said. However, he said the company agrees there are measurement and integrity issues with the current system. James Schultz, Co-founder and CEO of GreenCollar, said the organization did not agree on that and that their projects regrowing forests in cleared areas brought real emissions cuts. Macintosh, an environment law and policy professor who used to lead the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, said the carbon credits scheme was “largely a sham.” Earlier this year, industry leaders that profit from the carbon system in Australia also spoke out in support of expert analysis that said the country is generating meaningless credits that result in increased emissions.
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