UKH

Carbon offsetting - saving the planet or total bollocks?

Like it says. I don't accept the Green ideology that we shouldn't offset because we should be wearing hair shirts. At the same time I wonder about its efficacy.

Any opinions on whether to offset or not.

In reply to Removed User:

I think its questionable whether to direct your moey to somebody like BA or UPS or somebody else. They are almost bound to have an admin charge which they keep before passing the cost on.So I reckon it is a scam is in the making.

Give it direct to somebody like World Land Trust

In reply to Removed User:

Offsetting is fine in principle, however you need to be aware that your pollution is here and now, and whatever you fund is unlikely to sequester the carbon for some time.. years if not decades, probably. 

In reply to Removed User:

The market in carbon credits is almost endlessly creative

In reply to Removed User:

It makes polluters feel good.

In reply to Removed User:

There's little to no evidence that offsetting does any good at all. Compared to scientific facts, I occasionally wonder at the usefulness of terms like 'hair shirt' and 'ideology' when talking about climate change, BTW.

One could switch 'hair shirt' for 'compassionate reduction in environmental footprint'... 

In New Scientist recently, I read that if left to their own devices, people only generally do about as half as much as what is thought to be needed on an individual level, meaning that 'nudges' and incentives will need to be incorporated into society.

In reply to Removed User:

Our only green MP was saying almost the opposite in the TV news yesterday.  We should focus on political change that makes a real differemce and individuals should not be shamed for their choices (but should try and improve). 

In reply to Removed User:

I'm slightly sceptical. Offsetting by investing in renewables is probably best. The main point to remember is that carbon is stored in pools and the size of these pools effects climate (along with other factors). By far the largest pool is the lithosphere, i.e all carbon stored in rocks such as coal and oil as well as limestone. This is the long term storage pool and could be thought of as the planets tool in regulating it's own temperature. The smallest pool is the short term storage of the atmosphere and biosphere, i.e living organisms, soil and atmosphere.

Even though soils and plants do store carbon it is recycled through these systems relatively quickly. So therefore, it seems a massive mistake to keep shortcutting the system by taking carbon from a large stable pool and adding it to the pool which directly affects the climate and the ability for evolved life to survive on it.

Tree planting will only slow the problem, really the carbon needs to go back where it came from. 

In reply to Removed User:

I'd have to do quite a lot of carbon offsetting if I had loads of kids. For example perhaps an extra five full lifetimes worth of CO2 production and pollution.

Curiously this is hardly ever emphasized by environmental campaigners......too wary of offending friends and religious groups?

In reply to oldie: I think it'd be a good way of making people emotionally take against becoming greener to mention having fewer children, which is the last thing we need.

There's a psychological phenomenon apparently related to things environment related, which is that people either think that the issue is too big for them individually to do anything about, or that them by themselves don't present much of a problem in the scheme of things, it's either of these perspectives which leads to us not pondering what we might do individually.

In reply to oldie:

Depends on your lifestyle.

A single child family jet-setting around in a private jet would need to offset more than the 8 kid family who stay put.

Anyone suggesting that someone shouldn't have kids because of the carbon that child will consume should make sure that their entire existence is at least completely carbon neutral - otherwise they don't really have a great argument.

In reply to Timmd:

Really? Can you post any links that it's completely useless.

I use the term "hair shirt" because the "Green" movement seem to take the view that you should not be polluting in the first place. That's sensible if you can do that but some things are unavoidable and some things are important to the quality of one's life.

I asked this question because I'm going to visit my sister in New Zealand. She has recently become widowed and has no other family other than me. It's important that I see her but there is no alternative to burning a lot of carbon to do so.

If you convince me offsetting is a complete waste of time then I won't offset but I'll still travel so I'm looking forward to you saving me some money.

I'm not alone in this sort of situation and of course business travel in our global economy is only going to increase. There's only so much you can do over the phone. I'm thinking of trying to convince my company to offset the carbon involved in the travel they authorise for business which at a guess, amounts to the best part of 10000 tonnes a year. However if you convince me otherwise I won't bother.

In reply to Nempnett Thrubwell:

They should probably sign a pact to commit environmentally conscious suicide once they become dependant on the care of younger people through either direct social support or through pensions deriving from the earnings of younger people.

In reply to oldie:

This Is wrapped up in climate justice maybe. Justice being that those who follow should be able to live as full and worthwhile lives as ourselves who have done so in the back of the hydrocarbon workhorse. No matter how many children we have, they will inherit the damage we have done. By saying the solution lies in curtailing the rights of those who follow, and here the right to exist is fundamentally unfair. 

Those who pollute should not excuse themselves in this way. They should move as fast as possible to deliver climate justice. And that means they should do more than offset. They should recognise their responsibility for the catastrophe that they bring on future generations and devote themselves to finding alternatives and living virtually as like it or not we all bear responsibility for the planet that we hand on. 

In reply to Removed User:

I said there's little to no evidence that it does any good at all, they're not the same things,. I had in mind the urgent time frame we are currently in, too.

Yes, of course they are, it's a trope which is commonly used to disparage trying to be greener, and environmentalist, too.

Chill your boots, I understand the need to see family, I'm not the type who'd lecture anybody about that. As above, i didn't say it's completely useless, I said there's little to no evidence that it does any good - but should have added within the urgent time frame we need to make changes.  It isn't only CO2 which airliners put it, meaning that even if trees do absorb any of the CO2, other gasses are contributing still. More trees are likely to be good for other reasons though. It might depend on what is planted and where, and what they're replacing if applicable, could be something to look into.

In reply to Removed User:

I rather naively think that anything that funds tree planting is going to be good.  Especially if the money would otherwise go to executive bonuses and thence on to increasing atmospheric CO2 by increased holidays etc.

The strongest argument to me against offsetting is that it acts as a moral salve to the minority of people behind the largest emissions.  

Vote me king of the world and I’ll allow businesses to offset carbon by gifting employees funds to replace fossil heating with heat pumps, to install oodles or rooftop solar PV and so on.  
 

In reply to Removed User:

To be honest, it can be hard to keep up with the most recent thinking about tree planting, climate change and human behaviour and how they interlink because it's pretty complex.

https://www.dw.com/en/planting-1-trillion-trees-could-stop-climate-change-a...

If 1 trillion trees were planted, 1 study says that would be beneficial or could stop climate change, but it's a shifting picture. 

I was about to leave the house when I suddenly remembered recently hearing something about a huge number of trees. Pardon that (mildly speaking).

In reply to Nempnett Thrubwell:

And even more on the child's lifestyle in the future, which usually becomes outside parental control.

Obviously true. But the 8 kid family has 8 potential  jet-setters. 

I'm not suggesting that people should have no kids at all. Surely the argument against any CO2 producing factor is of practical validity in itself, it doesn't matter if that factor is family size or air miles. Just because someone isn't completely carbon neutral doesn't mean their argument about jet travel is any less valid than one about family size (in neither case are they necessarily on the moral high ground though). Being a hypocrite doesn't necessarily mean someone's points are invalid!

However I can see on an emotional level why campaigning for population reduction appears to be avoided by environmental groups.

In reply to mutt:

They would also be able to lead as empty and worthless lives of course, and continue to do so with the hydrocarbon workhorse.

We would not be curtailing the rights of those who follow, there would just be less people following. Should population increase exponentially forever? I do realize that all this may be unacceptable to many on religious grounds.

Quite right. But arguing that family size is important is not making an excuse.

Ideally one would do all those things. One of those "alternatives" might be to campaign for, and play a part in, population reduction.

In reply to Removed User:

It's a lot.  But, if you don't own a car, you've already by default offset more than a few return flights to NZ.

Plenty of people I know seem to buy a new car every ten years or less.  The manufacturing process of that alone will dwarf the emissions of a round-the-world-flight every few years.

~17 tonnes for a new car, 1.7 tonnes for a return flight to New York.

Ok but it sounds like this is your first port of call on your journey to a sustainable planet. There are plenty of ways to achieve that without withholding life most meaningful and fulfilling role. Deliver climate justice and I think a world where people dont need to have 6 children to secure their old age. 

In reply to Removed User:

Offsetting emissions is obviously inferior to not causing them in the first place but it's definitely better than not offsetting. Carbon offsetting is pretty cheap, especially compared to the cost of a long haul flight, so there's really no reason not to do it. But there's a couple of things to bear in mind if you want it to be effective, as opposed to just being a conscience salve. The first is that you should use a certified scheme rather than the airline's own scheme - this way your money is more likely to be going to a project that will make a difference rather than being a greenwash. The second is that emissions at altitude have a greater radiative forcing effect than those at ground level so you probably need to double the amount of carbon you're offsetting for the flight to be carbon neutral.

In reply to mutt:

Not the first, but I do think it is very important because every additional person potentially puts further stresses on sustainability by increasing all the other important factors. 

I'm not at all suggesting that the role of parenthood should be withheld, just being a parent to less children (incidentally with possible advantages in time and attention paid to each).

That may still be true in poorer places, but surely not for the vast majority in richer countries like the UK.

In reply to Timmd:

It will only stall it for 50-100 years. The gas, oil and coal we are burning was laid down over 50million years of continuous dense rainforest swamp. We’d need to be chopping those trillion trees down every few years and sealing them away somewhere. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

What, like building them into a house?

I assume that when wood rots it's eaten by bacteria and turned into manure keeps a lot of its carbon. Don't know but maybe someone will come along who knows all about that sort of thing.

In reply to Removed User:

Not an expert but based on school biology. Wood will rot due mainly to microrganisms, especially fungi. These organisms respire, braking down organic compounds, and produce CO2. As you say small remnant pieces help form humus in soil, but this is continually broken down further by soil organisms (all these organisms themselves die and are eaten or decompose producing CO2 at every stage). In some places conditions are not suitable for rotting, eg peat bogs, and organic matter can build up. Incidentally I'd guess the leaves shed and broken down over the lifetime of a tree might well be more than the biomass of wood.

I don't know how long timber lasts in the average dwelling but vast amounts presumably go to landfill (burning would mean almost everything went to CO2, incomplete burning could lock some of the carbon as charcoal but this won't be done on any scale). Rotting might well be slow in landfill if conditions were toxic or anaerobic.

Probably very simplistic, someone should be able to correct me.

In reply to oldie:

Thanks for that.

I did a bit of a google and came up with this rather learned article which to be honest is a bit much to take on after a long day reading stuff but skimming through it, it does say that the net overall effect is a net reduction in CO2: https://academic.oup.com/forestry/article/91/2/193/4812633

It does make the point that f wood is used for building material one also has to take into account the fact that other materials which produce CO2 are not used.

In reply to Removed User:

But we have burned pretty much 50million years worth of trees. Growing a trillion trees doesn’t even begin to cover it. 

In reply to Removed User:

Keep on doing what you're doing and pay cash to offset it in the future and feel good. Total bollox to me.

In reply to oldie:

I don't think that's quite right.  I recently visited one of  Europe's biggest sawmills.  Their primary output is timber for construction (CLT).  This is used to build houses that can meet Passivehouse standards with no further materials such as plasterboard.  The waste sawdust and bark etc is burnt to power the sawmill.  They cut 30% more trees than they process and all from within 50km of the mill so the transport costs are low.  Overall that is  vastly less polluting process that say using steel or concrete for building.

In reply to MG:

While planting trees is a good idea I think planting trees some how offsets any carbon you might have put into the atmosphere today is rubbish.

The worrying part of carbon offsetting is that it allows people to believe they can do anything that adds excess carbon to the atmosphere because they offset it by planting a tree/trees. The question should be, 'Is whatever they are doing, essential'.

I think eventually we will have to do something about the human population. The continual increase in population cannot continue. 

Good point about the use of concrete. Read somewhere that, on a world wide basis, if the construction industry was a country it would be the third biggest polluter.

Dave

In reply to MG:

Thanks. I'm no expert. I was trying to speculate on how long the buildings would last and what would happen to the timber when they were demolished.

Incidentally in my area when roof extensions are done all the old timber goes into skips. I took quite a lot from one skip....the builder said he was pleased someone was going to use (110 years old, good condition). As it happens I didn't use it (too much trouble as non-regularized dimensions, and preservative treating would have been expensive and probably poor compared to pressure treated new wood). So I gave it to neighbour for their wood burner (assume resin less bad for stoves in old softwood). So it ended up as CO2.

In reply to Tringa:

Why?  If I plant an acre of forest and that is there for centuries,  it will contain carbon for centuries that would otherwise be in the atmosphere.

And if it is essential, is it better to offset the carbon or ignore it?

In reply to oldie:

My post should of course have said plant more than process.  As long as this is the case, does it really matter what happens to the wood?  If it is burnt, that will emit carbon, but if overall there are more tree planted, the amount in the atmosphere will be less.  If they are buried somehow, I assume in due course they become coal or limestone or something and the carbon is trapped.

In reply to oldie:

Our house is wood, walls, floor, ceilings..  the lot. It's 160 years old, but was rebuilt when they moved it 50m up the hill, it stood in the previous location for at least 150 years prior to that. So taking known timelines, the wood was felled around 1700, arguably planted 1600 or earlier.

With these kind of time lines if the world shifted to wood construction, you can trap a lot of carbon over the next 100 years and I'd like to think we've solved many of the problems in 300 years. It does require a shift in mentality as many are very attached to their red bricks. 

In reply to oldie:

Given that we need the younger generation for our survival as a species it seems absurd to expect their parents to accept the responsibility for their existance.

Personally I'm more concerned about all the unproductive old farts on the planet.

In reply to summo:

I would happily demolish my 100+ year old brick house and re-build it out of wood and all the extras to make it carbon neutral, if you're willing to give me the hundreds of thousands of pounds to do it. Because I've not got anywhere near that sort of money.

In reply to Lusk:

Why not just start using a lot more wood in new building s?

In reply to Lusk:

Don't need to demolish any brick.. that would be a waste of the carbon used to build them. But perhaps a complete review of future building regulations. 

In reply to Removed User:

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/energy/short-guide-carbon-offsets

I had a quick look at the above link. Also, panorama on Monday was about carbon offsetting and I caught 5 minutes of the programme.

Some thoughts from those two sources;

1) if you are carbon offsetting as a personal decision, rather than legal compliance, then maybe avoid certified schemes. These schemes will spend a lot of your money on certification, just find a suitable charity and give what you think.

2)  for carbon offsetting, it sounds like clean energy is more directly useful than tree growing. Wind and solar farms could be the answer, but Ryanair were working with sending clean burn stoves to the developing world to help with emissions and the health of the users. This sounded like a good cause.

By the sound of it, trees are not the perfect vehicle for carbon offsetting, but I would have thought they also have a big secondary role in mitigating climate change. Schemes like Ethiopia's 4 billion trees are more concerned with combatting desertification and soil erosion than purely carbon capture.

In reply to timjones:

 Report

I am not arguing for or against responsibility for children's existence. Just saying that each extra person is likely to cause more pollution/CO2, thus good to restrict family size and reduction in population would be a good thing for the environment.

Valid point about unproductive old farts. Should we make them more productive (often hard) or eliminate them?

Signed: Unproductive old fart (I would claim I was productive for many years however)

In reply to Lusk:

I'd suggest insulating properly, or buying some more jumpers would be a better approach than re-building a perfectly usable building.

In reply to oldie:

We could offer them the choice

There is no easy answer, but it seems a little perverse that whilst a rising global population is not a good thing for the planet that we all share we keep on chasing medical research that inevitably prolongs our lifespan.

In reply to timjones:> There is no easy answer, but it seems a little perverse that whilst a rising global population is not a good thing for the planet that we all share we keep on chasing medical research that inevitably prolongs our lifespan.<

True. And without the very same medical research many of us would have died in our early years. If people accept that life should be preserved whenever possible and that high population is a major driver of high environmental damage, then logically we should have less children. Many will say that more young are needed partly to look after the old but following that logic population and environmental damage might exponentially increase.

In reply to MG:

It will only remove a few tons, once, taking about 30-100 years. It won’t keep removing tons after that. As the trees die and are replaced they give out CO2 and absorb it in equal measures. 
 

As above it took 50 million years to capture all the CO2 via trees and only because the earth was a hot humid swamp (due to all the CO2) and the dead trees were quickly buried in the swamps under silt. The environment was much different to today. 

In reply to oldie:

Family size is pretty much restricted now. Don’t worry about population growth. It’ll peak very soon and then reduce. 
 

youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Planting an acre absorbs about 15t in 50 years. Enough to offset two transatlantic flights.  Cost of planting can be low, or of course its not actually necessary to plant anything - just waiting does it. 

The potential is huge, and has many other benefits. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02846-4

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Not according to the UN

https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-pro...

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Great.  Plant enough trees now and we buy a 50 year reprieve.  We buy time to work on atmospheric CO2 extraction and sequestration and to work on green energy.

Only if they’re left to talk and decompose in the wild.  If you chop mature trees down the wood can be sequestered.  In buildings, down a mine or even just by letting it soak up water and sink to the sea bed or a lake bed where tree trunks are well preserved indefinitely.  

Even if the forests become carbon neutral due to inaction in a century, they’ve still pulled a big chunk of carbon out of the atmosphere.

It’s madness not to take the easy wins now because one of many obvious steps will have to be taken in a century to keep that win.  

In reply to MG:

Brownside Moss, Alston, Cumbria, CA9
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-74992456.html

I figure two rows of Sitka around the perimeter for near immediate wind protection and a mix of silver birch, rowan and ash with some oak sprinkled around for the long haul.

A couple of big grouse estates recently went for £1m or so in Northumberland; I was gutted not to have £1m lying about...

I totally agree. But we aren’t talking about a couple of acres per person here. We’re talking an acres per person per year. For the Uk that’s an areas one and a half times the UK.

I’m not saying do nothing but as the link shows 1 trillion may not even cover it but should definitely be the first thing to start.

There’s a lot more needs to be done.

In reply to MG:

I think the video covers that, or the previous report. The growth is slowing. Fertility rates are falling globally. The growth is mainly due to people who have already been born having children. Watch the video, it explains it very well. The population will peak, stall and then fall. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

No one doubts population will peak for reasons you give (if society survives that long). It's the timeframe.  I'm going with the UN's predictions over some youtube clip on this.

In reply to wintertree:

That would only cover you for your first 20 years of life. Assuming you live to 80, you’d need something 4x that size just to cover you for your lifetime, assuming you don’t have wife or children. Each family in the Uk would need a 300 acre property covered in woods. 

In reply to MG:

Watch the clip. It’s 2020 already 2100 is only 80 years away. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

The link I gave above suggests something along those lines is entirely possible, globally.  Rather better than relying on currently non-existent technology or inadequate politics alone.  There is also the sea to consider for "forests" in areas currently overfished.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Right.  I'll be dead, which means it isn't "soon" in my book.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Or - radical idea - I could spend the next 20 years reducing my carbon cost by insulating my house a lot more, installing a heat pump heating system and covering every bit of roof in used solar PV panels.  

I can’t comprehend the mindset of “there’s no point doing the trivially doable parts because they’re not enough”.  If you start out that defeatist, how are the harder parts ever going to get done?

Unless I create a wife out of thin air (Weird Science style) I fail to see how it I have a wife or not affects my carbon cost.

In reply to wintertree:

Because two people produce twice the footprint so you’d need a property twice the size. 
 

You have me all wrong here. 
 

It’s admirable that you’d spend a million quid planting a few trees, but that’s not going to touch a quarter of your lifetime carbon. 
You’d be better off buying land and planting trees in a cheaper country. 
In fact, that’s exactly what carbon offsetting is. 
A trillion trees is government level undertaking on a global scale, maybe even a UN undertaking. 
 

Many countries have already started re-wilding their dessert areas. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Trying to think of a pudding joke... 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Sure, but the same person exists be they my wife or not, so how many trees I should plant isn’t affected by if I have a wife or not.

Your maths is out in several ways.  The 20 acres I linked would take 2,000 Sitka spruce at a low density of one every 36 square meters.  After 15 years each would be pulling about 100-200 kg of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere per year, compared to a UK per capita emission of ~5,500 kg.  In the last 3 years I’ve planted more than “a few” trees - close to 1,500 to be precise - and its cost me a couple of thousand pounds and a few days with a garden shovel.  

Trees Please up the road from me grows and sells something like 8 million Sitka saplings each year.  
 

As an individual I disagree - I’d blow all my money on agents, travel and administration.  Although I do look at what the occasional glen sells for in Scotland - £300 per acre or so - and think about it!  Although the replanting happening up in the torridons is taking an awfully long time to establish against the harsh climate.

It sure is if people go round discouraging everyone else from trying.  We have a “tennis court” that was taken as far as the rock foundation layer and abandoned.  The previous owner used to weed killer the rocks.  We stopped and now it’s covered in Sitka, willow and birch that’s taller than me, and rowan, oak and ash are emerging.  All you really need to do is enclosed some land, plant a wide variety the right species very sparsely and leave it alone for 5 years and nature does the rest.  The frequently burnt heather uplands by me are full of saplings that’d take over if left to it.  Chuck in obvious benefits of flood control - the only reason it’s not happening is because the state subsidised grouse shooting by not charging the landowners for the indirect costs - CO2 cost by not having forest, land devaluation cost by leeching the nutrients out in to our brown rivers, and flooding costs downstream.

Edit: I’m torn here as I think it’s awful how little native broadleaf forest there is in my part of the world but one thing about Sitka is it grows like mad.  A mix of the two with Sitka providing fast establishing wind breaks is a nice way to go.

In reply to timjones:

Here's a brilliant lecture by Hans Rosling on population growth and wealth, it's well worth ten minutes of your life to watch it.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language...

In reply to wintertree:

I've been left thinking about the efforts to plant trees in the developed countries compared to the deforestation that's happening in South America and Indonesia and how we find a way of stopping deforestation such that the net tonnage of trees in the world increases.

It occurs to me that effects deforestation could be mitigated if there was a massive shift to wood in building materials and the wood was sourced from the countries that are currently practising slash and burn.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

It will be good if population peaks soon. However actual population Reduction is important. I assume that CO2/pollution is directly linked in some way to number of people.

In the future someone might use the same argument about CO2/pollution: "Don't worry about it. It will peak soon then reduce due to global agreements." Would that be sufficient? If population reduction does bring a proportional reduction in other climate factors then surely increased reduction in the number of large families would be effective. 

All this is largely my own musings and I don't really know enough to back it up. It was suggested backthread that it was "a good way of making people emotionally take against becoming greener to mention having fewer children, which is the last thing we need." Environmentalists may not want to overemphasize the need for small families for fear of losing support from those who object on religious or other grounds.

In reply to oldie:

I think the argument is the nations where the population is growing are the less developed nations who don’t use fossil fuels. Whereas the nations where the populations are shrinking are the developed nations who use the fossil fuels. 
 

There’s also the theory that if the developed nations come up with decent renewable power then the developing nations can skip their industrial revolution completely. 
 

Developed nations don’t need more than one or two children as mortality rates are incredibly low and the vast majority of us live to reproductive age. We also don’t use child labour so children are expensive and don’t bring income to the household. 

 We also don’t use child labour so children are expensive and don’t bring income to the household. 

You're forgetting the 12yr old millionaire youtubers...

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Are not, say, Indonesia, China, India, Brazil increasing in population and increasingly causing adverse climate effects? I don't the answer myself.

Great, but its just a theory.

So if we don't need as many children, each of which is likely to be responsible for pollution over their lifetime then smaller families would be advantageous on more than one count.

I really don't know all the facts myself, but I still can't quite accept that reducing family size globally is unimportant, and have the suspicion that the point is deliberately avoided by many environmentalists for fear of upsetting potential supporters.

In reply to oldie:

Yes. India and China are but the greatest increase is in Africa. India and China are slowing as they get access to better infrastructure. Hence there’s no need to reduce family sizes, it happens naturally. 
35% of India’s energy is from renewables. Because China is so large it is the world leader in renewable energy usage. 36% of its energy is from renewables. 28% of ours is! 
 

In reply to oldie:

The problem is that western social benefits (i.e. state pension) are predicated on the workers of today paying the pensions of today through taxation / national insurance. As long as there are more 'workers' than 'dependents' this works, but if you reduce the dependency ratio it doesn't. Effectively social benefits are a big ponzi scheme, and until that mechanism is broken politicians will always be encouraging more population to pay for pensions because <sarcasm mode on>all pensioners are really poor<off> :-/.

In reply to Toerag:

Its not just pensions though - say I saved up a fortune in gold (or whatever).  If there is no next generation because we stop breeding, what good will that gold do me when I’m 95?  Money only has value if there are people to incentivise with it.

In reply to Removed User:

My take on offsetting - use it for the carbon production you cannot avoid. For example, I have relatives in Germany so I have to see them occasionally. Each set of return flights produces more CO2 than I do in 3 years of driving my little van, so it's a big part of my carbon footprint.  I'm avoiding the flight CO2 entirely to an extent by going less often, but when I do go I offset. This xmas I'm going to take a ferry and train instead of flying.  Essentially offsetting is enabling CO2 reduction things that otherwise wouldn't happen. They give Africans efficient stoves that they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. They plant trees that wouldn't otherwise get planted. Of course, money gets siphoned off by the people managing the schemes to pay themselves, but its still better than nothing, and planting trees in a low cost jurisdiction is no doubt offers better bang for the buck than planting closer to home (which I've also done, I now can't get my arms round the beech I planted 30 years ago ).

In reply to Toerag:

Yes, I take much the same view.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

After a mini search on the internet I can see I've been posting from a very simplistic viewpoint. However on a personal level (still simplistic) if someone chose to have fewer children than what would have happened "naturally", eg two rather than four originally intended, that would surely have a massive preventative effect on CO2/pollution in the coming years (two lifetimes worth): if one accepts tree planting as an offset for the two extra then that would be the equivalent of not needing to plant 1000s of trees (estimates of trees necessary seem to vary hugely). The most effective places to have reductions might be the richer or up and coming nations with larger carbon footprints (perversely often those with smaller families anyway). Perhaps we should all give the childless a pat on the back, at least regarding climate change.

Percentages by themselves (65, 64, and 72% non-renewables from a pessimist's viewpoint) don't mean a lot: the actual bulk amounts of CO2 are of importance for climate change and might or might not give a different picture. Incidentally just because biomass (eg wood) is renewable presumably doesn't mean it is all renewed in practice. Inclusion of nuclear energy (non-renewable but not producing CO2) might also alter comparative values.

In reply to Toerag:

Agree tree planting offsetting is worthwhile as a practical contribution we can all make, though it will take many years before the trees are large enough to have much effect.

The speed of trees being felled (and presumably mainly burned - more CO2) in Brazil and Indonesia probably dwarfs tree planting elsewhere. Perhaps offsetting cash could be used to buy surviving peripheral forests in these countries which could have an immediate effect. However very hard and expensive to police and felling industry would probably just move to unsold areas. Perhaps offer money for national projects, dependent on land clearing having ceased. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Hmmm, garbage is the word that springs to mind. If the UK' s energy is even 10% from renewables I'd be suprised.

In reply to jimtitt:

11.2% in 2018, according to the Department for
Business, Energy
& Industrial Strategy.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/... 

UK electricity generation is now around 30% from renewables which is probably where the confusion has arisen. 

In reply to flaneur:

A reasonable guess! The confusion seems rampant in discussions over CO2 output and renewables, even amongst those who really should know better.

In reply to Removed User:

Just read that in landfill anaerobic decomposition (presumably wood is slow) of organic material produces a lot of methane which is worse than CO2 for climate change

In reply to oldie:

Yes. We have a few sites down the road from here. The methane is captured and used as fuel. 
 

It’s not bad for the environment because is part of the natural carbon cycle. It’s the coal and gas we are digging up and deforestation that’s bad. 

In reply to oldie:

Yes, from memory it's about 20 times worse but breaks down after 10 years.

In reply to oldie:

Err normally it's burnt, wood is a valuable resource for energy

In reply to jimtitt:

Thanks. I was trying to find out how wood decomposed in landfill, but I had wrongly assumed that most waste wood entered landfill.    According to woodrecyclers.org UK has 4.5 million tonnes of wood waste: 1.3 recycled, 2.1 to biomass for incineration/energy, and 0.3 exported which I think leaves about 1.3 to landfill (28%). I'd imagine that the landfill figure is an underestimate as waste wood missed in sorting sites, unethically sorted or straight delivered to landfill is impossible to estimate. That's much better than I thought, though apparently our overall landfill is among the worst in Europe.

In reply to Removed User:

Methane breaks down into carbon dioxide, and is much more than 20 times as bad anyway (Wikipedia says 84 times as bad over 20 years in terms of trapped heat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane (see references there for what that means))

In reply to jelaby:

Surely noboby in their right mind is suggesting we sequester CO² by planting trees then let them rot away later? That makes the problem worse not better. Planting a trillion trees then cutting them as fuel to replace using fossil fuels and replanting means we both keep most of the CO² locked away for ever and eliminate the emissions from the fuel saved in the future.

In reply to jimtitt:

Sure. I was replying to Eric9Points' post that rather downplayed the damage that methane could do (it read to me like "methane is 20 times as bad as CO2, but breaks down so it is not so bad in the long run").

With regard to burning wood: if you grow and then burn wood, how much of the CO2 is locked away? You don't get that much ash left behind when you burn wood, so isn't most of the mass of the wood converted back to CO2 and other gases?

Im admit I thought that burning wood was carbon neutral at best (ignoring transport costs, damage to soil, and methane produced by anything left to rot like offcut branches and leaves).

In reply to jelaby:

Sure but if you plant a forest with a growth life of 20 years and fell and burn 1/20th every year then replant the CO2 from burning is again absorbed by the next generation of trees so carbon neutral  plus you have the energy from burning the trees which can replace fossil fuels so a net saving. My central heating saves the planet from about 8 tons of CO2 as it is wood fired not gas or oil.

In reply to jelaby:

Interesting interview on R4 farming today this am (18 nov) 

Cambridge scientist was of the opinion that methane breaks down in the atmosphere after 12 years and is less to blame than is currently being asserted (cows/ beef etc)