#carbon offsetting

Airlines and airports opposed measures to combat global warming caused by jet vapour trails that evidence suggests account for more than half of the aviation industry’s climate impact, new documents reveal.

The industry argued in government submissions that the science was not “robust” enough to justify reduction targets for these non-CO2 emissions. Scientists say the climate impact of vapour trails, or contrails, has been known for more than two decades, with one accusing the industry of a “typical climate denialist strategy”.

While carbon emissions from jet engines contribute to global heating, research suggests the contrails formed when water vapour and soot particles form into ice crystals have an even greater impact. These human-made clouds trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape into space.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated in a special report in 1999 that the historic impact of aviation on the climate was two to four times greater than from its CO2 emissions alone. A 2020 study by the EU also reported that non-CO2 aircraft emissions, comprised mainly of contrails, warm the planet about twice as much as the carbon dioxide released by planes, but acknowledged there were “significant uncertainties”.

Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at Leeds University and a member of the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on emissions targets, said: “The industry should not hide behind uncertainty and needs to act to rapidly reduce both its CO2 and non-CO2 effects.”

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Picture this, it's 1902, a warm evening during the British Empire's grasp on the Raj. A Boris Johnsonesque Colonial official reprimands an Indian child for not appropriating white behaviours quickly enough. Fast forward to November 12th 2021, and you can see the exact archetypal figures spitting vehemently at Indian delegates, but this time it's the words coal is wrong; you're wrong.

There is a lot to unpack in these interactions, from the evident bullying to the more subtle but equally insidious patronising and paternalistic attitudes of wealthier countries who believe they have the authority to reprimand the same countries they have historically exploited and whose energy trajectory they have been entirely implicit. 

Coal, for example, is out of fashion in the West and has been for some time. Whilst I don't advocate coal as a sustainable energy form, I support global equality and truth. We must then acknowledge the historical power imbalances which have resulted in the timeline of coal's decline in the West, whilst the Global South has been left dependent on nonrenewable energy sources like coal and other fossil fuels out of necessity.

It is not unusual for the Western capitalist supernations to deflect blame onto the Eastern countries of the world. This power imbalance which Edward Said coined in his pivotal book Orientalism, published in 1978, is evident in the scapegoating of Eastern countries India and China as the 'bad guys' in the aftermath of the disappointing COP26 climate deal.

Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want, the anti-poverty London Based charity which challenges the root causes of inequality and injustice through partnerships with social movements in the global South and campaigns in the UK, described the deal as;

a betrayal in which only the fossil fuel industries will be celebrating.

It is a deal where global sized countries received the blame, whilst the richest countries, the United Kingdom, the USA and the European Union (also the countries most accountable for the violence and destruction of imperialism) bullied the smaller and poorer nations through treacherous omissions, and by controlling the venue and negotiating rooms by barring members of civil society whilst those big business lobbying corporations had no issue accessing platforms both digital and in person. 

The guilty three also blocked progress on promises of loss and damage demanded by the Global South who make up 80% of the world's population and whose inhabitants have already seen and lived through the threats imposed by the climate crisis, which intersects across the board of political and health inequity with which these countries are relentlessly battling against.

Excerpt from this story from Earther/Gizmodo:

Part of the agreement being hammered out at United Nations talks as they stretch into their (in theory) last day could let rich countries get away with continuing to pollute by using a bit of tricky math to justify it under the Paris Agreement. Welcome to one of the most confusing—and important—components of international climate policy.

The portion of the agreement, known cryptically as Article 6, is one of those things that is a huge headache due to how complicated it is even by the UN’s own impenetrable standards. (Every time I mention it to someone here in Glasgow, they roll their eyes and groan.) At its very simplest, Article 6 has to do with carbon markets and carbon offsets. These are the schemes that allow countries to pay for projects that take carbon out of the atmosphere—planting trees, for instance, or funding a renewable energy project—in order to get what amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card to keep up pollution at home.

In theory, the math around carbon markets should work. But in practice, it often ends up being a huge problem, due in large part to what’s known as double-counting. That’s when two separate entities claim the same offset in their calculations—with one country often using that offset to justify burning more fossil fuels.

Most of us are taking part in the destruction of our planet. Despite the reusable coffee cups and recycling bins, we produce climate-heating CO₂ every day. And we produce more than our due share.

To limit the average temperature rise to 2°C, we mustn’t release more than ca. 750 billion tonnes of CO₂ by 2050. Taking population growth into account, this means that each of us has a yearly budget of 2.3 tonnes of CO₂. That’s a one-way flight from Berlin to San Francisco.

It makes sense, then, to offset the emissions we fail to avoid. To compensate them by paying someone to remove the amount of carbon we released, and thereby take our footprint off the planet. Businesses, in particular, have adopted this logic, and use offsetting to market themselves as “carbon neutral”.

The carbon offset market has obvious benefits. Emitters pay for carbon credits, creating an incentive for others to find efficient ways to remove CO₂, or to prevent its release. These people, in turn, get paid for doing good.

The Sussexes follow Greta on Instagram

But also

Dan Wooton says