Some of these offsets are of dubious quality. E.g., I think some of these offsets are from _not_ doing something that you might have otherwise done, but maybe you wouldn't have done that thing regardless.

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colechristensen 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Some of those "avoided" things can be as dumb as having a parcel of forested land that you didn't chop down. Those trees were already there and claims that they might not have otherwise been without a little credit money are questionable.

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simianwords 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting. Maybe the offset should be the expected value of co2 that would not be emitted after accounting for probability. It doesn’t seem like a scam fundamentally.

	▲	notatoad 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		i think that's exactly it, it's not fundamentally a scam, but it's not as simple as 1:1 "5g in, 5g out" because there's always some formula to calculate how much carbon has been "saved" by the company selling the offsets taking whatever actions they are taking. which gives the companies selling offsets a financial motive to maximize that calculation, and in some cases does lead to outright scams. the classic example is landowners selling offsets for the mature forests on their land - that's good! and incentivising the preservation of forests is good! but that forest already existed, and has existed for hundreds of years, so does it really make sense that some company can count it against their carbon emissions and claim to be "net zero" just because they paid a landowner to not cut it down? it makes the whole concept of offsets less of an overall pure good than emitters simply not emitting carbon in the first place, because that is actually a very simple and clear calculation.