Why I Offset, Part II

Recently, I discussed why I purchase carbon offsets and why I believe they are not just sufficiently effective but highly so. Today, I would like to address what I perceive as the primary counter argument, which is that by purchasing offsets, one may feel they have paid for their “indulgences” and is therefore free to pollute.

First, the word “indulgence” is obviously a loaded term, and it is not particularly relevant anyway, as while most pollution (particular carbon) is completely fungible, while most sins are not. Nature doesn’t give a whit if I add a ton of CO2 here today and remove one there tomorrow. In contrast, I don’t get a free pass to steal from someone because I happened to return someone else’s lost purse. The idea that one can pay for immoral behavior with moral behavior is silly; the idea that you can clean up your messes is not. While there may be some borderline cases, this isn’t one of them, as the fungibility of carbon emissions is complete.

The crux of the matter, however, is the question as to what effects have on the purchaser’s emissions. One could argue that this is actually irrelevant, if the purchaser is honestly offsetting all their emissions. But even ignoring that point, do emissions actually increase for a typical purchaser? At least in my case, I strongly doubt it and in fact expect the reverse is true. There are in fact four mechanisms by which my emissions decrease when I purchase offsets:

1: The $100-200 I spend on offsets annually is $100-200 less I have to spend on anything else. Since there are few things I possibly could spend the money on that didn’t involve emissions, my emissions are almost certainly reduced. This represents a couple tenths of a percent of my income and likely decreases my total emissions by a similar amount.

2: Supply and demand. Knowing I have to purchase offsets causes me to perceive a higher price for any carbon-intensive activity and thus discourages me marginally from doing it

3: Guilt. In fact, this is so strong that just about every offset purchase I have ever made has been coupled with either donations to environmental organizations or volunteering with them

4: Direct action. Similar to above, my offset purchases usually spur me to act directly to reduce my emissions. They are like a big alarm clock that reminds me to check my tire pressure, fix that leaky window, or finally ditch that old, inefficient appliance.

Environmentalists who reject offsets do so essentially entirely two claims – that offsets don’t work, which I addressed last time, and that they cause the purchaser’s emissions to rise. Yet for the latter to be the case, the logic of indulgence – which just about anyone purchasing offsets would reject on principle – has to trump all four of the emission-decreasing effects listed above, two of which are rooted in very basic economic principles. Not only do I find this implausible, I am utterly certain in my own case that the balance lies heavily in the other direction, and that my offset purchases cause my emissions to drop substantially. Additionally, as I noted earlier, this is all likely irrelevant anyway because I am more-than-honestly offsetting all my emissions in the first place.

It goes even further than this. Even if one was only successfully offsetting a fraction of one’s emissions, the environment would likely come out ahead. If someone was emitting 10 tons a year before offsets, but post-offset emits 12 and offsets 8, there is still a net 60% reduction in carbon. I would hazard a guess that offset purchasers whose emissions increase by more than their successful offset purchases are close to non-existent. For example, if a typical purchaser successfully offsets half their emissions (failing in the other half due to either underestimating their emissions that need to offset, or buying offsets of insufficient quality), then their emissions would have to double in order to have a net negative impact. Barring a huge salary increase, a typical person would have to go out of their way to double their emissions, literally finding ways to burn fossil fuels with most of their spare cash. No one is going to do that. Even if there is a bump in people's emissions, which I doubt, it is unlikely to be anything more than a modest 10-20%, which in turn is almost certainly less than what they are offsetting. I simply see no plausible route for offset purchases to increase emissions.

Fracking boomlet, fracking bust...

Well, that was fun, folks.  Back at the height of the housing bubble, natural gas prices spiked.  This made it economical to adopt an existing oil-industry technique (developed in no small part by the federal government), hydraulic fracking, in the pursuit of natural gas trapped in shale rock.  This set off a gold rush, and like California in the 1850's, a lot of people are losing their shirts and the only people making money are those selling equipment to the suckers.  The rush mentality set off a huge burst of production, which preceded to cause, in combination with the recession, for prices to fall from nearly $11 per thousand cubic feet at their peak in 2008 to under $2 at their bottom last April.

So what is the status of fracking now?  A new report from the PostCarbon Institute lays it out in gory detail. Besides a lot of investors drowing in a mountain of red ink due to the rock-bottom prices, production has flat-lined.  Worse yet, the production rates of fracked wells plummets from the moment they are first tapped, falling by over 60% on average the first year and around 50% per year for the next few years.  Even to maintain flat production, something like $40 billion dollars of new equipment and drilling needs to be purchased every year.  In true Red Queen fashion, the fracking industry has to run faster and faster as its old wells' production falls like a rock, and new replacement wells, which are drilled ever further from the "sweet spots", have even less initial production and faster declines than the wells they are replacing.  It is a race they cannot win.  Even if they can outrun their creditors, they can't outrun physics and geology.  There just isn't that much frackable natural gas out there.  Below is a map of the major shale gas plays.  Note that they span about a quarter of the lower 48.  We've already poked and prodded everywhere, folks.  There are no more big plays to be found, and the biggest ones we have either leveled off or already in decline.

So no, fracking is not the long-term solution to anything.  It is an unsustainable boomlet that buys us at most a dozen years or so.  The same is true for the shale oil boomlet as well - it is a decade's worth of very expensive oil.  Both will peak sometime around 2020 and then we will enter yet another phase of long-term decline in production.  When we burn it and it is gone, and our only remaining choice to go after something that is deeper, thinner, dirtier, and even more expensive.  We need to start immediately on a major effort to plan for and construct the necessary infrastructure for a world where both oil and gas are very expensive, and we should be focusing on protecting our remaining high-quality oil and gas reserves rather than gold-rushing them into oblivion.  Our current path is madness.

Ecuador Avatar, and other interesting reads

A few reads I would like to share...

Meet the Shuar tribe of Ecuador, the closest thing here on Earth to what we all saw in "Avatar".  Of course, here on Earth, we turn a blind eye in order to make a quick buck.

Fleeing persecution, the Lykov family fled to the Siberian wild in 1936, whereupon they were isolated from human contact for the next forty years.

No, the minimum wage does not significantly affect unemployment rates.

Why does oil cost about $100 a barrel?  Because the marginal cost of producing one extra barrel of oil averages just about that amount for the major producers.  Get over it.

American carbon emissions are falling, but despite the claims, fracked natural gas is not the primary reason - the slow economy, followed by increasing use of renewables, have had larger impacts.