California’s Costly Cap and Commerce Program to Offset Forest Emissions Local weather Alert Solely Incompetence – Are You Completed With That?
Guest contribution by Larry Hamlin
An excellent article by Susan Shelley, published on the Orange County Register, shows how totally “net zero” the forest carbon offsets required by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which supposedly reduce the state’s emissions, are worthless increase costs for California residents and businesses. In reality, the state forest emission compensation program is actually detrimental to the state emission reduction systems because it creates emissions increasingly.
This very embarrassing and public controversy arose as a result of a study by a San Francisco nonprofit called CarbonPlan that concluded that emission allowances for forests actually increased the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In summary, the article sets the stage for this dilemma created by CARB and examines the debacle that is emerging by noting:
“Today virtually every company in America is under pressure to declare that it is working towards becoming“ carbon neutral ”or“ net zero ”. A small green leaf accompanies the pious statement “Carbon neutral since 2007” on the Google homepage.
But what exactly does that mean? This means that the company calculated the greenhouse gas emissions of its business activities and then bought “offsets” in order to achieve neutrality. “
“California, which accounts for about 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, has laws on the books calling for steady reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. These laws are enforced by the California Air Resources Board. To achieve this, CARB invented a “Cap and Trade” program that sets an annual cap on how many tons of greenhouse gases from “polluters” such as electricity-producing utilities, refineries that produce transport fuels, or manufacturers of materials or finished products, be emitted. “Polluters” must have permits or compensation payments for their greenhouse gas emissions. “
“This is where the forests enter this story. Trees consume carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Tons of carbon are “sequestered” in forests and stored in the trunks, branches and roots of trees. Cutting the tree releases the carbon. So paying a landowner not to cut trees is a “compensation”.
The Register article then further states that the CarbonPlan study for California unfortunately found that:
“Some activists point out that if there was never any deforestation in these forests anyway, the net effect of selling the emission allowances is that ‘polluters’ are emitting more tons of greenhouse gases.”
“For California consumers, the cost of living is the result of all this magical thinking. When a utility, refinery, or manufacturer spends millions of dollars buying carbon credits, who pays for them in the end? The consumer, of course. Prices go up when costs go up. But what does it do for the climate?
“Nothing.”
A likely contributor to creating this CARB forest emissions offsetting debacle is that California has made extensive regulatory efforts to establish the state bureaucratic procedures that define how companies participate in the state’s offsetting “markets” have to pay additional costs, but that this is not sufficiently considered, care has been taken to examine whether the “markets” for emissions from forests are related to reality.
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