Climate Progress

… the sugar you find in specially marked packages of Domino® Sugar have been certified CarbonFree®.

I’ve never been a fan of companies who try to greenwash hawk their products with terms like Carbon Neutral for several reasons:

• There’s no meaningful way of verifying the claim.
• Lifecycle analyses are notoriously easy to fudge and/or omit key inputs.
• The “neutrality” is typically achieved with rip-offsets, which are, after all, rip-offsets (see “Question from WSJ blog: Are Bogus Carbon Offsets Really That Bad?“).

Probably the silliest and most unfortunate recent attempt to capitalize on the carbon neutrality craze is Domino’s with their “certified CarbonFree® sugar.”

Many commenters, such as our friends at Scholars and Rogues in “Chemistry: FAIL,” have mocked pointed out informatively that:

The chemical formula for sucrose, aka sugar, is C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁:

Take the carbon out of sugar and you’re pretty much left with water. Methinks Someone failed their chemistry class. Or their marketing class. Or both.

What I think is particularly unfortunate about this is that Domino has a pretty good story to tell (at least for a sugar company):

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Certainly the weakest part of Waxman-Markey is the 2 billion rip-offsets that polluters are allowed to purchase each year in place of reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions.  After all, total U.S. GHGs in 2005 were about 7.2 billion tons (see “Bush policies cause U.S. GHG emissions to soar 1.4% in 2007“).

Rip-offsets deserve to be called rip-offsets because it is far from clear how many of them represent real reductions (see discussion at “NRDC and EDF endorse the weak, coal-friendly, rip-offset-heavy USCAP climate plan” and below).

The good news in Waxman-Markey is you apparently have to purchase 5 tons of offsets to substitute for 4 tons of actual emissions reductions and you can’t get international offsets from a country that has not agreed to reduce its emissions — which together are vast improvements over the USCAP proposal.  Also, Waxman-Markey would in theory let EPA set tough standards for domestic rip-offsets.  How tough those would be in practice is anyone guess.

Certainly 2 billion is way too many, but rather than trying to rewrite the bill to sharply reduce those in the early years, which seems unlikely to be a successful negotiating strategy, I’d just suggest that progressives in Congress (and elsewhere), push to sunset the offsets.

After all, two main purposes of the rip-offsets are to:

1. Give polluters some alternatives to reducing their own pollution while they are actively developing and deploying alternatives, and
2. Give credits for difficult-to-quantify (but presumably real and cheaper) GHG emissions reductions while the government is actively developing protocols to bring the offsets under the cap.
   

Now if you don’t motivate polluters to change, you end up with the inaction of the coal industry — as typified by Jim Rogers in his interview on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

A decade ago the coal industry said “don’t regulate us, give us a decade to develop sequestration and other clean technologies.”  Well, they never seriously invested in sequestration and they refuse to adopt the many clean technologies that have been developed, as Rogers made crystal clear [see "Like Detroit, the coal industry chooses (assisted) suicide" and Bush wanted to destroy the future of coal as much as the industry did, Futuregen was “nothing more than a public relations ploy,” House study finds].

Now I see two basic sunset strategies.

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At one time, Chicago was a serious contender for America’s greenest big city. Now they appear to be mostly contending for biggest greenwasher.

I didn’t learn the stunning story about what Chicago is trying to get away with until I was interviewed by a Chicago Tribune reporter. His story “Chicago’s ‘green’ promise fades: Chicago taxpayers on hook for carbon credits that do little to fight global warming,” was published yesterday:

Mayor Richard Daley promised long ago that his administration would start fighting global warming by buying 20 percent of its electricity from wind farms and other sources of green energy.

But more than two years after the deadline he set, the city continues to get nearly all of its power from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

Daley administration officials contend they have kept the mayor’s promise by buying carbon credits, a controversial way of offsetting pollution by paying money to producers of green energy. The credits are supposed to lower the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere.

But most of the credits Chicago has bought over the last two years didn’t reduce carbon emissions at all, energy experts and the city’s own broker on the deal said.

So what exactly is the city of Chicago wasting its citizens’ money on? Good old-fashioned rip-offsets — in this case, emphasis on the word “old”:

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The headline is from a remarkable story in last week’s Energy Daily (subs. req’d):

In a preview of a likely GOP strategy in the coming congressional battle over global warming legislation, Republican members of the House subcommittee charged with crafting the legislation last week blasted the use of greenhouse gas emissions offsets–a controversial mechanism for reducing compliance costs that is strongly supported by utilities and other U.S. industry sectors.

Now you know something is fishy when House Republicans have the exact same position as Climate Progress (see “You can call a rip-offset a CDM project, but it’s still a rip-offset“).

So what is their gambit in opposing the cost containment measure that is most popular among their own big-polluting constituents? Energy Daily explains:

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While I am not one to say “I told you so” [cough, cough], what else is the proper response to today’s Washington Post story by David Fahrenthold: “House Is Abandoning Carbon Neutral Plan: Move Highlights Congress’s Green Struggle“:

The U.S. House of Representatives has abandoned a plan to make its offices “carbon neutral,” a sign that Congress is wrestling with a pledge to become more green even as it crafts sweeping legislation on climate change.

The promise that the House would effectively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero was a centerpiece of the Green the Capitol program in which the new Democratic leadership sought to use Capitol Hill as a kind of a national demonstration project.

But last week, a spokesman for the House’s chief administrative officer said the chamber’s leadership had dropped an essential part of the plan, the purchase of “carbon offsets” to cancel out emissions from its buildings.

I had been quoted criticizing the rip-offset purchase, especially from the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), in a Fahrenthold piece from a year ago (see House carbon offsets “a waste of taxpayer money”).

So I applaud the House decision, as I told Fahrenthold in an interview he didn’t use [Note to self: Get over it!]. I wouldn’t, however, frame it the way he did in the piece.

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Rip-offset price for a metric tonne of CO2 on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

For many years, I was the go-to scientist for the media when they wanted a quote dissing hydrogen cars, thanks to my book, The Hype About Hydrogen. Now that hydrogen is fading faster than the Y2K bug, I get more press calls on the next big green scam, rip-offsets (see “Question from WSJ blog: Are Bogus Carbon Offsets Really That Bad?“).

Case in point: “Landfills generate ‘green’ cash in northern Utah” in last week’s Salt Lake Tribune.

Weber County and Wasatch Integrated Waste Management System not only make money by turning methane gas generated in the trash heaps into electricity, they’re also selling carbon offset credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange….

While energy and environmental activists applaud such efforts, some are not so enthusiastic about the markets, like Chicago Climate Exchange, that let those curbing emissions trade on their own good deeds.

I am the unenthusiastic “some” here:

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Yet another damning analysis questions the value of rip-offsets and the Clean Development Mechanism (see “You can call a rip-offset a CDM project, but it’s still a rip-offset“).

The Government Accountability Office — hardly a bastion of progressive eco-analysis — has written a devastating critique of rip-offsets, which concludes:

Key lessons from the CDM include: (1) the resources necessary to obtain project approval may reduce the cost-effectiveness and quality of projects; (2) the need to ensure the credibility of emission reductions presents a significant regulatory challenge; and (3) due to the tradeoffs with offsets, the use of such programs may be, at best, a temporary solution.

In short, what the hell is the point of the CDM?!

The GAO’s recommendations are equally strong, if still understated: (more…)

Like landfills, oil sands, and “occasional irregularity,” the term Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is in the euphemism Hall of Fame. But once a rip-offset, always a rip-offset. Reuters reports:

The U.N. climate change body has suspended one of the largest auditors of clean energy projects under Kyoto Protocol, a move highlighting problems long aired by critics of the climate pact’s greenhouse gas trading scheme.

Norway’s DNV had their accreditation as project auditors suspended late last week for five “non-conformities” relating to its practices, the U.N. said after performing a spot check of the company’s operations in early November.

Speaking of euphemisms, if George Carlin were still alive I’m sure he’d add “non-conformities” to his famous list. DNV wasn’t fraudulent or incompetent. No. It’s just a misunderstood nonconformist. Fortunately, DNV isn’t a big player or central to the entire CDM process.

DNV is a major player in the $13 billion CDM market, having validated close to half of the projects registered by the U.N.

D’oh. Well, at least the non-conformities weren’t in areas central to CDM credibility, like, say project auditing and verification would be.

DNV said the non-conformities related to project auditing and verification procedures.

Never mind.

Seriously folks, let’s remember that the West got suckered into giving China some $6 billion to destroy greenhouse gas refrigerants that probably cost Chinese companies $100 million to capture and destroy (for more details, see “Kyoto’s Great Carbon Offset Swindle“). Let’s remember that a major 2008 analysis from Stanford found

… “between a third and two thirds” of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) — set up under the Kyoto treaty to encourage emissions reductions in developing nations — do not represent actual emission cuts.

Let’s remember that

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Answer: Yes.

While the news division of the WSJ is trashing bogus offsets, the blog division is challenging my term for them (see “Selling Hot Air“):

Joe Romm at Climate Progress calls them “rip-offsets,” and bemoans the fact that people get paid extra for business as usual activities and that companies buying the offsets are wrapping themselves in a non-existent green cloak.

But are offsets really so bad? One of Mr. Romm’s readers says not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Some individual projects, like the New Jersey landfill profiled in the WSJ, might not provide “additional” emissions reductions. But if the carbon-offsets lucre encourages smaller, unregulated players to change their behavior, it’s not such a bad thing overall:

If the offset market for capturing landfill methane causes a lot of methane capture that would have not otherwise been captured, it is NOT a case of “lack of additionality.”

This isn’t a wonkish point. For climate-change legislation to pass Congress in the midst of an economic crisis, everybody from environmentalists to big business has to be on board, and businesses say they need access to cheap emissions reductions provided by the offset market.

It just goes to show you that a good comment on this blog can get you into the Wall Street Journal — congrats to Larry Coleman.

I definitely think the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But the phony should be the enemy of the genuine [Note to self: With that attitude, you're never going to get a job in Hollywood or in a GOP political consulting firm].

The problem with the WSJ/Coleman critique is that, as my lawyer friends might say, it assumes facts that are not in evidence. If the Chicago Climate Exchange or anybody else can find a landfill that was not capturing its methane but that needs the money from the offset market to make methane capture profitable, I say go for it. But where is the evidence that fraudulently charging Americans for projects that are supposed to be offsetting their emissions but in fact aren’t offsetting anything has caused methane capture that would not otherwise have occurred?

This isn’t a wonkish point. If climate legislation requires rip-offsets to be passed, and if the entire point of climate legislation is to reduce emissions and avert catastrophic climate outcomes, then offsets that are not real are merely enabling a system whereby coal companies can keep burning coal and then pay people to do stuff they were already doing. The net result — emissions keep rising.

I don’t keep repeating every single criticism of rip-offsets in every post — that is what hyperlinks are for. But let me repeat the central point from the major Stanford study this year done on the specific question of what happens if you allow rip-offsets to be used as a major cost-containment strategy in climate legislation (from my post “Q: What is the difference between carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securites?“)

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Richard Sandor and his Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) may be doing more to destroy the credibility of the carbon trading market than anyone in the world, as the Wall Street Journal makes painfully clear today.

I urge anyone considering throwing their money away on rip-offsets to read the entire piece, “Pollution Credits Let Dumps Double Dip: Landfills Find New Revenue in Trading System Meant to Curb Greenhouse Emissions.”

Sandor has turned the CCX into Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers and turned the carbon trading market into another example of casino capitalism — all in the name of the almighty dollar (see “Q: What is the difference between carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securites?“).

What CCX is doing — and how Sandor justified it to the WSJ — is almost beyond belief. Let’s start with the rip-offsets.

Buried in a recent Post article was the amazing fact that CCX was selling offsets from a landfill that was flaring methane — and that was going to keep doing so whether they got money from CCX or not (see Is the Chicago Climate Exchange selling rip-offsets?) Even if you think rip-offset money should go for methane flaring projects (I don’t), paying people to do things that they were going to do anyway means that your money is not offsetting any emissions at all. In rip-offset jargon, the project fails the additionality test — for a good discussion of this important concept, see this piece.

Should anyone pay CCX for making the sun rise in the morning? I suppose that if someone wants to flush their money down the toilet, that is their business. But if CCX is becoming the dominant player in the U.S. carbon market by selling rip-offsets and is working to become part of the foundation of a serious national carbon trading system, then it is everyone’s business.

After all, the story reports Sandor says the United States will adopt rules similar to CCX’s and that “companies that buy credits on the Chicago exchange today stand a good chance of being able to use them to comply with any future federal emissions rules.” Let’s hope that is just a huckster’s hype, since all major climate bills currently being considered rely heavily on rip-offsets — and John McCain would allow unlimited rip-offsets at the start of his climate plan (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“).

The WSJ made clear today that the landfill story above was not an anecdote but a core CCX strategy:

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