I'm going to wear my Pacific Forest Trust t-shirt when I mountain bike this afternoon.  Say hi if you see me.

Co-op America also takes the "no trees" approach to offsets (http://www.coopamerica.org/pubs/realmoney/articles/carbon ...),
for these reasons and one other:
Building new wind power capacity builds infrastructure that will make a low-carbon future possible. This is a side-benefit of the CO2 reduction purchased as an offset. It's important to stop deforestation, but planting trees doesn't build the infrastructure that will make it possible for our society to live in a way that curbs the climate crisis.

and not the good kind.

The sad thing is that we like single-tracks, or overgrown double-tracks ... but most "trails" out here are scrapped off fire roads.  After a whatever-ton cat goes through, I don't feel to guilty.

FWIW, I have seen MTB trail damage, and would myself close some trails.  Others ... ten years of heavy traffic and they don't look too bad.   Come to think of it, those trails might be 20 years old.

(I've done trail work with Share, but I admit not lately.)

Sam, I'm not sure why the concept of a sink from natural sources is be flawed, when deforestation accounts for 20% of global warming. It sort of follows from this fact that preventing further deforestation and encouraging reforestation could in principle be a useful way of sequestering carbon. The term "geo-engineering" sounds awfully scary, but projects like the ones being undertaken by Pacific Forest Trust are really all about forest preservation. Isn't stripping the landscape of trees also a form of geo-engineering?

More generally, "You reduce what you generate and get on with it!" is a slogan masquerading as a solution. It's utterly impossible for humankind to conserve its way out of climate change. The solution has to involve renewables.

www.terrapass.com/blog

Both Adam and Joe acknowledge reforestation makes the highest quality offsets in the world, as evidenced by their acceptance and certification under CDM.

If the UN's CDM is low-quality, please tell us what high quality project is?

You also acknowledge, correctly, that deforestation is a major part of climate change, 20%.

Your issue seems to be they are rare, which obfuscates the issue and says nothing about their quality and worthiness. Being high-quality and rare only means we need more.

There were less than 1 million cell phones in the US in 1990 and yet the industry did OK. Wind is extremely rare in the US, but I am sure Adam and Joe would agree it is good.

By contrast, terrapasss offsets meet no such UN certification. And Businessweek looked at their projects and gave them a very low quality grade:
 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b40270 ....

I like offsets and have bought them in the past. I think they serve an important purpose. I am not sure the value of Adam or Joe's rants.

missy
 

Um...no, neither I nor Joe acknowledge that trees make the highest quality offsets in the world. I think we both just spilled a lot of words saying the exact opposite. Nor does the UN think trees are great. Almost no tree-planting projects have made it through the CDM certification process. The reason for this is because tree-planting projects are problematic. Nor, unfortunately, is the CDM above reproach. In fact, the CDM is going through a fairly wrenching period of scrutiny right now. I doubt the august carbon experts at BusinessWeek would have very many positive things to say about the CDM.

Nor is my issue that tree-planting projects are rare. In fact, I was holding their relative rareness out as a saving grace. My issue is the other six substantive problems that I laid out.

The purpose and value of my, er, rant is to help people who are interested in offsets to identify high-quality ones that actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

www.terrapass.com/blog

Adam,
You say "almost" no projects have made it through the CDM process, which shows very clearly that projects are accepted under the UN CDM.

Rare means nothing. CDM has approved few of many types of projects.

By extension you imply how difficult it is to get through the CDM process. So to get through must mean something.

CDM may not be above reproach but show me a certification that is higher and more accepted? I researched this for an internship and can tell you CDM offsets are the highest priced tons in the world. BTW, CDM also certifies renewables and efficiency.

The conclusion: sequestration projects are CDM accepted and CDM is the highest accepted certification in the world.

By contrast, BusinessWeek showed that terrapass pays very little for its offsets and the projects were, according to the project owners, not additional.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b40270 ...

What should a consumer choose?

missy

Can't biofuels lead to defforestation?

Especially give the fungability of food crops and farm crops.

For instance growing soy for food in deforrested regions of Brazil, since massive quantities of soy have been removed from the US export marktet.
http://greyfalcon.net/soy2

Deforrestation from biodiesel could easily eliminate centuries worth of biofuel planting.

Since deforrestation accounts for CO2 in the trees, in the soils, evaporative cooling, and albedo from diurnal water vapor cycles.
http://greyfalcon.net/tropics3

As strange as Missy's comments are, they do bring up an important point.  There has never been a single forestry projected rejected under the CDM.  There is no doubt that the forestry projects have massive methodological problems recognized by the CDM board, but these methodological problems aren't the direct cause of failure in the CDM.  
I'm starting to think that the reason these projects are failing simply has to do with lack of demand due to default buyer liability for emissions reductions. Since there is a lot of risk that forestry projects won't actually result in additional emissions reductions due to the problems mentioned by Adam, most buyers go with the safer bets in the industrial sector.  Plus, industrial emission reductions tend to be much cheaper (especially when you're dealing with methane or HFC's).  That said, forestry projects can be cheap since that have the potential to be scaled up, but at small scales they are not cost competitive.  This, of course, results in a major damper to supply.  
So in the end, in the current CDM structure, there is not much potential for supply or demand of forestry credits.  
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the best hope yet is for the implementation of the Compensated Reductions approach to reduction of emissions from deforestation.  This proposal has substantial backing from many countries and is the most likely proposal to address deforestation in the post-2012 commitment period.

GreyFlcn -- the best source for this figure is probably the most recent IPCC report (pdf). The numbers can be a little hard to tease out, but here's a relevant graf (number ranges trimmed for legibility):

The primary source of the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial period results from fossil fuel use, with land use change providing another significant but smaller contribution. Annual fossil carbon dioxide emissions4 increased from an average of 6.4 GtC per year in the 1990s, to 7.2  GtC per year in 2000-2005. Carbon dioxide emissions associated with land-use change are estimated to be 1.6 GtC per year over the 1990s, although these estimates have a large uncertainty.

Yes, biofuels can also lead to deforestation, although it would be misleading to say that this has been a major historical cause.

www.terrapass.com/blog

Missy -- I'm generally not a big CDM basher. The CDM and Kyoto in general have problems, and the Eurocrats are aware of those problems and trying to address them in the next phase of the treaty. But your boosting of the CDM as the best of the world is, well, sort of missing the point entirely. There isn't a gold-plated offset standard because all of the standards are evolving.

I wish there were such a standard, because then we could just use it and be done with it. But there's not. For example, a large percentage of CDM credits come from refrigerant projects in China, which pretty much no one thinks are environmentally worthwhile.

And, yes, rarity does matter. Rarity indicates that there isn't a large supply of high-quality projects out there. It isn't particularly interesting that in theory the CDM thinks forestry is OK. In theory, I think forestry is OK too, as indicated by my endorsement of Pacific Forest Trust. What matters is whether high-quality projects actually exist and are available for sale. Given that offset retailers aren't selling the CDM credits that you approve of, what's your point exactly?

Finally, it's clear you think you can score easy points by repeatedly linking to a single nasty article about us, but a) your understanding of the article is way off, and b) the article itself was deeply flawed. We've dug into the issues raised in way more depth than I can go into here, but the entire discussion is on our web site.

www.terrapass.com/blog

Hi Adam,

It seems as though you never really brushed up on your Marrakech Accords

And, yes, rarity does matter. Rarity indicates that there isn't a large supply of high-quality projects out there

According to CDM rules, reforestation offsets under the CDM for the 2008-12 containment period are limited to one percent of CDM purchases for Annex I countries. Those 6 projects represent .34% of projects and I have a feeling that if it were done on total tons of CO2, that number would probably be pretty close to 1%, which doesn't make them "rare" at all, they're right in line with the UN rules, which you don't seem to have a very good understanding of.

I think my point is that I know nothing about carbon offsets, but in 10 minutes of Google searching I found conclusive evidence that your rarity argument is flat wrong.

I have the utmost respect for your position here and Terrapass as an organization, but it's pretty clear that Jospeh Romm doesn't really know anything about carbon offsets and you don't really know anything about reforestation.

I personally don't see why Grist is allowing you to write on something you don't really know much about. They should invite someone from The Nature Conservancy or The Pacific Forest Trust to write an article about the pluses and minuses of reforestation as carbon offsets so we readers can get a real understanding instead of clearly uninformed opinions.

-James K.

Yes, biofuels can also lead to deforestation, although it would be misleading to say that this has been a major historical cause.

Well it certainly is the reality as we head forward.

Brazil is becoming the new foodbasket of the world.

While at the same time the largest terrestrial carbonsink on earth.  (The ocean is bigger, but there's not much we can do about that with any certainty)

Soy is the top cash crop in Brazil and is now a leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon. The Amazon lost 6,950 square miles of rain forest between 2003 and 2004, while some 4,633 square miles of soybeans were planted during that time.

Brazil produces more agricultural foodcrops than any country in the world.  And similarly, more biofuels than any other country in the world.

And they are just getting started.  Once they finish their TransOceanic Highway linking Eastern Brazil, with the Pacific Ocean.  They are going to kick it into high gear. Exporting as much as they can to Pacific Ocean markets.  And they expect that will happen as soon as 2009.

They claimed a 2 year moritorium on Soy in deforrested regions, but that's basically meaningless:

  But two years is an insignificant period for soy monitoring, especially for new producers carving plantations out of the rain forest, Adario said.

    "Anyone who lives here knows that the first year you clear land, slash-and-burn and put some cows on the land," he said. "The second year you pull out stumps and plant rice. Soy is only planted the third year - after the ban loses effect."

Whats more, their "protection" is effectively to rot the rainforrest directly from inside it's core, rather than nibbling at the edges.

And the government is basically powerless to do anything about the massive illegal logging and farming operations.

It could take as much as 300 years of biofuel growth just to get back to the status quo, when you include deforrestation.

And even if we grow "green" fuels in the US, we are still feeding this vicious cycle, by removing food crops from the global market.  There's no escaping it.

_

Unobjective Optimism is perhaps the most dangerous thing about biofuels.

When it comes to the hidden negative consequences,
People just don't want to think about them.

They want to stay blissfully ignorant.

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/62/2 ...

Hi James,

I regret to say that you're confusing two very different numbers. The Marrakech Accords state that Annex I countries are allowed to offset no more than 1% of their emissions using forestry projects. That's an entirely different thing than saying that only 1% of CDM credits can be from forestry.

1% of total emissions from Annex I countries is equivalent to about 100 megatons (I think -- I'm doing the math quickly). So that's the cap on forestry credits.

Of that 100 megaton cap, here's how many forestry credits have been issued to date: zero. None of the six registered projects have issued any credits so far.

Here's how many forestry credits are expected to be issued by 2012, the end of period to which the Marrakech Accords apply: 3.9 megatons, or approximately 4% of the allowed total.

So the Kyoto signatories set a tight cap on forestry offsets, and then managed to only come up with projects totaling 4% of the cap. Kinda rare, I'd say, but that's just my uninformed opinion.

Let's peel back the onion a bit further. Why do you suppose forestry offsets were capped at 1%? Because the UN hates trees? Or because of a variety of concerns related to the ones I outlined in my post?

P.S. The folks at Pacific Forest Trust read Grist too. I talked to them just a little earlier today. They seemed pretty happy with what I wrote.

www.terrapass.com/blog

Fair enough Adam, perhaps I should have spent another 5 minutes Googling.

I do have another question: In the Business Week article mentioned by Missy (Which you guys did a fine job rebuking), it says the methane tons you purchase cost less than 2 bucks a ton to create.

Fast forward to your article that laments how "cheap" forestry offsets are. At the same time, in an interview Laurie Weyburn claims it would cost the Pacific Forest Trust $10 to offset one ton of CO2. http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/pelosi-makes-carbon-n ...

That's about 5 times as much as the Business Week article says a methane project costs. How is that even remotely a cheap credit?

I still don't feel we're getting the whole picture here.

James -- I make light reference in my post to the fact that Pacific Forest Trust credits are more expensive than typical tree-planting credits:

The resulting offsets are far more expensive than typical tree-based offsets, but as the price of carbon rises, they will become economically viable.

The number I have in my head is that PFT credits cost about $12/ton, which aligns pretty well with the Pelosi article. Many tree-planting projects, in contrast, cost $1/ton or less. The difference is simply due to the different nature of the projects. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the details of the forestry protocol that PFT is using, but I gather that it's quite heavy on monitoring and measurement. This is what makes it high-quality. It also makes the credits more expensive. If you're interested, you can dig into the details here:

http://www.climateregistry.org/PROTOCOLS/FP/

Tree-planting projects, on the other hand, can range pretty dramatically in quality. Putting up a mangrove plantation in a developing country can be quite inexpensive.

It's important to note that there's nothing inherently wrong with a source of carbon credits being less expensive. All other things being equal, it's better for the environment when credits are cheap, because it means more will be purchased. But all other things are generally not equal at this early phase of market development, so quality concerns are important.

www.terrapass.com/blog