Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change 178
Lasrick writes "Roberto Bissio has an excellent piece in a roundtable on biomass energy, pointing out that small scale biomass energy projects designed for people in poor countries aren't really a solution to climate change. After pointing out that patent protections could impede wide-spread adoption, Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place. As I mentioned in Round One, the planet's poorest 1 billion people are responsible for only 3 percent of global carbon emissions. The 1.26 billion people whose countries belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development account for 42 percent of emissions. The rich, if they reduced their emissions by just 8 percent, could achieve more climate mitigation than the poor could achieve by reducing their emissions to zero. The rich could manage this 8 percent reduction by altering their lifestyles in barely noticeable ways. For the poor, a reduction of 100 percent would imply permanent misery.'"
Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle (Score:4, Interesting)
he buys offsets to bring that number down to zero so that he can claim that he's not actually polluting.
TFTFY. The accounting on carbon offsets is totally bogus.
A windmill should not be able to credit any offsets until its manufacturing and operation costs are netted out, which can be 15 years of operation or more. Solar panels have only gone over unity in the past few years. etc.
People are getting credits for growing forests *that they were going to grow anyway*. No new behaviors are being created in these cases.
The primary value of carbon credits at this point are as an essential ingredient in greenwashing solutions. An honest market in carbon credits could exist (and there are probably a few small extant examples of this), but their primary purpose, currently, is not fulfilled by honest accounting.