The soil carbon market is going to collapse - and that's a good thing. One of the issues I explore in this week's column, about the dreamworld of climate fakery our legislators have created. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... - ThreadSky

georgemonbiot.bsky.social • 102 days ago

The soil carbon market is going to collapse - and that's a good thing.
One of the issues I explore in this week's column, about the dreamworld of climate fakery our legislators have created.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/donald-trump-science-climate-cop29-carbon-markets

Comments

philhamm.bsky.social•102 days ago

All climate change mitigation ideas are the stuff of delusion. Everything about modernity and civilization is only possible because of the incredible bounty of hydrocarbons that humans have learned to exploit. Adaptation is the only possible course.

theselocalgods.bsky.social•101 days ago

I'm the kind of weirdo who tries to do DIY carbon sequestration, mostly by composting cardboard into the soil. It takes ages and I reckon I sequester, at most, 0.5 tonnes of carbon PA for an indefinite period of time. It's good exercise but now I'm thinking I should get paid...

daverha52.bsky.social•98 days ago

Capitalism is creative, but amoral. While there are examples of merit, the really big money is being directed into scams such as Monbiot exposes in this essay. Read it and understand how the capitalist are grifting the climate crisis for profit

gothamgirlblue.com•102 days ago

📌

nonviolence.bsky.social•102 days ago

Healthy soil is our food life insurance. When it comes to nature - only nature that is left alone is real nature and might count es CO2 storage if protected forever. We have to end #cows asap to stand a chance. Their pasture land can rewild and this would count.

reinhart-kurt.bsky.social•100 days ago

I think this is a valid issue where forests are being converted into pasture but possibly not for the 1/3 of 🌍's land that is dry and likely only suitable ag production is rangeland or development.

nonviolence.bsky.social•100 days ago

I suggest rewilding half of all land by ending cows (beef and dairy). Cattle eats grass aka Poaceae /Gramineae. We humans do too. Rice, corn, wheat and even bamboo are all grass and could be grown where we have pasture today. But it would be better to #rewild.
https://bsky.app/profile/nonviolence.bsky.social/post/3lbkcwxxd322i

nigelinoz.bsky.social•102 days ago

thanks for taking this up. I’ve been arguing this for ages. The whole principle of an emitter buying the right to pretend not to emit from say a forester who must now pretend their wood has no carbon in it, with no net reduction in emissions anywhere is plainly bonkers!

matty1mac.bsky.social•102 days ago

Soil carbon credits are messy, but so is soil.
Soil health underpins life, and soils have been degrading for a long time. Credibility and measurement challenges are real, but carbon markets could still fund large-scale restoration.
Flawed markets don’t mean flawed solutions!

paul-haynes.bsky.social•102 days ago

I was thinking I could use a similar approach to carbon credits to assuage my guilt at being rich - by paying a poor person to give me 'poverty credits'. Unfortunately, they have to stay poor for this to work, so I'm afraid I can't pay them very much.

ianwilley.bsky.social•102 days ago

The illustration is very similar to one I drew for the Mirror nine years ago.

ianafraser.bsky.social•102 days ago

Carbon markets are something I find hard to understand, to the extent I do wonder if they are a legalised scam, akin to the subprime mortgage crisis that triggered and contributed to the global financial crisis. At some point, though, someone is accruing wealth.

laerinelt.bsky.social•102 days ago

It's an attempt for businesses to keep emitting CO2 while reducing emissions on paper. That's really all there is to it. It's much easier for businesses to pay some money to keep emissions than to reduce them in the first place.

ianafraser.bsky.social•102 days ago

A scam, then.

laerinelt.bsky.social•102 days ago

Pretty much. Lots of fun stuff like "selling promises to not cut down decorative trees(which wouldn't be cut down anyway) for carbon credits".

reinhart-kurt.bsky.social•100 days ago

Agree

timberdoodlydoo.bsky.social•100 days ago

so, after working for one of those carbon orgs for a while, here's how greasy it is:
1:You come up with a scheme to sequester carbon
2: *you* come up with a way to measure the amt of carbon sequestered
3: you get a third party, using *your* method, to verify it
1/7

ianafraser.bsky.social•100 days ago

Thanks, interesting thread. Is your work in the UK? I am closely involved with two nature recovery projects. We’ve pondered (and been encouraged) to derive income from selling carbon credits related to our woodland creation. It’s so opaque, and we’re not convinced long term it’s a good idea 1/

ianafraser.bsky.social•100 days ago

The projects are community owned and managed, and we follow permaculture principles. 2/

timberdoodlydoo.bsky.social•100 days ago

to be honest, with how there's practically no environmental benefit to selling the offset, and with how little money the landowner gets, it's not worth it. you'll have to deal with slimy people and any good feelings you get will be false.

don't let Amazon etc buy good PR from you

timberdoodlydoo.bsky.social•100 days ago

4: (and this is where it gets really sketch) you either sell it on the market, OR, you can sell it through a futures market.

the futures market is just as dumb as it sounds. say I have a 25 year project, and a landowner. I measure every 5 yrs, 3rd party measures, and you get a big pulse 2/7

timberdoodlydoo.bsky.social•100 days ago

of cash. well the landowner wants *annual payments*. So how do you even it out? FUTURES.

You project what you *think* the yield will be in the whole 25 year project, and then the futures org pays out annually, while taking a cut. then they get all the $ every 5 yrs. if the calculation is off 3/7

timberdoodlydoo.bsky.social•100 days ago

then that 4th party futures company takes the hit and re-adjusts their calculations for the next rounds. it carries risk, but also a TON of profit so long as you have the ton of money it requires to work.

Literally every step in this process is powered by VCs and Hedge Funds. 4/7

timberdoodlydoo.bsky.social•100 days ago

If each step of the scheme works, the VCs/Hedge Funds make stupidly huge sums of money.

But the latest literature says we need to capture and store carbon for like a thousand years in order to have an actual climate impact. that describes few if any of the carbon credits on the market. 5/7

valleywoman.bsky.social•102 days ago

Carbon trading is just smoke and mirrors, a way of avoiding doing anything while looking like you doing something.

scanthehorizon.bsky.social•102 days ago

Other part is massive emissions inherent in facilitating soil carbon market. Bayer, Deere, Corteva generate soil credits via AI enabled digital agriculture backed by intense computation + rural data transmission. Data centre emissions already outstrip aviation. Extending to farm data is disastrous

scanthehorizon.bsky.social•102 days ago

Agree caution over hyping biochar is warranted. Application appears to lead to pulse of incr C02 release altho longer impact on soil ghg releases mixed and depends on land management - see meta studies eg https://ainfo.cnptia.embrapa.br/digital/bitstream/item/134431/1/ArtigoSagriloGCBBionergy2015.pdf .and https://acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jeq2.20475

timeissliding.bsky.social•102 days ago

Carbon credits are just like the “end-of-pipe” pollution control bolt-ons that industry has often opted for instead of minimising the production of a pollutant at source. They can be the easy way to avoid changing how or what is being done…a sticking plaster for business as usual.

jowettnick.bsky.social•102 days ago

Some caricaturing of US Christians in this - sort of assuming they're all the same. There are many different denominations and theological approaches and a proper respect demands that writers take care to be accurate about precisely who they are writing about.

georgemonbiot.bsky.social•102 days ago

I'm not sure you read that very carefully.

jowettnick.bsky.social•101 days ago

Btw, I am on your side here, but in a very secularised society in the UK, there may be a tendency not to give Christian groups the respect of decent research. We are many different shades! As regard the rapture, such Christians think of themselves as going to a material not a spiritual heaven.

roydrunner.bsky.social•102 days ago

The truth is that capitalism per se has no solution to this problem

sarcasmodemiami.bsky.social•102 days ago

Trading credits aside, is small scale biochar production w/ (e.g.) kontiki kilns using dying trees (a result of emerald ash borers in the US) a beneficial labor of love? (Assume any such biochar produced is incorporated into my fields).

georgemonbiot.bsky.social•101 days ago

Could be, though hard to get right. And I worry for the health of the operators. Pyrolysis smoke is really nasty.

sarcasmodemiami.bsky.social•101 days ago

Unfortunate, as I have no idea if I’m ‘getting it right.’ On the plus side, it takes very little effort for me to simply let my land do its natural sink and sequester.

muenstem.bsky.social•102 days ago

We took a deep-dive into industry-driven #CarbonCredit schemes in chapter 3 of our soil crisis investigation last year, with a focus on the strategies of Bayer, BASF and other big farming players: https://boden-burnout.shorthandstories.com/chapter-I-losing-ground/

#COP29

ozzmanosgood.bsky.social•102 days ago

Actually, the so-called "deniers" had been trying to tell you this all along. This is no surprise to me.

paul-rea.bsky.social•102 days ago

A lot of good points. But I do think it is important to have estimates of the value of good soil, indeed this would be a better measure for rewarding farmers than traditional subsidies.

georgemonbiot.bsky.social•102 days ago

Indeed. There should be incentives for good practice. But trade requires Measuring, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification, and not one of those things can be done relaibly.

teresasm.bsky.social•102 days ago

Kind of like education it seems: the good things are harder to measure, so schools do the measurable things that make learning a slog and children leave in bigger numbers for HE.

paul-rea.bsky.social•102 days ago

Thanks and very true. In our EU funded research projects these are the sort of things we are looking at. Establishing baselines and modelling are not always the most exciting research topics, but absolutely vital.

paul-rea.bsky.social•102 days ago

Ps I shall spend this evening bragging to my daughter about being in a conversation with one of her heros !!!

heppy111.bsky.social•102 days ago

📌

aminhnow.bsky.social•102 days ago

Capitalism is not going to fix climate change no matter how many "markets" get set up.

climatecology.bsky.social•101 days ago

Covers it well. The main difficulty is measuring what is a small CHANGE in C against a large background.

Minor quibble, soil C:N ratios are not fixed at 12. Under forests can be 20, 30, 40. Also N not always needed to balance C. The C:N ratio can widen under different management practices.

gijskaper.bsky.social•102 days ago

Biochar made on the agricultural land itself from the biowastestream allready there can still be an insetting for agricultural methane emissions.

wilsonfink.bsky.social•102 days ago

A lot of weak arguments in here, though you do outline some of the key challenges with SOC. But what is missed is that companies buying or generating carbon offsets are also more ambitious in other climate mitigation efforts - these actions aren't mutually exclusive.

lancsstoic.bsky.social•102 days ago

Do share then. You also ignore it doesn't negate the weakness of carbon credits. I have a degree in physical geography that includes pedology, geomorphology and climatology. What about you?

greg-e.bsky.social•102 days ago

Let’s see the evidence for the greater ambition of those companies. Until then … pinch of salt.

wilsonfink.bsky.social•102 days ago

https://www.conservation.org/blog/report-companies-that-buy-carbon-credits-lead-on-climate-action

greg-e.bsky.social•102 days ago

Thanks, I’ll digest that properly later.

Meanwhile

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school/events/are-carbon-credits-worthless/

georgemonbiot.bsky.social•102 days ago

You are welcome to spell out the "weak arguments".

wilsonfink.bsky.social•102 days ago

I guess I'm referring to some of the sweeping statements about the impossibility of measuring soil organic carbon and bulk density. I work with great soil scientists every day and you can easily measure bulk density, and with enough (albeit, expensive) sampling, you can see positive impacts.

wilsonfink.bsky.social•102 days ago

Most of the additional carbon is accumulated in the top 30-60 cm. So the fact that we can't know the total soil depth from field to field isn't especially important, as the deeper soil layers are really quite stable.

wilsonfink.bsky.social•102 days ago

There are also alternatives to increasing the nitrogen content to maintain a proper C:N ratio, apart from manure and NH3. Like leguminous cover crop, or just more pulse crops in a rotation .

wilsonfink.bsky.social•102 days ago

Your dismissal of biogeochemical models is also unfounded, in my opinion. These models used in the C markets are the same models championed by universities for decades

8t3v3n.bsky.social•102 days ago

Dear George, please stop doing free scab labour for fascism, and go ahead and delete your X account. Waiting for an en masses move is exactly how fascism prospers. I know you know this. How do I know you know this? You keep adding value to a fascist site with reasons others might stay.

plantevolution.bsky.social•101 days ago

What do you make of efforts to increase the plant production of organic compounds that are recalcitrant to microbial degradation, as exemplified by the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative? https://www.salk.edu/harnessing-plants-initiative/
#plantscience

reinhart-kurt.bsky.social•100 days ago

I am not familiar with it. Soil organic carbon is routinely measured of soil that passes through a 2mm sieve and then has roots removed. So the OM is mostly degraded plant & microbial refuse. Not sure making plants' material "recalcitrant" will work. We already have biochar and bogs/permafrost...

wizzitwoody.bsky.social•102 days ago

Fascinating article, George, thank you. I really had very little idea.

adybee.bsky.social•102 days ago

Great little series detailing how they got us to this point … https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08lxv3n

britweathersvs.bsky.social•37 days ago

This is great & honest info Ady 🙏. I’m most the way through. I will pick up & use what is relevant via my various media channels. Reform & Farage are simply following historical denial precedence set by the fag industry. So transparent!

adybee.bsky.social•37 days ago

Glad to be of some help 👍 , unfortunately more recently the GBD (funded by the same people) used exactly the same playbook … creating doubt and offering an alternative scenario, when it came to Covid …

johnmashey.bsky.social•24 days ago

Sounds good, will watch later.
See also detailed history by @naomioreskes.bsky.social and @erikconway.bsky.social , especially in US:
"The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Myth-American-Business-Government/dp/1635573572
and also:
https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/109917839985186462

adybee.bsky.social•24 days ago

👍They interview Naomi in the series.

komadori.bsky.social•70 days ago

A bit rich, from the cowed and equivocating BBC.

adybee.bsky.social•70 days ago

🎯The BBC Radio 4 series , available on BBC Sounds places much of the blame at the door of … BBC journalists.

jgreen63.bsky.social•49 days ago

I watched their news report of the LA fires the other day and they firmly placed them in the context of man made climate change. They didn't bring in any pundit with an alternate point of view for 'balance'.

jgreen63.bsky.social•49 days ago

This doesn't mean they have stopped showcasing the neoliberal climate science deniers in other contexts though. Cf refuk.

adybee.bsky.social•49 days ago

Hopefully they’re learning, although Peter Levy was interviewing Tice about the Boston #Lincs flooding last week… Tice blamed Badgers 🤦‍♂️

gillbeckvalley.bsky.social•102 days ago

Yes, great stuff from the beeb. When they put it out on air originally you could experience it in direct juxtaposition to actual real-time doubt-sowing in the news/current affairs programmes before and after

adybee.bsky.social•98 days ago

🎯 https://bsky.app/profile/adybee.bsky.social/post/3lbobj4hloc2c

fizzinsoda.bsky.social•48 days ago

which really sucks because one gave you cancer and the other quite literally is impending doom.

orticoltore.bsky.social•102 days ago

Maybe it is possible to obtain a satisfactory proxy for SOC and evolutionary mapping.
https://sentinel.esa.int/web/success-stories/-/copernicus-sentinel-2-data-to-estimate-soil-organic-carbon-in-croplands

martin-for-change.bsky.social•102 days ago

Spot on - just creative accounting

iantho.bsky.social•102 days ago

Hard to build soil C without additions, harder to retain, still hard to measure. If it can be done, not sure that farmer won’t need it for their own emission reduction measures. Any effort to build soil C though is good for soil and production. Isn’t that enough?

livinginnoddyland.bsky.social•102 days ago

It’s not enough because average climate and sea temperatures are rising, due to too much C in the atmosphere, where it needs to be stored in the ground.

iantho.bsky.social•102 days ago

Try to store it in the ground by all means but as George Monbiot points out trading may come to tears. In a dry climate or sandy soil most gets released in drought

livinginnoddyland.bsky.social•102 days ago

Drought is just one phenomenon amongst many that will continue to increase CO2 & other GHGs. I would say some rather than most. Carbon trading and all jiggery-pokery blag-schemes that excuse the burning of fossil fuels will destroy Earth systems for most biological life

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply