Take Corporate Pledges of Net Zero With a Healthy Dose of Skepticism
Excerpts:
- “Each carbon credit represents 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide sequestered or avoided. The 142 million credits issued in 2019 represent emissions equivalent to taking 30 million cars off the road for one year.”
The Six Best Carbon Offset Programs of 2021
Excerpts:
- To protect customers, the best carbon offset programs only work with projects that are certified by third-party organizations. Therefore, our list only includes programs that are transparent about supporting certified carbon offset projects.
Best Overall: NativeEnergy
Best Air Travel: Sustainable Air Travel
Best Events: TerraPass
Best Commute: Clear
Best Home: myclimate
Best Corporate: 3Degrees
The Forest Carbon Picture in Oregon
Notes:
- Contains key info on Oregon’s carbon pool and carbon sequestration potential.
Excerpts:
- The biggest pools are in above ground live trees and soils (70%-80% for every ecoregion).
- “State average ~ 90 metric tons of carbon per acre.”
- “84% of logs harvested in state are processed in state.”
Trees Become Big Business, Driven by Emissions Reductions Rules
Notes:
- Published April 2020 in The Wall Street Journal
Excerpts:
- “The good news for trees is that the going rate for intact forests has become competitive with what mills pay for logs in corners of Alaska and Appalachia, the Adirondacks and up toward Acadia. That is spurring landowners to make centurylong conservation deals with fossil-fuel companies, which help the latter comply with regulatory demands to reduce their carbon emissions.”
- “One of the most enthusiastic, BP PLC, has already bought more than 40 million California offset credits since 2016 at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Last autumn, the energy giant invested $5 million in Pennsylvania’s Finite Carbon, a pioneer in the business of helping landowners create and sell credits. The investment is aimed at helping Finite hire more foresters, begin using satellites to measure biomass and drum up more credits for use in the voluntary market.”
- “Old-growth forests are also a defense against wildfires, because they are less susceptible than the scrubby growth that fills in after a clear-cut.”
- “(Critics) argue that a lot of forest protected by offsets wasn’t at high risk of being clear-cut, because doing so isn’t the usual business of its owners, like land trusts, or because the timber was remote or otherwise not particularly valuable.”
- “Registering typical terrain (to generate carbon credits from it) costs about $350 per plot… In Alaska, where helicopters and bear guards are needed, it runs around $1,000.”
- (The excerpt above refers to the costs of assessing land to determine the amount of carbon the trees on it have sequestered)
- Finite hopes to reduce costs by replacing some of the legwork with satellites and artificial intelligence. It is launching an online platform for its owners to register as few as 40 acres in the voluntary market.
AI startup Pachamama brings transparency to carbon offset projects
Notes:
- Published March 2021 in Fast Company
Excerpts:
- “Protecting and replanting forests is a crucial part of the fight against climate change as trees pull CO2 from the atmosphere. But tracking progress—and understanding how much carbon a forest is storing—is a labor-intensive, manual process. It often involves sending teams to remote sites to count and measure trees. Because that happens infrequently, it means that data is quickly outdated.”
- “The startup Pachama automates the process, using lidar, satellite images, and artificial intelligence to accurately measure changes in forest cover around the world. The platform monitors trees lost to illegal deforestation or fires, and as new trees grow, the AI system estimates the total biomass to understand the full carbon benefit at any given time. The company has also built a model to track annual trends over time in the Amazon rainforest in particular.”
Carbon markets gird for liftoff as big money gets close to nature
Notes:
- Published February 2021 in Reuters
Excerpts:
- “An expected dash by big corporations for offsets to meet their climate targets has prompted financial exchanges to launch carbon futures contracts to capitalize on what could be a multi-billion dollar market.”
- “Singapore-based digital exchange AirCarbon told Reuters it planned to launch an offset futures contract by the second quarter.”
- “The futures market would allow companies to buy a simple credit, effectively a promise to reduce a tonne of emissions but not specifying where that would take place, in contrast to the existing market that offers direct access to particular offset projects.”
- “Carbon offsets, generated by emissions reduction projects, such as tree planting or shifts to less polluting fuels, have struggled for years to gain credibility, but as climate action has become urgent, their market is expected to grow to as much as $50 billion by 2030.”
SilviaTerra wants to bring the benefits of carbon offsets to every land owner everywhere
Notes:
- Published January 2021 in Tech Crunch
Excerpts:
- “…the ultimate goal for (the founders of SilviaTerra) was to find a way to put a carbon market on equal footing with the timber industry. Instead of cutting trees for cash, potentially landowners could find out how much it would be worth to maintain their forestland. As the company notes, forest management had previously been driven by the economics of timber harvesting, with over $10 billion spent in the U.S. each year.”
- “Working with AI for Earth, SilviaTierra created their first product, Basemap, to process terabytes of satellite imagery to determine the sizes and species of trees on every acre of America’s forestland. The company also worked with the U.S. Forestry Service to access their data, which was used in creating this holistic view of the forest assets in the U.S.”
- “With the data from Basemap in hand, the company has created what it calls the Natural Capital Exchange. This program uses SilviaTerra’s unparalleled access to information about local forests, and the knowledge of how those forests are currently used to supply projects that actually represent land that would have been forested were it not for the offset money coming in.”
- “Currently, many forestry projects are being passed off to offset buyers as legitimate offsets on land that would never have been forested in the first place — rendering the project meaningless and useless in any real way as an offset for carbon dioxide emissions.”
At dawn of carbon markets, farmers get up to $20 per acre
Notes:
- Published April 2021 in Successful Farming
Excerpts:
- “Payment rates of $15 or $20 are commonly mentioned at present for each ton of carbon dioxide that is sequestered or preserved through reduced emissions. The carbon credits created when carbon is sequestered are sold to those who are trying to reduce their own carbon emissions, such as manufacturers and airlines. Growers who adopt practices such as cover crops or minimum tillage can remove from 0.2 to 1.5 tons of carbon per acre per year, says Nori, a carbon removal marketplace.”
- “At those prices, growers could spend more on cover crops than they would see in a carbon payment. The seed, equipment, and labor for cover crops ranges from $15 to $75 an acre, says the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Outreach initiative. On the other hand, Midwestern farmers spent hundreds of dollars an acre to grow corn and soybeans in recent years with relatively small returns, if any, on rented land.”
Centree Database 