Claver Gatete, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, keeps telling us that Africa could earn US$82 billion a year from carbon offsets. Where does this figure come from?
LoL. Not only does Gatete clearly have no idea about carbon markets, he also makes the inexcusable mistake of treating Africa like it's one country. 'Africa' will not receive payments from carbon offset projects: specific African governments (or more likely, shady private operators, as at present) will. As with colonial production of commodities, they will compete with each for market share and lowest price. That, as well as the current massive over-production of credits which almost no-one wants any more, will ensure credit prices long remain at rock bottom, and probably below production price.
Thank you - great research!! Yes, climate scientist Glen Peters gets it exactly right: “We need to protect forests, but they are not a fossil offset!” However, offsets are BS because the entire planet has always been involved with mitigating the carbon cycle. In a recent study https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177 "Towards a Cenozoic history of atmospheric CO2," it is shown that when the CO2 was 480 ppm 16 million years ago, it took the planet 2 million years to get to our present level of about 420 ppm, then another 11.5 million years to get to 280 ppm, the pre-industrial level, before we tried to dig up and burn every available fossil fuel. This study reveals the scale of the perturbations we have set in motion with our addiction to city life. But another report https://phys.org/news/2023-12-rich-nations-ditch-fossil-fuels.html says that we need to be completely off fossil fuels in just a few years. Unfortunately, that is a recipe for total societal collapse, since these over-inflated population numbers were built on the availability of cheap energy.
Chris, The info you have gathered about who is behind these platforms - a sort of neoliberal conservation-finance complex - is revealing. Thanks!
LoL. Not only does Gatete clearly have no idea about carbon markets, he also makes the inexcusable mistake of treating Africa like it's one country. 'Africa' will not receive payments from carbon offset projects: specific African governments (or more likely, shady private operators, as at present) will. As with colonial production of commodities, they will compete with each for market share and lowest price. That, as well as the current massive over-production of credits which almost no-one wants any more, will ensure credit prices long remain at rock bottom, and probably below production price.
Thank you - great research!! Yes, climate scientist Glen Peters gets it exactly right: “We need to protect forests, but they are not a fossil offset!” However, offsets are BS because the entire planet has always been involved with mitigating the carbon cycle. In a recent study https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177 "Towards a Cenozoic history of atmospheric CO2," it is shown that when the CO2 was 480 ppm 16 million years ago, it took the planet 2 million years to get to our present level of about 420 ppm, then another 11.5 million years to get to 280 ppm, the pre-industrial level, before we tried to dig up and burn every available fossil fuel. This study reveals the scale of the perturbations we have set in motion with our addiction to city life. But another report https://phys.org/news/2023-12-rich-nations-ditch-fossil-fuels.html says that we need to be completely off fossil fuels in just a few years. Unfortunately, that is a recipe for total societal collapse, since these over-inflated population numbers were built on the availability of cheap energy.