Buried at the bottom of a front page story in yesterday's Washington Post (see my post from yesterday) was a report of a landfill in Christiansburg VA that has sold $43,000 worth of carbon offsets on the Chicago Climate Exchange in just a few months, theoretically in exchange for capturing the methane that is created as the landfill contents decompose.
Earlier in that same article, which was about the voluntary carbon offset market generally, the reporter noted
"Some offset projects, such as mass tree plantings aimed at absorbing carbon dioxide, deliver climate benefits that are difficult to measure. In other cases, it is unclear whether offsets funnel money to existing projects or to projects that might have been done anyway."
Carbon sink projects (of which reforestation is one type) may be more difficult to measure than the amount of gas emitted by a landfill -- at least one where it has been channeled and collected (see how this is done) and shoved out of a pipe -- but there has been a lot of work on understanding these natural sink systems and methods are becoming more certain over time. What's more important though, is the scale at which these systems operate --that makes them an important part of the solution to global climate change...in fact, I would argue, the most important, because they are the only method of actually reducing the amount of greenhouse gases back to a level ( generally, 350 PPM) that is tolerable.
Remember, the only scenario under which infrastructure changes and emissions reductions can solve the climate change problem is one in which we reduce the level of annual emissions to below that of the net annual sequestration that occurs by natural processes, and the time scale of that scenario is way too long. No strategy that doesn't include optimizing natural carbon sinks -- the photosynthetic, plant based sequestration system which is at the heart of life on earth -- is going to get us to where we need to be.
Now, no journalist can be expected to know everything -- they are supposed to report and interpret the findings and opinions of people who do -- and the author of this piece, David Farenthold, seems to be a pretty sharp guy based on a review of the articles he has authored over the past few years, but I saw a subtle slash at plant sequestration in the article, while a free pass was given to the landfill project, even though it fails on two of the key criteria that determine whether a carbon offset has value: measurable reduction and additionality.
In the case of the landfill, yes the amount methan captured from the landfill is measurable, but there is no reduction in emissions going on at all if they are just flaring it off -- burning it, without even accomplishing anything in the process. Co-generation -- producing electricity from the landfill gas -- at least gets some benefit from the release, and might at least make it worthy of some sort of payment, but taking scarce carbon project funds and paying them to these people is poisoning the well of credibility, IMHO. An article from the Stafford County Sun, also in Virginia, makes this difference pretty obvious, especially considering they get their payout -- $180,000 / year -- from sales of electricity, not from selling bogus credits.
That's the other point: the Christiansburg project was already going, and the offsets that they are selling (despite not having anything to sell since they are flaring) have no additionality, that is they would be doing it anyway.
"'The money is gravy to us right now,' said Alan Cummins, executive director of the regional authority that runs the landfill. Even without it, he said, 'we would always continue to flare.'"
If the Chicago Climate Exchange allows this kind of pseudo-offset to trade in the market all they are going to do is ruin the market for credits that could be use to fund important, scale-capable projects in grassland, wetland, forestry and agriculture -- and I am not talking just no-till here -- that can really help us solve the climate change problem.
