High Country News does it again on climate change issues

Ten months after being called out by me for confusing — or to be less charitable, conflating — a carbon cap and trade system with a carbon tax, High Country News is at it again, now offering a he-said, she-said piece claiming carbon offsets work, but wondering if they might be an excuse for big companies. Given that Eric Niiler works for Wired, shock me that he'd write something like this. And, it's not even he-said, she-said, it''s he-said, he-pretended-she-said. The last two paragraphs reflect this:

(T)here are signs that offsets might help in the long term by forcing carbon-polluting industries to become a bit more creative.  …  (I)t may buy us a bit of time, time that is fast running out.

No, they won't. They'll buy more excuses, is what they will do.

So, they're more than that, more than an excuse for big companies. They go beyond the companies.

They're like a modern version of indulgences for environmentalists. In other words, they're an excuse for middle-class, upper-middle-class and rich neoliberal white environmentalists to not face the need for radical, post-capitalist changes to the domestic and world order. Those largely white neoliberals would include, per my first link, most readership as well as staff of HCN, environmental groups like Sierra Club and its youth movement front Sunrise Movement, and Democrats ripping off a Green New Deal from the Green Party and any actual Socialists who want to join in. 

And, no, that's not a new thought on offsets as indulgences. I blogged about that THIRTEEN years ago. As I did about the degree of difficulty in monitoring such offsets. 

That offsets Niiler's "creativity" claim here:

A Swiss livestock company, for example, sells a special garlic-and-citrus cattle feed supplement to help cows produce less methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. It just gained approval from Verra, a nonprofit that develops standards for carbon offset projects. Farmers who use the feed and lower their methane emissions can then, after an audit, sell the carbon credits as an additional source of income.

If you are going to be a capitalist, also, Niiler, how do you know if this feed blocks as much methane as claimed? What's the carbon cost of the supplement? And? How do you even price other social costs of this versus just biting the bullet and eating less beef (or less dairy from Brown Swiss)?

Why not tell people to eat less meat? Maybe in part because HCN still promotes the myth of the rural West, in spite of it being the most urbanized part of the country and in spite of BLM or USFS fattened cows only producing about 3 percent of US beef?

Showing nothing is new under the sun, Pro Publica wrote about the difficulty in monitoring offset programs in the so-called developing world just last year. Niiler even linked to that (with HCN's usual problem for me, at least on Chrome, of the link refusing to open in a new tab. Or open at all.) Of course, that's why they've been migrated there. It's deliberate. It's even harder to monitor, let alone oversee and run herd on, a tree-planting program in Brazil than one in Oregon. Niiler doesn't even talk about that.

And, all of this ignores the biggest issue. Contra Niiler period, carbon offsets by their nature are just designed to hold carbon emissions flat. They're specifically NOT designed to reduce said emissions, when we desperately need them reduced. Holding carbon emissions flat is like asking the electric chair executioner to drop the voltage from 20,000 to 15,000. He's still going to kill you.

Just click the "carbon offsets" tag below to read more.

Of course, Sierra has been a hypocrite on carbon emissions issues for that long itself.