![]() In response, the UC’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative set up the UC Carbon Abatement Committee, which worked with staff, students, and faculty from each campus to establish the institution’s purchasing standards and to identify the types of projects that could meet them. Students, faculty, and campus budget officers raised concerns about the institution’s plan to rely on and invest so heavily in such an unreliable climate tool. But reaching that goal would have also required significant purchases of offsets through carbon markets. In 2013, the University of California pledged to achieve carbon neutrality across its campuses and health centers within 12 years by shifting to emissions-free vehicles, building renewables projects, and undertaking similar efforts. If you can’t create your own, scrutinize the options in the marketplace very carefully and commit to only buy trustworthy ones.īut that third option “is a hard path to take,” she says, “just because of the poor quality on the market today.” If you must use offsets, create your own. Haya, who has highlighted issues with offsets for two decades, says she sees three main takeaways from the research project, which she lists in order of priority: Don’t buy carbon offsets focus on cutting emissions instead. Indeed, the subject will be a hot point of debate at the COP28 climate conference that kicks off November 30 in Dubai, where national negotiators will haggle over the standards for a UN-run global carbon trading market. But many corporations and nations alike continue to bank heavily on the promise of offsets. Recent data shows that demand for offsets is falling, as are prices for future contracts, a commitment to buy offsets at a set price at a later date, as some companies rethink their reliance on them. But a mounting body of studies and investigative reports has found that these projects can dramatically exaggerate the climate benefits in a variety of ways, often amounting to little more than greenwashing. The basic promise of offsets is that individuals or organizations can balance out their own greenhouse gas pollution by paying others to grow trees, halt logging, or take other steps that may reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. ![]() And the fact that it has taken such a strong stance on offsets marks another blow to battered carbon markets. Its commitment to replacing natural gas plants and other polluting infrastructure across the state highlights a model that other universities, organizations, and even cities could and should follow, says Holly Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo. The University of California is a huge and influential public research system encompassing three national labs and 10 campuses, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UCLA. On November 30, they will launch a website highlighting the array of problems they found, the strict standards they helped set for UC’s offset purchases, and the methods they developed for scrutinizing projects in voluntary carbon markets. Now the researchers are sharing the lessons they learned over the course of the project, in the hopes of helping other universities and organizations consider what role, if any, offsets should play in sustainability strategies, MIT Technology Review can report.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |