As he (and the other academics at Oxford who worked on this) argues then only offsets with certain, very stringent conditions can be relied upon to reduce future warming.
Very few currently available offsets are geologically-permanent, for example.
So one way in which these principles (and the report explaining them) are helpful is in telling the difference between total greenwash and genuine commitment.
Offsets have a bad name for a good reason: A large number of current market offsets (even those rated as "Gold-standard") would fail to meet even the least stringent of these Oxford Principles. (e.g. because they aren't additional, permanent or they involve double-counting.)
But after that it's not a simple pass/fail, and their taxonomy helps to explain the differences
Examples of how this makes distinguishing offsets clearer:
1) If I fly, but then pay someone to switch their boiler out for an electric one, I have bought an Emissions Reduction Offset.
2) If I fly, but then pay someone to suck carbon out of the air with DACCS, I have bought a Carbon Removal Offset.
3) If I choose not to fly, that is Emissions Reductions, but not an Offset.
4) If a brewing corp makes all parts of their business zero-carbon through electrification etc. Then on top of that (which is Emission Reductions) they also try to grow the crops for their beer in some way that absorbs CO2 from the air, that is Carbon Removal but not an Offset.
I personally think ideally offsetting would only be used for really important and irreplaceable activities (e.g. emissions from medical/scientific aircraft), and be geologically sequestered.
But to demand a company do it differently you should know what you're asking for.
/🧵
(This should have said "I think offsetting SHOULD only be used for X", not I think offsetting "WOULD only be used for X" - I very much think the offsetting market will grow massively even when I would much rather groups just directly avoided those emissions instead.)
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a) Policy people / the public, who want to know what fusion is and isn’t,
b) The fusion community, as we together need to better understand the context and likely competitive landscape our work will face.
2/
Despite a recent surge in activity, the timeline for fusion development is slow. And even once demonstrated, the tech doesn't lend itself well to a rapid rollout.
Fusion can likely only be significant after the world is already renewables-dominated.
People are still tweeting about the NYT's piece on the SPARC nuclear #fusionenergy release, so as a fusion PhD student I'm going to explain what it is and isn't...
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is a spin-out from MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Centre. A few years ago they described an innovative design for a power plant called ARC, which proposed using recent advances in high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets to shrink the machine.
This works because the fusion plasma is held by the strong magnetic field, as each charged particle corkscrews tightly around the field lines.
The higher the field (denoted B), the tighter the corkscrew, effectively shrinking the whole plasma.
For starters, credit to @BCG for making the pledge at all – it’s already more than @McKinsey and @BainAlerts have done (two of their main competitors), from what I can tell.
@BCG are talking about net-zero by 2030. That's not bad - well before the IPCC's 2050 date, and therefore in line with keeping to 1.5C of global warming.
The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill is a piece of work to be proud of, whose championing shows that @XRebellionUK can continue making a difference.
In particular we look at the most pernicious example of doomism within a movement @GalenHall4 and I are members of: the damaging effect of Jem Bendell’s @deepadaptation agenda on @ExtinctionR .
2/
The original Deep Adaptation paper has been downloaded 100’s of thousands of times, and Bendell contributed a chapter to the Extinction Rebellion handbook, and has spoken for the movement many other times.
It's 60 years to the day since Charles Keeling's paper showing that atmospheric CO2 concentrations were increasing was published: "The Concentration and Isotopic Abundances of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere".
The abstract is so understated for the gravity of the implications.
"A systematic variation with season and latitude in the concentration and isotopic abundance of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been found in the northern hemisphere. ... "
"In Antarctica, however, a small but persistent increase in concentration has been found. Possible causes for these variations are discussed."