ncx-gitbot
commented
1 year ago NCX response: The goal of climate mitigation is more about mitigating the damage caused by climate change, rather than the actual quantity of carbon in the atmosphere. The carbon in the atmosphere causes increased temperatures through climate forcing, which in turn lead to costly economic and social damages to our water, homes, businesses, and livelihoods. The long-standing research and implementation of the Social Cost of Carbon approximates the net present value of the perpetual stream of future costs and damages caused by climate change. For our methodology, we apply a similar economic framing and a net discount rate of 3.0% to identify the equivalence ratio between the benefits of delaying emissions for 1 year compared with 100 years. See Parisa et al. 2022 for a full explanation of how this economic model yields an economic equivalence between credits of different durations. In order to incentivize action today to avoid those future damages, it is appropriate to use a similar economic framework to calculate the benefits of near-term climate action. While a ratio does not signify a physical equivalence, it does appropriately value the future economic benefits of physical action today.
Commenter Organization: Carbon Direct, Inc.
Commenter: Bodie Cabiyo, Van Butsic, John Dees
2021 Deferred Harvest Methodology Section: No Section Indicated
Comment: Any amount of carbon stored for a single year represents a fundamentally different physical phenomenon than a long-lived carbon emission. Temporary carbon storage does not neutralize or fully “offset” cumulative radiative forcing from emitted CO2. It merely delays that forcing, exchanging short-term benefits for long-term impacts. This is particularly problematic in this proposed methodology because a significant fraction of the claimed avoided emissions from deferred harvest would actually become long-lived wood products. Thus, much of the actual emissions deferred will occur at the end of the useful life of the product, not during the one-year crediting period. This mismatch in time horizons is at odds with logic of tonne-year accounting.
Proposed Change: The proposed methodology should strike any mention of absolute physical equivalence between short-term harvest deferral and permanent reduction or avoided emission. Delayed cumulative radiative forcing expressed in tonne-years can be indicative of the value of “buying time” but never as directly offsetting a long-lived emission. It can only delay the impacts of emitted CO2 until a later time, at which time, the marginal impact may be greater or less than the present. Such tradeoffs should be explicitly considered in the approach to tonne-year accounting.