Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 4/5

Orbuch: Many low-durability carbon credits represent completely non-existent carbon removals

Ryan Orbuch · Growing the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) market · May 5, 2022 · at 18:53

Ryan Orbuch of Lowercarbon Capital discusses the lack of additionality and verification issues in cheap nature-based carbon offset credits.

0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Many of the, what we could refer to as low durability, low end credits today, whether it's something like improved forest management or otherwise, it's not that they're low durability, they actually just don't exist. Right? So, like, you have this weird thing where the lower the durability is, in practice, it ends up meaning it's, like, less and less likely to be additional.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Ryan Orbuch

Opinion
Orbuch: Legacy carbon registries protected brokers by pretending cheap offsets were real
“The original sin with carbon markets was this bad incentive structure encouraged by registries that weren't aligned around the problem to protect the interests of the sellers and brokers of the credits, to make them look like there are enough credits at low en…”
Ryan Orbuch Jan 4, 2024 ▶ 12:46 Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market
Insight
Orbuch: Legacy carbon offset market operated as an aligned house of cards
“Because the registries and the feedback loop with the registries is to just keep issuing credits and make each credit look the same as every other credit, everyone's incentivized the other way because the buyers don't want to go back and say, Wow, all this mon…”
Ryan Orbuch Jan 4, 2024 ▶ 25:31 Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market
Opinion
Orbuch: Legacy registry credits only vaguely corresponded to actual carbon cycles
“You need someone whose job it is, is to figure out the effect of a given thing on the carbon cycle. And we have said that the old registries played this role, and people believe they played that role, and that's what it meant for them to issue a ton. And that'…”
Ryan Orbuch Jan 4, 2024 ▶ 31:46 Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market
Assertion Supported
Orbuch: High-quality carbon removal offtakes rival legacy voluntary market size
“Most of the dollars that have gone into the sort of market for higher quality removals are forward offtakes, right? Shayle Kann: Right. Shayle Kann: I guess that's true. Ryan Orbuch: So the cash is spent when the removal is delivered. And like, if you add up a…”
Ryan Orbuch Jan 4, 2024 ▶ 7:16 Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Orbuch: Buyers cannot purchase real carbon removal for $10 per ton
“Turns out you can't spend 10 dollars a ton and do anything real.”
Ryan Orbuch Jan 4, 2024 ▶ 8:43 Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market
Assertion Supported
Orbuch: Carbon credit registries face structural conflicts when paid by suppliers
“The methodology creation itself is often conflicted, where the supplier is paying the registry to create a methodology for them, which has some obvious issues. Or they're using some other one that some other supplier created.”
Ryan Orbuch Jan 4, 2024 ▶ 19:11 Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.