worthless

The UN climate conference in November approved an official market for large-scale trading of carbon credits. This will allow industrial countries to help meet their emission reduction targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement by paying other nations to protect and restore forests and carbon-rich peatlands.

The first major participant in this multi-billion-dollar enterprise is Indonesia. That country is home to the world’s third largest expanse of tropical rainforests and more than a third of the world’s carbon-storing peatlands. Indonesia’s government plans to raise up to $65 billion by 2028 by selling carbon credits accrued by restoring and protecting its forests and peatlands.

The problem with carbon trading is that it can be filled with loopholes ranging from inaccurate carbon accounting to outright fraud. Carbon trading with both individual companies and other countries can result in double- and even triple-counting of the same carbon.

For example, carbon credits are assigned when forests earmarked for agricultural or other development are preserved instead of being felled. But what if that forest destruction wasn’t going to happen even without selling carbon credits?

There are organizations in the business of verifying carbon accounting, but independent analysis of their methodologies has revealed serious shortcomings, and in many cases, the verifications have been deemed to be worthless.

There are real problems with carbon accounting and setting correct baselines for the carbon emission reductions associated with carbon credits. Nevertheless, the existence of a global carbon market can be an important tool in the world’s efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

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Will UN Carbon Market Work? Indonesia Will Provide First Test

Photo, posted June 12, 2017, courtesy of Runa S. Lindebjerg via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

In the Back to the Future films, Doc Brown ran his DeLorean time machine on food scraps. It was a fun bit of science fiction. But researchers at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Canada are investigating the potential for using food waste to generate power.

Food waste is not a candidate to replace solar or wind power, but it could be a source of energy for powering fuel cells. As it is, food waste represents a sustainability challenge because of its detrimental impacts on the economy and the environment. Organic waste represents a significant fraction of the material in landfills and contributes to methane production, air pollution, and other harmful pollutants.

The UBC researchers focused on fruit waste, which is abundantly available in agricultural regions. They have devised microbial fuel cells that convert fruit waste into electrical energy using an anaerobic anode compartment. That is a chamber in which anaerobic microbes – ones that don’t need oxygen – utilize the organic matter to convert it into energy. The microbes consume the fruit waste and produce water while generating bioelectricity.

It is not like the Back to the Future time machine where you can just toss in scraps of whatever is on hand. Different types of fruits provide different results when used in the microbial fuel cell. The process works best when the food waste is separated and ground into small particles. There is a long way to go before the technology could produce bioenergy on a commercial scale, but there is considerable potential for doing something useful with something that is currently worthless.

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UBCO researchers aim to energize fruit waste

Photo, posted July 24, 2011, courtesy of Andrew Girdwood via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

The UN Carbon Market

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Energy From Fruit Waste | Earth Wise

In the Back to the Future films, Doc Brown ran his DeLorean time machine on food scraps. It was a fun bit of science fiction. But researchers at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Canada are investigating the potential for using food waste to generate power.

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