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Has anyone taken the SASB FSA exams? Any advice?
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There’s a lot more nuance to both than just good or bad, and they both have big problems. You should be really wary of them, and it’s not controversial for pro-climate folks to be opposed to them, largely because there are much better solutions out there for most applications and they are commonly used for greenwashing.
CCUS is probably necessary for hard-to-abate sectors (especially cement which has no feasible solution right now), but most of the CCUS that is getting investment is on fossil fuel power (mostly natural gas). Problem is it doesn’t work 100% (ie doesn’t capture all the CO2) and has a long history of projects failing to deliver against promised capture targets. So what you end up with is CCUS being used to justify the continued burning of fossil fuels, when a far better, cheaper and more effective solution would be to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
That’s not even getting to Enhanced Oil Recovery, which is the crazy process of injecting captured CO2 into the ground to more effectively extract oil. Which is then of course burned, and emits massive amounts of CO2. Just a ton of greenwashing here.
Offsets have similar but different problems. There’s a really wide range in terms of quality and validity, and a lot of them are garbage. Some big studies recently showing that so many offset projects never delivered the promised CO2 reduction or offset anything. So again, what you end up with is companies “offsetting” their emissions with bogus credits, and just continuing to emit.
To be legitimate, companies should be focusing on offsets that actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere permanently (like DAC or enhanced weathering). But at the moment they are super expensive, and a tiny percentage of the offer credits that are available on the market (like probably a lot less than 1%). Nature based solutions are great, and have a ton of co-benefits for things like biodiversity, but they have permanence issues (eg if the forest burns down).
Even the best offsets in isolation aren’t enough, so it’s important for them to not be a distraction from the main game which has to be renewable energy and decarbonization.
“Weird debates” when people question a decarb strategy? I’m skeptical of OP’s intentions here, tbh. Anything other than actual real economy decarb can and should warrant lots of scrutiny. There could be a time and place for some CCUS and offsets in certain circumstances, but as a strategy in and of itself it’s commonly greenwashing, as BCG1 noted.
Offsets are primarily greenwashing.
CCUS has some applications but there are some limitations and concerns. It’s certainly not a silver bullet.