All of Maria Shakhova's Comments + Replies

One of recommended carbon offsets is BURN. If I understand correctly, BURN provides households with more efficient stoves, which allows them to use less wood or charcoal for cooking. So carbon that would otherwise be in the atmosphere as CO2 remains in the form of trees. On the other hand, Giving Green does not recommend forestry offsets:

Of particular concern is “permanence”, which refers to the fact that in order to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere, trees must stay alive for many years. This adds an additional layer of uncertainty to any fores
... (read more)

Hi Maria, thanks for the note. I understand the point you're making, but I think the case of forestry and cookstoves are really quite different.  The difference is that with clean cookstove (or really any project that improves energy efficiency), you permanently remove demand for energy, which is not reversible. 

Let's take a classic impermanence example around forestry offsets. A project works for a year to conserve a hectare of forest that would have been counterfactually cut down . They are issued X carbon credits for this conservation, and sel... (read more)