Who Pays For The Carbon Offsets?

The AP reports that the California wildfires spewed as much carbon dioxide in a week as all of California's power stations and vehicles during the same timeframe. There's a couple of things I want to point out in this story besides the proper doubt the story brings up. Who pays for the carbon credits in an arson fire? And which agency's numbers do you accept?

I've always felt that man's contribution to greenhouse gases is dwarfed by all the natural sources, and last week's fires definitely highlight that fact. The AP writer also points to the doubted efficacy of carbon offsets and trading when natural disasters strike:

It [a new study] raises questions about how useful it is to plant trees to offset rising carbon dioxide emissions and soothe environmental consciences.

California basically doubled it's carbon dioxide output for one week. How about another scenario? There are all these Pacific islands clamoring for future damages payments set aside by the Kyoto Protocol because predicted rising sea levels might destroy them. These payments are predicated on a member nation's carbon output. What if one of these islands' volcano erupts, gushing forth more carbon than the entire country of Australia in a decade? Are they held responsible for setting back the carbon trading scheme? Likewise for our arson fires, do the convicted arsonists also have to pay reparations to California, or the United States if we ever do join a carbon market, so that they can purchase credits to offset the extra damage?

Right now, there is no mechanism for these kinds of scenarios, because the Kyoto Protocol really doesn't care about reducing overall carbon levels to stop theoretical global warming. If it were, we would know exactly how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, and how much of it industry actually put in there. But we don't, which brings me to the second thing I want to point out in the article.

Even the carbon dioxide levels we think are being injected into the atmosphere, be it natural or man-made, are theories also. The AP story is basically about a Colorado team about to publish a theoretical paper, and they just decided to apply their new computer program to the wildfires to calculate carbon output. They come up with 8.7 million tons. California's governmental body comes up with 6 million tons. What's the real number? Nobody knows, because those numbers are spit out by computer simulations, whose assumptions about fuel, burn rates, and chemical byproducts, are all theoretical. It's a wildfire model. So when the time comes to offset the carbon contribution of the volcano or wildfire, whose numbers do you go with?

This is why coming up with policy based on models that haven't been proven yet is sheer stupidity. It's taken twenty years to design the proper instruments and satellites to test the greenhouse theory, but they still won't be launched for another five years. When it will take 1000 years for sea levels to rise 23 feet, if the predictions are correct, I think we can wait until the data come in to support the theoretical model outputs. Honestly, what's the hurry? Unless the activists' plan is to get their policies in place before they are proven wrong, so that when the cooling cycle begins again, they can say their world-saving plans are working. But that's pretty cynical. Only someone who doesn't really care about the environment, but is more concerned with the prosperity gap between developed nations and poor nations, and wants to eliminate that gap by slowing working economies down, would come up with motivation like that. But you'd have to buy into economy stopping disaster scenarios like the population bomb, or peak oil. I mean, come on, those wacky ideas are over 40 years old. Nobody still believes them, do they?