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by tunesmith 2500 days ago
The average American has a 20-ton / year carbon footprint. Offsetting 20 tons per year has a cost that ranges depending on what service you use. I've seen estimates of $6-10/ton - $20/month is $12/ton.

Edit: for the average american footprint, you can easily find the stat that the US emitted 5.268 GtCO2 in 2018. There are 327.16 million people in the US. From that I get more like 16 tons/year per person, so 20 is out of date. Of course, we have to get to zero with sequestration on top of that.
1 comments
rtpg 2500 days ago
If we were thinking big picture, would this mean that the US gov't could basically spend $72 billion a year to zero out the carbon contribution of America?

Cheaper than the Iraq war....

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tunesmith 2500 days ago
Not really, because there's an implied capacity for offsetting carbon. That's what it costs now, but as more people participate, the cost will undoubtedly go up.
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rtpg 2500 days ago
I don't think it's that straightforward. Stuff like planting trees should have the cost/ton go down over time due to scale (there's a land question but there's a _lot_ of federally owned land). A lot of other stuff could work similarly.

Mass production is a thing that brings costs down, so some of the carbon offset programs could take advantage of similar effects.

You're definitely right that some of these projects aren't infinitely scalable though. There are only so many gas stoves used in northern Uganda to be replaced..

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chrdlu 2500 days ago
The costs may go up as tree planting is more limited, but the more money in the ecosystem will allow new innovations to be discovered!
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lozenge 2500 days ago
Offsetting carbon is not removing carbon.

For example, you could "offset" the effect of buying a daily latte on your household budget by just continuing to buy them while your partner promises to skip their own daily latte. Despite the offset, your bank balance would be lower than if you had just stopped buying them.

There is no known way to remove carbon at a scale that would make a difference and a cost people would accept. As almost all carbon from extracted fossil fuels is now in the atmosphere and ocean, it would amount to running our fossil fuel extraction in reverse.

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