I hear a lot of people around me complaining about the role of industry in this climate crisis. Why should we individuals change when industry just keeps on polluting? Earlier I wrote a post on why we shouldn’t think like that and that we all have a role in this crisis. But even if you disagree and think industry should change and not us individuals, I have something exciting to share. Today I am telling you about: destroying CO2 with Carbon Killing.
EU ETS for CO2
In 2005 the European Union set up an emission trading scheme, the EU ETS. It’s set up to combat the climate crisis in an economically efficient way. Here’s how the system works. From 2005 onwards CO2 emissions are to be traded on a market. The EU sets a limit on how many CO2 emissions can be emitted per year. They set a so-called ‘cap’. Let’s just fictionally say they set a cap of 100 tons of CO2 emissions, that’s then the maximum all EU companies can emit together. Let’s say a fictional company wants to emit 1 tons of CO2 that year, they have to buy this permit on the EU ETS market. They have to pay for their emissions. The EU lowers the cap every year by a certain percentage until the cap is at zero. And so, slowly but surely emissions are lowered and eventually eliminated.
Flaws
Seems like a great idea, right? I agree, this system is a good thing. It does have flaws unfortunately. It’s still a political measure and politicians are receptive to lobbying. This makes that not all industries are included in the EU ETS, the cap is set too high, the cap does not decrease fast enough, not all greenhouse gases are included, the price of the permits is too low and the EU even gives free permits to certain companies. As I said, it has flaws. The emissions under the EU ETS are decreasing by 2.2% each year. Unfortunately, this number is not based on science. We need emissions to go down faster. Politicians are working on all these issues and it’s improving, but we’re not where we should be yet.
Carbon Killer
That’s where the Carbon Killer comes in. And that’s where we as individuals come in. We don’t have to feel powerless. We can literally force industry to change. Not by protesting or asking, but by buying up and destroying CO2 with Carbon Killer. On the Carbon Killer website you can enter the EU ETS market and buy up emissions permits. After you’ve purchased the amount of tons of CO2, the Carbon Killer buys the permits and destroys them. It costs 89 euros to destroy 1 ton of CO2.
It currently costs 89 euros to destroy 1 ton of CO2
Carbon Killer
Destroying CO2 with Carbon Killer
So, let’s go back to this example I mentioned above. The EU sets a cap of 100 tons of CO2 for example. If we then buy all the permits for that 100 tons of CO2 and destroy them, companies have no means left to emit CO2. Companies are forced to entirely cut their emissions. And even if we buy 50 permits, or 10, we prevent all this CO2 from being emitted! It’s horrible that money has all this power, but still. We as individuals can force companies to change. The more permits we buy, the faster we combat this climate crisis.
Privilege
Of course this tool is only available for privileged people. If you have money, you can make a difference here. That’s not fair, but it also means that we privileged people should act. Personally, I think I will use the tool for compensation. Once a year, I calculate my personal impact. I probably can see how much CO2 I have emitted that year and then I buy up the equal amount of permits. That means I have compensated all my behavior, even though I already live within the earth’s capacity! But of course for this tool the rule the more the better applies.
Let’s force those companies to change!
Yours sincerely,
Romee
This post is not sponsored, none of my posts are.