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Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

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Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#41

Post by ajross »

brunoTbear wrote: post #18
esotericn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest ClimeWorks plan, if it's trustworthy (can't personally vouch for it) is approx 1 USD per kg CO2 captured, or $1k per ton. That's pretty expensive. But at $100 it starts to look a lot more favourable when compared with a personal footprint - 30 tons emitted would be $3K, perfectly achievable for someone who's talking about flying to go skiing.

Terrapass seems to say my CO2 emissions from flying so far this year are going to come in around 13 metric tons. At $1000 per ton this isn't feasible. At $100 I'd think about it. At $10 it's not a question that I'd buy it. At $1000 per ton I'd change my air spending habits. At $100 per ton built into the price per flight I would probably take the same trips. tl;dr: get this price down an order of magnitude and I'm in…

Express it as an overhead on ticket price. You're using terrapass, so I plugged some numbers in and it out to about 20-30% based on what I can remember paying for typical domestic economy seats. If you fly on more expensive flights, it's even cheaper.

That sounds tolerable to me as a price of saving the planet. Certainly it's not an economy-busting impossibility given that it's in the range that can be reasonably borne by normal middle class individuals.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#42

Post by ajross »

sbierwagen wrote: post #36
ac29 wrote: post #8

Interesting that they are willing to pay any price the market offers, and expect to pay over $100/t. I wonder to what degree large scale burying of biomass would be effective? It'd be effectively the same process that created the hydrocarbon fuels we use today, which would be fairly effectively sequestered if we didnt drill them out of the ground. It seems the idea has certainly been thought of: https://cbmjournal.bi…

That paper avoids mentioning BECCS, the most extensively researched plan for carbon sequestration: reducing wood to charcoal, burning the syngas you produce during the process to generate electricity, and then sequestering the charcoal.[1] The Kyoto protocol for limiting global warming to 2C requires massive use of BECCS. Pros: The output material has a higher carbon content, so you're locking up less water, and it's…

> Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood.

It's a crop, though. That carbon you put into the atmosphere got sucked out by the tree you baked to begin with. Use renewable biomass (a "farm" in the jargon) and this problem goes away.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#43

Post by gbrown »

taurath wrote: post #27
Areading314 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big polluters, like airlines, energy, transportation, and chemical companies are the ones that will have to take these steps to see any effect. Every bit helps, of course, but the cost of implementing something like this is doable for some, while for many would mean extinction, or fundamental changes to their business model.

I think it’s on all of us, including all the corporations. We should have a carbon tax to disincentivize mass c02 production - at the moment all the profits are private and all the losses (to the environment) are public. If they want to pay someone who’s planting trees for carbon caps then that’s fine for me. Just solve the damn problem. Who’s standing in the way? Shareholders of the above companies (and by proxy, th…

It's literally economics 101: externalities, but for some crazy reason in the US it's seen as a leftist anti-capitalist issue.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#44

Post by kingbirdy »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #28
surfmike wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you then need to worry about enforcement mechanisms to keep those trees from getting cut down? If they’re all harvested after say n decades, there’s no net effect on climate.

How does it follow that there's no net effect on climate (or amount of atmospheric carbon) if the tree is cut down? I can only see that if the timber is burned for fuel. If someone instead carved the timber up into N skateboards, modulo waste, the carbon would stay with the skateboards.

Skateboards don't stay skateboards forever. Eventually they'll be thrown out, where they'll degrade & eventually decompose, re-releasing the stored CO2.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#45

Post by maximente »

tlb wrote: post #9
itcrowd wrote: post #3

This is an amazing pledge and very powerful statement. However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. The main counter argument being that CCS technology enables the status quo of fossil fuel burning to continue. On the other hand, there are some heavy industries (steel production?) that do not have any alternatives to coal burning in order to operate and CCS can offset the carbon footprint in these indus…

There isn't some intrinsic moral sin to burning carbon. There are just practical problems with having too much in the atmosphere. If you can remove carbon, especially if you can also convert it back into fuel, that solves the problem. (Carbon isn't the only emission from burning coal -- it contains sulfur and thorium too. But these can also be mitigated with some expense. And if you're converting CO2 directly to fuel…

no, this is too simplistic. extracting carbon from the ground is neither free nor reversable so this analogy isn't appropriate here. even if one could turn it back into whatever it's original form was (impossible to do without additional energy due to thermodyamics/entropy), the site of extraction is way worse for the wear.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#46

Post by lkschubert8 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #14

It's a small step in the grand scheme of things... But it's a huge step (and commitment) coming from a single company. I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view. Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys. As a si…

Am I mistaken in thinking that afforestation is technically a carbon sequestration strategy?

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#47

Post by reitzensteinm »

esotericn wrote: post #37
reitzensteinm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a red flag that they sell their highest plan, 600kg a year, as "approx. 100% of a global average footprint". While that's probably true, the median human does not fly. A one way flight London->New York generates almost this much per passenger. The mean emissions of those willing to spend 600 EUR/year to offset their travel are going to be at least an order of magnitude higher. You're better off feeling…

Right. US per capita is ~16 tons, UK is ~7. So at least ten times that figure. Agree with the rest of your post.

Their pitch is offsetting travel emissions, not all emissions.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#48

Post by kingbirdy »

itcrowd wrote: post #3

This is an amazing pledge and very powerful statement. However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. The main counter argument being that CCS technology enables the status quo of fossil fuel burning to continue. On the other hand, there are some heavy industries (steel production?) that do not have any alternatives to coal burning in order to operate and CCS can offset the carbon footprint in these indus…

The status quo of burning fossil fuels will continue whether we employ CCS or not, so we may as well use every tool available.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#49

Post by nightski »

gbrown wrote: post #43
taurath wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s on all of us, including all the corporations. We should have a carbon tax to disincentivize mass c02 production - at the moment all the profits are private and all the losses (to the environment) are public. If they want to pay someone who’s planting trees for carbon caps then that’s fine for me. Just solve the damn problem. Who’s standing in the way? Shareholders of the above companies (and by proxy, th…

It's literally economics 101: externalities, but for some crazy reason in the US it's seen as a leftist anti-capitalist issue.

Because you are acting like this would punish the company. It might to an extent but in reality consumers would hurt the most. That in my opinion is why it doesn't happen.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#50

Post by nextos »

Areading314 wrote: post #21
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #14

It's a small step in the grand scheme of things... But it's a huge step (and commitment) coming from a single company. I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view. Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys. As a si…

The big polluters, like airlines, energy, transportation, and chemical companies are the ones that will have to take these steps to see any effect. Every bit helps, of course, but the cost of implementing something like this is doable for some, while for many would mean extinction, or fundamental changes to their business model.

I think we need to implement world-wide tax on pollution to avoid some crazy externalitiees.

For example, cheap flights used frequently are a ridiculous luxury we cannot afford. I know lots of people that use budget airlines more than once per month to make weekend trips across Europe.

The amount of CO2 they are putting into the atmosphere is simply insane. A bit more than doing the same trip by car, for each passenger.

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