Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment • Hacker News Board

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#131

Post by esotericn » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

chrdlu wrote: post #110

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.

Individuals matter too! Netflix made had $5.8B in revenue from small $10-20 subscription users! Today, for $20 a month you can offset your own carbon footprint! This matters because the more resources that goes into fighting climate change allows innovation. Even by generating more demand for carbon credits and offsetting, new businesses can thrive and grow by fighting climate change! I've been super obsessed with ht…

Way less than $20 a month in a lot of the world too. Americans have a footprint twice as high as Brits, even.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#132

Post by semi-extrinsic » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

azernik wrote: post #75

godelski wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your sequestration comment. No one is saying don't plant trees. Fuck yeah, plant all the trees! But that won't wont be enough. Sequestration will get better, but one of the big things it helps with is locality. CO2 isn't homogenously spread across the globe. It also doesn't spread very well. Concentrations vary drastically over the year and so do plants' ability to capture carbon. Carbon can build up in certain re…

Sequestration is also good for catching carbon at potential emission sources; it's easier to grab CO2 out of the atmosphere at the point where you're burning methane than to let it out in the atmosphere and then try to catch it again. (Or, in some interesting experiments, even before emission; there's work on splitting methane from natural gas into carbon and hydrogen and just burning the hydrogen. Gets you something…

Re: your second point, splitting methane into H2 and CO2 is not something that's being investigated at lab scale, it's how 95% of global hydrogen production today is done. We're talking close to a trillion cubic meters per year from steam methane reforming.

It's just that most of the time, resulting CO2 is just released instead of being stored. But that is changing, fast.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#133

Post by esotericn » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #123

chrdlu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founders of Project Wren ( https://projectwren.com/ ) went from building HR Software to building software to combat climate change. We need profitable enterprises focused on this large global problem! I think the tides are starting to shift and would love to see the smartest minds of our generation focused on this issue!

You know, I would love for an option that just asked how old you are and just let you pay to offset your expected life's worth of tree replanting (this might just be the closest thing I've ever seen).

That's quite a hard figure to come up with I'd think, though there's no problem with overshooting of course.

My personal emissions going forward are likely to be way lower than previous years simply due to awareness.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#134

Post by fucking_tragedy » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:08 AM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #89

kingbirdy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mostly into the ground, no? Isn't that how petroleum was formed in the first place?

Probably not. Most of the oil we find comes from a period when very few organisms could break down waste from dead trees and plants.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#135

Post by aurelwu » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:18 AM UTC

cca wrote: post #126

matznerd wrote: post #87

Major respect to Stripe for starting this program, as this helps solve a real problem in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field. At Project Vesta (thanks for the shoutout[1]), while we have a plan for individuals to pay for their CO2 removal by donating directly for a specific tonnage of olivine to be placed on a beach in their name, all of the investors/fund advisors who have approached us and are interested in gett…

Thanks Eric. This well-captures what we hope to do. Please drop me a message at christian@stripe.com -- I'd love to talk about how our projects can work together.

Hi Christian, first of all I think it's a great commitment.

May I ask what measures stripe has taken when it comes to energy efficiency to reduce emissions - often this can be cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards. Do you know, and are at liberty to disclose, how much energy your datacenters consume and what measures to reduce their footprint have you taken? Also, I read on stripe's homepage that you heat using natural gas. While this can result in rather low emissions it hugely depends on the source of the gas - if the leakage rate is too high (with fracking it often is) , it can even be worse than lignite especially when looking at shorter timeframes (20-30 years opposed to the 100 which is often used for the co2eq factor)[1] so alternative heating options if available might reduce the emissions.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.35

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#136

Post by icebraining » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:21 AM UTC

eanzenberg wrote: post #122

gbrown wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because reducing US emissions to 0 will have no effect on global warming.

Reducing emissions by 14% will have no impact? I doubt that very much.

And that's just direct emissions; the emissions of other countries can often be attributed to supplying to the US.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#137

Post by aaaaaar » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:26 AM UTC

Areading314 wrote: post #104

BurningFrog wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A carbon tax is well known to be the rational solution to the problem. Even conservatives agree. It just happens to be politically impossible.

People pretend it's hard to create a carbon tax, but it's really not. Just tax the fuel (gas/oil/coal), and the cost will be passed on to polluters. Edit, of course, politically yes it's hard.

Does it have to be?

Planet Money had an episode about "revenue-neutral carbon tax", where all the money collected is returned back to the tax payers, to spend however they want.

The point of this tax is not to raise money, but to change behavior. This, a family that drives to work and school every day will pay more carbon tax, but this will be offset by the tax refund (or lower income tax). And a family that finds ways to reduce their carbon footprint will benefit from the tax refund and able to spend it on other things.

WA state had a carbon tax initiative but the revenues went to environmental efforts, and it failed. I think if it were made revenue-neutral, or heck, even made as an overall tax-cut to please the fiscal conservatives, I think it would pass (although it would face pushback from environmentally minded about not doing enough).

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#138

Post by icebraining » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

choeger wrote: post #120

sizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are electric airplanes feasible in the foreseeable future?

No. That's physically not efficient. Synthetic fuels may be, though.

We already know we can produce jet fuel from captured CO2 from the air. The trick is making it cheaper, particularly energy-wise. We can't dedicate half the world for solar panels to make fuel.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#139

Post by glogla » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:30 AM UTC

chrdlu wrote: post #110

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.

Individuals matter too! Netflix made had $5.8B in revenue from small $10-20 subscription users! Today, for $20 a month you can offset your own carbon footprint! This matters because the more resources that goes into fighting climate change allows innovation. Even by generating more demand for carbon credits and offsetting, new businesses can thrive and grow by fighting climate change! I've been super obsessed with ht…

I like it, but why do I have to give my email for emission calculation? It's off-putting, I don't want even more spam. And I will tell them where do I live and how, will they package it with my email and sell it to ad companies as a handy profile?

Sorry to be paranoid, but most startups (uber, airbnb, paypal, not to mention facebook ...) are evil and exploitative.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#140

Post by throwaway3627 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 7:35 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #55

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…

To your sequestration comment. No one is saying don't plant trees. Fuck yeah, plant all the trees! But that won't wont be enough. Sequestration will get better, but one of the big things it helps with is locality. CO2 isn't homogenously spread across the globe. It also doesn't spread very well. Concentrations vary drastically over the year and so do plants' ability to capture carbon. Carbon can build up in certain re…

Ummm, planting trees is pointless, virtue-signaling tokenism that cannot capture any meaningful carbon because it doesn't sequester anything permanently. Thunderf00t throughly debunked the Ethiopian plan as utterly pointless. https://youtu.be/Z5uuIcS4kqE