Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 335 posts

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#111

Post by zo1 »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #39
extropy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not buying the access to clean water = less burning of hydrocarbon. The poor people by definition are resource strapped and will use any means of energy available, just for different purpose. On the cynical side: clean water -> less mortality -> more population -> more carbon use to sustain said population.

clean water -> less mortality -> less population (as people stop having extra children) -> roughly the same amount of carbon.

Yeah, but there is an "initial surge" of lots of additional people before the mortality-rate signal lowers it (maybe 2-3 generations?) And then you're stuck with a lot of people that are now consumers and generating more carbon than if you just told them "No" in the first place and gave them a good quality of life improvement. We're watching that happen right now, we're many generations in and most of the 3rd world is not slowing down their population growth fast enough despite lowered mortality rates.

Way I see it, any help or financial aid to 3rd world countries (with high birth rates) needs to be coupled with comprehensive and mandatory contraceptive, health-information and birth control drives that is overseen by independent 1st world entities such as the WHO with the intent on lowering mortality rates and birth rates. And if these countries' birth rates don't start following a downward trajectory after a short period, then stop giving fancy aid and switch to bare-bones humanitarian aid. Seems way better than "lending" them the money they need and then making them dependent on the 1st world in perpetuity.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#112

Post by samvher »

stiray wrote: post #106
samvher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your 0 emission statement suffers from exactly the same criticism you're firing at Google. How was your bike built? How was your bus/train built? What's powering your bus/train? Also the assumption that a vegetarian diet is 0 emission is wrong - you're relying on a massive (oil-fueled) production system that emits a lot, to provide you with the food you buy. Sure, it's less than would be necessary if you ate meat but…

I think that I have explained it very well and I have put it there as an example why the claim from google is a fallacy. > once I start to count in how my food was produced, how the goods I am using were produced etc. this is just not true. I wasnt clear enough?

Sorry - I think I read too quickly (assuming you didn't edit your comment?).

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#113

Post by Filligree »

polote wrote: post #52

I don't understand how that can be possible. Is Google planting trees to remove carbon from the air ? I mean there are hundreds of google employees who take the plane everyday and therefore emit carbon, how this carbon emission is removed ?

Paying people up plant trees, or to use carbon-neutral sources of energy that they otherwise wouldn't.

Carbon offsets are currently much cheaper than they really should be, because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit like the latter, but that doesn't mean they're not genuinely causing less CO2 to stay in the atmosphere than otherwise would.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#114

Post by zo1 »

growlist wrote: post #61
ForHackernews wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions. For example, look at some of the projects here: https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissio... Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or…

> cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions Contraception.

Sent to the third world countries you mean?

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#116

Post by actuator »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #109

There's a really good explanation of different loopholes in calculating carbon emissions in the Microsoft carbon target announcement from last year[1]. Eg do you count secondary services your employees use, like food services or emissions from their commute? Do you count partner services, like shipping providers for physical product? These, along with your direct emissions, are categorized into three "scopes" of emis…

> emissions from their commute

Isn't stuff like this kind of out of their hand unless the state itself tries to fix this.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#117

Post by Filligree »

polote wrote: post #107
robjan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought carbon offsets which are more focused on preventing / reducing carbon from being generated. It's basically saying "if I stop x amount of carbon from being emitted somewhere in the world, it's as good as -ve carbon on the balance sheet".

so basically company A says it built one solar panel for company B to use. Company A says it reduced its carbon emission and company B says it reduced also his. So we have reduced emission by a factor of 2 solar panels by using only one? seems smart!

No, that's not how the calculation works.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#118

Post by stiray »

samvher wrote: post #112
stiray wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that I have explained it very well and I have put it there as an example why the claim from google is a fallacy. > once I start to count in how my food was produced, how the goods I am using were produced etc. this is just not true. I wasnt clear enough?

Sorry - I think I read too quickly (assuming you didn't edit your comment?).

Nope, I didnt. This was the whole point why I even put the statement there.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#120

Post by djsumdog »

Aunche wrote: post #72
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #41

This is like rich countries moving factories to third-world countries where industry emits more CO2. They pretend to be responsible for less and less greenhouse gases even though they consume more physical goods, with larger carbon footprint. Worst, they feel fine flying and buying SUV because their not that dirty compared to people in undeveloped countries whose carbon footprint keeps increasing.

They aren't displacing factories to third world countries. They're displacing dirty power with cleaner power. Obviously this won't be sustainable forever, but it's a good start.

But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean. Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts. Those high end molten salt solar plans take natural gas to startup. Most "wood chip" plants burn the same fast growing trees used by paper mills.

CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. The massive amount of plastic particles in the ocean. Colossal e-waste from electronics only designed to last two years.

Real, meaningful changes that will stop environmental devastation require reduction of consumption. Unless Google finds a way to reduce their data center footprints, the CO2 numbers are most likely just cooked books; displacing CO2 with other environmental disaster.

We need to consume less things.

Post reply on HN