181–190 of 335 posts
Sorry, but this is greenwashing.
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…
> do you count secondary services your employees use No, you don't. If you pull the food service thread, you can go through the food wholesalers to farmers, then to John Deere, then to steel plants, then to miners, then to hard hats and eventually you'll end up in China where the game will be declared lost.
This is not some abstract game to be won. This making real changes in the real world.
And no: when the stakes are this high, it being extremely difficult is no reason to just assume it's impossible.
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> emissions from their commute Isn't stuff like this kind of out of their hand unless the state itself tries to fix this.
Companies can help a lot by locating their offices in places that enable less carbon intensive commuting, lobbying local government, supporting initiatives that promote density, and supporting local transit initiatives (example: [0]). When businesses speak up and say, local business needs workers to be able to commute without a car, our competitiveness will suffer without it and we will fall behind, that speaks to a…
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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 o…
> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only > Natural gas to startup That's strictly cleaner than running the region on natural gas only >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. Lak…
> That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only
True, but from a CO2 and climate standpoint that's strictly dirtier than nuclear. And reducing emissions by enforcing good insulation norms, taxing the hell out of kerosene, etc.
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Companies can help a lot by locating their offices in places that enable less carbon intensive commuting, lobbying local government, supporting initiatives that promote density, and supporting local transit initiatives (example: [0]). When businesses speak up and say, local business needs workers to be able to commute without a car, our competitiveness will suffer without it and we will fall behind, that speaks to a…
Or allowing work from home.
I'm always suspicious about carbon offsets. From what I've seen buying flights for example, the price seems surprisingly low. Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. Does anyone have more expertise on this?
In other words, if the whole world were trying to offset its carbon emissions, the price per offset would rise dramatically.
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Even with all those caveats, its still an impressive milestone and a step in the right direction.
Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?
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Even with all those caveats, its still an impressive milestone and a step in the right direction.
One of the problems with the offset approach is it's not that repeatable. Only a certain number of companies can buy carbon offsets before there aren't really any more offsets to buy, and we have to start actually reducing the carbon to begin with. Separately, one of the things that gets to me with companies like Google claiming a zero carbon footprint is that if you look at its corporate headquarters, it's mostly pa…
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Even with all those caveats, its still an impressive milestone and a step in the right direction.
Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?
And as sibling comment mentions, climate change is bad for business too, so that's the incentive for net-negative.
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Even with all those caveats, its still an impressive milestone and a step in the right direction.
Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?