251–260 of 335 posts
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Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?
Assuming they actually reached zero, who cares? I mean I'd love google to work on carbon removal efforts for the world at whole, but, capitalism.
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…
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Hawaii has one of (if the not the ) largest solar farms in the world — and they use sheep for weed removal. We definitely should be reforesting land, but land that is already pasture has a lot of potential for regenerative agricultural practices which greatly increase the prairie’s carbon-capture potential. Particularly if animals are incorporated intelligently. One study showed that the panels themselves can actuall…
Sheep produce methane which is far more harmful per unit mass than co2. I'm guessing sheep (especially plural) are less efficient than a fossil-fuel trimmer (maybe not after accounting for the carbon used to manufacture the trimmer?), but you could probably replace it with an electric trimmer and be even better off. Reasoning about carbon is hard.
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Assuming they actually reached zero, who cares? I mean I'd love google to work on carbon removal efforts for the world at whole, but, capitalism.
Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity —- think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)
Mostly, it does.
> think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)
Those laws are at odds with capitalism, because they limit the control of private capital owners over the application of that capital in favor of social direction or limitation by the State on others’ interest.
Now, you can support that as necessary for the good of society or oppose it as an infringement on the liberty of owners, but in either case you shouldn't mistake it for capitalism.
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The issue is that this price doesn't scale. Let's say that the current price of an offset is $5/ton-of-co2. Let's say that presently all offsets are being put toward replacing inefficient wood-burning stoves in third-world countries with much more efficient electric stoves, because it's the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions. Right now, only a very small amount of offsets are being purchased (relatively little c…
The idea is though, once the low hanging fruit of cheap offsetting dries up, causing offsets to become more expensive, the more appealing the price of carbon neutral energy becomes. Say now the reason people still burn coal is because it's cheap and you can offset it cheaply, once offestting becomes more expensive, you may as well spend the same total amount, but buy green energy instead of coal+an offest.
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Sheep produce methane which is far more harmful per unit mass than co2. I'm guessing sheep (especially plural) are less efficient than a fossil-fuel trimmer (maybe not after accounting for the carbon used to manufacture the trimmer?), but you could probably replace it with an electric trimmer and be even better off. Reasoning about carbon is hard.
Methane dissipates in the atmosphere within ~12 years, CO2 takes hundreds to thousands of years.
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I don't understand how we are comparing Energy generation with specifics about how it is generated and Plastic Recycling...what's that have to do with Energy production? Totally separate things.
GP already provided some "devil-in-the-details" line items to poke holes at carbon offsets (e.g. are all types of emissions being considered correctly) The parallel that I'm drawing is that recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems, but what ended up happening is that people's impression of recycling and their actual implementations turned out to be woefully out of sync…
On the contrary that's not how i remember it - everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst out of reduce, reuse, recycle.
However people want to clear their concious for free, so they chose recycling above all else.
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> 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. Yeah, that the trick. To put it boldly: What they offer is not sustainable. This means that these green initiatives hide the real price of CO2 or at least give a very wrong impression.
That statement is too bold -- the price of a CO2 offset is not a constant. As the easy methods become exhausted, we'll have to move to more expensive methods, yes. But currently there's still an absolute glut of fairly-cheap CO2 reduction methods that just aren't being done, or wouldn't be done without the offset pricing, so it's still a net benefit to do them.
Well asymptocially it is. And then the real intersting stuff happens, because economy becomes aligned.
> But currently there's still an absolute glut of fairly-cheap CO2 reduction methods that just aren't being done, or wouldn't be done without the offset pricing, so it's still a net benefit to do them.
There also is a net harm if people get the wrong impression of what the real cost of CO2 is.
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…
Seriously, you cannot just cut a deal with the building next door and say, I'll give you a bunch of cash if you claim you're using the coal power so I can claim I am using the solar power. And then pretend to be carbon free.
Here's a wild, crazy, dangerous idea for discussion: how about we start curtailing globalism, and encourage people to live less carbon intensive lives by building economies based around what's available nearby?
I like that idea, and it is legitimately how I am trying to live my life, but - The problem with that is - it requires people to either migrate away from areas that are not great at producing food without massive resource investment (or bringing it in from somewhere else), or to splinter basic things like hygiene and nutrition based on region. For example - for the last 5 years my family has exclusively eaten locally…