Google says its carbon footprint is now zero • Hacker News Board

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#261

Post by growlist » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

parasubvert wrote: post #148

growlist wrote: post #70

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?

Lots of reasons? A) We’ve globally lowered poverty to its lowest levels in history through trade. Pretty much every government And populace on earth would be against this policy except the absolute richest blocs (eg. The EU, elements of the USA). B) Globalism has already been pretty curtailed by populism the past 20 years. But this includes the good parts of globalism, like coordinated carbon reductions. C) Carbon re…

> mass migrations that will be required later this century due to carbon emissions.

...only if we choose not to do something about controlling fertility. But in the end I strongly suspect we'll all be travelling about a lot less. Which is fine with me. Globalism is all about destroying diversity and culture, which is an awful future.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#262

Post by ip26 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #214

ip26 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700. A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For thi…

You're already taxed (potentially a lot) on fuel. Adding another tax that's harder to measure consumption for seems like a bad idea.

I'm not really stumping for the carbon tax here, it's mostly just a thought experiment on the relative significance of pricing carbon.

I have to add though, while carbon taxes would have challenges to implement, adding a carbon tax to fuel specifically is not hard to measure at all! We know exactly how much carbon is in the fuel. A $40/ton carbon tax means +$0.36 per gallon of gasoline.

P.S. The US federal fuel tax ($0.18) was last increased in 1993, and was not indexed to inflation.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#263

Post by tonfa » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #228

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who told you going carbon neutral was economy killing? And if it is, why are all the world's governments commited to doing it? I think you can probably trace that information source back to someone who makes their money pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because it would most likely mean forcibly destroying petrol powered cars, which is pretty economy killing as well as vote killing. Consider: if you don't do that, you're emitting a lot of CO2. You could wait until everyone upgrades to electric cars but it takes several decades for the vehicle fleet to turn over, so even if everyone started buying nothing but electric now, it would take decades to phase out the old v…

In bunch of countries phase out of ICE cars is planned for the 2030-2040 time frame.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#264

Post by rossng » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

boogies wrote: post #218

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what? Build a giant fence around it? Why the hell would you even care that much about 3,500 fucking birds ? There are FAR better uses for taxpayer money than figuring out how to save a vanishingly small number of them, when we kill them in the billions for dinner anyway. The plant still seems to be a decent step forward, and nothing ever is going to be perfect. If we're going to go down that road, then we're com…

Like nuclear. Why the heck would you care about soda fizz and not about the 2.9 billion wind and solar deaths contributing to the 29% loss of the entire country’s birds? (Or the endangered species being killed, or the human deaths?) https://townhall.com/columnists/katiekieffer/2019/09/23/29-b...

This is one of the most intellectually dishonest things I have ever read on Hacker News. There is _no_ evidence presented here that wind and solar are responsible for anything more than a negligible fraction of this species loss.

It reminds me rather of https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#265

Post by danans » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #120

Aunche wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts.

There are lots of known ways to deal with this, including grid scale batteries and demand-response, both of which are now reaching the electricity market.

What we need is the political and cultural shift to support massive investment in these technologies. There will be room for natural gas as a bridge fuel, but coal has no future. And yes, it's not happening fast enough, and no snap of the fingers will do it.

> CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on

Only if you're willing to ignore the clearly visible impacts of global warming amplified destructive events worldwide. The waters are rising and the global warming denial island is getting smaller with every passing year.

> We need to consume less things.

We need to consume less-carbon-intensive things (hyphenation intentional). We can start by consuming longer-lasting things, consuming things whose materials are more readily recyclable, and reducing waste (where no utility is derived from the consumption). But the first step is to reduce the carbon intensity of things we already consume.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#266

Post by xyzzyz » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

corty wrote: post #237

soperj wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?

You can sell the negative carbon as offsets to others. Lots of products are greened up by just buying offsets instead of really doing something, so there is lots of money in it.

Buying copious amounts of offsets is probably how Google gets to claim it’s carbon neutral in the first place.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#267

Post by boogies » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #227

boogies wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, as of the last millenium at the latest. Chernobyl was last millenium. Fukushima was a tsunami. There were 0 (zero) deaths from radiation there (and ironically, perhaps there were deaths from irrational fear of it — from the rushed evacuation — perhaps it would be better named FUDushima). And tsunamis don’t happen in the US. The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, pilin…

> Fukushima was a tsunami Tsunamis, by themselves, don't contaminate ocean-water with radioactive material to a density high enough to create a 10-km no-fish-zone. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00664/fukushima-fishin... And while Chernobyl didn't happen in the past 20 years, I think it's naive to consider nuclear power safe when a continent-threatening disaster occurred in the past 40 years. "One massive disa…

> Tsunamis, by themselves, don't contaminate ocean-water with radioactive material to a density high enough to create a 10-km no-fish-zone

OK, fair enough, I think it may be a good idea not to build nuclear reactors in potential direct paths of tsunamis, or at least not on the seashore the fourth most powerful earthquake in the recorded history of the world, causing the only nuclear “disaster” to share the same maximum classification as Chernobyl, killed at maximum one person singular, a thousand times less than an average year of rooftop solar https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... § The safety issues with Rooftop solar installations / http://www.osha.gov/Publications/Construction_Fatalities/Con..., “raise[s] serious questions about the safety of nuclear power,” I don’t know an appropriate adjective to describe the questions raised by one form of solar killing 3 orders of magnitude more yearly.

(Edit: On fires)

Heat may exacerbate fires, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t burn what isn’t there, and there simply wouldn’t be anywhere near as much flammable undergrowth, etc. if firefighters didn’t fight to prevent nature from removing it in smaller, safer quantities. The number of deaths from natural disasters relative to population is decreasing and there’s no reason for the west coast to be an exception (other than blaming the weather and ignoring inconvenient facts and logic).

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#268

Post by the8472 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

paul_f wrote: post #259

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…

Sorry, buts carbon offsets are utter BS. Google has a 500,000 square foot office in Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles gets 20% of its electricity from a coal plant in Utah. Power is fungible, you cannot select the source for your power if on the city's grid. Therefore, Google's electricity comes from burning coal. Seriously, you cannot just cut a deal with the building next door and say, I'll give you a bunch of c…

Power may be fungible, but purchase agreements are less so. Someone has to contract with that coal plant. If nobody is buying from them they have to close. And if there's a lot of companies that want to give themselves a grain paint then there'll also be more demand for renewables than supply and more will have to be built. That is of course entirely dependent on the accounting being done correctly.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#269

Post by lhorie » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #257

lhorie wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems 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.

> everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst

Curious to hear some of these examples.

If you look at Japan, for example, they obsessively went all in on recycling. Look at how many different types of recyclables they have, the new electronics craze, the apartment complex obasans that would bring your unsorted garbage back to your unit door as a form of passive-aggressive social peer pressure, etc.

I distinctly remember being taught about recycling in school, and reading about it in children's books, but reduce and reuse were at best afterthoughts, if mentioned at all.

Governments spend a considerable amount on recycling education (e.g. pamphlets about what can and cannot go in a recycling bin), but the taxation incentives I'm aware of don't really paint a super convincing reduce/reuse-oriented strategy.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#270

Post by bluGill » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #201

bluGill wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most corporate campuses are located such that public transportation cannot serve it well. They tend to be isolated islands surrounded by parking lots and grass land, with no through street that transit could take that would get from on place to another. Thus the only transit ends at their building, this is okay for a zoo or shopping mall where people come and go all day, but offices tend to be everyone arriving at th…

Yep. Carbon initiatives like the Microsoft one will force them to rethink the wisdom of building corporate campuses. > people with a choice will prefer to drive just for the one time that the kid gets sick and they have to leave early This used to be a major (underestimated, in my opinion) issue, and I used to bring it up all the time as something that needed to be addressed before people who were accustomed to drivi…

Uber and Lyft are not a good solution. I could every trip on them as worth a weeks worth of driving alone since you don't know where those drivers are driving (or sitting stopped waiting for a call) when you call them. If everyone is normally using transit they are okay - but then there should be all day service to the campus so you don't need them. (I will agree if you say I'm over counting their environmental costs - I do that to make a point that is often ignored)