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Stripe Climate

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61–70 of 227 posts

Re: Stripe Climate

#61

Post by DennisP »

tima101 wrote: post #36

Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel? Simply fund reforestation efforts. Plus many wildlife species will be saved from extinction. For example, orangutans in forests of Borneo island. EDIT And besides, humans will survive climate change, we are 7.8 billion. But we made 1000s of species go extinct. So I say carbon capture is the wrong problem to solve.

The problem is scale. Doing a lot of carbon capture with trees doesn't mean you're growing a nice biodiverse forests, it means you're growing vast tree plantations that you periodically chop down and sequester, e.g. with biochar.

A while back I saw a paper in Nature claiming that we could use trees to absorb up to 1 gigaton carbon annually, but more than that and we'd seriously impact biodiversity. There are probably other estimates around, but regardless of the exact threshold, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have technology able to do the same thing with a thousand times less land area. Then we can let the forests grow undisturbed.

To your edit: climate change itself is making species go extinct, so it's not like we can solve the extinction problem without addressing climate change too.

Re: Stripe Climate

#62

Post by redwoolf »

While things like this are valuable, it still places the onus on consumers to change their behavior to combat climate change. Not until large polluters are charged for their carbon production, or are compelled to contribute to carbon removal will this have a net benefit. This is conscience-friendly capitalism at best.

Re: Stripe Climate

#63

Post by mytailorisrich »

joshmanders wrote: post #53
alien1993 wrote: post #39

Yet another way to feel like you're doing something while doing absolutely nothing, or maybe even worse. Keep it up people!

Giving money is doing something.

Giving money is making yourself feel good. Whether that actually achieves anything is another question altogether.

But giving money to achieve something is difficult because you need to invest time and effort to investigate where to give and to whom.

Re: Stripe Climate

#64

Post by deanclatworthy »

sritchie wrote: post #10

If anyone from Stripe is reading - is it possible yet for me to simply donate money to the portfolio you’ve assembled without running a business? We purchase monthly offsets now and I’d love to switch to funding direct carbon capture (and will happily spend more).

If you want to do this, try compensate.com

Re: Stripe Climate

#65

Post by jl2718 »

Sorry, but this feel-goodism around carbon capture doesn’t work. They paid $775/ton. Coal is $30/ton. Those are not carbon-free facilities and salaries. Capture requires energy that could be used to reduce carbon emissions demand. 2nd law of thermodynamics says you can’t win this game. The best carbon capture technology is plants and plankton. The best carbon strategy is to use less. Buying offsets feels like penitential indulgences.

Re: Stripe Climate

#67

Post by 908B64B197 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40
tima101 wrote: post #36

Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel? Simply fund reforestation efforts. Plus many wildlife species will be saved from extinction. For example, orangutans in forests of Borneo island. EDIT And besides, humans will survive climate change, we are 7.8 billion. But we made 1000s of species go extinct. So I say carbon capture is the wrong problem to solve.

> Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel? Trees haven’t been carbon sinks for hundreds of millions of years [1]. They absorb carbon while growing, but release it in decay. Short of planting and burying gigatonnes of forest, trees aren’t going to be our way out of this. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

What about trees used as building material?

Re: Stripe Climate

#68

Post by evanlivingston »

feoren wrote: post #57
syndacks wrote: post #24

I take serious moral concern with the notion that we can "spend our way out of climate disaster" as these initiatives ultimately suggest. Furthermore, this makes individuals feel better about doing something (having agency). This is a false sense of making a difference; we need sweeping, fundamental changes to address climate change, not at the individual level, but at the state level and beyond.

Do you think the existence of these small efforts makes the larger efforts harder or easier? More or less likely?

My personal belief is that the larger effort looks a lot like early COVID lockdowns. We more or less did exactly what we need to do: Driving only when absolutely necessary, only purchasing exactly what was necessary, furloughing most industry, turning the lights off at the local big box stores, grocery stores only open 10-5, etc... To me, these smaller efforts feel like they distract from the more grim reality that our behavior needs to drastically change.

Re: Stripe Climate

#69

Post by tkzed49 »

jl2718 wrote: post #65

Sorry, but this feel-goodism around carbon capture doesn’t work. They paid $775/ton. Coal is $30/ton. Those are not carbon-free facilities and salaries. Capture requires energy that could be used to reduce carbon emissions demand. 2nd law of thermodynamics says you can’t win this game. The best carbon capture technology is plants and plankton. The best carbon strategy is to use less. Buying offsets feels like peniten…

The linked article specifically explains that this does not involve the traditional practice of purchasing offsets and is focused on research.

Re: Stripe Climate

#70

Post by orbuch »

sudhirj wrote: post #59

@orbuch can we get an API to set the percentage for each purchase programmatically? or at least vary it by country? I’d like to increase prices and the percentage for customers from countries who don’t do a good job handing climate change.

Thanks for the suggestion! You can set the percentage with just a few clicks in the Dashboard right now. We’re exploring what the right API experience might look like for Stripe Climate in future.
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