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Stripe Climate

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Re: Stripe Climate

#151

Post by ihm »

defterGoose wrote: post #83
lefrenchy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I think far too many people will not evaluate the Green New Deal on it's actual merits and instead write it off because Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others have written/supported it. The strife and division we are seeing in the US will be a significant impact to climate action. We've already seen its impact on something as simple as mask wearing becoming politicized and difficult to coordinate on.

I can only hope that those driving the division (older people) will be dead soon, so that the younger generations who are by and large more eco-friendly can get on with the difficult work that needs to be done. Its past time for the old, rotten way of thinking to be plowed under.

The interests opposed to actual change are the oil+coal industry most obviously, but also the rich more generally who are opposed to the redistribution which is necessary to make real climate action politically viable. (We will need to reduce certain forms of carbon-intensive production, and without wealth redistribution to compensate for that, the resulting society will be unstable.)

Unfortunately we can't wait for the coal industry or the rich to die, they reproduce themselves.

Re: Stripe Climate

#152

Post by angusb »

el_nahual wrote: post #92

Quick reminder that carbon removal is a necessary but secondary step. We need to stop pumping more carbon into the air faster than we need to stop taking it out, simply because it takes more energy to get carbon out of the air than the energy that carbon was used for in the first place . To use a financial analogy: We have a high-interest credit card. That debt has compounding interest rates, and the interest rate is…

this isn't quite right - if you use zero carbon sources (e.g. solar) to power carbon removal the operation would be net carbon negative.

"but why wouldn't you just use that solar capacity to displace coal plants on the electricity grid??????"

there's already a rapid switch of installed electrical capacity from fossil fuels to solar/wind, but electricity typically accounts for 20% of a developed economy's emissions, so after that we need to look to decarbonise other parts of the economy.

removing carbon from the wider economy involves some low hanging fruits (e.g. better insulation in houses) followed by a succession of increasingly difficult and expensive removal processes, with a very long tail.

at the far end you have things like removing carbon emissions from long haul flights, which is extremely difficult - once it gets this hard, it's much more practical to use solar to power carbon removal.

we can't wait for emissions to go to zero before investing in carbon capture because we'd be waiting decades for battery energy density to increase by orders of magnitude before they are good enough to support long haul flights. We don't have that long

Re: Stripe Climate

#153

Post by jdlshore »

marvin wrote: post #141

Is there anywhere I can credibly pay any reasonable amount of money to offset my CO2 emissions? I would be willing to pay a monthly salary for this, if the effect can be demonstrated to be sustainable and permanent. I've been wondering how the various companies that have CO2 offset programs do it; whether it's credible or not.

The Nature Conservancy has a carbon offset program that I use. They're credible. The money goes towards purchasing and managing land for forests and net carbon removal. It's surprisingly cheap.

They seem to have changed their site, though, and I can no longer find the page that allowed a direct carbon offset donation.

Also, here in Oregon, you can pay the electric company a small fee (for me, about $11-12 a month) to guarantee that your electricity use is 100% offset by carbon-neutral generation (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear).

Also in Oregon, you can pay the natural gas company a fee (for me, $5.50 per month) to offset your natural gas usage with "bio digesters." I'm more skeptical about their efficacy.

Re: Stripe Climate

#154

Post by core-questions »

coldpie wrote: post #34
core-questions wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It remains to be seen if carbon removal can be done in a way that makes sense thermodynamically (i.e. it takes tremendous energy input to do, where does that energy come from, is it using carbon-emitting energy from elsewhere on the grid, etc). If at any point a carbon-emitting energy source is involved, there's no way that the system is going to be absorbing as much carbon from the air as was emitted for the same am…

You're right that energy costs need to be accounted for when examining a potential capture method. But this is so blindingly obvious that of course the researchers are doing it. It is always accounted for when they are making their claims. As a single example see this recent article[1]: > A simple chemical model estimated the rate of weathering for the crushed rock based on the local soil conditions. They also calcul…

> If it was true that any carbon capture method that uses energy will emit more carbon that it captures

The only way this works is if it's using excess energy that wasn't produced by processes that emit carbon to start with. Run it on nuclear, solar, etc. and it can work. However, the grid is still awash with coal power! There's no way any machine is going to capture more carbon per KW consumed energy than the coal to produce that many KW emitted to start with.

So, does it makes sense to deploy this in areas with a ton of green energy available on the grid? Maybe... but those areas have lower PPM carbon in the air, so it's not the right place to run the machine anyway.

Perhaps instead of all this wasted effort and engineering time, we could just replace the damned coal plants and stop emitting carbon itself.

Re: Stripe Climate

#155

Post by tabbott »

I don't think it's possible for this sort of individual, opt-in action to be material to the climate problem; problems at this scale can only be solved by government action. If Stripe raises $30M/year from this program, it'd be like 10000x too little to be significant to our carbon problem. (Maybe it could have some minor R&D acceleration impact for the carbon removal techniques they're looking at).

The root cause of our climate problem is the fossil fuel industry having successfully manipulated the government and public to prevent real action on climate change, for decades. The Drilled podcast is a good resource for primary source material on how oil companies systematically manufactured climate change denial.

I would prefer that Stripe allocate the funds to groups working to counter the fossil fuel industry's misinformation strategy. $30M/year would be a significant budget for that sort of work.

Re: Stripe Climate

#157

Post by samatman »

core-questions wrote: post #25
BlueTemplar wrote: post #13

The history of the carbon removal companies is not good (mostly due to the large incentive to game the measures), and smells of indulgences . However, this industry is still quite young... EDIT : Also this initiative seems to be very research-focused, rather than be just about using already known methods?

It remains to be seen if carbon removal can be done in a way that makes sense thermodynamically (i.e. it takes tremendous energy input to do, where does that energy come from, is it using carbon-emitting energy from elsewhere on the grid, etc). If at any point a carbon-emitting energy source is involved, there's no way that the system is going to be absorbing as much carbon from the air as was emitted for the same am…

Not so simple as just saying "plants" and calling it a day.

Yes, plants remove carbon from the air. But plants die, and rot, and some amount of that carbon (all, at the limit) ends up right back in the atmosphere.

I happen to think that planting poplar, making it into charcoal on an industrial scale, and using the biochar as a soil amendment to mitigate topsoil depletion, is severely underutilized as a carbon capture strategy. We should be doing enormous amounts of this, instead of... basically none.

But it isn't "just plant trees". There's more to the job than that. But nothing which requires technology which was unknown to the Romans.

Re: Stripe Climate

#158

Post by picodguyo »

defterGoose wrote: post #83
lefrenchy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I think far too many people will not evaluate the Green New Deal on it's actual merits and instead write it off because Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others have written/supported it. The strife and division we are seeing in the US will be a significant impact to climate action. We've already seen its impact on something as simple as mask wearing becoming politicized and difficult to coordinate on.

I can only hope that those driving the division (older people) will be dead soon, so that the younger generations who are by and large more eco-friendly can get on with the difficult work that needs to be done. Its past time for the old, rotten way of thinking to be plowed under.

"Older people" is a renewable resource. I've been surprised by how much more conservative my older relatives have become as they've aged.

Re: Stripe Climate

#159

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

abalone wrote: post #132
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's important to take lots of action on climate change as soon as possible. That's why it seems counterproductive to tell a company they should stop taking direct action and start promoting the Green New Deal. It's too urgent of a problem to insist that only people with a particular political stance should help. Maybe the specifics of the Green New Deal are getting lost in translation here? The package…

The only meaningful direct action here with a hope of saving the planet is large scale government intervention and the mass mobilization needed to bring it forth. You may have disagreements with the specifics but it is false to suggest that there is some apolitical path to turning around 200 years of an economic logic that got us here, inside of 10 years. It is also misleading to imply that what SV companies like thi…

I guess I'm not sure what to tell you here. If we can't figure out a way to address climate change without dragging in all these other controversial issues, I don't think we'll be able to address it.

Re: Stripe Climate

#160

Post by marcosdumay »

tabbott wrote: post #155

I don't think it's possible for this sort of individual, opt-in action to be material to the climate problem; problems at this scale can only be solved by government action. If Stripe raises $30M/year from this program, it'd be like 10000x too little to be significant to our carbon problem. (Maybe it could have some minor R&D acceleration impact for the carbon removal techniques they're looking at). The root cause of…

If Stripe raises $30M/year for this program, there will be $30M/year spent on validation and R&D that one can point to and say "look, that can be done and works".

I agree that governments should be making large grants for research in renewables and capture everywhere, and tax fossil fuels enough to make them uncompetitive. But they aren't, and part of the way you can change a government's course is by having something running you can use as an example.

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