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Stripe Climate

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Re: Stripe Climate

#191

Post by marvin »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #145
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.

One is tempted to advise, lower your carbon footprint to start with! But its hard to figure out how. Most of the public infrastructure we use to survive is beyond our control. Drive or take the bus? Which is better? Or walk, but the extra food you consume is a worse contributor to your footprint! So remain a couch potato and work from home. But illness, depression and early decrepitude cost society too, which has its…

Can't reduce them to zero. CO2 capture and sequestering, or the same effect through other means that don't have externalities, is required to go CO2 neutral on a personal level.

Re: Stripe Climate

#192

Post by lopmotr »

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.

What an arrogant statement. When old and young disagree on a political issue, you assume the old are wrong? Why? Is there some fact they don't know? Have they not thought through all the correct chains of causation, whereas you have? Of course not. They might turn out to be right. You can't assume you're right just because all your peers agree with you and the outsider group is wrong because that's not the group you belong to.

I know a child who's afraid of climate change. Not in a political way but afraid of drowning in high sea water or her house being destroyed by the weather or something like that. Her grandmother reassured her that it's all blown out of proportion and people will manage to cope just fine. Who's right - old or young? Don't pretend you know the answer because you don't. Nobody does.

Re: Stripe Climate

#193

Post by abalone »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #159
abalone wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Climate change is a “controversial issue” so that line of reasoning is DOA.

Re: Stripe Climate

#194

Post by jackdeansmith »

yongjik wrote: post #181

My chief problem with carbon capture as policy is that it's even less politically viable than carbon tax or any other government subsidies. Carbon capture doesn't generate money in itself. You have to pay someone to do this, and since it's more expensive to capture CO2 than not emitting it in the first place, someone has to pay more money than, say, reducing US fossil fuel usage by 10%, to achieve the same CO2 reduct…

Even one we reach net-zero emissions (which I agree, is proving to be an incredibly hard task politically) we still have the problem of a century of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Getting our climate back to pre-industrial is going to require carbon capture ramping up dramatically later this century.

These projects will only make sense to operate at truly large scale once we've already shut down all the coal plants. I think what stripe is trying to do here is make early investments so that when we really need it to scale, the costs are low and the tech is mature.

Re: Stripe Climate

#195

Post by marvin »

jackdeansmith wrote: post #174
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.

It depends on what you mean by offset. If you're okay with carbon stored in the biosphere by trees then there are plenty of programs. If you want to put carbon back in the geosphere (since trees eventually rot or burn) sending money to climeworks is the best thing available right now. Their DAC + geologic storage approach is expensive at around $1k/ton, but highly credible.

Not okay with planting trees; they will live on the whims of politicians and are too likely to be cut down later. It would have to be in the form of permanent reforestation, and I don't think anyone can credibly promise that.

The climeworks program looks like exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for, however, so thanks for pointing that out. My CO2 emissions are on the order of 10 tons per year, going by the average per capita number, so that would be around $10,000 per year, with no tax deduction available (my marginal tax is 40%). Also, looks like their pilot plant sequesters 50 tons per year, corresponding to the output of five people.

But it's very much the right type of idea.

Re: Stripe Climate

#196

Post by jackdeansmith »

adamsea wrote: post #140
orbuch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Ryan from the Climate team at Stripe. Yes, the field is super young. Regardless of previous attempts, the world is very likely going to need giagatons of carbon removal, and the necessary technologies won't magically scale without the support of early purchasers. We're taking a portfolio approach and will be expanding the number of projects we support over the coming years. Regarding "indulgences", this is no sub…

Out of curiosity why not work with a group planting trees, or folks switching to renewable sources of energy?

Not affiliated with stripe here, but I'm guessing because tree planting can't scale up to the level of removal that's necessary and renewable energy is already pretty far down the cost learning curve. Stripe has limited capital compared to govts and large institutions and is being strategic about which projects need early investment to bring down costs.

Re: Stripe Climate

#197

Post by lopmotr »

ihm wrote: post #151
defterGoose wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are also people, like myself, who just don't like the negativity of it all. We want progress and not regression but are told to use less of this, do less of that, ban this, ban that. But most importantly, stop looking forward to a brighter future for humanity. We should move backwards, not forwards. Destroy what we've created and make the future worse than the present because good things are bad, like puritanism. For optimistic people, this is just painful. For hopeless aimless people, it might give them a sense of something to fight for.

Re: Stripe Climate

#198

Post by ohazi »

yongjik wrote: post #181

My chief problem with carbon capture as policy is that it's even less politically viable than carbon tax or any other government subsidies. Carbon capture doesn't generate money in itself. You have to pay someone to do this, and since it's more expensive to capture CO2 than not emitting it in the first place, someone has to pay more money than, say, reducing US fossil fuel usage by 10%, to achieve the same CO2 reduct…

> Imagine going to these same people and saying "Good news, you can keep your coal plants, we will just tax you more than how much it would cost to shut them down!"

...thus incentivizing the operator to shut down the plant of their own accord. This was the desired outcome anyway, so what's the problem?

Re: Stripe Climate

#199

Post by PaulHoule »

faitswulff wrote: post #119
PaulHoule wrote: post #9

I like it that they are attempting at least four different schemes. There is a lot of risk in some schemes, for instance it is easy to say you left some trees standing but it is not easy to know somebody won't cut them in five years. For instance, it will be hard to prove that the Vesta scheme works. Putting all the money in the lowest cost strategy would be likely to fail. If you spread it out probably some will suc…

What are the other 3 schemes?

Scroll down on the page, they have a list of partners at the bottom who are doing very different things, but none of them are doing the traditional "inject CO2 into a saline aquifer" solution which can be attached to biofuel combustion or fermentation.

Re: Stripe Climate

#200

Post by burner831234 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #139
el_nahual wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy here is that because most people intuitively understand the near-impossibility of coordinated legislative action, they assume that it must be MORE difficult than some sort of engineering solution (whose magnitude they do not intuitively understand). They are wrong. Yes, coordinated action to reduce emissions is nearly impossible... but it's less impossible than the alternative. There's no negotiating with…

I don't think it's impossible. It just seems that way if your only experience with politics is neoliberal US politics over the last 40 years. At some point the dam breaks. In the US neoliberalism is at the same point Soviet communism was in the 80's. It's a complete failure and everyone knows it.

Part of our political system's fiction and ability to make no progress is deeply ingrained in lobbying and expenses that is more PR than impact. I think this is the parent post's point.

We think its a "grand pie in the sky", meanwhile some other countries are making real moves. Corporations meanwhile get to "do something" while in reality doing very little.

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