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Stripe Climate

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Re: Stripe Climate

#201

Post by BlueTemplar »

frank2 wrote: post #60
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?

>carbon removal . . . smells of indulgences Do you believe a religious metaphor to be useful for understanding climate change? Do you believe adding CO2 molecules to the air to be intrinsically sinful with the result that no amount of subsequent removal of CO2 can wash away the sin?

Funnily it works both ways as indulgences were supposed to "wash away the sin".

Also, I would have hoped that we could have managed to solve the pollution issue in a rational way, but hope is getting thin. And religion comes with the power of strong taboos that might succeed where we previously failed. Or maybe what is blocking us is how progress has been given the status of a new religion, and while we can appreciate where it got us, we also have to consider whether the costs aren't going to outweigh the benefits in the future...

Re: Stripe Climate

#202

Post by philipkglass »

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…

Political viability differs a lot between polities. Oregon shut down its last coal plant this year. Oregonians can't vote to shut down West Virginian coal plants. Oregon can't impose carbon tariffs to nudge other states, either, since interstate commerce is the domain of federal power. But Oregon can theoretically get to net 0 emissions by deploying carbon capture in tandem with their own ongoing phaseout of fossil fuels. Carbon capture is the least bad option once a polity has cut its own internal emissions as much as practical and has tried and failed to get other polities to make similar cuts.

Re: Stripe Climate

#203

Post by FooHentai »

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?

It's addressed in the FAQ:

"Does Stripe Climate offer traditional carbon offsets? No. Traditional carbon offsets, while often inexpensive, are unlikely to scale to the size of the climate problem. Instead, we’ve chosen to focus on permanent carbon removal technologies."

Planting trees and renewable energy are some activities that carbon offsets fund.

Re: Stripe Climate

#204

Post by harryVic »

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…

It feels pessimistic to think this way but I agree. Most people don't even save for their own retirement, how can we expect voluntary action to save the climate? Poverty rates among elderly were crazy high before social security was established. Similarly, it will take government action to solve climate change.

Re: Stripe Climate

#205

Post by leoedin »

abalone wrote: post #73

The only realistic solution to carbon removal is massive government investment, like most other major Silicon Valley core technologies. We need the Green New Deal. Anything less is posturing. I would even go so far as to say that on an issue of this importance, where we have maybe a decade left to turn the tide, giving the impression that private enterprise can solve it is irresponsible. Put those donations into GND…

Government investment is essentially a form of planned economy. There's lots of examples of that not working so well.

I'd argue that the most effective solution is a carbon tax, applied on any carbon which leaves the ground. That would create incredibly strong market conditions for energy saving technologies, and provide a big cost advantage to renewable energy.

We know that pricing effects consumer behaviour. The oil price increases of the 70s and late 2000s reduced miles driven and changed car buying behaviour.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/business/19gas.html?ref=b...

When the right conditions in the market exist, the rate of development will be so much faster than any inefficient direct investment program every will.

https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/green-tech-market/

Re: Stripe Climate

#206

Post by FooHentai »

gwbas1c wrote: post #147
gravitystorm wrote: post #29

Carbon capture is necessary in the long term, for particular emissions that are hard to avoid (like specific industrial processes and parts of agriculture). But while we're still pumping out emissions that can be easily and cheaply displaced today, like coal and gas fired grid electricity, then the money being spent on carbon capture is being spent terribly ineffectively. And globally, we don't have the time or money…

> Carbon capture is necessary in the long term When it comes to long-term technologies, they just don't become ready when you need them. We need to start investing in them today so they're ready when we need them to operate at scale. One thing to consider is that "carbon capture" can be a good stopgap approach to long-term energy storage. For example, use the extra sunlight in the summer to run carbon capture, and th…

Carbon capture methods already exist, they're just not sexy, profit-generating, or tech-based.

Example: Raise fast-growing forestry (e.g. pine), harvest it, then bury in deep pits. Repeat. The buried carbon will release just ~3% back to the atmosphere in a decade. The sequestration potential of this technique alone is significant, of the kind of scale we need to tackle the issue. All of the fields of knowledge we need to execute on it (forestry, landfill, mining) are well-developed today.

Pretending it's a problem with no existing solutions is a ploy to secure investments and diverts attention from action that could be taken today. But, of course, there's no money in that.

Re: Stripe Climate

#207

Post by yongjik »

ohazi wrote: post #198
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?

The problem is that politics is less like a parent telling the kid "Well, if you don't eat your broccoli then no dessert for you, your choice," and more like a kid telling the parent "If you don't take me to the beach this weekend I demand two beach trips next weekend!"

I.e., if policy A is already unpopular, bringing up an even less popular policy B won't help you.

Re: Stripe Climate

#208

Post by FooHentai »

samatman wrote: post #157
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…

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…

I posted this on another thread in these comments but another strategy here is grow trees, bury trees, grow more trees. 3% re-release of carbon back to the atmosphere per dacade stored, and all the tech to accomplish it is already developed.

Re: Stripe Climate

#209

Post by FooHentai »

nanr wrote: post #21
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).

Hi, Nan from Stripe! Accepting direct contributions from individuals isn’t a central focus for us right now, but we intend to publish what we learn about carbon removal, which can help inform your own efforts. Some of our partners accept contributions directly: https://www.climeworks.com/subscriptions , https://projectvesta.org/crowdfunding/

Climeworks? That's not great news IMO. They recently pivoted to soliciting direct investments from the public, and their previous business model was to pipe CO2 into greenhouses to make lettuce grow faster or to sell it to soda bottling plants.

Wish I was joking. But if the tech has promise who cares right? Well...

Climeworks first demo site had (as of ~2017) the potential to remove 900 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year. Over one million of these facilities, ignoring the carbon cost to create them, would be needed to remove just 5% of annual CO2 released. It looks like, as of their last press release, they have 14 sites now, with another one planned that will remove 4000 tonnes of carbon per year. Right now on this trajectory, what they are doing is not showing promise of scaling to the extent needed.

Vesta on the other hand has more yet to shake out before we can fairly assess their potential. With trial sites now well underway, I eagerly await their findings.

Re: Stripe Climate

#210

Post by FooHentai »

adamsea wrote: post #142
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).

Honest question - is direct carbon capture better, than offsets or putting that money into helping folks switch to sustainable energy sources?

The two work together, it's hard to pin one or the other as 'better'. If we dropped to zero emissions overnight, we've likely already put so much carbon into the atmosphere that we need active removal measures to draw it back down quickly and reduce the consequences.

On the other hand, if we develop kick-ass capture solutions tomorrow but keep emitting at our current rate (or increased), the two will compete head-to-head and unless the capture method vastly outweighs the emissions, we're still on an increasing or (at best) steady-state situation with carbon in the atmosphere, neither of which give good outcomes.

If you made a massive advancement in either field you would perhaps be able to forego the other. But on the more probable path of gradual progress, tackling both is best.

I'm talking about all forms of carbon capture here BTW, not just direct. My personal opinion is that valid methods of re-sequestering atmospheric CO2 already exist and could be applied. However since there's money to be made in hawking tech-based solutions these are quietly sidelined in favour of new and sexy and (to the salesmen) profitable.

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