Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 322 posts

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#161

Post by vel0city »

hkt wrote: post #120
robnado wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can slow down the use of fossil fuels, but as long as we are 8 billion people on the planet and we find no better way to produce ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, we will keep needing huge amounts of fossil fuels. Personally, I feel that the solution is to gradually raise the tax rate on fossil fuels in order to disincentives their use and incentivize the production of alternatives. We've done this for cigare…

Steel and concrete aren't necessary for the most part: other materials that don't emit (or even actively sequester) carbon are available and have been for a long, long time. It doesn't even preclude building densely either: just look at cross laminated timber.

We're going to build bridges and trains and rails and roads and ships out of cross laminated timber?

And yes, you can build pretty tall structures out of CLT, but there's still smaller than what you can build with steel and concrete. The tallest one built that I know of is 25 stories. But at least 6 or so of those floors are all concrete+steel, and it still uses concrete+steel emergency stairwells.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/w...

But what is the foundation made from? What do you think the elevator shafts are made from? Its not like its 100% wood. I would like to see more CLT construction, and modern building codes are allowing taller and larger stick construction as well, but arguing that steel and concrete aren't necessary is ignoring all the rest of the things supporting that structure along with all the other things that still need steel and concrete. How did all the building materials arrive at the site? What harvested the wood? What were the machines making the CLT made out of? What are the fireproof stairwells usually made out of? Steel and concrete.

We'll probably see more and more construction which looks like this, where some CLT offsets some concrete and steel, but chances are the whole building isn't entirely wood:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fs_wysiwy...

Using modern materials and building codes can let us reduce our usage of things like steel and concrete for more buildings, but its not going to fully eliminate their usage in our world.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#162

Post by kjkjadksj »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #145
coding123 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we've KNOWN what this shit does to the air and water for at least, what 40 years? At what point do we blame ourselves to increasing fossil fuel usage, even in the what, past 5 years?

> we blame ourselves So I buy shrimp that was grown locally. Then I read up that shrimps were transported to the other side of the world, peeled there, and shipped back, travelled 20,000 miles, before landong on my plate. I buy canned pairs, and turns out the same story. What am I suppose to do, starve? The capitalist machine prioritises fictitious resource of money, over real resource of oil. It wastes huge amount o…

People forget that as consumers we arent free to be choosey. We only can chose among options the market has already made available to us, options that are presented in the first place because economies of scale have been developed to put them in front of every consumer. All of that cannot be unwound overnight or restarted with some alternative since it took so much iteration just to reach this point at all.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#163

Post by throwaway894345 »

egberts1 wrote: post #155

As one of the thousands who planted one of the million trees within Sacramento, California during the 1970s, I did my part toward reducing CO2 and added cooling of urban areas. You should too. It's not that hard. I am doing it again, but in another city.

The average lifetime co2 emissions per person seems to be in the tens or hundreds of tons (probably on the higher end of the spectrum for Americans, especially those decades in the latter half of the 20th century). Most trees weigh a single digit number of tons when fully grown, and many trees don't survive to full growth and in any case they may release much of that carbon through decay or combustion. It seems pretty unlikely to me that planting a tree actually offset your carbon emissions.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#165

Post by [deleted] »

vasco wrote: post #141
mullingitover wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These seem like ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Give me a list of disingenuous points for dismissing anthropogenic climate change.”

I don't think they are dismissive points. I think specially the ending makes a whole lot of sense to me. I'd give negative shits about the environment if I struggled for food or housing or basic essentials. The same way the best way to tackle crime is through better education for the people, getting the existing people out of poverty might be the single best thing we can do to have them realize the impact, reproduce…

[deleted]

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#166

Post by throwaway894345 »

hkt wrote: post #106

Remember folks, you can strike back: ditch your car, ditch your gas cooker, get solar panels, get batteries, use less energy, get a heat pump. Change your life to be healthier and deprive these animals of profit.

You don't even have to ditch your car (an absurd proposition for most people), you could just get an EV.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#167

Post by wonderwonder »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #20
matthewdgreen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your view is that these companies are multi-decade sustainable businesses, then you want to invest in shoring up the firms' reputation and drilling new wells. If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.

> If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders. I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table. That they…

"they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades"

And they are right. There are viable alternatives to gasoline cars now and people still buy gas powered vehicles. Most of Teslas success I think has not been so much due to the hunger for an electric vehicle but because of Tesla's cool factor, performance and design. The rest of the major vehicle manufacturers have essentially failed on the electric vehicle front.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#168

Post by kjkjadksj »

fluoridation wrote: post #127
Aachen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what I wondered at the headline as well. Sounded ambitious, but with how much profit they make it's not immediately obvious whether it's infeasible, especially if you can convince a government to then be exempt from a part of the fuel taxes because you don't have to pay for the pollution aspect

It sounds not just infeasible, but comically infeasible. For the sake of argument, let's assume that it's easy to improve ICEs in general by 5%. You still have to apply that upgrade to all the existing engine designs, ideally as drop-in replacements, and then swap all those engines in the wild.

I assume the biggest polluters are not cars but big industrial operations or shipping. That seems like a smaller perhaps even realistic number of sites to target for some amount of efficiency gains. Especially if margins are too low in these industries for them to invest in their own efficiency.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#169

Post by trashtester »

axioms_End wrote: post #119
trashtester wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years I think a lot of people feel that. Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain". If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems…

Small difference: we banned chemicals responsible for ozon layer disruption, similar situation with acid rain (talking about 1st world with rain). So it's not like we forgotten, more like it's a non-issue now. Global warming is only going to get worse.

> Global warming is only going to get worse.

How much net real harm to humanity do you think global warming causes today? (If we ingnore psychological harm caused mostly by the scare tactics used to prevent it)

According to this article, total excess mortality from cold weather is still an order of magnitude higher than from hot weather:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

As the world has been warming over the last decades, mortality from cold weather has been declining faster than the mortality from warm weather has increased.

This is from Europe, but prior studies have been conducted that produce the same results globally:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> more like it's a non-issue now

So my claim is that global warming is also in reality a non-issue right now, even though it could in theory become a big issue in about 100-200 years, if we don't do anything.

I think the reason why Global Warming gets so much attention right now, is partly that we have few other serious issues to worry about right now, and partly because some groups have chosen to put it on the agenda.

Few people alive today actually remember WW2, and even the Cold War and the Nuclear Scare is becoming a distant memory.

So my prediction is NOT that the real threat of Global Warming will necesarily go away, but rather that something (like AGI) will appear that makes it seem insignificant by comparison.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#170

Post by p1mrx »

prmoustache wrote: post #41
bryanlarsen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global hydrocarbon consumption is down on a per capita basis. And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share. It's only the last year or two that renewable energy's share has become non-negligible. The EV transition is lagging the renewable energy transition, but it's happening too. EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales, but since it takes ~20 years…

> EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales, In only a few third world countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country

Are you talking about China? I think they're considered a second-world country, as they were somewhat aligned with the USSR.

Post reply on HN