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

Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

power-technology.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 173 posts

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#161

Post by sfn42 »

philipkglass wrote: post #138
anonporridge wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace. Some quick and dirty back of the envelope math. According to this source, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption , oil, coal, and nat gas, the big culprits, currently account for 137,000 TWh of energy use per year…

Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. The rest of your analysis is quite correct but this is too pessimistic. You don't have to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel to get it out of the atmosphere. You only have to…

If it's that easy, why are we wasting billions researching carbon capture? Why aren't we just doing this?

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#162

Post by zigzag312 »

anonporridge wrote: post #67
GenerocUsername wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like modern form of absolving sins. All you need is charismatic preacher to bop you on theforhead and say you are saved.

It is. A modern instantiation of buying indulgences from the Catholic Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence A hug part of the power of religions, such as christianity or ESG, is that it provides a mechanism to allow normal people to engage in evil but feel forgiven or justified. "If someone can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities."

Fun analogy, but the link you provided seems to contradict your interpretation:

> An indulgence does not forgive the guilt of sin, nor does it provide release from the eternal punishment associated with unforgiven mortal sins. The Catholic Church teaches that indulgences relieve only the temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin ... an indulgence is not a permit to commit sin, a pardon of future sin, nor a guarantee of salvation for oneself or for another.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#163

Post by munk-a »

qball wrote: post #124
prewett wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse. We've been pumping out CO2 on an industrial scale for two centuries and using the energy that gave. So now we've got to put back that energy on the industrial scale. Needless to say, we do not have an industrial level of excess energy.

>we do not have an industrial level of excess energy If only there was some turnkey design we could build that produces utterly massive amounts of energy with a few grams of fuel that can also be continually recycled based on physical principles understood for over a century. Fortunately for environmentalists, no such solution exists. Could you imagine how much of a socioeconomic disaster it would be if we printed a…

There's a fair amount of snark there but I would agree that environmentalists being against nuclear energy is one of the most unfortunate impediments to a sane climate change in modern years - the constant lobbying and sheer economic force of fossil fuel companies has definitely had a stronger negative impact but everyone I meet someone who associates with environmentalism that is anti-nuke I want to bop them over the head. I even formally lived in Vermont where Vermont Yankee made an absolute mess of running a responsible and clean plant (releasing a lot of very bad stuff into local water supplies) and yet all those released carcinogens are still not nearly to the level you can expect from good ol' coal power (even if you use a brillo pad on the coal first).

That all said - the amount of power we'd need for carbon sequestration with our current technological prowess dwarfs what we're producing at the moment and would require a massive investment in human and material capital that I don't believe the US (at least) is willing to deal with. The only nation that I'd really hold my breath here for is France which, while it has some significant issues itself, it has a strong advantage in having a workforce that is actually trained to operate and care for nuclear plants.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#164

Post by Dylan16807 »

sfn42 wrote: post #161
philipkglass wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. The rest of your analysis is quite correct but this is too pessimistic. You don't have to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel to get it out of the atmosphere. You only have to…

If it's that easy, why are we wasting billions researching carbon capture? Why aren't we just doing this?

This is one of the things being researched.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#165

Post by philipkglass »

sfn42 wrote: post #161
philipkglass wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. The rest of your analysis is quite correct but this is too pessimistic. You don't have to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel to get it out of the atmosphere. You only have to…

If it's that easy, why are we wasting billions researching carbon capture? Why aren't we just doing this?

Accelerated silicate weathering seems like the most affordable carbon capture solution that actually works, but it's still a more expensive way to decarbonize than shutting down coal fired plants or partially displacing gas-generated electricity with non-combustion electricity sources. The vast majority of countries that want to decarbonize still burn coal and gas for energy; incrementally reducing combustion of these fuels is the most cost effective incremental move for the next several years. That's why (IMO) no country is doing large scale carbon capture yet.

As for the research efforts, some privately funded work is trying to get a saleable product out of carbon capture, like turning CO2 into useful polymers or other chemicals. Accelerated silicate weathering is simpler but it also has no hope of producing any valuable outputs. It's purely a mitigation measure for CO2 that has already been emitted. I don't think that these efforts are likely to yield profitable processes, but it would be great if they did because then even countries without government decarbonization mandates could improve via private business efforts.

On the government-funded side, I think that some unproductive R&D work is being funded either due to funding bodies not being savvy enough or due to politics. Kind of like how NASA has to go forward with the Space Launch System even though it's ridiculously expensive for what it does.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#166

Post by hollandheese »

cm2012 wrote: post #117
londons_explore wrote: post #37

In other news, world oil consumption is at record highs at 101.5 million barrels of oil per day. Thats 2 liters (large coke bottle) of oil per person in the world per day, and when burned turns into 3000 liters of CO2 (about the volume of a large couch). If everyone produced a couch-size piece of any other kind of junk each day, within a week the streets would be jammed with couches. But because it's invisible gas, l…

Emissions are dropping like a rock though in the US and EU.

More like emissions are being moved to other countries so the US and EU can claim their emissions are dropping like a rock. When a US company moves production out of the US to China, suddenly the emissions become China's problem.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#167

Post by dang »

moralestapia wrote: post #14

Three years ago I entered this business as I saw some opportunity. After about a year I got out because everything there was fraud. F R A U D. >most of them exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate the potential harm [...] >projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing” that undermines its alleged emissions offsetting power [...] Stop trying to disguise these ope…

> Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment

Looks like a mod downweighted your comment, probably because it was a bit fulminatey and a bit generic. Those are inauspicious markers for an HN thread, which is why the site guidelines ask people to avoid them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Your comment wasn't terrible, nor bad enough to get a moderation scolding—though it would have been better if you had shared some interesting details about actual fraud!—always a popular and curious topic—instead of generic rhetoric about it.

However, these markers are particularly bad at the top of a page, because the top subthread has a power-law influence on how the whole discussion ends up going. So when we see such a subthread at the top, we often downweight it, refresh the page, and then repeat the procedure until something more HN-salubrious is at the top.

Actually this way of moderating subthreads is probably the single biggest thing we've ever hit on for thread quality.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#168

Post by yyyk »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #65
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #36

S06E06 of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! debunked carbon credits. That was 15 years ago. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1272784/

Carbon credits can work in a system where you don't just let people make them with weak verification. The problem isn't the underlying concept.

A system where everyone have the incentive to cheat in the same direction isn't going to work in practice.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#169

Post by cm2012 »

hollandheese wrote: post #166
cm2012 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emissions are dropping like a rock though in the US and EU.

More like emissions are being moved to other countries so the US and EU can claim their emissions are dropping like a rock. When a US company moves production out of the US to China, suddenly the emissions become China's problem.

This has been looked into and it's not a substantial part of the drop.

Re: Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“

#170

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #167
moralestapia wrote: post #14

Three years ago I entered this business as I saw some opportunity. After about a year I got out because everything there was fraud. F R A U D. >most of them exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate the potential harm [...] >projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing” that undermines its alleged emissions offsetting power [...] Stop trying to disguise these ope…

> Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment Looks like a mod downweighted your comment, probably because it was a bit fulminatey and a bit generic. Those are inauspicious markers for an HN thread, which is why the site guidelines ask people to avoid them ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). Your comment wasn't terrible, nor bad enough to get a moderation scolding—though…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN