Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment • Hacker News Board

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#201

Post by dgellow » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

WhompingWindows wrote: post #181

dgellow wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need massive mobilization at the federal level to hit the necessary emissions reductions within the next 12 years if we are to avoid a catastrophic rise in temperature. That doesn’t really make sense IMHO, global warming isn’t a US problem, it’s a worldwide issue. Let’s say the US becomes a benevolent dictatorship with the mission to reduce CO2 emissions by any mean necessary (and is somehow successful), you sti…

Come now, think creatively here, this going to war nonsense is a total straw man argument. Carbon-based import tariffs, sanctions, and having a very strong, innovative US clean tech to export/sell its tech to other countries who need but dont have the R&D budget.

How is it a straw man argument? I’m not a US citizen, I look at the country history at dealing with international actors. The country has a terrible history at cooperating with others in a peaceful way, or even consider common interests. If for some reasons the US government decides to that its mission is to tackle climate issues, I don’t think it will take long before they come with a rational for a climate war.

> Carbon-based import tariffs, sanctions, and having a very strong, innovative US clean tech to export/sell its tech to other countries who need but dont have the R&D budget.

Sure, that’s all fine. That’s really not what I would expect from a country that systematically refused to collaborate on climate issues with others, but that would be great.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#202

Post by crb002 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

Best thing you can do to limit carbon emissions is run an efficient business that gets a high ROI. Dollars to doughnuts, $$$ spent tracks with barrels of oil burned to crank out those goods/services consumed.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#203

Post by mtranzambetti » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

glogla wrote: post #139

chrdlu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals matter too! Netflix made had $5.8B in revenue from small $10-20 subscription users! Today, for $20 a month you can offset your own carbon footprint! This matters because the more resources that goes into fighting climate change allows innovation. Even by generating more demand for carbon credits and offsetting, new businesses can thrive and grow by fighting climate change! I've been super obsessed with ht…

I like it, but why do I have to give my email for emission calculation? It's off-putting, I don't want even more spam. And I will tell them where do I live and how, will they package it with my email and sell it to ad companies as a handy profile? Sorry to be paranoid, but most startups (uber, airbnb, paypal, not to mention facebook ...) are evil and exploitative.

Wren co-founder here — we ask for your email so we can send you a report on your footprint (if you choose) or come back to the onboarding flow later. We're spinning the calculator out into an open resource soon though!

Finally, we just started two months ago and have not sold user information to ad companies nor do we ever plan to. That sounds like an evil and unnecessary way to go about not accomplishing our mission.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#204

Post by semi-extrinsic » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

azernik wrote: post #169

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha, so it's targeting "CCU". Then OK, I can maybe see there is a point initially, but not at anything near the scale we need. Global graphite production from mining is at 1 megatonne/year, while synthetic is a few hundred kilotonnes/year. We need CCS to operate at tens of gigatonnes per year, that's four orders of magnitude beyond all the graphite the world needs. This is the problem with anything CCU - there just a…

I'd imagine extra graphite is pretty easy to store, though?

At the gigatonne scale, nothing is easy to store. Fill the entire Hoover dam with graphite, and you've stored 6 gigatonnes. We need to store tens of gigatonnes per year for a hundred years.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#205

Post by Areading314 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 8:43 PM UTC

SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #164

esotericn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way less than $20 a month in a lot of the world too. Americans have a footprint twice as high as Brits, even.

Cars and air-con are the main offenders there, right?

And air travel

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#206

Post by graeme » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

Areading314 wrote: post #104

BurningFrog wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A carbon tax is well known to be the rational solution to the problem. Even conservatives agree. It just happens to be politically impossible.

People pretend it's hard to create a carbon tax, but it's really not. Just tax the fuel (gas/oil/coal), and the cost will be passed on to polluters. Edit, of course, politically yes it's hard.

The trouble is “polluters” is everyone in society. People who use a lot of carbon feel personally attacked bu such a tax...because itmis in fact directly affecting them.

A carbon tax is my top priority. There’s no sense denying the opposition though. The yellow vest protests in france were from a fuel tax.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#207

Post by graeme » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #117

Just to summarize (warm up those downvotes...): * “almost certainly more” than 84% of stripe’s emissions will not be sequestered because it’s “financially infeasible” * no mention of stripe’s actual carbon footprint * talk of startups and trillion dollar industry “by the end of the century” but no mention of government intervention / green new deal to turn the tide in the next decade before it’s too late Verdict: fre…

The first sentence literally said this:

>As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets.

The sequestration is in addition to those offsets. They’re trying to advance sequestration technology by boosting demand. They’ll be offsetting and sequestering more than 100% of their emissions. The excess cost referred to sequestration, not offsets.

Government has done basically nothing for 30 years. I really, really want governments to take it seriously, tax carbon, etc. but I welcome private companies stepping in to try things too.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#208

Post by matznerd » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

cca wrote: post #126

matznerd wrote: post #87

Major respect to Stripe for starting this program, as this helps solve a real problem in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field. At Project Vesta (thanks for the shoutout[1]), while we have a plan for individuals to pay for their CO2 removal by donating directly for a specific tonnage of olivine to be placed on a beach in their name, all of the investors/fund advisors who have approached us and are interested in gett…

Thanks Eric. This well-captures what we hope to do. Please drop me a message at christian@stripe.com -- I'd love to talk about how our projects can work together.

That would be great, I'll be in touch.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#209

Post by abalone » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 1:56 AM UTC

graeme wrote: post #207

abalone wrote: post #117

Just to summarize (warm up those downvotes...): * “almost certainly more” than 84% of stripe’s emissions will not be sequestered because it’s “financially infeasible” * no mention of stripe’s actual carbon footprint * talk of startups and trillion dollar industry “by the end of the century” but no mention of government intervention / green new deal to turn the tide in the next decade before it’s too late Verdict: fre…

The first sentence literally said this: >As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets. The sequestration is in addition to those offsets. They’re trying to advance sequestration technology by boosting demand. They’ll be offsetting and sequestering more than 100% of their emissions. The excess cost referred to sequestration, not offsets.…

Not sure who you're arguing with, as the post you're responding to literally only addresses sequestering. Offsets alone are not a solution to the urgent need to turn the tide on climate change. They offer an easy way for CO2 emitters to sort of greenwash what they're doing and keep doing it.

"Private companies trying things" is fine but as we can see from the reactions to this press release that the standard for private companies trying things is incredibly low and nowhere near what's required to hit the IPCC targets.

We agree on one thing though: government has not done nearly enough historically. Of course much worse could be said for industry, the primary source of CO2 emission (along with the military) and fundamentally incentivized to exploit externalized costs and pollute our planet.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#210

Post by fyfy18 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 4:18 AM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #70

keithnz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, the average total carbon emission per person is 4.5 tons, and your flying alone is 13? Isn't it better that you/we change your/our air spending habits? I don't believe that we can offset our carbon footprint fast enough with carbon sinks while still maintaing the same levels of carbon emission. Reality of course is that if there is significant upfront economic costs then very few people are going to buy into the…

If you add the cost of $100 per ton to the price of the plane ticket, you would see some amount of travel reduction naturally. What travel reduction we would have would, at that point, pay for the appropriate sequestration. Honestly, it sounds like we should just require everyone to buy 100% sequestration for their carbon production (priced into the goods and services). Add a phase in over, say 10 years to.

I'd like to see companies actually track how much CO2 goes into the production of their products. Imagine if everything you buy had the equivalent of an EnergyGuide sticker for CO2 emissions used in the production of that thing. It would lead to companies trying to optimise their products to reduce CO2 used in the manufacturing process.