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Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

bbc.com

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Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#291

Post by komali2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #254
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity —- think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)

> Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity Mostly, it does. > think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA) Those laws are at odds with capitalism, because they limit the control of private capital owners over the application of that capital in favor of social direction or limitation by the State on others’ interest. Now, you can support that as necessary for the good of so…

This is correct and shouldn't be downvoted. You can like capitalism while acknowledging its faults.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#292

Post by chrisseaton »

Spivak wrote: post #283
Qwertious wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.' This statement always throws me - did we just make a complete context-switch from talking about car emissions to talking about gas turbines? Or is "gas" being used to refer to petrol ("gasoline")? The subject of the previous post was clearly cars, but that sentence is talking about gas and coal, better…

It might be a US-ism? I've never heard anyone in casual conversion call it gasoline or petrol. You would get weird looks if you called it gasoline. "You fill up your gas tank at the gas station and get a gas can just in case you get low on gas before you can hit the next station to gas up."

Not hard to see how it's confusing - you call it gas but it's not a gas, it's a liquid.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#293

Post by opo »

shadowgovt wrote: post #227
boogies wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, as of the last millenium at the latest. Chernobyl was last millenium. Fukushima was a tsunami. There were 0 (zero) deaths from radiation there (and ironically, perhaps there were deaths from irrational fear of it — from the rushed evacuation — perhaps it would be better named FUDushima). And tsunamis don’t happen in the US. The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, pilin…

> Fukushima was a tsunami Tsunamis, by themselves, don't contaminate ocean-water with radioactive material to a density high enough to create a 10-km no-fish-zone. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00664/fukushima-fishin... And while Chernobyl didn't happen in the past 20 years, I think it's naive to consider nuclear power safe when a continent-threatening disaster occurred in the past 40 years. "One massive disa…

>...Personally, I think the grand calculus may tilt slightly in nuclear's favor over fossil fuels, but the risk can't be swept under the rug.

Slightly?

No one except the Soviet Union said the Chernobyl style plants were reasonable designs. That kind of design would have been illegal to build anywhere else in the world.

The death rate from Fukishima is far less than the death rate from any properly working fossil fuels source (or wind or rooftop solar for that matter). One estimate is that worldwide use of coal causes up to 800,000 deaths a year - this is much worse than all deaths from nuclear, including the bombs that were dropped on Japan!

https://endcoal.org/health/

A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009:

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/

No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could've let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would they have covered it if 200 thousand were evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#294

Post by i_miss_unix »

dheera wrote: post #221
i_miss_unix wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they basically have a massive fleet of buses that cart in all the kids to work who cannot afford to live within 10 miles of the place? Are those buses natural gas?

Oh, sure, they exist, but why are there still parking lots almost full of cars? And also, 10 miles is a really long distance. Most people consider anything more than 1 mile un-walkable for a commute, so what about all the people between 1 to 10 miles? And what about visitors, contractors, interviewees, partner company employees, and everyone else who can't take the bus? Why aren't the buses a part of the local transi…

FAANG could easily pay for this and it would be approved almost without push back, but will they? And like in Demolition Man, there is a Taco Bell at every stop. Only Taco Bell.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#295

Post by Spivak »

chrisseaton wrote: post #292
Spivak wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a US-ism? I've never heard anyone in casual conversion call it gasoline or petrol. You would get weird looks if you called it gasoline. "You fill up your gas tank at the gas station and get a gas can just in case you get low on gas before you can hit the next station to gas up."

Not hard to see how it's confusing - you call it gas but it's not a gas, it's a liquid.

But it’s just a case of a word with two meanings that depends on context. That’s like the least weird thing that happens in English.

“You call returned soldiers vets, but they don’t work with animals.”

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#296

Post by paconbork »

ip26 wrote: post #122
namdnay wrote: post #14

I'm always suspicious about carbon offsets. From what I've seen buying flights for example, the price seems surprisingly low. Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. Does anyone have more expertise on this?

being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700. A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For thi…

That's just because introducing a new tax opens a new avenue for taxes to increase in the future. Even if it's not significant now, the infrastructure will be in place to increase taxes later (after all, the first income tax was a measly 3%). Whether it's reasonable to expect this tax to increase significantly is of course a different question entirely, but the visceral gut reaction to yet another tax is somewhat understandable imo.

Now don't get me wrong, I am in favor of carbon taxing as it's probably one of the best tools we have to fight climate change. But the only way something like this is going to see widespread approval is if all of the proceeds are guaranteed to be paid back to the people and not disappear into the ether of government bureaucracy.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#297

Post by afiori »

Qwertious wrote: post #240
Spivak wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is yes, the long answer is "it depends on your local electricity generation but probably still yes." There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.

'There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.' This statement always throws me - did we just make a complete context-switch from talking about car emissions to talking about gas turbines? Or is "gas" being used to refer to petrol ("gasoline")? The subject of the previous post was clearly cars, but that sentence is talking about gas and coal, better…

I always found the acronym LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) funny for similar reasons.

The definition of the difference between gas and vapour is that a gas cannot be liquefied by pressure (so water vapour heated over ~374°C becomes a gas)

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#298

Post by ohthehugemanate »

air7 wrote: post #249
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #109

There's a really good explanation of different loopholes in calculating carbon emissions in the Microsoft carbon target announcement from last year[1]. Eg do you count secondary services your employees use, like food services or emissions from their commute? Do you count partner services, like shipping providers for physical product? These, along with your direct emissions, are categorized into three "scopes" of emis…

> do you count secondary services your employees use I find this question to be a classic ridiculous slippery slope. For example: Do you count the foot print of the plane that takes employees on vacation bought using the company's salary? Or the foot print of the extra child they decided to bear thanks to the finical stability the company offers? I feel these type of claims should not be taken literally but rather as…

Microsoft is using the standard way to reckon GHG emissions in climate science, and accepting an order of magnitude more emissions into the calculation. The EPA has an OK explanation of the system:

https://www.epa.gov/greeningepa/greenhouse-gases-epa

Though I think the MS article is easier to understand. If you think this is not a reasonable or accurate way to measure emissions, there are some great peer reviewed journals you could write to.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#299

Post by teekert »

hwillis wrote: post #173
teekert wrote: post #139

Meanwhile I'm also completely CO2 neutral with my ICE car: [0] why is this even a problem? for 1ct per liter we are CO2 neutral, Google and everybody is doing it. And yet... [0] https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...

You absolutely are not. Shell is doing the cheapest possible thing; planting trees. It is NOT permanent and not sustainable. As soon as someone decides to cut down those trees, that CO2 goes right back into the air. Shell is also estimating the offset at $5/ton, which is an order of magnitude lower than expected: https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf Planting trees simply will not work. Cumulative anthropogen…

Thanx you, I was hoping for this reaction. Shell's tactics feel completely wrong, and so they are. How can they get away with this?

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#300

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

komali2 wrote: post #291
dragonwriter wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity Mostly, it does. > think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA) Those laws are at odds with capitalism, because they limit the control of private capital owners over the application of that capital in favor of social direction or limitation by the State on others’ interest. Now, you can support that as necessary for the good of so…

This is correct and shouldn't be downvoted. You can like capitalism while acknowledging its faults.

I think I am conflating capitalism and free markets.
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