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Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

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Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#71

Post by henryfjordan »

itcrowd wrote: post #38
moultano wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limiting climate change to 2C is such a hail mary at this point that we should look favorably on anything, no matter how imperfect, that moves us in that direction. There are no silver bullets, we need to do everything at once.

While I agree that there are no silver bullets and multiple approaches are required, I don't agree that we need to pursue everything that may help. First, a lot of R&D must be done (for all types of solutions) and the money to fund this can only be spent once. So we need to pre-select some promising ideas (could still be many ideas, but not all ideas). Second, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. While I am…

Even if you could snap your fingers and make perfectly renewable energy, we still have the problem that there's a bunch of carbon in the air that used to be in the ground, and that's not going away unless we do something about it.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#72

Post by titojankowski »

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Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#73

Post by godelski »

itcrowd wrote: post #3

This is an amazing pledge and very powerful statement. However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. The main counter argument being that CCS technology enables the status quo of fossil fuel burning to continue. On the other hand, there are some heavy industries (steel production?) that do not have any alternatives to coal burning in order to operate and CCS can offset the carbon footprint in these indus…

It's a fair question, but I'll ask you "what's the alternative?"

We can't plant enough trees. Nor can we always plant them in the most needed places (North, where carbon accumulates). We can't build even public transport (which is still positive emissions). We can't get everyone to go vegan (which still is positive emissions. Even lab meat won't make negative emissions). We can't stop air travel and shipping without significantly affecting people's lives (including their ability to live, as drugs, equipment, and experts aren't all created locally). We can't get everyone to leave their homes and concentrate into cities.

Even if we could do all that, we'd still be positive. Worse, how do we get every country in the world to do the same? It seems infeasible to me. And it doesn't address the problems like that carbon builds up in certain areas that we just can't even plant trees.

But here's the thing. The argument isn't "planting trees vs CC", it is "trees + CC". Actually it's more! It's about using every available method we have at our disposal. There is nothing wrong with burning carbon actually. The issue is burning so much that we are destroying the plant. Destroying the planet is the issue. If we have negative emissions total (and aren't creating carbon hot zones) then who cares how much we emit? As long as it's captured and doesn't damage the planet.

Leaving CC off the table is like telling a bunch of starving children that they can't have hamburgers because some of them might eat too many and get fat. The concern is completely missing the point of the problem.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#74

Post by sremani »

Data centers are factories without smoke stacks, they are voracious consumers of energy and since "cloud" everything computing is the name of the game at least for medium term, tech companies would do a favor if they focus on tackling the datacenter related issue.

Also chip fabrication is a dirty dirty dirty business, as the consumers of the computer hardware, we as an industry has responsibility to pollution reduction of this process.

Planting trees is good, giving aid money is good, but cleaning your own shit is better!

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#75

Post by azernik »

godelski wrote: post #55
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #14

It's a small step in the grand scheme of things... But it's a huge step (and commitment) coming from a single company. I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view. Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys. As a si…

To your sequestration comment. No one is saying don't plant trees. Fuck yeah, plant all the trees! But that won't wont be enough. Sequestration will get better, but one of the big things it helps with is locality. CO2 isn't homogenously spread across the globe. It also doesn't spread very well. Concentrations vary drastically over the year and so do plants' ability to capture carbon. Carbon can build up in certain re…

Sequestration is also good for catching carbon at potential emission sources; it's easier to grab CO2 out of the atmosphere at the point where you're burning methane than to let it out in the atmosphere and then try to catch it again.

(Or, in some interesting experiments, even before emission; there's work on splitting methane from natural gas into carbon and hydrogen and just burning the hydrogen. Gets you something like 66% of the energy of burning the methane completely, and with no CO2 emissions.)

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#76

Post by maximente »

harryh wrote: post #61
maximente wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, this is too simplistic. extracting carbon from the ground is neither free nor reversable so this analogy isn't appropriate here. even if one could turn it back into whatever it's original form was (impossible to do without additional energy due to thermodyamics/entropy), the site of extraction is way worse for the wear.

No one cares about the "worse for the wear" problems of digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia. The whole problem is the CO2 that ends up in our air on the other end of the process.

> digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia

are you aware of fracking and tar sands and their environmental impacts? you cannot possibly trivialize those as "digging holes in the ground".

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#77

Post by harryh »

maximente wrote: post #76
harryh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one cares about the "worse for the wear" problems of digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia. The whole problem is the CO2 that ends up in our air on the other end of the process.

> digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia are you aware of fracking and tar sands and their environmental impacts? you cannot possibly trivialize those as "digging holes in the ground".

Meh. In the grand scheme of things, those environmental impacts are nothing compared to the problems of climate change.

Re: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

#78

Post by shepwalker »

I'm a big 'ol fan of Stripe, but large scale change isn't going to happen through corporate self regulation.

I wish tech companies that insist they want to make large, positive changes would come to terms with the fact that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary. I would be far more aggressive in my support of this effort if it was explicitly "we're doing this effort to cover our own tracks and we're contributing to a PAC that will support politicians who prioritize sensible environmental policy."

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