19 ms·

Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment

569 points by mhoad 7y ago

didgeoridoo 7y ago
Missed opportunity to call this C-- !
- dwohnitmok 7y ago
  C-- the programming language already exists: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html
itcrowd 7y ago
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 industries. I would however not call this "negative emissions" but rather "emission-free" or similar. What is your opinion on CCS? Can people convince me in either direction?
- moultano 7y ago
  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.
  - itcrowd 7y ago
    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 pretty neutral / undecided on nuclear power, some argue that the (potential) problems it brings along are not worth the risk, even if it is a carbon neutral method of power production. Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before) (I would like to emphasize here that I am not arguing about the extent or existence of a climate crisis. I am aware of the literature and agree that immediate action is required to limit carbon emissions)
    - henryfjordan 7y ago
      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.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      > Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before) Eh, renewable energy is getting quite cheap. If you add the costs of CCS into fossil fuel, I think you'll still have plenty of incentives to invest on renewables, and to use fossil as a last resort only.
- tlb 7y ago
  There isn't some intrinsic moral sin to burning carbon. There are just practical problems with having too much in the atmosphere. If you can remove carbon, especially if you can also convert it back into fuel, that solves the problem. (Carbon isn't the only emission from burning coal -- it contains sulfur and thorium too. But these can also be mitigated with some expense. And if you're converting CO2 directly to fuel, there's no increase in pollution at all.)
  - itcrowd 7y ago
    I would argue there is a moral "sin" in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because (in your words) it leads to "practical problems", i.e. anthropogenic climate change. If you can remove the carbon again, then it is still a "sin" unless you pay to have your share removed. If it can then be converted to fuel again that is an added bonus. Of course, this whole process needs to occur at a massive scale because we are releasing so much carbon dioxide and want to remove more than we are currently emitting. (P.s. I don't like the word "sin" in this context because of the theological connotation it implies, but I hope the message is clear)
  - maximente 7y ago
    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.
    - harryh 7y ago
      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.
      - maximente 7y ago
        > 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".
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  You could just buy oil and not burn it. Far simpler than CCS.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Eh? That assumes oil production is static. We have effectively infinite resources of fossil fuels still yet to be extracted. That's like saying you can reduce car miles driven by buying a car and not driving it. Another one will just be made.
    - davidw 7y ago
      And you've increased the demand, ever so slightly.
      - esotericn 7y ago
        Yep.
    - doctorpangloss 7y ago
      > Another one will just be made Can we legislate a cap on the production of anything?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - ajross 7y ago
    That does nothing to reduce consumption. Oil isn't zero sum. If you make the market less efficient prices will rise a bit, but production numbers will still match demand. Fracking taught us this. If you want a simple solution, buy a farm and bury the output. Simpler than storing a bunch of oil, even. But not very effective relative to land use.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- bobbygoodlatte 7y ago
  I think it depends what the lower limit of this technology is in terms of cost-per-ton. If the technology can get 100X cheaper, it would be immoral not to pursue it. If it only gets 2-3X as cheap as it is today, it might create the moral excuse you cited and be a net-negative. My instinct is it could be an extremely important technology for fighting climate change. And while it develops it's important to continue to insist that it doesn't excuse the emissions it might offset.
  - itcrowd 7y ago
    Well put, the scalability is a nice insight.
- ajross 7y ago
  > However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. So... let's put off saving the planet because someone has moral qualms? No. This is a legitimate emergency. If we have something that has a net positive impact, we need to do it and stop arguing about it on the internet. Nothing is without tradeoffs, and some are simply going to have to be made. There are no easy solutions. We have seven billion people to feed while we manage to undo all the damage too, remember. I'm not saying capture solutions are the best choice, mind you. I'm saying that decision needs to be made with numbers and not "morals".
- kingbirdy 7y ago
  The status quo of burning fossil fuels will continue whether we employ CCS or not, so we may as well use every tool available.
- godelski 7y ago
  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.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  SSAB and LKAB are experimenting with burning hydrogen instead of coal for steelproduction.
esotericn 7y ago
Proud. I'm in the process of setting up a new consulting business, and one of my major commitments is to donate a significant percentage (at least 10%; likely more) of profits towards CO2 reduction / capture efforts. I'm watching this space eagerly.
- chrdlu 7y ago
  Trail of Bits (a security consulting firm) recently subscribed to an offset program that offsets all of the carbon from their employees! https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711 https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I had an incomplete checkout process with Wren. Just signed up for 200% (I suspect the estimate is on the low side as I don't know the impact of producing a lot of the things I own). Cheers for the reminder!
brunoTbear 7y ago
I'm surprised by the size of the commit. If $1M is the floor for what a Stripe-sized org is willing to spend, how expensive would a carbon tax actually be? Are there good estimators for my impact as a consumer and how much I need to commit to this? Basically I want to know how much it costs to feel ok about my flights to go skiing.
- esotericn 7y ago
  The highest ClimeWorks plan, if it's trustworthy (can't personally vouch for it) is approx 1 USD per kg CO2 captured, or $1k per ton. That's pretty expensive. But at $100 it starts to look a lot more favourable when compared with a personal footprint - 30 tons emitted would be $3K, perfectly achievable for someone who's talking about flying to go skiing.
  - brunoTbear 7y ago
    Terrapass seems to say my CO2 emissions from flying so far this year are going to come in around 13 metric tons. At $1000 per ton this isn't feasible. At $100 I'd think about it. At $10 it's not a question that I'd buy it. At $1000 per ton I'd change my air spending habits. At $100 per ton built into the price per flight I would probably take the same trips. tl;dr: get this price down an order of magnitude and I'm in.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Mmm. I'd like to think that at $100/ton, or probably before that, we just price it in to flights.
    - ajross 7y ago
      Express it as an overhead on ticket price. You're using terrapass, so I plugged some numbers in and it out to about 20-30% based on what I can remember paying for typical domestic economy seats. If you fly on more expensive flights, it's even cheaper. That sounds tolerable to me as a price of saving the planet. Certainly it's not an economy-busting impossibility given that it's in the range that can be reasonably borne by normal middle class individuals.
ac29 7y ago
Interesting that they are willing to pay any price the market offers, and expect to pay over $100/t. I wonder to what degree large scale burying of biomass would be effective? It'd be effectively the same process that created the hydrocarbon fuels we use today, which would be fairly effectively sequestered if we didnt drill them out of the ground. It seems the idea has certainly been thought of: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
- tlb 7y ago
  The problem with burying biomass is that it gets metabolized by bacteria into CO2 and (worse) methane, which escapes into the air. Some landfills manage to capture most of the methane, but on the 100-year time scale it's not clear that burying is very effective.
  - ac29 7y ago
    The study I linked addresses that point - they suggest that "only 0–3% of the carbon from wood are ever emitted as landfill gas after several decades". I don't consider myself qualified to evaluate that claim, but it certainly seems plausible, given that wood clearly decays far slower than, for example, kitchen scraps found in household bio-waste.
  - itcrowd 7y ago
    Additionally, the required storage volume looks pretty insane (see one of the figures in the linked paper). I'm not convinced of biomass burial.
- sbierwagen 7y ago
  That paper avoids mentioning BECCS, the most extensively researched plan for carbon sequestration: reducing wood to charcoal, burning the syngas you produce during the process to generate electricity, and then sequestering the charcoal.[1] The Kyoto protocol for limiting global warming to 2C requires massive use of BECCS. Pros: The output material has a higher carbon content, so you're locking up less water, and it's completely biologically inert, so you can just dump it into an open pit instead of burying it, where wood would otherwise rot and release its carbon back into the air. However, you're in real trouble if your giant pile of charcoal is ignited somehow, which can be harder to put out than you'd think.[2] Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood. Running a biomass power plant has higher operating costs than just shoveling wood into a hole. BECCS requires a particular set of incentives in order to be economical. You need both very expensive electricity and also a high carbon sequestration subsidy. If solar+battery storage is cheap, direct burial makes more sense. --- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
alkibiades 7y ago
why should they waste investor money so they can feel good about themselves and feel “noble”. the most recent investors are suckers
- brunoTbear 7y ago
  You got downvotes, I hope because your tone isn't super productive, not because HN doesn't like the realist viewpoint you're taking.
  - alkibiades 7y ago
    i think it’s the second. IMO if the people who run the company want to donate to charity, they can use their own money.
    - mikeg8 7y ago
      Well as they own they company, it technically is their money. I think the bigger point you're missing is how our society's corporate leadership needs to shift their mentality and follow along with Stripe. Solving this problem isn't the sole responsibility of philanthropic individuals.
    - superflit 7y ago
      You are right. Any investor should be aware that it may lose or gain wealth from this actions. As customer I will take a lower fee instead of that and then I will choose whatever I will do with a lower fee.
  - ian0 7y ago
    Thats the opposite of realist. A realist would observe that the stripe founders own and manage stripe, that their investors probably do share the same ideals as them, that HR is challenging and this obviously wins favor, that people involved understand the global optimum (not damaging the planet) can be greater than the local optimum (maintaining low expenses for stripe) and on and on. The comment was idealist, not realist.
- 7y ago
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
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 side note: I personally think that the way we look at environment and impact is plainly wrong. E.g. it is much more effective to plant trees (called "afforestation") rather than sequester CO2. Here's some old but decent sources [0], [1]. Can't find a proper source, but afforestation, when done together with habitat restoration, can be even cheaper than these numbers, when done in certain areas of Africa, South America and Central Asia. If Stripe wants to go the proverbial extra mile, it should consider "educating" people on the subject AND take consequent action, as opposed to "just" taking action following conventional wisdom. [0]: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf [1]: https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf (afforestation "price" starting at ~$50/ton)
- surfmike 7y ago
  Don’t you then need to worry about enforcement mechanisms to keep those trees from getting cut down? If they’re all harvested after say n decades, there’s no net effect on climate.
  - tomjakubowski 7y ago
    How does it follow that there's no net effect on climate (or amount of atmospheric carbon) if the tree is cut down? I can only see that if the timber is burned for fuel. If someone instead carved the timber up into N skateboards, modulo waste, the carbon would stay with the skateboards.
    - kingbirdy 7y ago
      Skateboards don't stay skateboards forever. Eventually they'll be thrown out, where they'll degrade & eventually decompose, re-releasing the stored CO2.
mapster 7y ago
I've seen a lot of tech companies carefully analyzing impact of commute. Essentially re-locating closer/central to employees like using the commutestudy tool. 100% public transit commute is a long term goal, so work/live distance should be as short as possible short term.
- rsanek 7y ago
  > 100% public transit commute is a long term goal Why is this a goal? Public transit isn't inherently cleaner. What makes it environmentally more attractive than personal ownership of electric vehicles, or a transit system subsidized by the government instead of run by it?
  - mapster 7y ago
    Even personal elec vehicles is a dumb way for millions to get to/from work in the future. Its very 'western' and old way of thinking. In 100yrs ppl will be either walking/biking/public transit or remote.
aVx1uyD5pYWW 7y ago
>This leads to Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment. We will seek to purchase negative CO2 emissions at any price per tCO2, starting immediately. We expect that the best price will initially be very high: almost certainly more than $100 per tCO2, as compared to the $8 per tCO2 we pay for offsets. We don’t expect to be able to sequester all of our carbon emissions, both because the relevant technologies are not yet operating at sufficient scale, and because it would be financially infeasible for Stripe. And so we commit to spending at least twice as much on sequestration as we do on offsets, with a floor of at least $1M per year. What is the difference between sequestration and offsets?
- tgog 7y ago
  Sequestration means literally filtering CO2 out of the air. Offsets are essentially just a contract that someone who would otherwise have created emissions, won't. For example, instead of deforesting an area I own and selling it for wood, I might sell an offset contract and keep it intact.
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  In this context offsets are paying to reduce new CO2 emissions while sequestration is getting rid of previously emitted CO2.
mikeg8 7y ago
Bravo to Stripe's continued leadership and exemplification of what a modern corporation can and should be. The CCS area I've been most fascinated by recently is listed as their first area of interest: natural carbon sinks via land management practices. I've been reading a little more about mob-stalked, heavily mobile grazing techniques (rotating cows/buffalo/ruminants daily) which increases the grass productivity per acre, thus capuring more carbon in the grass --> soil. If anyone knows of any resources/studies comparing the carbon sequestration of grasslands, which have incredible biomass cycles over several decades, vs managed forests which do not see the same level of biomass turnover, I would love to see them.
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titojankowski 7y ago
For people really into carbon removal --- Check out AirMiners, the largest community of entrepreneurs, researchers, and funders exploring opportunities in negative emissions and carbon removal. Folks from every major carbon removal startups like Climeworks, Global Thermostat, etc. Join 320+ of us on Slack! Apply here to join: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fwe-RuPBpqWXsvyYK4/edit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fw... There's also a public meetup group in the Bay Area: https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/ https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/
- titojankowski 7y ago
  woohoo, 3 new applications so far!
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Let's say I'm a regular web developer and know nothing about climate science, carbon removal, or any related science or technologies, but might be interested in donating my time and and skills. Do you have any recommendations?
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    This is probably a really sensitive topic but.. Donating your time to help get politicians elected who are serious about doing what's necessary may be the best thing you can do.
    - titojankowski 7y ago
      Politicians are powerless without good technology options. Today, the technology options are not good. but good options are within sight. As a technologist, let's go make better tech. Climate change is a technology problem and a marketing problem. YC's carbon site does a great job marketing for these crucial technologies: http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
      - 7y ago
sremani 7y ago
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!
- Nyandalized 7y ago
  I'd argue that "the cloud" makes traditional computing more efficient. Since their motto is "pay for what you use", it automatically aligns with motives for the most efficient use. Not to mention that the usage of computers has reduced the need for much more power hungry methods. We can now efficiently calculate much stronger, lighter, easier to manufacture parts and building patterns. There is no need to drive/ride/walk to a place to hear the message, radio broadcasting is much more effective, even though it itself consumes power.
shepwalker 7y ago
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."
- rtpg 7y ago
  OTOH let’s say you spent $1M a year on a PAC. In this political environment how far would you be able to go? This feels like trying to establish some sort of technological catalyst. This also might not be enough but it’s something.
  - shepwalker 7y ago
    You can't throw a wifi-enabled juicer 5 feet without hitting half a dozen companies that are trying to be 'technological catalysts'. You're giving extra credit for unproven rate of return, which I'd still argue won't amount to meaningful change unless the political status quo is aggressively challenged. The reason you spent $Xmil on a PAC is the same reason we (inclusive, hopefully) vote. Will one significantly contributor turn the tide? Probably not. But it requires good (corporate) citizens to put up or shutup instead of leveraging a tweak on a pet environmental project to gain a positive press cycle.
- mikeg8 7y ago
  I disagree. While there is no guarantee large scale change will be fully driven by corporate self regulation, I'd argue that corporate self regulation, and initiatives like this, have the potential to be substantially more impactful than waiting on help from dysfunctional big government. yes we need political levers to move, but I'm not holding my breath, and I welcome any and all corporate efforts.
- mLuby 7y ago
  >I wish tech companies that… want… large, positive changes would [accept] that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary. I agree that corporate self-regulation is the laziest political solution. But instead of doubling down on a mistake, let's get all company hands off the political levers and have real separation of corp and state. Company influence on politics is an arms race that entrenches the most powerful firms, many of which are fundamentally opposed to climate change regulation.
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dkraft 7y ago
Load of crap. Based on misinformation. Just shilling to the same ignorant customer base that uses microtransactions that hide the realities of debt and interest rates.
gitgud 7y ago
So they're basically going to pay for the CO2 emissions at around 100$ per tonne (10 cents per kg), right? Well, we can calculate the C02 exhaled by a typical human, as [1] 36.84 mg = 0.03684 kg of CO2 per breath. (0.03684 kg @ 10c per kg) Therefore each breath you exhale is worth 0.003684 cents.... So how do you want to pay me @stripe? [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mass-of-the-carbon-dioxide-exhaled-in-a-breath https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mass-of-the-carbon-dioxide...
- rwz 7y ago
  Are you saying you’re going to stop breathing after receiving the money?
matznerd 7y ago
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 getting into the CDR field, have generally been limited in that they can only make investments into an organization if there is a way to get a financial return. They can't put money in non-profits, even to potentially help "save the world," as they are still operating with a fiduciary responsibility and for-profit motives. If no one is paying for carbon removal, there is no business. For scientists and others trying to create carbon removal solutions, this represents a major problem, as no matter how good or cheap their CDR technique is, they also have to come up with a market of who will buy their CDR "product." So even though many groups/companies want to get involved in CDR, if there is no market for paying for "CDR as a product," investors will not put money in. Having Stripe and other companies guarantee payment for carbon dioxide removal would actually make a real difference in helping to spur the CDR market. Companies would be able to point at who will buy their "product" and at what price, and then investors would be able to invest. Creating a carbon price is the most obvious and simple solution to make the "free market" solve a problem created by the inefficiency of the "free market" in the first place, of not pricing in the real world cost of the externalities from each tonne of CO2 released. The emitters should have to pay because each tonne of carbon put out into the atmosphere causes economic damage in terms of health effects and more. Some 30,000 people die prematurely in the US each year due to air pollution, yet most emitters do not pay these costs[2]. This is termed the "social cost of carbon" (SCC) and based on estimates from the U.S. governmental Interagency Working Group in 2013, each 1 metric ton of CO2 released is said to have an SCC of around $37 (2007 USD).[3] So even though there is a consensus among most scientists and economists that there should be a carbon price, and companies technically owe around $37/tonne, no one is sure when it will occur or at what price it will be at. This uncertainty and lack of a large scale market is what prevents major private investments into large scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. It is particularly frustrating because if the free market was truly rational, polluters would be paying for the externalities on their CO2 emissions, and the CDR field would blossom. By creating a market themselves and also offering to pay at a range of prices (even though there may be cheaper options available), Stripe can help foster CDR companies when they are most vulnerable, helping them breakthrough their technological learning curves and achieve scale. At the very least, just keeping companies subsidized and advancing technologically until the world corrects this economic error, is a worthy cause. Having a guaranteed CO2 removal price would allow these companies to just focus on their technology and not have to individually force the global economic system to price carbon, in order to be viable. So again, great job Stripe in starting this, and to other companies/organizations, please start similar initiatives. [1] "Interesting ideas include crushing rock with natural forces" [https://ProjectVesta.org https://ProjectVesta.org] [2] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us-deaths-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us-death... [3] https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusreport.pdf https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusrepor...
Proven 7y ago
I couldn't care less. If I were a Stripe shareholder I'd try to get the management fired or else sell the stock. The losers clearly can't focus on doing their job and should probably go to "work" for the government or a non-profit.
CAPTUREJosie 7y ago
Shameless plug here but anyone interested in helping us prototype test an app to track/gamify/offset daily carbon emissions? We are a start-up in Singapore called CAPTURE :) all about helping people become aware of the impact their daily actions can have on their carbon footprint, make it fun and add a little competition, then for what you can't reduce - we will offer in-app offsetting via CAPTURE forests, where you'll be able to track your individual trees and watch your forests grow via a monthly drone update! Would be super grateful for any feedback. Early stages but testers/those interested please sign-up at www.thecapture.club
spenrose 7y ago
Wonderful leadership. Thank you, Stripe!
papreclip 7y ago
They might make up for their electricity bill 1:1 but they'll never go neutral on the amount of carbon wealth they consume in payment for their services. Imagine I have a business where I busk for money with my guitar outside of a coal plant and a single coal minor is my patron. I may be "carbon neutral" but in fact I owe my whole existence to coal being mined and burnt. Coal is my life blood and the sole source of wealth in my life. I may as well mine the coal myself and play guitar for myself, and if you consider me and the miner to be a unit it's obvious the two of us are living on coal and the fact that he does all the work while I play guitar hardly means anything. Companies like stripe are sufficiently separated from coal and oil that they can believe they don't suck at the teat of fossil fuels, and that the only coal wealth they consume is whatever powers their light bulbs and servers. But ultimately you can track back the wealth that comes their way - all of it - to operations that generate quite a bit more emissions. We can run subsidies and credits in little isolated corners of our economy, but it's like running a refrigerator in a closed room. Ultimately you're just burning wealth which creates a greater load on the wealth-generating machine that is the fossil fuel industry. Real advances that make it possible to generate wealth without fossil fuel money in subsidies should be celebrated. These tech guys taking $1m of their $100m in profits (the coal miner pays the busker using stripe) to pay their $1m light bill is a shell game
- Nyandalized 7y ago
  I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Are you discounting their efforts? Their motives? You're not responsible for everyone else, or if you were, they'd not need to be for themselves.
iamleppert 7y ago
What kind of margins do they have that enables them to just throw money around like this? Is the payments industry that big of a cash machine to allow this kind of spending that has nothing to do with their core business?
- Nyandalized 7y ago
  You would find that banking and it's related fields are indeed very profitable.
abalone 7y ago
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: free market ideologues are not ever going to be leaders on climate. 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.
- dgellow 7y ago
  > 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 still have the global problem. And then what, do you go to war against other countries?
  - lyian 7y ago
    I don't think you need to go to war for that. The EU is aware of global warming and is taking actions to lessen their emission even tho it is still to slow. The most important part is to reduce the overwhelming consumption of the western world and then teaching and investing in the developing countries to prevent them to have the same habits we have/had.
  - mononcqc 7y ago
    You do your part, other countries try to do the same, and various means and strategies are implemented and shared globally. This “but we can’t fix it all alone, it’s a global issue” thinking mode has to go. All contributions are important in reducing the speed of warming, whether your neighbour participates or not. Interestingly, the longer you wait, the more you can expect people with more extreme agendas to pop up around the globe because they will see the point in coercion to save the world. Early investment at a massive scale is worth it.
truthwhisperer 7y ago
This is indeed very bad news. You are a payment processor. Stick to your core and let the "CO2" discussion held by the government and apply the rules they issue. Don't create your own society related rules. If you don't agree create your own political movement What's next? Companies who produce a lot of "CO2" are not allowed to process payments anymore? Or should first "buy" your CO2 credits? Crazy millennial trash talk Next();
mcot2 7y ago
Why not invest in new solar power generation instead of removing co2 at this point.
- JimiofEden 7y ago
  Why not both? At least in terms of priority, the damage is done and is already in the atmosphere. imo, we need to first focus on cleaning that up and getting some form of homeostasis before it gets much worse, WHILE working on solar/nuclear/renewable tech to make sure we don't just relapse and make the problem worse again. I'm optimistically hoping that's the route we'd take anyways. Money tends to say otherwise tho. =(
hugoromano 7y ago
Our normal state should be doing good for the planet, and not bragging for doing the right thing. For starters, Stripe staff should fly far less, invest in remote working, or research how to make payments with the lowest carbon footprint. Cash is the baseline. I hope that there isn’t an hidden agenda of carbon credits as a business.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Should. Doesn't mean it's possible. When the market doesn't favor doing the right thing, companies trying to do it die quickly, outcompeted by those who don't care. That's one reason why this has to be a gradual process, involving carbon credits and companies bragging about doing a bit of the right thing, and hopefully having that bragging be positively received.
brazir 7y ago
I personally wish more companies worked like this. I know in about six months once i sort out the spend rate for engineering at my startup i am going to be looking at if we can give back either to environment or to open source. There is an inevitability as the old die off and the young more hyper aware we forge ahead to a less pollution intense world.
crb002 7y ago
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.

569 points by mhoad 7y ago

didgeoridoo 7y ago

Missed opportunity to call this C-- !

dwohnitmok 7y ago
C-- the programming language already exists: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html

itcrowd 7y ago

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 industries. I would however not call this "negative emissions" but rather "emission-free" or similar. What is your opinion on CCS? Can people convince me in either direction?

moultano 7y ago
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.
- itcrowd 7y ago
  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 pretty neutral / undecided on nuclear power, some argue that the (potential) problems it brings along are not worth the risk, even if it is a carbon neutral method of power production. Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before) (I would like to emphasize here that I am not arguing about the extent or existence of a climate crisis. I am aware of the literature and agree that immediate action is required to limit carbon emissions)
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    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.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    > Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before) Eh, renewable energy is getting quite cheap. If you add the costs of CCS into fossil fuel, I think you'll still have plenty of incentives to invest on renewables, and to use fossil as a last resort only.
tlb 7y ago
There isn't some intrinsic moral sin to burning carbon. There are just practical problems with having too much in the atmosphere. If you can remove carbon, especially if you can also convert it back into fuel, that solves the problem. (Carbon isn't the only emission from burning coal -- it contains sulfur and thorium too. But these can also be mitigated with some expense. And if you're converting CO2 directly to fuel, there's no increase in pollution at all.)
- itcrowd 7y ago
  I would argue there is a moral "sin" in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because (in your words) it leads to "practical problems", i.e. anthropogenic climate change. If you can remove the carbon again, then it is still a "sin" unless you pay to have your share removed. If it can then be converted to fuel again that is an added bonus. Of course, this whole process needs to occur at a massive scale because we are releasing so much carbon dioxide and want to remove more than we are currently emitting. (P.s. I don't like the word "sin" in this context because of the theological connotation it implies, but I hope the message is clear)
- maximente 7y ago
  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.
  - harryh 7y ago
    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.
    - maximente 7y ago
      > 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".
doctorpangloss 7y ago
You could just buy oil and not burn it. Far simpler than CCS.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Eh? That assumes oil production is static. We have effectively infinite resources of fossil fuels still yet to be extracted. That's like saying you can reduce car miles driven by buying a car and not driving it. Another one will just be made.
  - davidw 7y ago
    And you've increased the demand, ever so slightly.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Yep.
  - doctorpangloss 7y ago
    > Another one will just be made Can we legislate a cap on the production of anything?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- ajross 7y ago
  That does nothing to reduce consumption. Oil isn't zero sum. If you make the market less efficient prices will rise a bit, but production numbers will still match demand. Fracking taught us this. If you want a simple solution, buy a farm and bury the output. Simpler than storing a bunch of oil, even. But not very effective relative to land use.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
bobbygoodlatte 7y ago
I think it depends what the lower limit of this technology is in terms of cost-per-ton. If the technology can get 100X cheaper, it would be immoral not to pursue it. If it only gets 2-3X as cheap as it is today, it might create the moral excuse you cited and be a net-negative. My instinct is it could be an extremely important technology for fighting climate change. And while it develops it's important to continue to insist that it doesn't excuse the emissions it might offset.
- itcrowd 7y ago
  Well put, the scalability is a nice insight.
ajross 7y ago
> However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. So... let's put off saving the planet because someone has moral qualms? No. This is a legitimate emergency. If we have something that has a net positive impact, we need to do it and stop arguing about it on the internet. Nothing is without tradeoffs, and some are simply going to have to be made. There are no easy solutions. We have seven billion people to feed while we manage to undo all the damage too, remember. I'm not saying capture solutions are the best choice, mind you. I'm saying that decision needs to be made with numbers and not "morals".
kingbirdy 7y ago
The status quo of burning fossil fuels will continue whether we employ CCS or not, so we may as well use every tool available.
godelski 7y ago
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.
Ma8ee 7y ago
SSAB and LKAB are experimenting with burning hydrogen instead of coal for steelproduction.

esotericn 7y ago

Proud. I'm in the process of setting up a new consulting business, and one of my major commitments is to donate a significant percentage (at least 10%; likely more) of profits towards CO2 reduction / capture efforts. I'm watching this space eagerly.

chrdlu 7y ago
Trail of Bits (a security consulting firm) recently subscribed to an offset program that offsets all of the carbon from their employees! https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711 https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711
- esotericn 7y ago
  I had an incomplete checkout process with Wren. Just signed up for 200% (I suspect the estimate is on the low side as I don't know the impact of producing a lot of the things I own). Cheers for the reminder!

brunoTbear 7y ago

I'm surprised by the size of the commit. If $1M is the floor for what a Stripe-sized org is willing to spend, how expensive would a carbon tax actually be? Are there good estimators for my impact as a consumer and how much I need to commit to this? Basically I want to know how much it costs to feel ok about my flights to go skiing.

esotericn 7y ago
The highest ClimeWorks plan, if it's trustworthy (can't personally vouch for it) is approx 1 USD per kg CO2 captured, or $1k per ton. That's pretty expensive. But at $100 it starts to look a lot more favourable when compared with a personal footprint - 30 tons emitted would be $3K, perfectly achievable for someone who's talking about flying to go skiing.
- brunoTbear 7y ago
  Terrapass seems to say my CO2 emissions from flying so far this year are going to come in around 13 metric tons. At $1000 per ton this isn't feasible. At $100 I'd think about it. At $10 it's not a question that I'd buy it. At $1000 per ton I'd change my air spending habits. At $100 per ton built into the price per flight I would probably take the same trips. tl;dr: get this price down an order of magnitude and I'm in.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Mmm. I'd like to think that at $100/ton, or probably before that, we just price it in to flights.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Express it as an overhead on ticket price. You're using terrapass, so I plugged some numbers in and it out to about 20-30% based on what I can remember paying for typical domestic economy seats. If you fly on more expensive flights, it's even cheaper. That sounds tolerable to me as a price of saving the planet. Certainly it's not an economy-busting impossibility given that it's in the range that can be reasonably borne by normal middle class individuals.

ac29 7y ago

Interesting that they are willing to pay any price the market offers, and expect to pay over $100/t. I wonder to what degree large scale burying of biomass would be effective? It'd be effectively the same process that created the hydrocarbon fuels we use today, which would be fairly effectively sequestered if we didnt drill them out of the ground. It seems the idea has certainly been thought of: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

tlb 7y ago
The problem with burying biomass is that it gets metabolized by bacteria into CO2 and (worse) methane, which escapes into the air. Some landfills manage to capture most of the methane, but on the 100-year time scale it's not clear that burying is very effective.
- ac29 7y ago
  The study I linked addresses that point - they suggest that "only 0–3% of the carbon from wood are ever emitted as landfill gas after several decades". I don't consider myself qualified to evaluate that claim, but it certainly seems plausible, given that wood clearly decays far slower than, for example, kitchen scraps found in household bio-waste.
- itcrowd 7y ago
  Additionally, the required storage volume looks pretty insane (see one of the figures in the linked paper). I'm not convinced of biomass burial.
sbierwagen 7y ago
That paper avoids mentioning BECCS, the most extensively researched plan for carbon sequestration: reducing wood to charcoal, burning the syngas you produce during the process to generate electricity, and then sequestering the charcoal.[1] The Kyoto protocol for limiting global warming to 2C requires massive use of BECCS. Pros: The output material has a higher carbon content, so you're locking up less water, and it's completely biologically inert, so you can just dump it into an open pit instead of burying it, where wood would otherwise rot and release its carbon back into the air. However, you're in real trouble if your giant pile of charcoal is ignited somehow, which can be harder to put out than you'd think.[2] Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood. Running a biomass power plant has higher operating costs than just shoveling wood into a hole. BECCS requires a particular set of incentives in order to be economical. You need both very expensive electricity and also a high carbon sequestration subsidy. If solar+battery storage is cheap, direct burial makes more sense. --- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

alkibiades 7y ago

why should they waste investor money so they can feel good about themselves and feel “noble”. the most recent investors are suckers

brunoTbear 7y ago
You got downvotes, I hope because your tone isn't super productive, not because HN doesn't like the realist viewpoint you're taking.
- alkibiades 7y ago
  i think it’s the second. IMO if the people who run the company want to donate to charity, they can use their own money.
  - mikeg8 7y ago
    Well as they own they company, it technically is their money. I think the bigger point you're missing is how our society's corporate leadership needs to shift their mentality and follow along with Stripe. Solving this problem isn't the sole responsibility of philanthropic individuals.
  - superflit 7y ago
    You are right. Any investor should be aware that it may lose or gain wealth from this actions. As customer I will take a lower fee instead of that and then I will choose whatever I will do with a lower fee.
- ian0 7y ago
  Thats the opposite of realist. A realist would observe that the stripe founders own and manage stripe, that their investors probably do share the same ideals as them, that HR is challenging and this obviously wins favor, that people involved understand the global optimum (not damaging the planet) can be greater than the local optimum (maintaining low expenses for stripe) and on and on. The comment was idealist, not realist.
7y ago

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

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 side note: I personally think that the way we look at environment and impact is plainly wrong. E.g. it is much more effective to plant trees (called "afforestation") rather than sequester CO2. Here's some old but decent sources [0], [1]. Can't find a proper source, but afforestation, when done together with habitat restoration, can be even cheaper than these numbers, when done in certain areas of Africa, South America and Central Asia. If Stripe wants to go the proverbial extra mile, it should consider "educating" people on the subject AND take consequent action, as opposed to "just" taking action following conventional wisdom. [0]: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf [1]: https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf (afforestation "price" starting at ~$50/ton)

surfmike 7y ago
Don’t you then need to worry about enforcement mechanisms to keep those trees from getting cut down? If they’re all harvested after say n decades, there’s no net effect on climate.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  How does it follow that there's no net effect on climate (or amount of atmospheric carbon) if the tree is cut down? I can only see that if the timber is burned for fuel. If someone instead carved the timber up into N skateboards, modulo waste, the carbon would stay with the skateboards.
  - kingbirdy 7y ago
    Skateboards don't stay skateboards forever. Eventually they'll be thrown out, where they'll degrade & eventually decompose, re-releasing the stored CO2.

mapster 7y ago

I've seen a lot of tech companies carefully analyzing impact of commute. Essentially re-locating closer/central to employees like using the commutestudy tool. 100% public transit commute is a long term goal, so work/live distance should be as short as possible short term.

rsanek 7y ago
> 100% public transit commute is a long term goal Why is this a goal? Public transit isn't inherently cleaner. What makes it environmentally more attractive than personal ownership of electric vehicles, or a transit system subsidized by the government instead of run by it?
- mapster 7y ago
  Even personal elec vehicles is a dumb way for millions to get to/from work in the future. Its very 'western' and old way of thinking. In 100yrs ppl will be either walking/biking/public transit or remote.

aVx1uyD5pYWW 7y ago

>This leads to Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment. We will seek to purchase negative CO2 emissions at any price per tCO2, starting immediately. We expect that the best price will initially be very high: almost certainly more than $100 per tCO2, as compared to the $8 per tCO2 we pay for offsets. We don’t expect to be able to sequester all of our carbon emissions, both because the relevant technologies are not yet operating at sufficient scale, and because it would be financially infeasible for Stripe. And so we commit to spending at least twice as much on sequestration as we do on offsets, with a floor of at least $1M per year. What is the difference between sequestration and offsets?

tgog 7y ago
Sequestration means literally filtering CO2 out of the air. Offsets are essentially just a contract that someone who would otherwise have created emissions, won't. For example, instead of deforesting an area I own and selling it for wood, I might sell an offset contract and keep it intact.
kasey_junk 7y ago
In this context offsets are paying to reduce new CO2 emissions while sequestration is getting rid of previously emitted CO2.

mikeg8 7y ago

Bravo to Stripe's continued leadership and exemplification of what a modern corporation can and should be. The CCS area I've been most fascinated by recently is listed as their first area of interest: natural carbon sinks via land management practices. I've been reading a little more about mob-stalked, heavily mobile grazing techniques (rotating cows/buffalo/ruminants daily) which increases the grass productivity per acre, thus capuring more carbon in the grass --> soil. If anyone knows of any resources/studies comparing the carbon sequestration of grasslands, which have incredible biomass cycles over several decades, vs managed forests which do not see the same level of biomass turnover, I would love to see them.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

titojankowski 7y ago

For people really into carbon removal --- Check out AirMiners, the largest community of entrepreneurs, researchers, and funders exploring opportunities in negative emissions and carbon removal. Folks from every major carbon removal startups like Climeworks, Global Thermostat, etc. Join 320+ of us on Slack! Apply here to join: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fwe-RuPBpqWXsvyYK4/edit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fw... There's also a public meetup group in the Bay Area: https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/ https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/

titojankowski 7y ago
woohoo, 3 new applications so far!
enraged_camel 7y ago
Let's say I'm a regular web developer and know nothing about climate science, carbon removal, or any related science or technologies, but might be interested in donating my time and and skills. Do you have any recommendations?
- Rapzid 7y ago
  This is probably a really sensitive topic but.. Donating your time to help get politicians elected who are serious about doing what's necessary may be the best thing you can do.
  - titojankowski 7y ago
    Politicians are powerless without good technology options. Today, the technology options are not good. but good options are within sight. As a technologist, let's go make better tech. Climate change is a technology problem and a marketing problem. YC's carbon site does a great job marketing for these crucial technologies: http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
    - 7y ago

sremani 7y ago

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!

Nyandalized 7y ago
I'd argue that "the cloud" makes traditional computing more efficient. Since their motto is "pay for what you use", it automatically aligns with motives for the most efficient use. Not to mention that the usage of computers has reduced the need for much more power hungry methods. We can now efficiently calculate much stronger, lighter, easier to manufacture parts and building patterns. There is no need to drive/ride/walk to a place to hear the message, radio broadcasting is much more effective, even though it itself consumes power.

shepwalker 7y ago

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."

rtpg 7y ago
OTOH let’s say you spent $1M a year on a PAC. In this political environment how far would you be able to go? This feels like trying to establish some sort of technological catalyst. This also might not be enough but it’s something.
- shepwalker 7y ago
  You can't throw a wifi-enabled juicer 5 feet without hitting half a dozen companies that are trying to be 'technological catalysts'. You're giving extra credit for unproven rate of return, which I'd still argue won't amount to meaningful change unless the political status quo is aggressively challenged. The reason you spent $Xmil on a PAC is the same reason we (inclusive, hopefully) vote. Will one significantly contributor turn the tide? Probably not. But it requires good (corporate) citizens to put up or shutup instead of leveraging a tweak on a pet environmental project to gain a positive press cycle.
mikeg8 7y ago
I disagree. While there is no guarantee large scale change will be fully driven by corporate self regulation, I'd argue that corporate self regulation, and initiatives like this, have the potential to be substantially more impactful than waiting on help from dysfunctional big government. yes we need political levers to move, but I'm not holding my breath, and I welcome any and all corporate efforts.
mLuby 7y ago
>I wish tech companies that… want… large, positive changes would [accept] that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary. I agree that corporate self-regulation is the laziest political solution. But instead of doubling down on a mistake, let's get all company hands off the political levers and have real separation of corp and state. Company influence on politics is an arms race that entrenches the most powerful firms, many of which are fundamentally opposed to climate change regulation.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dkraft 7y ago

Load of crap. Based on misinformation. Just shilling to the same ignorant customer base that uses microtransactions that hide the realities of debt and interest rates.

gitgud 7y ago

So they're basically going to pay for the CO2 emissions at around 100$ per tonne (10 cents per kg), right? Well, we can calculate the C02 exhaled by a typical human, as [1] 36.84 mg = 0.03684 kg of CO2 per breath. (0.03684 kg @ 10c per kg) Therefore each breath you exhale is worth 0.003684 cents.... So how do you want to pay me @stripe? [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mass-of-the-carbon-dioxide-exhaled-in-a-breath https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mass-of-the-carbon-dioxide...

rwz 7y ago
Are you saying you’re going to stop breathing after receiving the money?

matznerd 7y ago

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 getting into the CDR field, have generally been limited in that they can only make investments into an organization if there is a way to get a financial return. They can't put money in non-profits, even to potentially help "save the world," as they are still operating with a fiduciary responsibility and for-profit motives. If no one is paying for carbon removal, there is no business. For scientists and others trying to create carbon removal solutions, this represents a major problem, as no matter how good or cheap their CDR technique is, they also have to come up with a market of who will buy their CDR "product." So even though many groups/companies want to get involved in CDR, if there is no market for paying for "CDR as a product," investors will not put money in. Having Stripe and other companies guarantee payment for carbon dioxide removal would actually make a real difference in helping to spur the CDR market. Companies would be able to point at who will buy their "product" and at what price, and then investors would be able to invest. Creating a carbon price is the most obvious and simple solution to make the "free market" solve a problem created by the inefficiency of the "free market" in the first place, of not pricing in the real world cost of the externalities from each tonne of CO2 released. The emitters should have to pay because each tonne of carbon put out into the atmosphere causes economic damage in terms of health effects and more. Some 30,000 people die prematurely in the US each year due to air pollution, yet most emitters do not pay these costs[2]. This is termed the "social cost of carbon" (SCC) and based on estimates from the U.S. governmental Interagency Working Group in 2013, each 1 metric ton of CO2 released is said to have an SCC of around $37 (2007 USD).[3] So even though there is a consensus among most scientists and economists that there should be a carbon price, and companies technically owe around $37/tonne, no one is sure when it will occur or at what price it will be at. This uncertainty and lack of a large scale market is what prevents major private investments into large scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. It is particularly frustrating because if the free market was truly rational, polluters would be paying for the externalities on their CO2 emissions, and the CDR field would blossom. By creating a market themselves and also offering to pay at a range of prices (even though there may be cheaper options available), Stripe can help foster CDR companies when they are most vulnerable, helping them breakthrough their technological learning curves and achieve scale. At the very least, just keeping companies subsidized and advancing technologically until the world corrects this economic error, is a worthy cause. Having a guaranteed CO2 removal price would allow these companies to just focus on their technology and not have to individually force the global economic system to price carbon, in order to be viable. So again, great job Stripe in starting this, and to other companies/organizations, please start similar initiatives. [1] "Interesting ideas include crushing rock with natural forces" [https://ProjectVesta.org https://ProjectVesta.org] [2] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us-deaths-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us-death... [3] https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusreport.pdf https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusrepor...

Proven 7y ago

I couldn't care less. If I were a Stripe shareholder I'd try to get the management fired or else sell the stock. The losers clearly can't focus on doing their job and should probably go to "work" for the government or a non-profit.

CAPTUREJosie 7y ago

Shameless plug here but anyone interested in helping us prototype test an app to track/gamify/offset daily carbon emissions? We are a start-up in Singapore called CAPTURE :) all about helping people become aware of the impact their daily actions can have on their carbon footprint, make it fun and add a little competition, then for what you can't reduce - we will offer in-app offsetting via CAPTURE forests, where you'll be able to track your individual trees and watch your forests grow via a monthly drone update! Would be super grateful for any feedback. Early stages but testers/those interested please sign-up at www.thecapture.club

spenrose 7y ago

Wonderful leadership. Thank you, Stripe!

papreclip 7y ago

They might make up for their electricity bill 1:1 but they'll never go neutral on the amount of carbon wealth they consume in payment for their services. Imagine I have a business where I busk for money with my guitar outside of a coal plant and a single coal minor is my patron. I may be "carbon neutral" but in fact I owe my whole existence to coal being mined and burnt. Coal is my life blood and the sole source of wealth in my life. I may as well mine the coal myself and play guitar for myself, and if you consider me and the miner to be a unit it's obvious the two of us are living on coal and the fact that he does all the work while I play guitar hardly means anything. Companies like stripe are sufficiently separated from coal and oil that they can believe they don't suck at the teat of fossil fuels, and that the only coal wealth they consume is whatever powers their light bulbs and servers. But ultimately you can track back the wealth that comes their way - all of it - to operations that generate quite a bit more emissions. We can run subsidies and credits in little isolated corners of our economy, but it's like running a refrigerator in a closed room. Ultimately you're just burning wealth which creates a greater load on the wealth-generating machine that is the fossil fuel industry. Real advances that make it possible to generate wealth without fossil fuel money in subsidies should be celebrated. These tech guys taking $1m of their $100m in profits (the coal miner pays the busker using stripe) to pay their $1m light bill is a shell game

Nyandalized 7y ago
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Are you discounting their efforts? Their motives? You're not responsible for everyone else, or if you were, they'd not need to be for themselves.

iamleppert 7y ago

What kind of margins do they have that enables them to just throw money around like this? Is the payments industry that big of a cash machine to allow this kind of spending that has nothing to do with their core business?

Nyandalized 7y ago
You would find that banking and it's related fields are indeed very profitable.

abalone 7y ago

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: free market ideologues are not ever going to be leaders on climate. 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.

dgellow 7y ago
> 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 still have the global problem. And then what, do you go to war against other countries?
- lyian 7y ago
  I don't think you need to go to war for that. The EU is aware of global warming and is taking actions to lessen their emission even tho it is still to slow. The most important part is to reduce the overwhelming consumption of the western world and then teaching and investing in the developing countries to prevent them to have the same habits we have/had.
- mononcqc 7y ago
  You do your part, other countries try to do the same, and various means and strategies are implemented and shared globally. This “but we can’t fix it all alone, it’s a global issue” thinking mode has to go. All contributions are important in reducing the speed of warming, whether your neighbour participates or not. Interestingly, the longer you wait, the more you can expect people with more extreme agendas to pop up around the globe because they will see the point in coercion to save the world. Early investment at a massive scale is worth it.

truthwhisperer 7y ago

This is indeed very bad news. You are a payment processor. Stick to your core and let the "CO2" discussion held by the government and apply the rules they issue. Don't create your own society related rules. If you don't agree create your own political movement What's next? Companies who produce a lot of "CO2" are not allowed to process payments anymore? Or should first "buy" your CO2 credits? Crazy millennial trash talk Next();

mcot2 7y ago

Why not invest in new solar power generation instead of removing co2 at this point.

JimiofEden 7y ago
Why not both? At least in terms of priority, the damage is done and is already in the atmosphere. imo, we need to first focus on cleaning that up and getting some form of homeostasis before it gets much worse, WHILE working on solar/nuclear/renewable tech to make sure we don't just relapse and make the problem worse again. I'm optimistically hoping that's the route we'd take anyways. Money tends to say otherwise tho. =(

hugoromano 7y ago

Our normal state should be doing good for the planet, and not bragging for doing the right thing. For starters, Stripe staff should fly far less, invest in remote working, or research how to make payments with the lowest carbon footprint. Cash is the baseline. I hope that there isn’t an hidden agenda of carbon credits as a business.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Should. Doesn't mean it's possible. When the market doesn't favor doing the right thing, companies trying to do it die quickly, outcompeted by those who don't care. That's one reason why this has to be a gradual process, involving carbon credits and companies bragging about doing a bit of the right thing, and hopefully having that bragging be positively received.

brazir 7y ago

I personally wish more companies worked like this. I know in about six months once i sort out the spend rate for engineering at my startup i am going to be looking at if we can give back either to environment or to open source. There is an inevitability as the old die off and the young more hyper aware we forge ahead to a less pollution intense world.

crb002 7y ago

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.