20 ms·
Google says its carbon footprint is now zero
- jurgenaut23 6y agoHow about the carbon footprint of their users while using their services?
- interrupt_ 6y agoThey don't have control over that. They can only ensure the energy required to run the services are offset.
- brainfog 6y agoThey do to some extent, albeit not really in a measurable way. They could improve the battery usage of their apps, optimize power on Android, and make their services less addictive.
- hhjj 6y agoWell if they wouldn't be constantly trying to phone home data and use more static technologies they would reduce users footprint. Although you are right they can't really prevent their users to (ab)use its services (especially if they want to preserve privacy).
- masswerk 6y agoAlso, network traffic is about 40% (estimated) of the energy consumption of IT according to the statistics I've seen.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI could bet that this is wrong. Network taking almost equal energy as CPU does not seem correct. Any sources?
- benwsapp 6y agoNetwork traffic makes sense if you consider that network traffic is active usage - and the routers, switches, infra all need power. Whereas a typical user's CPU sits idle most of the time.
- kolinko 6y agoIdle CPU still uses a ton of energy. Even a laptop in sleep mode uses ~2W, and a desktop - 6-10W. Average wifi router uses constant 6W if I'm not mistaken.
- jeffbee 6y agoYou should get your money back if your sleeping laptop uses 2W. At that rate, a MacBook Pro would drain its battery in only one day. Correctly-working laptops should draw about 100-200mW and their batteries should last for a week or more. 6-10W kinda sucks for an active desktop, much less a sleeping one. My development system while in S0 currently measures 3.04W (of course, ~30W when running hard).
- Cro_on 6y agoHow about the carbon footprint of [insert arbitrary company]'s users while using their services? It is totally nonsense and doesn't help at all. Forgiving my own displeasure at google-everything, I think I can at least appreciate that they might not be all evil all the time – perhaps they could even influence people in a positive way? Also excuse the related tangent and cherry picking, I am not condoning most of China's behaviour, but being big and bad doesn't necessarily mean that they cannot produce positive effects. [0] [0]https://www.wsj.com/ad/article/chinaenergy-powerhouse https://www.wsj.com/ad/article/chinaenergy-powerhouse
- jurgenaut23 6y agoI am not talking about Google specifically. It is true for any company, you are right, but I don't think you can claim to be have offset your carbon footprint completely until you account for the global impact of your business on this planet. To give an extreme example, how would you react if Exxon Mobil were to claim to be carbon-neutral because they offset the footprint of all their datacenters, offices, drilling facilities, and supply chain? I am sure you would call bullshit, as their whole business is about extracting carbon from the earth to put it back in the atmosphere. I just think it is unfair to claim that you have zero impact on this planet until you really offset it for real.
- jsmith99 6y agoThat would be a fair argument against, say, an oil company claiming its operations (ie distribution) are carbon neutral while ignoring the use to which people put its products. But most tech firms' products encourage users to stay at home on the couch and produce less carbon, if anything. Probably the only Google product that encourages users to produce CO2 is Maps.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoYoutube, too; e.g I could take a walk in the neigh-borough or watch a car racing video (where Google pays for the gas by sharing ad revenues).
- srtjstjsj 6y agoPeople seems to be upset because they misinterpreted an an ambiguous statement. Google should include the cost of user computers running JavaScript.
- Maximus9000 6y ago[Deleted]
- hervature 6y agoExactly. My TL;DR is: Company that doesn’t use fossil fuels claims it doesn’t use fossil fuels. More nuanced. They purchased carbon credits without providing how much carbon they claim to have produced. I highly doubt the credits they purchased will actually come close to their emissions.
- throwaway287391 6y agoPretty sure the data centers and offices are counted in the all-time carbon footprint of zero. Your second quote is talking about switching to carbon-free energy, which is different from the carbon offsets referred to by your first quote.
- mjlm 6y agoCurrently, they buy carbon offsets to be net-neutral. The goal is to buy carbon-neutral energy in the first place.
- tantalor 6y agoIt's the difference between offsets (use fossil fuels and pay for equivalent carbon capture) versus operating on carbon-free energy.
- mc32 6y ago>” its offsets so far have focused mainly on capturing natural gas where it's escaping from pig farms and landfill sites. ” Currently via offsets above; in the future via carbon-free energy. I agree. It sounds better than it actually is, but on the other hand it helps mop up others’ sloppiness.
- donalhunt 6y agoGoogle blog article: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-third-decade-climate-action-realizing-carbon-free-future/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-...
- kzrdude 6y agoI'd like to know more, if they do more than just their electricity consumption. Do they include in their carbon footprint their whole energy consumption (from heating to fuel for company cars)? Do they include other resource consumption from wares and goods, including the production of all the servers they use?
- namdnay 6y agoI'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?
- coldpie 6y agoPricing carbon emissions is tricky, obviously. A recent analysis put the cost of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 at between $34 and $124/tn[1], depending on when you start the pricing. I was surprised how low these prices are. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-focuses-on-results-you-want-not-impacts-you-dont/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-foc...
- jsmith99 6y agoAssuming only a small proportion of polluters are offsetting I would expect to pay towards the bottom end of the range. The more expensive offsets need only be considered once we approach net zero.
- Gys 6y agoI always think the carbon offset offering for flights are only for peace of mind. I still have this mental note to look into it. I suspect prices include Value added Tax (around 20% in Europe) and a margin for the airline company. So not much left for a third party. And then I wonder how that is invested as well...
- thundergolfer 6y agoI looked into it a while ago after having my chosen airline tell me it'd cost $2 to offset, which sounds suspiciously cheap, and while I can't remember the exact third-party site I went to a remember their offset calculation being at least 10x greater. I bet this is something that isn't regulated properly so we have Airlines straight up misleading customers about how much offsetting does cost.
- 6y ago
- roenxi 6y agoThis is quite impressive, but it is also somewhat meaningless. I suppose I'd draw an analogy to a cake shop boasting that it had achieved net-no industrial accidents over its existence - a great record, but also not really a particular stretch to achieve. Carbon emissions aren't about servers. They are about, in order of priority: * How do we feed people cheaply without fossil fuels (both as fertiliser & for crop transport)? * How do we extract minerals cheaply (especially aluminium) without fossil fuels? * How do we maintain the cheap logistics network that gets us stuff without fossil fuels? The first two are non-negotiable, the 3rd is quite important. If those 3 problems were solved then fossil fuels would just go away quietly. Google isn't involved in any of those things; it is part of the 'these carbon emissions are incidental' category of emissions that we can reasonably get rid of. But, again, good on them for setting clear goals and achieving them.
- taf2 6y agoNot sure it’s correct way to view the problem but in my mind if google could 1. Ensure all employees traveling to work had zero emissions 2. The production of energy to power their offices and servers produced zero emissions 3. The sourcing of materials to build and maintain the energy production produced zero emissions 4. The food required to feed the people working for them produced zero emissions I think 3 and 4 are going to be the hardest for the world to figure out 1 and 2 we have good solutions either solar/ hydro or mass transit or electric cars. But the supporting infrastructure that’s harder maybe?
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoAt Google at least there's some reasonable support for EV charging at work. The Mountain View office support for this is better than my own (Waterloo) where we have only 4 chargers for the entire office -- located indoors underground right in the office building making them competitive spaces that people use even though they don't need it. But the infrastructure in California is actually quite impressive, and they were early to the game on that. But better than making driving less CO2 intensive is to have people not drive at all.
- YetAnotherNick 6y ago
- PeterStuer 6y agoCimate acconting is much like tax accounting. You find a loophole, then magically slush all your profits through it. I don't want to be too harsh on Google as at the very least they project they care if not more. The sad reality is that once 'compensation' was on the books, this led to the worst ecological whitewashing imaginable. Right now Europe is being deforested at an unprecedented rate because the timber and coal industry managed to get their extremely polluting wood burning practices declared 'carbon neutral' and 'renewable'. Then they went all in on pro-fines for Eu countries not meeting renewable deadlines, forcing them to allow strip mining of the few forests Europe has left. In 'renewable' Excel spreadsheets all is dandy. In the real world we are looking at ecological genocide.
- the_gastropod 6y agoI have mixed feelings about this. It’s wonderful that Google is making progress on their emissions. But I wonder if their business model is at all compatible with a 0 carbon world. Their entire raison d’être is to convince people to buy things they don’t need. They even have a very targeted flight purchasing service. This type of behavior we’ve grown accustomed to—of unbridled consumerism and excess—seems like it’s gotta be dialed back if we’re to make any meaningful progress on greenhouse gas emissions as a planet.
- Cro_on 6y agoI wouldn't agree that that is their raison d’être – their, or their competitors, existence is by now as fundamental as public infrastructure.
- delegate 6y agoI'm sad that people are down voting this, we should start to be honest about it if we want to find solutions to the problem that the world faces. Through their ad business model, Google (and others like it, you know them) are enabling commerce at a scale never seen before. Remove the Internet and the world's economy would collapse.. Quick and dirty search - world GDP has grown 420% since 1970, before computers became mainstream. How much of that is due to computers, the Internet and advertising, I don't know, but I suspect these are major factors. Through their reach, these companies could have a huge impact, but they do nothing about it except use renewable energy in their data centers.. too little impact imo.
- hammock 6y agoThis story is in reaction to the Amazon TV ad campaign that just launched pledging that Amazon will be carbon-neutral by 2040 and they're "not sure how we'll get there, but we will." Obviously two tech companies with drastically different carbon footprints, considering Google doesn't own a global multimodal logistics fleet.
- umanwizard 6y ago> not sure how we'll get there, but we will. This reminds me of Bezos’s announcement that Amazon would be making deliveries by drone by 2018.
- adrianmonk 6y agoWhat I love about that announcement is that it came right during Christmas shopping season. Hey everybody, we have nothing concrete to announce, but while we have your attention, remember that Prime is a great way to buy holiday gifts for people!
- what_ever 6y agoCorrect me if I am wrong, but from the blog post, Google is claiming that they have been carbon neutral from 2007. They just took care of offsetting the emissions before 2007. The 2030 aim is to be carbon free. Not sure how it compares to Amazon. disc: Googler.
- angel_j 6y agoThis is a wealth privilege, setting an example others cannot follow unless the whole economy is changed. It does nothing to address the externalization of pollution as a norm of the free market, for which all are complicit. It's just like sending plastic to a poor country and giving them a little cash to make it their problem.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoThis is like rich countries moving factories to third-world countries where industry emits more CO2. They pretend to be responsible for less and less greenhouse gases even though they consume more physical goods, with larger carbon footprint. Worst, they feel fine flying and buying SUV because their not that dirty compared to people in undeveloped countries whose carbon footprint keeps increasing.
- what_ever 6y agoI don't get the analogy - could you explain more? Disc: Googler.
- iamgopal 6y agoGoogle's energy consumption to make goods is zero. Achieving similar zero carbon foot print is next to impossible for lower profit margin fertilizer production. ( i.e. third world countries, as a whole, are working at quite less profit margins, and because of that, have trouble achieving similar zero carbon footprint. Ultimately All the profits are moving to west.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoI rephrased my comment (hopes it help). Another mediocre analogy on the subject that you may find both relevant and funny: "I spread germs all over town today but I bought coronavirus offsets so we’re all good". via https://twitter.com/WeiZhangAtmos/status/1245890907511181312 https://twitter.com/WeiZhangAtmos/status/1245890907511181312
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoIsnt this effectively what all governments are doing? Paying people to stay home so that other people with essential roles can carry on with less chance of spreading covid?
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoNo. That would be the case only if essential workers were using their government-issued permit to go to night clubs without mask nor physical distancing, and pretend to not spread germs because others are staying at home.
- tjpnz 6y ago>"We'll do things like pairing wind and solar power sources together and increasing our use of battery storage," he said. Is Google accounting for the environmental destruction that goes into making those solar panels.
- unpolloloco 6y agoIt's right in the title...CARBON footprint is 0. That said, it's becoming more and more clear that wind/solar are less damaging than coal on a non-carbon basis as well. Nothing we do has zero impact...the goal is to minimize it. The only way to have zero impact is to wipe out the human species (and even then there will be some impact!!).
- polote 6y agoI don't understand how that can be possible. Is Google planting trees to remove carbon from the air ? I mean there are hundreds of google employees who take the plane everyday and therefore emit carbon, how this carbon emission is removed ?
- Arnt 6y agoThe former, more or less, except different. The very short version is: They calculated the total carbon emission of the company's activity to date, then paid someone to capture that amount of carbon. There are two subtle points: Google's past is finite, so there is a total amount of carbon that has been emitted. Planting trees etc. doesn't work (forever) against open-ended ongoing activities, but a specific amount of CO₂ is a different matter. It's possible to buy enough land, plant trees on it and keep ownership of the land. Of course one can discuss how to calculate a company's emissions. I find it quite laudable that they even tried.
- robjan 6y agoThey bought carbon offsets which are more focused on preventing / reducing carbon from being generated. It's basically saying "if I stop x amount of carbon from being emitted somewhere in the world, it's as good as -ve carbon on the balance sheet".
- polote 6y agoso basically company A says it built one solar panel for company B to use. Company A says it reduced its carbon emission and company B says it reduced also his. So we have reduced emission by a factor of 2 solar panels by using only one? seems smart!
- fxtentacle 6y ago... by installing fart filters for pigs. I kid you not: "The company tells me its offsets so far have focused mainly on capturing natural gas where it's escaping from pig farms and landfill sites."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- noxer 6y agoThere is no carbon-free energy just because you don't burn stuff doesn't mean no carbon is released at some point.
- qubex 6y agoDoesn’t “all-time cumulated carbon footprint” make a bit more sense?
- boogies 6y agoBut at what cost? Alphabet pressures local governments to let them drain aquifers to cool their machines¹, and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of light that literally burn alive thousands of birds: Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.². 1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-groundwater-withdrawal-sparks-question-of-who-owns/article_bed9179c-1baa-11e7-983e-03d6b33a01e7.html https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g... 2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mojave-desert-scorch-birds-in-mid-air/ https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo... "Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-1434138485 https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...
- Filligree 6y agoAs opposed to the billions of animals, and millions of people, who die every year due to air pollution and radiation from coal ash? I'll take those costs.
- gre 6y agoThere is a more expensive solution where neither birds nor humans have to die. How do we get to that instead?
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
- growlist 6y agoHere's a wild, crazy, dangerous idea for discussion: how about we start curtailing globalism, and encourage people to live less carbon intensive lives by building economies based around what's available nearby?
- Loughla 6y agoI like that idea, and it is legitimately how I am trying to live my life, but - The problem with that is - it requires people to either migrate away from areas that are not great at producing food without massive resource investment (or bringing it in from somewhere else), or to splinter basic things like hygiene and nutrition based on region. For example - for the last 5 years my family has exclusively eaten locally. Either something we can produce from seed/start locally, animals harvested at our own farm (or hunted), or other items purchased from hyper-local areas (we defined this as within a comfortable bike ride from our home). We immediately noticed that we would need vitamin supplements to make up for the lack of certain nutrients. For example - vitamin C is in short supply in the food profile in our part of the world. We didn't want to drink pine-needle tea, because it's gross, so we had to purchase supplements. What about the people who have neither the time nor energy to devote to finding local food and/or identifying nutrition gaps in their diets? If it wasn't a hobby of mine (via low-grade prepping), we never would've known until the scurvy set in, or something else. Rickets maybe. Who knows.
- opwieurposiu 6y agoWow that is really cool. How many acres/person do you need to farm for this?
- Loughla 6y agoFamily of 3, on 56 acres. The breakdown is as follows: 10 acres for pasture, 9 acres for vegetable/grain production, 30 acres of timber, 2 acres of pond, 5 acres of grass/brush/fallow ground at any one time. We could support 9-12 people on this amount of ground, if I had to guess, and if we had to. I like to have a lot of woods/timber for hunting and trapping as a hobby. The gardens produce WAY more than enough for our needs - but storage is an issue. Not everything lends itself to drying, canning, or pickling. So you learn to eat when the food is there and pack on pounds for when it's not. This time of year, I'm 5-10 pounds overweight; in March, right before spring, I'll be well under my regular weight. Not sure about the long-term effects of that. . . . We practice steady rotation of crops, and do square foot practices instead of traditional row crops. The time spent is minimal, once it's up and running. I can't even begin to imagine the thousands of hours we spent setting everything up, though. We've lived out there for almost 2 decades now, and are JUST getting to the point where it works.
- hannob 6y agoThis article misses the elephant in the room: The emissions created by the use of a companies product. Google, like all large cloud providers, has lately heavily invested in collaborations with the oil industry: https://gizmodo.com/how-google-microsoft-and-big-tech-are-automating-the-1832790799 https://gizmodo.com/how-google-microsoft-and-big-tech-are-au... Their whole emission calculation just ignores that factor.
- perfunctory 6y ago> But the claim to have "offset" all of Google's historical carbon "debt" needs scrutiny. > The company tells me its offsets so far have focused mainly on capturing natural gas where it's escaping from pig farms and landfill sites. But arguably governments should be ensuring this happens anyway. Go figure.
- jariel 6y agoThis is ridiculous propaganda. 'Carbon offsets' are rubbish unless they are literally pulling CO2 out of the air.
- nixass 6y agoThis is laugh.
- matthewheath 6y agoOffsets are helpful, but are not the solution. At best, they're a stepping stone. The only sustainable solution is reduction in usage. I'm not sure how feasible that is, or how to achieve it necessarily, but that's the only sustainable basis to proceed on.
- Loughla 6y ago>I'm not sure how feasible that is This is actually why I 100% believe we will not be able to change any amount of global warming, and if anything will make it worse as more and more countries become industrialized. The only way to reduce usage is to change our lifestyles. Less consumption, less travel, less of the 'modern conveniences' people in wealthy counties have become accustomed to. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I genuinely believe humans are incapable, en masse, of that type of sacrifice - the tragedy of the commons and whatnot. The only time something will change is when everything crashes down around us because of major disruption, famine, migration, and other life-altering events. Only then will we change, but not by choice - only because we will have exhausted all other options to keep our soft lives the same.
- abyssin 6y agoIn our situation, optimism is a moral duty. I understand the cynical attitude, because I have it at times. But I also think we can't just say there's nothing to do. I'm afraid that would strengthen the tendency of many people to downplay what's happening, and ignore the truth. Even in the face of disaster, I want to keep valuing truth, and I want to be surrounded by people who value truth.
- 08-15 6y agoThis is an outright lie. Google's carbon footprint is still positive, but their net greenhouse gas footprint is negative now, according to some particular accounting scheme which posits that 1 ton of methane is equivalent to 34 tons of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide and methane are not equal, and arguably not even equivalent, since methane's impact is short term compared to that of carbon dioxide. That's why the equivalence ratio depends on the time horizon chosen. (100 years is customary, but if Google assumed 20 years, that makes the numbers balance even more cheaply.) So if the headline said "greenhouse gas footprint", it would be technically correct, but misleading. The way it's written, it's a lie.
- actuator 6y agoThis has been very commendable from Google, since they started working towards it. Sure, there have been environmental impact from this as others have pointed out, but since they were one of the earliest movers on these things, we can expect them to run into issues which hopefully they will work towards fixing for everyone. Also, we do need to compare the impact with the impact of what it replaces to keep things in perspective. I am glad that more companies have joined them on this, since it looks like it will be very hard to convince some governments to course correct on these issues.
- ohthehugemanate 6y agoThere'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 emissions. Do you include purchased offsets against emissions, and at what rate? This is what most companies (including MS, since 2012) use to be "carbon neutral". Companies are selective about which scopes they include, and they pay for the total in offsets. The point of the blog lost is to be clear (and holier-than-thou) about MS's announced goal: to remove more carbon than they produce in all three scopes each year by 2030 ("net negative"), and to remove all the carbon Microsoft has ever produced in all three scopes from the atmosphere by 2050. Actual carbon removal, not offsets. I have not read this article so I have no idea what google is or isn't claiming here. But I learned a lot from the MS blog post so I thought I'd share. [1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...
- actuator 6y ago> emissions from their commute Isn't stuff like this kind of out of their hand unless the state itself tries to fix this.
- boogies 6y agoNo, they choose their location, and some tech companies provide transportation. Facebook is even building their own employee housing.
- ape4 6y agoLook at the Apple spaceship. It will require tons of employee driving.
- actuator 6y agoCompanies do provide credits towards cycling and FB does this for even tube in London, but that will be still limited based on location. Though you are right about the location bit, they should force the hand of the state by speaking with their foot, I guess fear of losing talent opportunity scares them. > Facebook even builds their own employee housing. I wasn't aware about this, where are they building these?
- mensetmanusman 6y agoDo they include carbon cost of the entire supply chain of their servers?
- paulcole 6y agoThis sure sounds good in a press release and there are certainly worse things to do. But Google’s environmental impact is massive. They can only “offset” so much of that impact.
- jansan 6y agoGoogle could reduce carbon emissions quite a bit by making Chrome's stupid "Software Reporter Tool" consume less CPU power on millions of computers. This almost undocumented program could easily be the most energy consuming software worldwide.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- teekert 6y agoMeanwhile 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-co2-neutral-refueling https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...
- hwillis 6y agoYou 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 https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf Planting trees simply will not work. Cumulative anthropogenic GHG emissions are >410 gigatonnes of carbon with 10 gigatonnes worth of GHG released each year. There's 550 ~gigatonnes of carbon in all living creatures, with about 450 Gt in plants, most of that terrestrial. Even if we went back to pre-human levels of forestation it would not cancel out all the CO2 we have already emitted.
- teekert 6y agoThanx you, I was hoping for this reaction. Shell's tactics feel completely wrong, and so they are. How can they get away with this?
- LostTrackHowM 6y agoI wish we would subside biochar in agriculture the same way we did ethanol. Or include it in carbon trading. Or both. And fertilise the open ocean deserts with iron while we're at it. I kinda feel like it's try anything time.
- citizenpaul 6y agoOk this is hacker news supposedly educated logical people. Surely some of you have to be able to see this is all a huge joke that detracts from actual meaningful change? They can literally buy "carbon credits" and magically they no longer pollute? There is no way you can "offset" dumping pollution in the air. Either you do it or you don't.
- jefftk 6y ago> There is no way you can "offset" dumping pollution in the air. Either you do it or you don't. At the extreme, how would you consider direct carbon capture (https://www.jefftk.com/keith2018.pdf https://www.jefftk.com/keith2018.pdf etc) from the air?
- johnhenry 6y agoKinda feels like google is an end-product of the industrial revolution. So, if we take the rest of that into account...
- amai 6y agoGoogle is now into pig farming to reduce CO2 emissions? "The company tells me its offsets so far have focused mainly on capturing natural gas where it's escaping from pig farms and landfill sites."
- wazoox 6y agoCarbon "offsets" give a nice, reassuring feeling. But what actually counts for the planet is actual, raw emissions, how much of the dirty stuff you're throwing out. "Emitting than planting some trees that will hopefully fix back the carbon in 40 years" isn't the same at all as "not emitting". Sorry, but this is greenwashing.
- m1117 6y agoEven the employees don't produce carbon by driving non-tesla cars to work
- pmlnr 6y agoGREENWASHING.
- jibolso 6y agoJust thinking out loud, but does it count if I've just bought loads of Carbon credits?
- jokoon 6y agoSo all their employees don't eat meat, don't use thermal cars? What about the concrete of their buildings? Another flagrant example of greenwashing. It's useless to pretend one entity has a low carbon footprint because carbon is systemic. For example google as a business is only viable if smartphones are getting produced. Why can't anybody understand and accept the fact that oil is an awesome source of energy? It's exactly like telling people to stop drinking sodas because it will kill them. The problem here is that sodas drinkers will give diabetes to everybody. That cannot go on.
- larvaetron 6y agoThe "graying out comments I don't like" effect on HN is getting really bad lately.
- raffraffraff 6y agoMicrosoft is the winner in this PR battle: "When it comes to carbon, neutrality is not enough," said Microsoft president Brad Smith. Fucking right. But how are you going to reverse it? It has never been done. The technology doesn't exist, except as ideas or sometimes prototypes. It doesn't scale. With greenhouse emissions you can't put the genie back into the bottle. It took a very green earth with no industry on it billions of years to lock up the carbon that we've released over the last few centuries. If all this talk of carbon offset was worth anything, atmospheric CO2 and methane would be reducing. It's not. It's still accelerating. Putting money into carbon offset programs doesn't suck your flight's CO2 out of the atmosphere, or somehow remove the methane produced by the herd of cows that produced every steak you've ever eaten. It's not any different to paying the church to absolve you of sin. One could argue that the Catholic church did some good with the money (maybe?) but the main effect of buying indulgences is that you feel better about your sins. Californians still watered their lands during droughts because they felt that they somehow earned the right: "I paid for that water" Sorry. I'm just entirely pessimistic about this. As a kid I used to think that people were so stupid back in the 1600s-1800s, for causing extinctions left and right. The unfortunate Dodo, Tasmanian Tiger, Great Auk, Passenger pigeon. The generations that inhabited earth within our living memory have done far worse. We are now seeing some of the dreaded "feedback loops" we were warned about: Methane release from melting ice, decreased summer ice coverage reducing reflected solar energy. Mass extinctions will be the new normal. We'll start to see more of those weird "hundred of thousands of birds mysteriously dead" posts. The only thing that made a dent in our emissions was covid-19. I'm starting to wonder if it wasn't part of some "benevolent" 12 Monkeys plot. (Kidding! That was humans being fucking stoooooopid too)