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Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an

by RobinL 3y ago

Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an impact

moralestapia 3y ago
There were a few carbon capture (CC) projects that were genuine, shoutout to the guys at AirMiners, they also have a great community and they're a pretty smart bunch of people. Downside of CC is it's still too expensive and current methods capture carbon on the order of kilograms/month where gigatons/month is needed. Sure, the tech will improve with time, and there's economies of scale, etc..., but a 10,000,000,000-fold change? Doubt it. Also, there's some fundamental physical limits that you'll hit way before you get close to that throughput. I wouldn't think of them as fraud though, as the people involved (usually) do not lie about what the current state of tech is. I'd say whatever shows reduction on carbon emissions is a legit thing; far from ideal, but the best thing we have atm.
- dskloet 3y ago
  > Downside of CC is it's still too expensive Some googling suggests that it's $200 per metric ton, is that right? That would put the cost of capturing the world's entire footprint at $7T per year. That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing. Especially given that once we decide to do it, it will get cheaper quickly.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    When I was involved in this, the real cost of capture, all things considered, was in the high thousands/ton. Climeworks, which is one of the companies trying to take this to a big scale, quotes it at 1,000EUR/ton. No one really talks about "carbon emitted while capturing carbon", though, as that would make the numbers MUCH worse. So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
  - psychlops 3y ago
    > That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.

by RobinL 3y ago

Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an impact

moralestapia 3y ago

There were a few carbon capture (CC) projects that were genuine, shoutout to the guys at AirMiners, they also have a great community and they're a pretty smart bunch of people. Downside of CC is it's still too expensive and current methods capture carbon on the order of kilograms/month where gigatons/month is needed. Sure, the tech will improve with time, and there's economies of scale, etc..., but a 10,000,000,000-fold change? Doubt it. Also, there's some fundamental physical limits that you'll hit way before you get close to that throughput. I wouldn't think of them as fraud though, as the people involved (usually) do not lie about what the current state of tech is. I'd say whatever shows reduction on carbon emissions is a legit thing; far from ideal, but the best thing we have atm.

dskloet 3y ago
> Downside of CC is it's still too expensive Some googling suggests that it's $200 per metric ton, is that right? That would put the cost of capturing the world's entire footprint at $7T per year. That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing. Especially given that once we decide to do it, it will get cheaper quickly.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  When I was involved in this, the real cost of capture, all things considered, was in the high thousands/ton. Climeworks, which is one of the companies trying to take this to a big scale, quotes it at 1,000EUR/ton. No one really talks about "carbon emitted while capturing carbon", though, as that would make the numbers MUCH worse. So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
- psychlops 3y ago
  > That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.