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.
No one is saying don't plant trees. Fuck yeah, plant all the trees! But that won't wont be enough. Sequestration will get better, but one of the big things it helps with is locality. CO2 isn't homogenously spread across the globe. It also doesn't spread very well. Concentrations vary drastically over the year and so do plants' ability to capture carbon. Carbon can build up in certain regions. Worse, it can pool where we can't grow trees [0]. Places where we can't get enough water to introduce new populations of trees (without significant carbon costs, defeating the purpose. Also the local ecosystem) Cities. The Arctic. The ocean. I'm all for planting trees (even beyond CO2, I just feel better around trees) but people need to stop making the trees vs sequestration argument. It's trees + sequestration (air and ocean) + promoting corral development + more. (This same argument applies to a lot of things, especially in climate. It's not a "this vs that" argument, it's "this PLUS that".
Nearly every day on here there's a thread about empty/meaningless work and feeling like we're not contributing anything that will matter 50 years from now - and I often participate as I feel this way quite strongly. This is the kind of work that's meaningful. This is a huge commitment to well-thought-out climate healing and using wealth for actual tangible good. Stripe already deserves a place above FAANG for their incredible work culture [1] but this goes even beyond that and would be fantastic to contribute towards. I'll be checking their careers page often, in case they get into hardware.
The big polluters, like airlines, energy, transportation, and chemical companies are the ones that will have to take these steps to see any effect. Every bit helps, of course, but the cost of implementing something like this is doable for some, while for many would mean extinction, or fundamental changes to their business model.
Short summary: There is no free lunch. Almost everything is expensive, natural systems (afforestation and land use change) are cheaper but more variable. The cheapest negative emission technology is not to emit in the first place.
I've actually been slightly interested in buying some cheap land outside of town and slowly planting trees to forest it over the next decade. The goal would be to plant enough trees to cover the carbon footprint of me and my entire family.
What I don't know is where I can find out which trees are particularly suited for carbon capture. From what I've read, fast growing trees will capture carbon quickly, but only if you harvest them, prevent rotting of the wood, and replanting a new crop.
Slow growth trees will store more carbon, but it takes a longer time for it to accomplish it.
I suppose it's like one of those "Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick two" situations. Is it better to capture a lot of carbon quickly to help the planet ASAP, or to kick-off the planting of trees that will capture carbon for the next 300 years?
Even when that's decided, how do I pick which trees aren't just suited for my area (relatively easily with native tree guides), but also well-suited for carbon capture and survival in an increasingly chaotic climate and ecosystem?
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.
* “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.
>As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets.
The sequestration is in addition to those offsets. They’re trying to advance sequestration technology by boosting demand. They’ll be offsetting and sequestering more than 100% of their emissions. The excess cost referred to sequestration, not offsets.
Government has done basically nothing for 30 years. I really, really want governments to take it seriously, tax carbon, etc. but I welcome private companies stepping in to try things too.
> 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?
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.
I'm really interested in the topic and would love to just lurk and read what people say on there for a while, but the text in the signup form makes it sound like a person like me wouldn't be accepted, since I don't have super concrete plans to make that my next profession (although I'm generally interested in exploring this field if I really started thinking that my skills would make sense there).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Sorry if I sound too negative but I think carbon offsetting is the very quintessence of what one would call green washing. There is no way around changing our life styles. If you don't want to feel bad about flying, take a train.
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?
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.)
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."
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.
>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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
If anyone from Stripe is reading this, I do hope a significant amount of support goes to Project Vesta. I have not seen a better sequestration strategy, in that olivine weathering is both a long term CO2 sink, and -also- helps deacidify the oceans. I have no affiliation with Project Vesta, I'm just very excited by it.
My question for the Vesta folk is, what is the current status of the project? There is a timeline on your website but no indication of how close any of these stages are to being a reality. What are the blockers, who can help, when will you "start shipping", as it were?
Thanks Eric. This well-captures what we hope to do. Please drop me a message at [email protected] -- I'd love to talk about how our projects can work together.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|6 years ago|reply
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
[1]: https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf (afforestation "price" starting at ~$50/ton)
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
No one is saying don't plant trees. Fuck yeah, plant all the trees! But that won't wont be enough. Sequestration will get better, but one of the big things it helps with is locality. CO2 isn't homogenously spread across the globe. It also doesn't spread very well. Concentrations vary drastically over the year and so do plants' ability to capture carbon. Carbon can build up in certain regions. Worse, it can pool where we can't grow trees [0]. Places where we can't get enough water to introduce new populations of trees (without significant carbon costs, defeating the purpose. Also the local ecosystem) Cities. The Arctic. The ocean. I'm all for planting trees (even beyond CO2, I just feel better around trees) but people need to stop making the trees vs sequestration argument. It's trees + sequestration (air and ocean) + promoting corral development + more. (This same argument applies to a lot of things, especially in climate. It's not a "this vs that" argument, it's "this PLUS that".
[0] https://youtu.be/x1SgmFa0r04
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19422833
[+] [-] Areading314|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmutel|6 years ago|reply
Short summary: There is no free lunch. Almost everything is expensive, natural systems (afforestation and land use change) are cheaper but more variable. The cheapest negative emission technology is not to emit in the first place.
[+] [-] deftnerd|6 years ago|reply
What I don't know is where I can find out which trees are particularly suited for carbon capture. From what I've read, fast growing trees will capture carbon quickly, but only if you harvest them, prevent rotting of the wood, and replanting a new crop.
Slow growth trees will store more carbon, but it takes a longer time for it to accomplish it.
I suppose it's like one of those "Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick two" situations. Is it better to capture a lot of carbon quickly to help the planet ASAP, or to kick-off the planting of trees that will capture carbon for the next 300 years?
Even when that's decided, how do I pick which trees aren't just suited for my area (relatively easily with native tree guides), but also well-suited for carbon capture and survival in an increasingly chaotic climate and ecosystem?
[+] [-] deepakb358|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surfmike|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkschubert8|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abalone|6 years ago|reply
* “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.
[+] [-] graeme|6 years ago|reply
>As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets.
The sequestration is in addition to those offsets. They’re trying to advance sequestration technology by boosting demand. They’ll be offsetting and sequestering more than 100% of their emissions. The excess cost referred to sequestration, not offsets.
Government has done basically nothing for 30 years. I really, really want governments to take it seriously, tax carbon, etc. but I welcome private companies stepping in to try things too.
[+] [-] dgellow|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] titojankowski|6 years ago|reply
Join 320+ of us on Slack!
Apply here to join: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fw...
There's also a public meetup group in the Bay Area: https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/
[+] [-] jrv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|6 years ago|reply
Do you have any recommendations?
[+] [-] titojankowski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CAPTUREJosie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeg8|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brunoTbear|6 years ago|reply
Basically I want to know how much it costs to feel ok about my flights to go skiing.
[+] [-] chrdlu|6 years ago|reply
It costs me $40 a month to offset my own carbon footprint, but I take a lot more flights than the average person.
[+] [-] esotericn|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itcrowd|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tlb|6 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] shepwalker|6 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] mikeg8|6 years ago|reply
yes we need political levers to move, but I'm not holding my breath, and I welcome any and all corporate efforts.
[+] [-] mLuby|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rtpg|6 years ago|reply
This feels like trying to establish some sort of technological catalyst. This also might not be enough but it’s something.
[+] [-] aVx1uyD5pYWW|6 years ago|reply
What is the difference between sequestration and offsets?
[+] [-] mapster|6 years ago|reply
100% public transit commute is a long term goal, so work/live distance should be as short as possible short term.
[+] [-] esotericn|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711
[+] [-] ac29|6 years ago|reply
It seems the idea has certainly been thought of: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
[+] [-] sbierwagen|6 years ago|reply
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...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
[+] [-] tlb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sremani|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] brazir|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papreclip|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
You're not responsible for everyone else, or if you were, they'd not need to be for themselves.
[+] [-] matznerd|6 years ago|reply
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]
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us-death...
[3] https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusrepor...
[+] [-] allday|6 years ago|reply
My question for the Vesta folk is, what is the current status of the project? There is a timeline on your website but no indication of how close any of these stages are to being a reality. What are the blockers, who can help, when will you "start shipping", as it were?
[+] [-] cca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truthwhisperer|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] didgeoridoo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nyandalized|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crb002|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugoromano|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|6 years ago|reply
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.