There'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.
> do you count secondary services your employees use
I find this question to be a classic ridiculous slippery slope. For example: Do you count the foot print of the plane that takes employees on vacation bought using the company's salary? Or the foot print of the extra child they decided to bear thanks to the finical stability the company offers?
I feel these type of claims should not be taken literally but rather as "We made a substantial dent in our footprint".
> do you count secondary services your employees use
No, you don't. If you pull the food service thread, you can go through the food wholesalers to farmers, then to John Deere, then to steel plants, then to miners, then to hard hats and eventually you'll end up in China where the game will be declared lost.
Sorry, buts carbon offsets are utter BS. Google has a 500,000 square foot office in Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles gets 20% of its electricity from a coal plant in Utah. Power is fungible, you cannot select the source for your power if on the city's grid. Therefore, Google's electricity comes from burning coal.
Seriously, you cannot just cut a deal with the building next door and say, I'll give you a bunch of cash if you claim you're using the coal power so I can claim I am using the solar power. And then pretend to be carbon free.
Right. Just considering how Chrome uses energy on my Mac, I think they might have further to go before they are truly mitigating their own impact and reaching carbon neutral.
This 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.
They aren't displacing factories to third world countries. They're displacing dirty power with cleaner power. Obviously this won't be sustainable forever, but it's a good start.
I wonder (actually I really dont - it is clear that it doesnt) if 0 emission include also creation of silicon resin, PCBs, wiring, electricity,... And to back up parent claim - where where they produced?
I am not saying it is nothing - surely better than nothing - but it is "a tad" spitting into the sea.
The major footprint comes from heavy industry that is creating the materials so google can actually operate and if I would be sarcastic - they actually create a greater need for materials where its production produce large amount of emissions.
I would even claim, that they would do far more if they would stop showing ads. The electricity footprint on world wide scale must be enormous - not from google serving them but actually reaching destination and browsers processing them - and not all electricity is coming from "green" sources.
I can claim 0 emission for myself except from (sorry, I just had to say it :D), farting and breathing. But once I start to count in how my food was produced, how the goods I am using were produced etc. this is just not true. Anyway as a decades long vegetarian, strictly driven on public transport or bicycle (:D) I do my best here.
This is just publicity stunt from google PR and it doesn't really mean anything.
But looks like it worked. BBC cached it and is doing an article about it.
Reminder: Tesla is only profitable because it sell carbon tax credits to makes of ICE vehicles so they in turn can produce the less efficient cars which are basically just status symbols.
I'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?
> Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher.
I think the distinction you're overlooking is marginal price vs true price. It could easily be the case that reducing carbon on the margins is cheap.
Going from 100% of current levels to 99% may involve giving up some very low value activity. Especially because in most of the world the cost of carbon emissions is zero to begin with. But going from 1% to 0% could be extraordinarily costly, because it involves the highest value usage of carbon.
Another way to think about it is that carbon offsets may be very cheap, because so few people buy them. If the practice became more widespread, either because of social norms or government regulation, then the demand could easily push up the price to where it does become a significant cost.
Pricing 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.
The issue is that this price doesn't scale. Let's say that the current price of an offset is $5/ton-of-co2. Let's say that presently all offsets are being put toward replacing inefficient wood-burning stoves in third-world countries with much more efficient electric stoves, because it's the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions. Right now, only a very small amount of offsets are being purchased (relatively little carbon is being offset); however, if lots of offsets were to be purchased (lots of people trying to offset their emissions) then we would run out of wood-burning stoves to replace with electric stoves and people who sell offsets would have to finance a more expensive type of carbon-reducing project, increasing the per-ton cost of a carbon offset. As demand for offsets rise, that new more expensive project would run out as well, and we would have to move onto increasingly expensive projects and the price of offsets would continue to rise.
In other words, if the whole world were trying to offset its carbon emissions, the price per offset would rise dramatically.
being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say
I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700.
A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For this cohort, it simply doesn't matter what the math says.
Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions. For example, look at some of the projects here: https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissio...
Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or cleaner-burning cooking gases. Prices are as low as 10-15 USD per tonne of CO2.
If we ever make a serious attempt to decarbonize the entire economy, we will run out of cheap/easy options and be forced to make harder, more expensive tradeoffs.
I once thought the same as you, so I did a quick estimation calculation. This is very back-of-the-envelope, so take it with a pinch of salt.
The flight in question was a roughly 1500 km + 1500 km = 3000 km roundtrip. I remember the airline offered to make my flight CO₂-neutral for about €20 or so. ICAO's emissions calculator [1] put my total contributed CO₂ emissions at about 280 kg. An economically very very inefficient baseline for counteracting CO₂ emissions is just extracting it from the air and storing it [2]. This is hard and expensive because the concentrations are so low in the atmosphere in general (away from emissions sources), but even in that case, numbers from pilot projects come out at $94-$232/ton [3]. Taking the optimistic estimate, that would mean my emissions could be undone for as little as roughly $26. Things seem to work out in roughly the right ballpark.
Of course the airline doesn't use direct air capture for this offsetting, but I looked into it and seem to recall the money going to sane projects. Another comment points out some of the much lower-hanging targets for emissions reductions out there, and they are of course much more effective per buck spent than direct air capture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438
I 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...
For one, yeah, those offsetting companies calculate very generously. E.g. I once looked a bit into this and they make arguments like "we don't consider construction of the airport, because it's already there". The calculations for the offsets are also often calculated very generously, e.g. they often use the same mechanisms as the so-called Clean Development mechanism (which is part of the european emission trading system), which is known to overcalculate savings enormously.
The other thing is they offset things the cheapest way possible. That works as long as there are cheap ways to save carbon. It doesn't scale.
Yeah, it's like Shell was offering customers to pay one cent extra per liter of fuel to drive in a "CO2 neutral" way. If it really was that cheap to offset carbon emissions, we wouldn't have any climate problem by now, would we.
This 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.
This 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.
This 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.
Correct 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.
Offsets 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.
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.
> 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.
But 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.
"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-t...
Microsoft 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)
Meanwhile 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...
Carbon "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".
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.
I 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.
[+] [-] ohthehugemanate|5 years ago|reply
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-b...
[+] [-] air7|5 years ago|reply
I find this question to be a classic ridiculous slippery slope. For example: Do you count the foot print of the plane that takes employees on vacation bought using the company's salary? Or the foot print of the extra child they decided to bear thanks to the finical stability the company offers?
I feel these type of claims should not be taken literally but rather as "We made a substantial dent in our footprint".
[+] [-] bawolff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|5 years ago|reply
No, you don't. If you pull the food service thread, you can go through the food wholesalers to farmers, then to John Deere, then to steel plants, then to miners, then to hard hats and eventually you'll end up in China where the game will be declared lost.
[+] [-] actuator|5 years ago|reply
Isn't stuff like this kind of out of their hand unless the state itself tries to fix this.
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|5 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws
The sheer number of vendors google has makes it nearly impossible to be 100% carbon neutral.
[+] [-] irrational|5 years ago|reply
Does this include all carbon produced by all devices that have run MS OSes? All servers, computers, mobile devices, gaming platforms, etc.?
[+] [-] paul_f|5 years ago|reply
Seriously, you cannot just cut a deal with the building next door and say, I'll give you a bunch of cash if you claim you're using the coal power so I can claim I am using the solar power. And then pretend to be carbon free.
[+] [-] Viliam1234|5 years ago|reply
Technically, this is also a small contribution towards reducing the carbon footprint.
[+] [-] trolololooo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stiray|5 years ago|reply
I wonder (actually I really dont - it is clear that it doesnt) if 0 emission include also creation of silicon resin, PCBs, wiring, electricity,... And to back up parent claim - where where they produced?
I am not saying it is nothing - surely better than nothing - but it is "a tad" spitting into the sea.
The major footprint comes from heavy industry that is creating the materials so google can actually operate and if I would be sarcastic - they actually create a greater need for materials where its production produce large amount of emissions.
I would even claim, that they would do far more if they would stop showing ads. The electricity footprint on world wide scale must be enormous - not from google serving them but actually reaching destination and browsers processing them - and not all electricity is coming from "green" sources.
I can claim 0 emission for myself except from (sorry, I just had to say it :D), farting and breathing. But once I start to count in how my food was produced, how the goods I am using were produced etc. this is just not true. Anyway as a decades long vegetarian, strictly driven on public transport or bicycle (:D) I do my best here.
This is just publicity stunt from google PR and it doesn't really mean anything.
But looks like it worked. BBC cached it and is doing an article about it.
[+] [-] what_ever|5 years ago|reply
Disc: Googler.
[+] [-] danmg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namdnay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcolkitt|5 years ago|reply
I think the distinction you're overlooking is marginal price vs true price. It could easily be the case that reducing carbon on the margins is cheap.
Going from 100% of current levels to 99% may involve giving up some very low value activity. Especially because in most of the world the cost of carbon emissions is zero to begin with. But going from 1% to 0% could be extraordinarily costly, because it involves the highest value usage of carbon.
Another way to think about it is that carbon offsets may be very cheap, because so few people buy them. If the practice became more widespread, either because of social norms or government regulation, then the demand could easily push up the price to where it does become a significant cost.
[+] [-] coldpie|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/new-carbon-price-foc...
[+] [-] throwaway894345|5 years ago|reply
In other words, if the whole world were trying to offset its carbon emissions, the price per offset would rise dramatically.
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
I think this is a big part of it. Just look at carbon tax proposals. A commonly suggested initial tax is $40/ton. My family racks up about 4-6 tons of CO2 each year driving. That's $160-240/yr. By comparison, registration is ~$300 and insurance is ~$700.
A large portion of the voting public opposes virtually all regulation & taxes simply on principal. For this cohort, it simply doesn't matter what the math says.
[+] [-] ForHackernews|5 years ago|reply
Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or cleaner-burning cooking gases. Prices are as low as 10-15 USD per tonne of CO2.
If we ever make a serious attempt to decarbonize the entire economy, we will run out of cheap/easy options and be forced to make harder, more expensive tradeoffs.
[+] [-] gspr|5 years ago|reply
The flight in question was a roughly 1500 km + 1500 km = 3000 km roundtrip. I remember the airline offered to make my flight CO₂-neutral for about €20 or so. ICAO's emissions calculator [1] put my total contributed CO₂ emissions at about 280 kg. An economically very very inefficient baseline for counteracting CO₂ emissions is just extracting it from the air and storing it [2]. This is hard and expensive because the concentrations are so low in the atmosphere in general (away from emissions sources), but even in that case, numbers from pilot projects come out at $94-$232/ton [3]. Taking the optimistic estimate, that would mean my emissions could be undone for as little as roughly $26. Things seem to work out in roughly the right ballpark.
Of course the airline doesn't use direct air capture for this offsetting, but I looked into it and seem to recall the money going to sane projects. Another comment points out some of the much lower-hanging targets for emissions reductions out there, and they are of course much more effective per buck spent than direct air capture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469438
[1] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture
[3] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|5 years ago|reply
I think you can probably trace that information source back to someone who makes their money pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
[+] [-] hedgedoops2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hannob|5 years ago|reply
For one, yeah, those offsetting companies calculate very generously. E.g. I once looked a bit into this and they make arguments like "we don't consider construction of the airport, because it's already there". The calculations for the offsets are also often calculated very generously, e.g. they often use the same mechanisms as the so-called Clean Development mechanism (which is part of the european emission trading system), which is known to overcalculate savings enormously.
The other thing is they offset things the cheapest way possible. That works as long as there are cheap ways to save carbon. It doesn't scale.
[+] [-] perfunctory|5 years ago|reply
https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...
[+] [-] roenxi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] donalhunt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actuator|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hammock|5 years ago|reply
Obviously two tech companies with drastically different carbon footprints, considering Google doesn't own a global multimodal logistics fleet.
[+] [-] what_ever|5 years ago|reply
disc: Googler.
[+] [-] umanwizard|5 years ago|reply
This reminds me of Bezos’s announcement that Amazon would be making deliveries by drone by 2018.
[+] [-] matthewheath|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] perfunctory|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] hannob|5 years ago|reply
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-au...
Their whole emission calculation just ignores that factor.
[+] [-] boogies|5 years ago|reply
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-g...
2: 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-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...
[+] [-] Filligree|5 years ago|reply
I'll take those costs.
[+] [-] kzrdude|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] raffraffraff|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] larvaetron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teekert|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...
[+] [-] wazoox|5 years ago|reply
Sorry, but this is greenwashing.
[+] [-] polote|5 years ago|reply
I mean there are hundreds of google employees who take the plane everyday and therefore emit carbon, how this carbon emission is removed ?
[+] [-] Arnt|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LostTrackHowM|5 years ago|reply
I kinda feel like it's try anything time.
[+] [-] amai|5 years ago|reply
"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."