All Lyft Rides Are Now Carbon Neutral | Hacker News Reader

All Lyft Rides Are Now Carbon Neutral

medium.com

26 pointstony1019 comments

This is highly laudable and a great step in the right direction. Something that struck me though: what about all the time drivers are

- idling and waiting for a ride

- driving to a pick-up point

- driving to and from a high-demand area

It seems like the act of working as a Lyft driver would contribute more carbon dioxide than other jobs or contract positions.

The cool thing is, now that they are paying for the extra carbon pollution it pays to try to mitigate these types of issues. The less carbon dioxide they pollute the better it is for their bottom line

I think the GP was asking whether those emissions were being offset, or only emissions incurred during rides.

It’s a valid point, but there are also factors in the other direction- for instance, there are people who would have chosen to buy cars if ride sharing weren’t available, and this would have led to greenhouse gas emission through their manufacture, trips taken lazily by car rather than walking, and etc.

Too bad they are not available in Amsterdam. This is the kind of thing that would make me use lyft instead of something else. I wish more products would be carbon neutral or negative. I also liked stripe's move and I think slowly more companies are changing this.

How are they able to do this without it making their rides significantly less competitive against the other ride apps that are not C-neutral?

The market for ride-sharing services is over $17B [1], of which Lyft accounts for about a quarter. This is cited as a “multimillion dollar” effort- it’s likely barely a drop in the bucket. (And nice marketing, to boot.)

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/368/109/ride-sharing/united...

If Lyft accounts for 25% and they have made every/all Lyft rides carbon neutral, that would be more than a drop in the bucket. It would be 1/4th.

However I don't understand where they are getting the money to pay for the carbon offsets without raising their price point above the competition.

I thought selling indulgences stopped with the protestant reformation.

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