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Let's say I have a factory A that generates 1 ton of CO2. It's hugely expensive (let's say, $10000) to pull the CO2 out of atmosphere. What's done is done. But I also happen to have another factory B, which generates 2 tons of CO2, and with a smaller amount of money (let's say $100) I can make it generate only 1 ton of CO2.

So, the economically sensible thing is spend $100 to make factory B more efficient, instead of spending $10000 to undo the effect of factory A. Same thing: the nature largely doesn't care where the CO2 comes from.

Now, imagine factory B is actually owned by my friend. He doesn't want to (or can't afford to) reduce CO2 footprint on his own, but he tells me, "Hey, if you pay me $150, I will reduce my CO2 emission by one ton."

So the system can work, as long as everybody's honest (or as long as there's some system that verifies that they are honest).

What you're describing is a failure of the government (and 'the market') to price our taxes and externalities correctly.

> So, the economically sensible thing is spend $100 to make factory B more efficient, instead of spending $10000 to undo the effect of factory A

This is where my understanding breaks down. I don't think this is true at all. I think the opposite is true - it's economically sensible to remove the pollution immediately from the first factory, not to (conditionally promise to) reduce the future output of another factory.

I don't get it. The planet is heating up and each degree we go is going to cost untold trillions. Saying it is economically sensible to try to reduce future output over not making new output at all is the part I don't get. It's just not true that you can choose to pollute more now and promise that it'll be a reduction in pollution output later and come out ahead. You will come out behind on this. The climate is changing faster than we are able to clean it up.

> So the system can work, as long as everybody's honest (or as long as there's some system that verifies that they are honest).

There is no such system. And in the US, the current Republican government is dismantling all oversight that may have existed or could exist to help this.

Another example: Exxon knew about the damages their products were doing to our health, but they lied about it for 50 years.

So I stand by my points. This idea does not work, and Cloudflare is taking positive credit for "reducing their carbon output" but I think it's just a lie. It simply cannot be true.

It kind of depends on what your target is. If your target is absolutely zero emissions, you do have to turn off all the factories, regardless of cost. If you have a target with some emissions allowed, it makes sense to first reduce the emissions where the cost per unit reduced is least -- and ensure somehow that emissions don't just get moved outside of the measurement regime.

If your target is absolutely zero emissions, you also have to ban volcanos, limestone erosion, permafrost melting, cows, humans, and really all animal life on earth. There are plenty of natural processes that result in CO2 being released into the air, not least of which is breathing.

Grandparent post has a "perfect is the enemy of the good" fallacy. Banning all emissions is simply not possible. That doesn't mean that efforts to limit emissions aren't worthwhile. And that's what cap & trade programs do; the government sets a cap on carbon emissions based on the best available science for what the planet can tolerate before we get unacceptable levels of warming, and then companies can trade carbon credits amongst themselves to allocate who reduces their emissions and who pays other people to reduce their emissions.

As far as I know, cap-and-trade programs were successful in reducing SO2/NOx emissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program

> Since the 1990s, SO2 emissions have dropped 40%, and according to the Pacific Research Institute, acid rain levels have dropped 65% since 1976.

...although it seems debatable whether it is more effective than plain regulation.

> However, although it reduced emissions by 40%, the US Acid Rain Program has not reduced SO2 emissions as much as the conventional regulation applied in the European Union (EU), which reduced SO2 emissions by more than 70%. Therefore, the effectiveness of the emissions trading element as a mechanism has been criticised, ...

Would you rather spend the 10,000 to capture 1 ton of carbon or instead pay 10 factories to reduce their output 10 tons each.

We can make it a concrete example.

Build a nuclear plant first.

Alternative 1: use the nuke plant to do carbon capture from the atmosphere while next door ten coal plants run and pollute as before.

Alternative 2: produce electricity so all the ten coal plants stay off.

The latter approach has about 10x the CO2 reduction effect.

Look, here's the core of it. Suppose I fly long haul airplanes. Long haul electric planes don't exist, so I have to burn fuel. But I care about the environment, so I contract Carbon Engineering to remove an equal amount of carbon from the air. Thus my planes are carbon neutral- every pound is later removed- and it's all priced into my airline tickets.

REC's are just a bit more abstract. Emissions avoided are as good as emissions removed from the air. First rule of conservation. So instead of contracting Carbon Engineering, who is still working down their cost per ton, I pay out of my pocket to install solar panels on the roof of somebody else's factory, averting the carbon emissions their electricity demands would create. So again, in net, flying my planes produces carbon, but buying a ticket on my plane also pays for solar panels that save carbon.

Wait, sorry, it's one more level of abstraction- I didn't actually install those solar panels, I just paid a chunk of money to somebody to help them install solar panels when they couldn't otherwise- it's a pain to do things in units of "one whole solar installation", and I don't want to worry about the details like which roof to put them on.

Sure, it would be great if we could halt all carbon output today, right now. But we can't. So REC's help send more money to the renewable energy industry, bring more capacity online faster, and advance their R&D quicker than would otherwise. REC's aren't a tool for getting us to zero; they are part of getting the ball rolling in a downward direction.

I think you have based this all on false assumptions, which is why we have a communication breakdown. I still don't get it.

> Thus my planes are carbon neutral,

How though? The carbon went into the atmosphere first. Then - some time later, how long? - an equivalent amount has been removed. But that takes time and that time is lost forever, the heat has been captured and the Earth warmed, already.

> Emissions avoided are as good as emissions removed from the air.

These two things are not equivalent. Emissions avoided are fare better that emissions removed from the air. Emissions removed from the air have already produced a warming effect on the Earth, while avoided emissions have not.

> So again, in net, flying my planes produces carbon, but a ticket on my plane also pays for solar panels that save carbon.

This doesn't make any sense though. You have still made a large carbon output, and your assumption is that without your plane, the house would never convert to solar but that simply isn't true. It's a false dichotomy and I don't understand how these two things could be equal to each other (removal vs. non-output). They are physically different processes with different consequences.

> to help them install solar panels when they couldn't otherwise.

This doesn't make sense to me though.

> REC's help send more money to the renewable energy industry, bring more capacity online faster, and advance their R&D quicker than would otherwise.

That's good! But it has nothing to do with Cloudflare "reducing" their carbon footprint.

I think fundamentally, you're demanding perfection. Which is why you're talking past everyone. Here in the real world, there's a line between "today" and "zero", and it's not a delta function.

Also, how do you "not understand" that someone might not be able to install renewables without financial assistance? It's a huge capital outlay, often with marginal payoff.

Say you want to make sure a beach has the same amount of footprints in the sand after you walk over it as it did before you walked over it. You can't stop yourself from creating your own footprints, so the only option is to remove an equal amount of pre-existing footprints or to clear up immediately after yourself. Until we get hoverboards, this is the only way to prevent there being more footprints left on the beach.

> Emissions avoided are as good as emissions removed from the air.

If my household budget followed this reasoning, I could offset my Starbucks today by avoiding purchasing one tomorrow.

Every stage in the REC calculation - "solar panels they wouldn't have purchased otherwise", "emissions that would have happened without the solar panels", etc - are ripe for very profitable and fictional adjustments.

The gap between the actual cost of removing carbon from the air, and the cost of an REC, gives a hint as to the difference in how meaningful they are.

I think a REC is more like offsetting your Starbucks by paying someone else in line to skip coffee that day.

I can agree REC's could be abused. Although this part: gap between the actual cost of removing carbon from the air I think reflects the immature science of removing carbon from the air, more than anything else. Renewable energy is fifty or seventy years along its development, carbon capture is pretty young, maybe a decade?

I believe what it does is economically incentivize more people to build renewable energy plants by paying them more for each kWh they generate. If you pay to cover one ton of CO2 you are raising the price paid for renewable energy, such that more renewable plants will be built, such that some future energy need will pull from those plants instead, ultimately generating the total amount of energy the world demands but with one ton less CO2 released.

I'm far from an expert though, hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

There's a lot of "such that..." and hopeful language there. I don't see it playing out so easily as that in the real future. And it doesn't seem to me like any of this actually reduces Cloudflare's carbon footprint. Incentivizing other people to do things has no real bearing on whether or not they will do them (see Trump's dedication to bringing back coal for example) and also has nothing to do with Cloudflare's carbon footprint.

They are grandstanding with this post. I see their technology as wildly beneficial to the planet, but the attitude that they can pollute and just "offset it" is ridiculous and I think, a major problem with how we are looking at addressing these problems.

I am not well versed in the theories on this, but as I understand it things like carbon credits are designed deal with the issue of externalities.

Right now, costs of goods do not reflect reality. For example, if a company pollutes a river to save money on producing some widget, people still pay money in the form of lowered property value, future cleanup efforts, medical expenses, etc. Just not neccissarily the people who purchased the artificially cheap widget. If the company can't externalize costs because they still have to pay for polluting, the increased cost is reflected in the price of the widget and market forces will lower the demand, reducing overall pollution caused by widget production. Perhaps even invalidating some problematic business models.

That's my understanding anyway.

Well, to be a producer of credits, you need to be actively sequestering / somehow helping. So, arguably, the cost of credits will be massive at first (few people helping), and that should drive companies to spring up and plant trees, provide sequestration, ... whatever it is they do.

I don't think they ante up and go about business.

But, it really doesn't work unless everyone has to work with the carbon system, and that carbon trade system has been repeatedly shot down over and over.

But really, I have no idea if it's a good system at all, or if TFA describes that type of system.

It reminds me of the south park episode about the margaritaville mixer.

"What we do is find people who want a carbon neutral environment but can't afford one and package their investments up into one giant carbon emissions security and chop them up in a way that we can sell them to banks."

Problem solved!