Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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 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.

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