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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?

Offsets are better than nothing, but they're not sustainable. Low-hanging fruit will be used up at some point, and actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere is really expensive (most optimistic figure I've seen anywhere estimates $50/ton for the mid-to-long term). So the incentive is to push for actually zero emissions instead of net zero.

And as sibling comment mentions, climate change is bad for business too, so that's the incentive for net-negative.

Is $50/ton really so expensive? At that price you could sequester average household emissions for $375/yr.

Can't help but note, flood or wildfire insurance (for people in risk areas) has climbed in cost a lot more than $375/yr.

$375/household/yr sounds downright cheap to me, if it gets us out of this hurricane/wildfire/drought/flood cycle.

I get that, but they haven't actually arrived at zero. They've arrived at their version of zero, and thus have incentive to get to actual zero, since they're already at "zero".

Maintaining "net zero" takes a lot of work/money. It's not something you can do once. Every time you put carbon into the atmosphere, you have to go buy an offset. Over time those offsets get more expensive.

Wouldn't they be cheaper as businesses invest to use less carbon over time.

Like I said, low hanging fruit goes first. Later efficiency gains will be more expensive.

If all their current customers die due to global warming their profit will be lower, regardless of who created the carbon footprint.

You can sell the negative carbon as offsets to others. Lots of products are greened up by just buying offsets instead of really doing something, so there is lots of money in it.

Buying copious amounts of offsets is probably how Google gets to claim it’s carbon neutral in the first place.

Assuming they actually reached zero, who cares? I mean I'd love google to work on carbon removal efforts for the world at whole, but, capitalism.

Well presumably customers care. Azure positions itself in some markets as the ethical choice - large parts open source, actually net zero carbon, AI ethics board and terms that rejects dicey cases, etc etc. Argue against the usefulness or real impact of these moves all you want, the point is that they show the image MS is trying to build.

But speaking a bit more broadly, you'd get a good idea from the Wikipedia page on corporate ethics. It's a whole field of study.

they haven't, that's the point, and why I had the zero in quotes.

Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity —- think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)

I actually agree wholly - I think we should pass regulation. But I don't understand why we don't regulate zero carbon and that's that. Beyond that, presumably it'd be the government's responsibility to purge remaining excess carbon from the atmosphere.

> Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity

Mostly, it does.

> think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)

Those laws are at odds with capitalism, because they limit the control of private capital owners over the application of that capital in favor of social direction or limitation by the State on others’ interest.

Now, you can support that as necessary for the good of society or oppose it as an infringement on the liberty of owners, but in either case you shouldn't mistake it for capitalism.

This is correct and shouldn't be downvoted. You can like capitalism while acknowledging its faults.

Its a very missing the forest for the trees definition.

Like how my computer is technically a regular expression because the universe is finite so it can be simulated by a large enough finite state machine.

The post is presuming that limitations can not be placed on capitalism. As it is verbally used, capitalism is compatible with regulation. For example, slavery and child prostitution are illegal in essentially every capitalist economy.

I think I am conflating capitalism and free markets.

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