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384 pointsconstantinum224 comments

Quick reminder that carbon removal is a necessary but secondary step. We need to stop pumping more carbon into the air faster than we need to stop taking it out, simply because it takes more energy to get carbon out of the air than the energy that carbon was used for in the first place.

To use a financial analogy: We have a high-interest credit card. That debt has compounding interest rates, and the interest rate is accelerating because of positive feedback loops.

A "carbon removal" strategy is basically like putting X dollars on our accelerating-rate credit card in order to invest X in a fund with a lower interest rate than the card itself. Obviously this will result in spiraling debt.

The ONLY solution is to take carbon spending to ~0 and only then focus on removing it from the air.

While ideal, this isn't very realistic. Likelier is that we will slowly get off carbon intensive energy sources and production mechanisms, but fail to move off them entirely for a long period. In this period it is essential that we invest in the technology required to stablize our climate, i.e. carbon capture.

With the proper clean energy generation capacity these systems can exist in harmony. Where carbon capture buys us more time to get more people on board with cleaner mechanisms. In addition, as this page points out, sustained investment is essential to technological development. By pushing down the cost of capture we allow for new economic opportunities, which provide both incentives (carbon tax for example) and direct benefits (using that tax income for capture).

I agree it's not realistic, but it's actually more realistic than the alternative.

The key here is that every new emission today multiplies because of positive feedback. So every day that passes, the problem of scrubbing enough carbon actually becomes harder--whereas the problem of simply not putting it out there keeps the same magnitude.

Put differently, it costs "one less airplane trip" to prevent the carbon associated with 1 flight out of the air, but it costs an increasing amount of trips to get it out.

Lastly... we know how to keep carbon out of the air. It's a politically difficult problem but one with a known solution. Just stop doing things. And stop doing them by taxing them to oblivion.... whereas we don't actually know how to get carbon out of the air in a clean way with sufficient magnitude in order to prevent runaway growth. And it goes without saying that in that scenario we'd probably have to reduce emissions as well!

The argument that reducing emissions to ~0 is unrealistic is true, but it's more realistic than the alternative.

This isn't entirely true. There are many high benefit activities we should target (flights are a good one), however there are also others that are much more difficult to reduce (energy production in emerging economies for example). I think my main issue is that zero, or effectively zero, is too high a bar.

Your thinking is in-line with mine. That we should treat carbon emission as an economic problem, as in we need to get to net zero, so what is the most effective (by $$$) way to get there. My bet is that it's a mix of reduction + capture, and we should pursue the most ecost-effective mix.

I'm not super familiar on the subject, but are you sure the analogy holds?

If we build enough capacity to scrub more carbon from the atmosphere than we add each year, then the problem will taper off, no? In your analogy, we'd be moving money from the high rate card to a lower rate one, and also making more $$$ than we spend annually.

Scrubbing that carbon takes energy. Thus, if that energy is from fossil fuels, the carbon emitted can be greater than that captured. In that case, it is worse than doing nothing.

At any rate, removing carbon from the atmosphere is a vastly harder problem than reducing our emissions. Geoengineering solutions are so impractical or beyond currently practical engineering can't be realistically done on human timescales. Planting trees is going to be insignificant, especially when places like the Amazon are being destroyed far faster.

The exception is sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. That doesn't solve ocean acidification, and the effects are still somewhat unpredictable, especially regionally. That, and the temp immediately shoots up once you stop.

edit: I'm not sure people realize the difference, but there is a big difference between reducing emissions by capturing CO2 before it comes out of the stack vs. geoengineering removal of much more diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which Stripe seems to be implying. The first is a tool worth using sometimes, the second is hard enough to be impossible and would be massively energy-hungry.

Either that or people really don't like to be told there isn't a magic tech fix for climate change and ecosystem collapse.

Not all carbon sequestration requires input energy from the grid. As an example, one of the projects that Stripe is funding is https://projectvesta.org/, which distributes olivine, a volcanic rock that absorbs CO2 to become limestone when it is eroded. By moving this material to beaches, wave energy can be harnessed to remove CO2

Ah, simply crush billions of tons of olivine and move it to a beach.

Weathering olivine doesn't scale, because you need so much. It involves hitherto unprecendented amounts of quarrying and then transport. The quarrying would destroy massive amounts of habitat. After the waves do their trick, near-shore habitats would be devastated because the entire ocean floor is covered in olivine.

I am a former geophysicist by the way. While I did not work in geoengineering, I am familiar with most of the serious proposals with scientific support. Be skeptical of these groups that claim to have an easy answer. I can tell you that no one in the field thinks carbon capture from the atmosphere is realistic anytime soon. The scale is enormous. Most people have trouble understanding the difference in scale with what we actually have the capability for.

Once people realize the true impact of climate change they are going to be desperate enough to attempt anything that even shows a tiny glimmer of hope.

The only problem is that some people pretend that this glimmer is a guaranteed solution.

There is a guaranteed solution to stop it from becoming apocalyptic which is comparatively easy and cheap, and we know it would work: just move away from fossil fuels and carbon intensive production ASAP. This requires political will we don't have, and fantasies like this just distract from what is necessary and the steps we must take.

These kind of pie-in-the-sky things takes money and attention from real solutions that work. They are false hopes that make people complacent and the problem seem less urgent, thinking that we'll tech our way out without fundamental changes to how we live on this planet.

The issue is two-fold:

One, that there are positive feedback loops out there for existing carbon, but there are no positive feedback loops for carbon removal. You're never going to catch it.

Two, it takes more energy to get carbon out of the air than the energy it took to put it in there. So not only do you have to find clean energy to replace our current needs, you then have to find an integer multiple of that clean energy to get the carbon out, plus an accelerating multiple to get the postive-feedback carbon out too.

You'll never get that card down to 0 if you keep spending on it.

Sure, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's easy for me to directly contribute to carbon removal, because of things like this. It's a little more difficult for me to help pump less carbon into the air — I can try to minimize my carbon footprint, but ultimately the thing we need is investment in clean energy and legislation forcing companies to limit their emissions.

My point was that Stripe's massive resources are better spent lobbying/writing legislation/researching how to properly implement a carbon tax than this.

Why would Stripe write legislation to create a new tax? How does that help their bottom line or their customers' bottom line?

It helps about as much as this initiative does.

Presumably because the Collison brothers recognize that climate change poses an existential threat to the well being of their firm, their customers and their employees, and that because of their awesome entrepreneurial abilities their investors have granted them BDFL powers over Stripe.

Spending money lobbying for something that has no chance of passing would be incredibly stupid.

I'm glad people are taking direct action and not waiting around for some pie in the sky grand solution that simply isn't coming.

The fallacy here is that because most people intuitively understand the near-impossibility of coordinated legislative action, they assume that it must be MORE difficult than some sort of engineering solution (whose magnitude they do not intuitively understand).

They are wrong. Yes, coordinated action to reduce emissions is nearly impossible... but it's less impossible than the alternative. There's no negotiating with thermodynamics.

I don't think it's impossible. It just seems that way if your only experience with politics is neoliberal US politics over the last 40 years. At some point the dam breaks. In the US neoliberalism is at the same point Soviet communism was in the 80's. It's a complete failure and everyone knows it.

Part of our political system's fiction and ability to make no progress is deeply ingrained in lobbying and expenses that is more PR than impact. I think this is the parent post's point.

We think its a "grand pie in the sky", meanwhile some other countries are making real moves. Corporations meanwhile get to "do something" while in reality doing very little.

Yes the two are complimentary but I wouldn't make a differentiation between primary and secondary.

We need to reduce but we need to be removing at the same time. Not only so the net emissions are lower but even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is already an excess we must remove.

this isn't quite right - if you use zero carbon sources (e.g. solar) to power carbon removal the operation would be net carbon negative.

"but why wouldn't you just use that solar capacity to displace coal plants on the electricity grid??????"

there's already a rapid switch of installed electrical capacity from fossil fuels to solar/wind, but electricity typically accounts for 20% of a developed economy's emissions, so after that we need to look to decarbonise other parts of the economy.

removing carbon from the wider economy involves some low hanging fruits (e.g. better insulation in houses) followed by a succession of increasingly difficult and expensive removal processes, with a very long tail.

at the far end you have things like removing carbon emissions from long haul flights, which is extremely difficult - once it gets this hard, it's much more practical to use solar to power carbon removal.

we can't wait for emissions to go to zero before investing in carbon capture because we'd be waiting decades for battery energy density to increase by orders of magnitude before they are good enough to support long haul flights. We don't have that long

Agreed on the need to invest in carbon capture now. My main argument was that a) reducing emissions to ~0 is going to be necessary even if we invent some insanely efficient carbon sequestration tech; b) the longer we wait, the worse the problem gets, in an exponential way. Emissions reproduce; c) Therefore the bulk of our effort should be spent trying to get emissions down to 0. Because if we fail at that (a task that we know how to accomplish), then no amount of sequestration tech will save us.

Hmm, still not sure I agree. Reducing emissions to close to 0 is definitely very important but it seems probable that we'll reach a steady state where some niche sources of carbon still persist, and are accompanied by corresponding capture. Some niche sources are just unbelievably hard to decarbonise

If in 20 years 1% of our emissions remain but they are accompanied by capture (with a multiplier to account for inefficiencies in capture) then that would be ok by me.

(You'd still want the extra carbon removal to reverse the warming caused by past emissions ofc)

No, your conclusion is wrong. You don't need to put more carbon into the atmosphere to take carbon out. Nobody would fund that, well without bad subsidies anyway.

We need to reduce the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere AND increase the amount we take out. There is no reason not to pursue both strategies at the same time - indeed time is short and everything we can do counts.

Agreed. What I was trying to convey is that reducing new emissions to ~0 is a necessary win condition. It's not optional...and it's also urgent because those emissions reproduce. We're going to have to cut emissions to 0 anyway, so the sooner we do so, the better...by a LOT.

And besides being urgent, it's also something that we know how to do. As in, today. We have the technology! (It's called massive carbon taxes). Or at least we're much closer technologically than we are to any sort of clean, insanely efficient sequestration tech.

Perhaps this is obvious to you, but if you read the replies to my comment you'll see a number of replies where the tenor is "it's impossible to enact carbon taxes to reduce our emissions so let's work on sequestration instead."

> because those emissions reproduce

What does that mean?

> We have the technology! (It's called massive carbon taxes)

I agree that that's the best solution. Buy I don't see any signs it's politically possible.

I don't think we'll get to 0, nor do we need to. We do need to get our net emissions to 0 though, or even drive it negative for a while.

I'm such a fan of carbon taxes. If the market doesn't account for externalities, then price them in with taxes. Then the market will solve climate faster than any amount of regulation or wishful thinking. That's an excellent use of state power. Or governments or our people are too shortsighted or stupid I think it's fair to say in this case to see that. I'm not entirely sure which it is, maybe both.

Working on carbon sequestration instead is also silly. I mean it's a typical engineer response of ignoring the messy regulatory and political world and trying to build our way out of the problem. But we need to focus on both, working on one approach does not preclude the other.

> The ONLY solution is to take carbon spending to ~0 and only then focus on removing it from the air.

I object to the "only then". Cutting emissions is absolutely the top priority, but we're going to need to scale up carbon removal dramatically by around mid-century. By starting soon we can bring costs down and get the tech ready for when we really need it to scale.

You use the word "need" a lot, but need is relative. We need to do X in order to get Y. What's Y and what's its value? Is it greater than the cost of X? If not, then not only do we not need to do X, but we also should not do X.

We still need to fund those project, to make them able to be scaled and have ridden their learning curve when we have decarbonized our energy systems.

The only realistic solution to carbon removal is massive government investment, like most other major Silicon Valley core technologies. We need the Green New Deal. Anything less is posturing. I would even go so far as to say that on an issue of this importance, where we have maybe a decade left to turn the tide, giving the impression that private enterprise can solve it is irresponsible.

Put those donations into GND activism — it’s a political problem.

I'm an energy investor (primarily focused on renewables), and I couldn't disagree more. I could go on an on with examples of how government intervention has created busts across the renewables space for the past 20 years, and has thrown down the drain billions of tax payer money. I'd like to keep governments out of something that works without them.

It almost certainly doesnt though, and your personal experience over the last two decades or whatever probably means squat.

If the US government is/was capable of succeeding with the Manhattan and Apollo projects, there's no reason to believe that the same wouldn't be true of similar gargantuan efforts today.

I'm not saying that the US can solve AGCC by itself, but I am saying that uncoordinated efforts by loosely coupled private entities cannot.

> It almost certainly doesnt though, and your personal experience over the last two decades or whatever probably means squat.

We all know that an anecdote is not data, but being so dismissive towards someone with specific industry knowledge seems inappropriate.

FWIW, the grandparent's industry specific knowledge is in investment into developing renewable energy companies. This isn't very applicable to the article or problem at hand.

1) doesn't justify telling someone their experience means "squat"

2) since when do you have to be vetted/credentialed to participate in a discussion here?

> since when do you have to be vetted/credentialed to participate in a discussion here

Since they're using their credentials to try and lend credulity to their argument. Specifically, it's an "appeal to [their] authority" on the subject, but they don't have that requisite 'authority'.

Since when is providing some background about your experience considered a negative? You should try to be a bit more generous and not assume, on almost non-existent evidence, that someone is being disingenuous.

Private investment makes companies go bust too, that's not isolated to government intervention.

But honestly how well is this really working without governments? We're running out of time by certain metrics.

An energy investor who doesn't support the GND? What a surprise

My god this is an irresponsible comment. Where to begin? First, it fundamentally misunderstands the history of Silicon Valley tech development, which has been primarily funded by government institutions such as DARPA at its core. This is true for sustainable energy as well — it is federally funded research that is advancing solar panel efficiency, for example.[1]

Second, you have a profit motive to rewrite this narrative and position private tech investors as the key innovation enablers. This happens all the time. The reality is the VC industry cherry picks the fruit that DARPA and related agencies invest in or sustain through government procurement. It takes billions over decades of failures to produce something that can be brought to market, and it’s done at taxpayer expense. The profits are privatized.

I say it is irresponsible in this case because we are literally facing the doom of our planet. This is not time to screw around with easily disproven self-aggrandizing Liberterian narratives that would detract from the political activism we need to solve this problem. We must understand how our system really works if we hope to save ourselves.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nrel-darpa-both...

Sadly I think far too many people will not evaluate the Green New Deal on it's actual merits and instead write it off because Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others have written/supported it. The strife and division we are seeing in the US will be a significant impact to climate action. We've already seen its impact on something as simple as mask wearing becoming politicized and difficult to coordinate on.

I can only hope that those driving the division (older people) will be dead soon, so that the younger generations who are by and large more eco-friendly can get on with the difficult work that needs to be done.

Its past time for the old, rotten way of thinking to be plowed under.

I'm not entirely convinced older people are driving the division.

The average age of congressional representatives is roughly 60, and has been creeping up for 40 years. Im not sure how to not analyze that as a problem with ideological stagnation. Additionally, people from younger generations never experienced the relative boom period of the 50s and 60s so there's not as much dogmatic inertia there.

I think the split is among party lines. The closer to the political right you go the more resistance against solutions of climate change you're going to see at any age group. Trump is pretty much the poster child but not because he is old, it's simply because he is a republican.

Yeah, it's a class conflict and class/wealth is correlated with age. Bernie (who is old last I checked) being one of the biggest supporters gives the lie to this.

Aha. What is old for you and what is young?

(Younger generations eco-friendly? That must be a joke. My parents do even unplug devices at night to save energy.)

The interests opposed to actual change are the oil+coal industry most obviously, but also the rich more generally who are opposed to the redistribution which is necessary to make real climate action politically viable. (We will need to reduce certain forms of carbon-intensive production, and without wealth redistribution to compensate for that, the resulting society will be unstable.)

Unfortunately we can't wait for the coal industry or the rich to die, they reproduce themselves.

There are also people, like myself, who just don't like the negativity of it all. We want progress and not regression but are told to use less of this, do less of that, ban this, ban that. But most importantly, stop looking forward to a brighter future for humanity. We should move backwards, not forwards. Destroy what we've created and make the future worse than the present because good things are bad, like puritanism. For optimistic people, this is just painful. For hopeless aimless people, it might give them a sense of something to fight for.

Totally agree. That’s the idea the Green New Deal tries to articulate. The book “A Planet to Win”[0] describes a detailed vision of how we can come out of a transition off fossil fuels as a stronger, more prosperous society. To quote some reviews

“the tone of the book is urgent and pragmatic. It's also refreshingly optimistic and future-oriented, filled with specific ideas.... Their portrait of a planet transformed by the [Green New Deal] is designed to spark that effort."

And "its optimism is inspiring....The authors’ battle-ready tone on this score breaks with the often moralistic and soul-searching mode of some of the higher-profile climate books of the last few years."

[0]: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3107-a-planet-to-win

"Older people" is a renewable resource. I've been surprised by how much more conservative my older relatives have become as they've aged.

What an arrogant statement. When old and young disagree on a political issue, you assume the old are wrong? Why? Is there some fact they don't know? Have they not thought through all the correct chains of causation, whereas you have? Of course not. They might turn out to be right. You can't assume you're right just because all your peers agree with you and the outsider group is wrong because that's not the group you belong to.

I know a child who's afraid of climate change. Not in a political way but afraid of drowning in high sea water or her house being destroyed by the weather or something like that. Her grandmother reassured her that it's all blown out of proportion and people will manage to cope just fine. Who's right - old or young? Don't pretend you know the answer because you don't. Nobody does.

Or maybe I'm completely right and you're just making ad hominem attacks because you can't deal with the fact that there are people who rightfully fear that the basic underpinnings of life are being threatened? Can i ask how old you are? Because in my experience, age correlates strongly with a tendency to look inward towards oneself rather than outwards towards the problems in the world.

You seem threatened by pessimism. I see it as a tool.

It seems pretty unlikely that a very specific bundle of proposed legislation is the only way to address climate change. Are all other countries doomed to failure because they don't have the Green New Deal?

Not because of not having a GND, but if the US doesn't take drastic measures soon, yes all other countries are doomed.

Because the US alone is the 2nd biggest contributor to carbon emissions in the world, and probably the only country that can make China (the 1st carbon emitter) cut theirs.

I agree that it's important to take lots of action on climate change as soon as possible. That's why it seems counterproductive to tell a company they should stop taking direct action and start promoting the Green New Deal. It's too urgent of a problem to insist that only people with a particular political stance should help.

Maybe the specifics of the Green New Deal are getting lost in translation here? The package isn't just about climate change; like its namesake, the Green New Deal includes provisions about labor rights, education, healthcare, etc. Not everyone who wants to address climate change will necessarily agree with the Green New Deal proponents on those other problems. (And that glosses over a lot of disagreement even on climate change - for example, the Green New Deal doesn't include nuclear power which many people feel is essential.)

You are completely right. If individuals and companies can contribute in any way possible that's great. Personally I don't care if it's the GND or whatever, but the government needs to take climate change very very seriously.

> the Green New Deal includes provisions about labor rights, education, healthcare, etc.

Interesting. So it is the IPv6 of climate policies.

The only meaningful direct action here with a hope of saving the planet is large scale government intervention and the mass mobilization needed to bring it forth. You may have disagreements with the specifics but it is false to suggest that there is some apolitical path to turning around 200 years of an economic logic that got us here, inside of 10 years. It is also misleading to imply that what SV companies like this are doing is apolitical: they very much want to market a message that private enterprise can solve this, we don’t need too much government, Capitalism is both a cause and a savior, etc. The silence and obstructionism here on govt intervention is dangerous and telling.

For the past couple decades Silicon Valley has sort of gotten away with marketing this idea of the private entrepreneur ushering forth technological change and erased the absolutely foundational role of federal funding. Because if you recognize the role of the taxpayer then maybe people start questioning whether all the profits should be privatized. That’s an existential threat. What you’re seeing here is not apolitical — it is an attempt to offer a private enterprise answer to the GND. Because you’re right, the GND recognizes that you can’t fix climate without also fixing broader social and economic issues that got us here. You can’t just tax gas without uplifting working class people that would be devastated by it. More people will realize the role the govt plays in tech and that it’s not just Elon Musks (who actually specializes in bringing fed funded tech to market like space flight and autonomous vehicles). The GND would actually provide a lot of opportunities for private enterprise but it would undoubtably diminish some of the SV VC community mythology.

I guess I'm not sure what to tell you here. If we can't figure out a way to address climate change without dragging in all these other controversial issues, I don't think we'll be able to address it.

Climate change is a “controversial issue” so that line of reasoning is DOA.

There are similar efforts in other countries, e.g. the European Green Deal.[1] And yes, we are all doomed without massive government intervention and mass mobilization in the next few years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal

> It seems pretty unlikely that a very specific bundle of proposed legislation is the only way to address climate change. Are all other countries doomed to failure because they don't have the Green New Deal?

GND is not the only way to address it, but it definitely seems like the most politically palatable option right now inside the US. In terms of options that will have an actual impact and are also legislatively achievable, GND seems to be it. It also doesn't really "address" it so much as slow it.

Other countries HAVE already passed legislation and have taken substantive action, so they would not need to pass a GND. Though the ones that haven't passed anything would need to figure out what they can do that is palatable, yes. The US hasn't, and lately has been rolling back rules and regulations such that we're moving in the opposite direction.

Government investment is essentially a form of planned economy. There's lots of examples of that not working so well.

I'd argue that the most effective solution is a carbon tax, applied on any carbon which leaves the ground. That would create incredibly strong market conditions for energy saving technologies, and provide a big cost advantage to renewable energy.

We know that pricing effects consumer behaviour. The oil price increases of the 70s and late 2000s reduced miles driven and changed car buying behaviour.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/business/19gas.html?ref=b...

When the right conditions in the market exist, the rate of development will be so much faster than any inefficient direct investment program every will.

https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/green-tech-market/

> Government investment is essentially a form of planned economy. There's lots of examples of that not working so well.

You mean like this?

https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-va...

The politicians pushing the GND do not care about climate change.

We need a clean bill that only reduces or outright zeros net carbon output, including carbon generated from imports and exports.

It's no good if we just export pollution somewhere else.

The Green New Deal is not that bill.

It is packed with a massive pile of changes to healthcare, finance, and labor laws which are totally unrelated to addressing carbon emissions. Not to mention the call for Venezuela-style nationalization.

That's a non-starter, and rightly so.

If you can't put aside power-grabs and partisan politics to tackle climate change, then you clearly do not care about fixing climate change.

If the GND passes, the important-to-humans part (carbon) will go to the back of the political bus, and the important-to-the-oligarchs part (more power! more money!) will be put in the drivers' seat.

That’s a failed theory. This is what happens when you try to address carbon output without looking at healthcare, finance, labor laws and the impacts on the working class:

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

It failed. We have to approach this as a complex sociopolitical problem and it will likely require some broader changes to our 200 plus year old economic system.

(And did you say you think GND calls for more power to oligarchs? That’s a weird take.)

The first line of your linked Wikipedia article[1] reads:

> "The yellow vests movement or yellow jackets movement (French: Mouvement des gilets jaunes, pronounced [muvmɑ̃ de ʒilɛ ʒon]) is a populist,[64] grassroots[65] protest movement for economic justice[66]"

The goals listed for the movement, also from that article:

> Increase in the French minimum wage[37], End to austerity measures[38], Improved standard of living[38], Government transparency and accountability[38], Improved government services for rural areas[38], and Constitutional proposal for Citizens' initiative referendum, including constitutional, legislative, abrogative, and recall initiatives[39]

The words "climate change" appear once in the entire article.

Looks to me like climate change was told to sit at the back of the political bus.

[1] http://archive.today/RGUVx

You misunderstand. The protest was over environmentally-motivated taxes on fuel which didn’t take into account the impacts on the working class. It was the tax strategy that failed. This was a direct lesson for the crafting of the GND. We must also uplift and include the working class in the economic transformation we must undergo.

More detail (linked from the Wikipedia article): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/16/gilet-jaunes-y...

The history of the carbon removal companies is not good (mostly due to the large incentive to game the measures), and smells of indulgences. However, this industry is still quite young...

EDIT : Also this initiative seems to be very research-focused, rather than be just about using already known methods?

It remains to be seen if carbon removal can be done in a way that makes sense thermodynamically (i.e. it takes tremendous energy input to do, where does that energy come from, is it using carbon-emitting energy from elsewhere on the grid, etc). If at any point a carbon-emitting energy source is involved, there's no way that the system is going to be absorbing as much carbon from the air as was emitted for the same amount of energy.

If we're going to flatten the peaks of power availability with anything, it should probably be novel energy storage techniques so that the carbon that is output is not wasted, so the energy is actually used eventually for something productive.

We already have a carbon removal system that is viciously efficient and solar powered: it's called a plant.

Enhanced Rock Weathering was discussed recently[1], and that is cost effective at something like $100/ton. I don’t think there is any question about whether it’s thermodynamically possible (trees do it, as you say), it’s more whether it’s economically possible; without a carbon tax there is no real incentive for most producers to offset. (If we are relying on demand from “ethical consumers” I don’t think we are going to shift things very far.)

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/08/spreadin...

You're right that energy costs need to be accounted for when examining a potential capture method. But this is so blindingly obvious that of course the researchers are doing it. It is always accounted for when they are making their claims. As a single example see this recent article[1]:

> A simple chemical model estimated the rate of weathering for the crushed rock based on the local soil conditions. They also calculated energy requirements based on distance from likely rock sources, as well as accounting for the energy mix available to run everything. (The more fossil fuel burned to carry out the work, the less CO2 removed from the atmosphere in the final accounting.)

If it was true that any carbon capture method that uses energy will emit more carbon that it captures, then the researchers wouldn't have bothered doing the research. Yet they have, and do. Carbon capture is a very good avenue of research for mitigating climate change in the near term as we transition to new power sources.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/spreading-rock-dust-...

> If it was true that any carbon capture method that uses energy will emit more carbon that it captures

The only way this works is if it's using excess energy that wasn't produced by processes that emit carbon to start with. Run it on nuclear, solar, etc. and it can work. However, the grid is still awash with coal power! There's no way any machine is going to capture more carbon per KW consumed energy than the coal to produce that many KW emitted to start with.

So, does it makes sense to deploy this in areas with a ton of green energy available on the grid? Maybe... but those areas have lower PPM carbon in the air, so it's not the right place to run the machine anyway.

Perhaps instead of all this wasted effort and engineering time, we could just replace the damned coal plants and stop emitting carbon itself.

> the grid is still awash with coal power!

Not really, coal is quickly vanishing from the US electricity sector due to cheap natural gas and renewables. I see no reason that trend won't continue. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

> So, does it makes sense to deploy this in areas with a ton of green energy available on the grid? Maybe... but those areas have lower PPM carbon in the air, so it's not the right place to run the machine anyway.

Global carbon dioxide concentrations are not evenly distributed, but the distribution has much more to do with climate patterns than where the emissions happened. The atmosphere is fairly well-mixed. Across the whole globe, concentrations are significantly higher than pre-industrial levels. Source: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/82142/global-patter...

> Perhaps instead of all this wasted effort and engineering time, we could just replace the damned coal plants and stop emitting carbon itself.

Once the world reaches net-zero emissions, we can't celebrate and say we've stopped the problem. We just stopped it from getting worse. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, if we want to return the climate to pre-industrial, massive negative emissions will eventually be necessary. Engineering work on negative emissions will not be wasted unless we give up on that goal completly.

Not so simple as just saying "plants" and calling it a day.

Yes, plants remove carbon from the air. But plants die, and rot, and some amount of that carbon (all, at the limit) ends up right back in the atmosphere.

I happen to think that planting poplar, making it into charcoal on an industrial scale, and using the biochar as a soil amendment to mitigate topsoil depletion, is severely underutilized as a carbon capture strategy. We should be doing enormous amounts of this, instead of... basically none.

But it isn't "just plant trees". There's more to the job than that. But nothing which requires technology which was unknown to the Romans.

I posted this on another thread in these comments but another strategy here is grow trees, bury trees, grow more trees. 3% re-release of carbon back to the atmosphere per dacade stored, and all the tech to accomplish it is already developed.

Hi! Ryan from the Climate team at Stripe. Yes, the field is super young. Regardless of previous attempts, the world is very likely going to need giagatons of carbon removal, and the necessary technologies won't magically scale without the support of early purchasers. We're taking a portfolio approach and will be expanding the number of projects we support over the coming years. Regarding "indulgences", this is no substitute for emissions reduction, and we aren't purchasing traditional offsets or suggesting this as a mechanism for carbon neutrality. More details on all this in our FAQs if you're curious! https://stripe.com/docs/climate/faqs

Out of curiosity why not work with a group planting trees, or folks switching to renewable sources of energy?

Not affiliated with stripe here, but I'm guessing because tree planting can't scale up to the level of removal that's necessary and renewable energy is already pretty far down the cost learning curve. Stripe has limited capital compared to govts and large institutions and is being strategic about which projects need early investment to bring down costs.

It's addressed in the FAQ:

"Does Stripe Climate offer traditional carbon offsets? No. Traditional carbon offsets, while often inexpensive, are unlikely to scale to the size of the climate problem. Instead, we’ve chosen to focus on permanent carbon removal technologies."

Planting trees and renewable energy are some activities that carbon offsets fund.

>carbon removal . . . smells of indulgences

Do you believe a religious metaphor to be useful for understanding climate change?

Do you believe adding CO2 molecules to the air to be intrinsically sinful with the result that no amount of subsequent removal of CO2 can wash away the sin?

Well, indulgences are basically fraud and CO2 offsets that do not materialize are also fraud.

The problem isn't on the buyer side. It's that the seller is inherently going to break his promises and defraud you for a penny.

Sure, but CO2 removal can be funded otherwise than by CO2 offsets or carbon credits -- by a tax on fossil fuels, for example. It is even possible that research can be targeted at using the carbon removed from the atmosphere for fuel or for production of plastic. Burning the carbon (again) as fuel results in no net reduction in atmospheric CO2 of course, but it would probably replace fossil fuels (just as any other renewable source of energy would) and if it ever looks to become profitable, then that would tend to cause increases in the efficiency of CO2-removal tech at no expense to the taxpayer with the result that any CO2-removal efforts not funded by profit-motivated fuel production (e.g., taxpayer funded CO2 removal) become more efficient.

But my main point is that global warming is eminently amenable to technical solutions similar to how for example putting humans on the moon was eminently amenable. Not all societal concerns are so amenable, but for those that are, it seems to me very suboptimal to resort to analogies with religious concepts in public discussions of the concern.

My first comment has a score of -4 now by the way.

Funnily it works both ways as indulgences were supposed to "wash away the sin".

Also, I would have hoped that we could have managed to solve the pollution issue in a rational way, but hope is getting thin. And religion comes with the power of strong taboos that might succeed where we previously failed. Or maybe what is blocking us is how progress has been given the status of a new religion, and while we can appreciate where it got us, we also have to consider whether the costs aren't going to outweigh the benefits in the future...

Are you confusing carbon offsetting companies with carbon removal companies? They can overlap, but are not the same thing. And I think the gaming is a particular problem of carbon offsetting (and I don't think there's a lot of history with carbon removal yet, at least if we talk about carbon removal in the sense of direct air capture technology).

I had indeed first confused them but they are likely to run into similar issues (depending on the regulatory environment).

Carbon capture is necessary in the long term, for particular emissions that are hard to avoid (like specific industrial processes and parts of agriculture). But while we're still pumping out emissions that can be easily and cheaply displaced today, like coal and gas fired grid electricity, then the money being spent on carbon capture is being spent terribly ineffectively. And globally, we don't have the time or money to waste.

For example, most electricity grids are still partially carbon-intensive, despite renewable sources being cheap and available and in use. Simply buying some more solar panels and hooking them to a carbon-intensive grid will displace coal or gas emissions by the following lunchtime, far more cost-effectively than any form of carbon capture.

I understand the principle on working on research projects that have a long lead time. But Stripe should treat carbon capture as such, and could have a more cost-efficient climate strategy: put most of this money today into the most cost-efficient solutions available today, rather than putting its entire budget into the least cost-efficient solution.

> But while we're still pumping out emissions that can be easily and cheaply displaced today, like coal and gas fired grid electricity

Coal and gas fired electricity can be easily and cheaply displaced today? Then why isn't it? I was under the impression that we needed coal + gas still because it wasn't easy or cheap to meet the energy level needs of today with alternatives.

The price of wind and solar is coming down so fast that what didn't work in 2015 is perfectly feasible in 2020. My town's sustainability plan was developed in 2014, passed in 2020 and it's already obsolete. Many organizations are planning today based on data that is already out of date.

Well, it can easily be displaced at low market penetration for wind/solar. At high levels, like well over 50%, storage cost starts to be a serious issue.

We could have displaced them almost entirely in the 60s and 70s with nuclear, and we can do so today with renewables and nuclear. We haven't yet because it turns out oil and gas are pretty profitable, and climate change became a recognized issue just as the US was moving toward a more laissez-faire style of governance.

We can't currently displace oil usage for certain fuels, but we can start creating it from renewable sources using the carbon-free energy sources to power the process. Basically convert nuclear energy (via uranium or the Sun) into chemical energy.

You're right, but it's a lot harder to account for emission reduction, and offsets based on those are often illusory. For example, you might award carbon offsets for replacing a coal plant with solar, when that would have happened anyway just because the economics worked out better. If you're actually removing carbon from the atmosphere, that's not an issue.

As a matter of government policy, we definitely need to focus on reducing emissions, and a simple way to do that is with a carbon fee. But for voluntary contributions right now, it's not so clearcut.

> you might award carbon offsets for replacing a coal plant with solar, when that would have happened anyway just because the economics worked out better

It depends on which organisation verifies your offset, but the big three (Gold Standard, Verra VCS, and United Nations), all require _additionality_. That is where you have to prove that the offset financing is making the project happen, rather than market forces.

It’s not a flawless process, but in many cases offsetting is helping to accelerate the transition away from carbon intensive emitters.

> Carbon capture is necessary in the long term

When it comes to long-term technologies, they just don't become ready when you need them. We need to start investing in them today so they're ready when we need them to operate at scale.

One thing to consider is that "carbon capture" can be a good stopgap approach to long-term energy storage. For example, use the extra sunlight in the summer to run carbon capture, and then on shorter winter days burn fossil fuels.

Carbon capture methods already exist, they're just not sexy, profit-generating, or tech-based.

Example: Raise fast-growing forestry (e.g. pine), harvest it, then bury in deep pits. Repeat. The buried carbon will release just ~3% back to the atmosphere in a decade. The sequestration potential of this technique alone is significant, of the kind of scale we need to tackle the issue. All of the fields of knowledge we need to execute on it (forestry, landfill, mining) are well-developed today.

Pretending it's a problem with no existing solutions is a ploy to secure investments and diverts attention from action that could be taken today. But, of course, there's no money in that.

If anyone from Stripe is reading - is it possible yet for me to simply donate money to the portfolio you’ve assembled without running a business? We purchase monthly offsets now and I’d love to switch to funding direct carbon capture (and will happily spend more).

Hi, Nan from Stripe! Accepting direct contributions from individuals isn’t a central focus for us right now, but we intend to publish what we learn about carbon removal, which can help inform your own efforts. Some of our partners accept contributions directly: https://www.climeworks.com/subscriptions, https://projectvesta.org/crowdfunding/

Climeworks? That's not great news IMO. They recently pivoted to soliciting direct investments from the public, and their previous business model was to pipe CO2 into greenhouses to make lettuce grow faster or to sell it to soda bottling plants.

Wish I was joking. But if the tech has promise who cares right? Well...

Climeworks first demo site had (as of ~2017) the potential to remove 900 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year. Over one million of these facilities, ignoring the carbon cost to create them, would be needed to remove just 5% of annual CO2 released. It looks like, as of their last press release, they have 14 sites now, with another one planned that will remove 4000 tonnes of carbon per year. Right now on this trajectory, what they are doing is not showing promise of scaling to the extent needed.

Vesta on the other hand has more yet to shake out before we can fairly assess their potential. With trial sites now well underway, I eagerly await their findings.

Nori.com might interest you they work with carbon removal as well.

If you want to do this, try compensate.com

> compensate.com

This Finnish nonprofit has some legal problems in Finland. The authorities interpret that their promise of compensation is too vague to be seen as their customers receiving something for their payments. So the nonprofit would need a permit for asking donations, instead of selling compensation, and they hadn't applied for the permit.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11138597

Take a look at CarbonRemoved.com

We have recently added removal via Bio-oil (Charm Industrial) and Olivine.

You can choose to remove via monthly subscription or a one-time purchase.

Let me know what you think!

You should check out https://coolerfuture.com/ !

Honest question - is direct carbon capture better, than offsets or putting that money into helping folks switch to sustainable energy sources?

The two work together, it's hard to pin one or the other as 'better'. If we dropped to zero emissions overnight, we've likely already put so much carbon into the atmosphere that we need active removal measures to draw it back down quickly and reduce the consequences.

On the other hand, if we develop kick-ass capture solutions tomorrow but keep emitting at our current rate (or increased), the two will compete head-to-head and unless the capture method vastly outweighs the emissions, we're still on an increasing or (at best) steady-state situation with carbon in the atmosphere, neither of which give good outcomes.

If you made a massive advancement in either field you would perhaps be able to forego the other. But on the more probable path of gradual progress, tackling both is best.

I'm talking about all forms of carbon capture here BTW, not just direct. My personal opinion is that valid methods of re-sequestering atmospheric CO2 already exist and could be applied. However since there's money to be made in hawking tech-based solutions these are quietly sidelined in favour of new and sexy and (to the salesmen) profitable.

I don't think it's possible for this sort of individual, opt-in action to be material to the climate problem; problems at this scale can only be solved by government action. If Stripe raises $30M/year from this program, it'd be like 10000x too little to be significant to our carbon problem. (Maybe it could have some minor R&D acceleration impact for the carbon removal techniques they're looking at).

The root cause of our climate problem is the fossil fuel industry having successfully manipulated the government and public to prevent real action on climate change, for decades. The Drilled podcast is a good resource for primary source material on how oil companies systematically manufactured climate change denial.

I would prefer that Stripe allocate the funds to groups working to counter the fossil fuel industry's misinformation strategy. $30M/year would be a significant budget for that sort of work.

If Stripe raises $30M/year for this program, there will be $30M/year spent on validation and R&D that one can point to and say "look, that can be done and works".

I agree that governments should be making large grants for research in renewables and capture everywhere, and tax fossil fuels enough to make them uncompetitive. But they aren't, and part of the way you can change a government's course is by having something running you can use as an example.

It feels pessimistic to think this way but I agree. Most people don't even save for their own retirement, how can we expect voluntary action to save the climate? Poverty rates among elderly were crazy high before social security was established. Similarly, it will take government action to solve climate change.

I'm surprised to not see these investments directed towards the voluntary carbon market, in which projects such as those REDD+ certified achieve more than 10X higher efficiency, with significant co-benefits in biodiversity and support to the local communities (here's an example I give often: https://standfortrees.org/).

It looks like the projects were chosen through the biases of Silicon Valley, chosen to be futuristic and technologically impressive rather than impactful.

Carbon credits markets sometimes have a bad press due to the abuses in carbon offsetting approaches, but since the approach here is voluntary action rather than offsetting, I see no reason not to use them.

What seems more sensible to you, financing Western entrepreneurs at $100/tCO2e, or financing nature preservation, energy transition and poverty alleviation in developing countries at $10/tCO2e? Thanks Stripe, but I'll keep buying carbon credits.

There is a distinction between carbon credits and negative emissions.

I wouldn't say these projects are bias towards silicon valley style there is simply a growing acceptance that nature based solutions - whole undeniably important and essential - are simply not enough.

They are cheap but slow. Trees can be wiped out with wild-fires releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Negative emissions technologies such as bio-oil, direct air capture and storage, olivine and biochar, are developing to help support nature based solutions and remove quickly.

While expensive at the moment I believe they will become cheaper as the technologies and processes mature and the economies of scale kick in.

I don't say this to convert you - nature is a great way to help combat the climate crisis - however do not dismiss this essential step for our future.

Any studies you can cite to support your beliefs you're sharing here?

As far as nature based solutions go, this study on the potential for afforestation is a good place to start: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.14887/. Simply put, there isn't enough land to plant enough trees to get us out of this mess. That doesn't mean that planting trees isn't useful, I think the paper makes a good case for why it's cost effective and buys time, but it isn't enough alone.

My personal take is that the cheap carbon credits are indeed a more cost effective use of money right now, but it's low hanging fruit that we will run out of soon.

Note that carbon credits are not all about afforestation - if you don't believe in afforestation, fine, you can buy from projects that do energy transition or industrial efficiency (at the same cost, preventing emissions is always better than capturing CO2). So that's not really an argument against carbon credits.

I'm not saying technology has no role to play - but this specific choice of technologies by Stripe seems dubious to me, and seems to optimize for futuristic enthusiasm rather than potential impact.

I'm not against researching uncertain technology. But all of these projects are about aiming for highly-uncertain technology to solve our problems. Not a single one is about changing the way we live or relying on proven techniques. See why I'm talking about Silicon Valley bias here?

Sorry, but this feel-goodism around carbon capture doesn’t work. They paid $775/ton. Coal is $30/ton. Those are not carbon-free facilities and salaries. Capture requires energy that could be used to reduce carbon emissions demand. 2nd law of thermodynamics says you can’t win this game. The best carbon capture technology is plants and plankton. The best carbon strategy is to use less. Buying offsets feels like penitential indulgences.

The linked article specifically explains that this does not involve the traditional practice of purchasing offsets and is focused on research.

> is focused on research

So while their punchline is "Remove carbon as you grow your business", when you read the fine print, they don't even promise to remove any carbon? At least the fine print is honest.

Well let's look at these projects: https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases

{Climeworks: startup, Project Vesta: non-profit, CarbonCure: startup, Charm: startup}

Smells like an investor scheme to pump revenues. "Honest" fine print would disclose any and all financial interest in these startups by Stripe corporate officers.

My optimism for carbon capture is because it allows a politics free Arbitrage opportunity. Generating hydro electric power in Canada to capture CO2 is a real opportunity, and yes today it is far too expensive, but as more research is done technology is improved those prices will come down.

My pessimism for a political solution hinges on the fact that the leading CO2 producers in the world are unlikely to agree on drastic CO2 cuts:

China: 28% USA: 15% India: 7% Russia: 5%

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...

> They paid $775/ton. Coal is $30/ton.

That's the whole problem, the cost of coal needs to come up and that's something that's in policy makers hands. Stripe is trying to reduce that $775 by investing early in these projects.

> Capture requires energy that could be used to reduce carbon emissions demand. 2nd law of thermodynamics says you can’t win this game.

Assuming all energy comes from coal, which isn't even remotely close to true.

> The best carbon capture technology is plants and plankton.

Plants and plankton are useful for capturing carbon and storing that biomass, but that's not a long-term storage strategy. All plants die and decay, returning carbon to the carbon cycle. If we want a long term solution, we need to put carbon back into the geosphere where we got it from.

> the cost of coal needs to come up ... Stripe is trying to reduce that $775.

Non-sequitur. And no, I believe that's a marginal rate.

> Assuming all energy comes from coal

all=>any, coal=>hydrocarbons

> All plants die and decay, returning carbon to the carbon cycle.

How do you think the fossil fuels got underground in the first place?

Okay, yeah, it's complicated, but the planet has sequestered carbon from volcanic eruptions over billions of years before anyone tried pumping it down a mine shaft. Really it's mostly done by clouds, which absorb CO2 into H2CO3 and then plankton build their shells out of it, and deposit it as lime at the bottom of the ocean. Land-based carbon also washes away as acid or gets buried or turned into ash by oxygen-poor heat from fires.

Now the whole problem we're concerned about is not exactly carbon, but global warming, which is caused firstly by low albedo, and secondly by greenhouse gas absorption of surface heat remissions.

The most significant source of albedo is clouds, as is the most significant source of carbon capture. So it's really too bad that we've been waging a global war on clouds. We seed clouds for aviation, for farming, for ski resorts, tourism, whatever; we hate clouds. Everybody does it.

It seems to me that I see less of them today than decades ago, but I don't know. (Okay, I just checked, and yes, this is true)

> we need to put carbon back

Sorry, but no, no, no. _We_ do not need to do anything. _We_ are not helping. Do you have any idea how much carbon emission it takes to build a sequestration plant? We need to do less of everything. Less driving, less building, less industry, and less buying junk you don't need, even if 1% is going to some feel-good slush fund to pump up revenues for someone's misguided eco-startup investments.

ICYMI there's a public repo that has more details (and answered several of my questions in one convenient place)

https://github.com/stripe/negative-emissions-source-material...

Nice to see the transparency on this.

This is excellent and a great option for responsible users!

We should not get distracted from the reality however that to really move the needle we need universal carbon pricing.

And to stop consuming so many goods!

And to stop doubling our population every 30 years.

@orbuch can we get an API to set the percentage for each purchase programmatically? or at least vary it by country? I’d like to increase prices and the percentage for customers from countries who don’t do a good job handing climate change.

Thanks for the suggestion! You can set the percentage with just a few clicks in the Dashboard right now. We’re exploring what the right API experience might look like for Stripe Climate in future.

I like it that they are attempting at least four different schemes.

There is a lot of risk in some schemes, for instance it is easy to say you left some trees standing but it is not easy to know somebody won't cut them in five years. For instance, it will be hard to prove that the Vesta scheme works.

Putting all the money in the lowest cost strategy would be likely to fail. If you spread it out probably some will succeed and others will fail.,

What are the other 3 schemes?

Scroll down on the page, they have a list of partners at the bottom who are doing very different things, but none of them are doing the traditional "inject CO2 into a saline aquifer" solution which can be attached to biofuel combustion or fermentation.

Ah, I thought you meant schemes other than Stripe Climate.

Great initiative, though why not use those funds to also sustain forests and natural carbon capturing methods in the tropical regions? Use those funds, so that jobs can be created where forests are getting cut down for agriculture use? We could preserve our natural carbon capturing biosphere as well as invest in carbon capture technology.

There will be little incentive to preserve biosphere lands.

Agreed, this seems like a more immediately effective vector, on multiple fronts.

Let's face it: this 1% transaction fee is going to mostly go into the hands of administrators, bureaucratic types, functionaries, middlemen, and grifters who have gotten themselves into the right place at the right time to proselytize a bunch of catabolic techniques to "capture carbon" that use more energy to capture carbon than was produced by releasing that same amount of carbon. It makes virtually zero sense.

It’s always great to see things like this that remove the barrier to doing some good. Stripe has a huge user base, so it’ll be interesting to see how much impact this is able to make.

My chief problem with carbon capture as policy is that it's even less politically viable than carbon tax or any other government subsidies.

Carbon capture doesn't generate money in itself. You have to pay someone to do this, and since it's more expensive to capture CO2 than not emitting it in the first place, someone has to pay more money than, say, reducing US fossil fuel usage by 10%, to achieve the same CO2 reduction.

We can't even muster enough political willpower to shut down coal plants. Imagine going to these same people and saying "Good news, you can keep your coal plants, we will just tax you more than how much it would cost to shut them down!"

Is the state of carbon capture tech like where transistors were in 1950, or has it already reached the physical limit and the only gains to be made are through better/cheaper/cleaner energy sources to power carbon capture?

Somewhere in the middle I'd guess, I'd say more like photovoltaics about ten years ago. There's still a lot of room for improving efficiency and manufacturing cheap hardware.

Even one we reach net-zero emissions (which I agree, is proving to be an incredibly hard task politically) we still have the problem of a century of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Getting our climate back to pre-industrial is going to require carbon capture ramping up dramatically later this century.

These projects will only make sense to operate at truly large scale once we've already shut down all the coal plants. I think what stripe is trying to do here is make early investments so that when we really need it to scale, the costs are low and the tech is mature.

> Imagine going to these same people and saying "Good news, you can keep your coal plants, we will just tax you more than how much it would cost to shut them down!"

...thus incentivizing the operator to shut down the plant of their own accord. This was the desired outcome anyway, so what's the problem?

The problem is that politics is less like a parent telling the kid "Well, if you don't eat your broccoli then no dessert for you, your choice," and more like a kid telling the parent "If you don't take me to the beach this weekend I demand two beach trips next weekend!"

I.e., if policy A is already unpopular, bringing up an even less popular policy B won't help you.

Political viability differs a lot between polities. Oregon shut down its last coal plant this year. Oregonians can't vote to shut down West Virginian coal plants. Oregon can't impose carbon tariffs to nudge other states, either, since interstate commerce is the domain of federal power. But Oregon can theoretically get to net 0 emissions by deploying carbon capture in tandem with their own ongoing phaseout of fossil fuels. Carbon capture is the least bad option once a polity has cut its own internal emissions as much as practical and has tried and failed to get other polities to make similar cuts.

This is really cool! Kudos to the team there for doing this!!

Semi-shameless plug (it's for the environment!!): We're launching something similar next week here [1]. Instead pulling off revenue we're helping teams plant trees when they close an issue or merge a PR. I think the additional visibility to the team members as they work has a great feel-good vibe! We currently connect with Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab & JIRA. We also give badges to show on your repos.

Here is a video to see what it looks like [2]. If you'd like to join the beta please email at parham@cloudsynth.com!

[1] https://cloudsynth.com/social-impact/trees

[2] https://www.loom.com/share/2ad9a30d13aa4cd78ed98308b0d37283

Hey parhamn, Cloudsynth looks awesome. If you'd like to connect with a community of climate action oriented people, feel free to post about your work over at https://collective.energy (I'm the founder).

For anyone else who cares about making a positive impact on the planet, come join us as well!

This is pretty awesome! How does pricing work for this?

We're providing this service for free. Your team sets your monthly donation limit and we just handle everything else. 100% goes to #TeamTrees.

This smptomatic of the green-washing trend. Planting trees by itself is not an action that is inherently good: it is if placed where useful for instance to fight desertification, it can be dommageable in other cases such as planting non native species, or planting moni-cture forest.

As usual with this kind of initiative, there is no info on the type of trees planted, where they are and why it does matter to the local environnement. There is no way to verify impact.

My comment might be harsh, but most of the releved criticized can be easily addressed with more information.

You're absolutely right, it can be easily addressed with more information. So perhaps it would have been worth it to get that information first and level a more applicable criticism before posting valueless FUD.

https://teamtrees.org/

Sure, it's a fair question :)

The idea came to me when I saw the popular youtube campaign TeamTrees [1], and wondered how we can achieve a similar throughput on a regular basis.

We're still looking for t he best partners forward the money to. We'd love to allocate to any provider we think is going to do the most for the climate. I'm happy to forward they money to Stripe as well if they have better strategies for this.

It seems fine to forward it to the team that Mark Robber and Mr. Beast put together (assuming they have done proper due diligence given Elon & Tobi have donated 1m respectively), until we find better strategies.

[1] https://teamtrees.org/

What do you think about this option from Project Wren? It looks like the money is going to an established organization (TIST) run with an eye towards everything you said.

https://projectwren.com/projects/community-tree-planting

I just found out about Project Wren recently, turns out they are a YC company.

I want to pull the trigger on signing up for it but I want to be really sure what I'm donating towards is actually effective.

If anyone wants some evidence supporting this comment's overall idea, here's an applicable podcast episode to provide some examples of when indiscriminately planting trees might have unintended consequences:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/for-the-love-of-peat/

Is there anywhere I can credibly pay any reasonable amount of money to offset my CO2 emissions? I would be willing to pay a monthly salary for this, if the effect can be demonstrated to be sustainable and permanent.

I've been wondering how the various companies that have CO2 offset programs do it; whether it's credible or not.

One is tempted to advise, lower your carbon footprint to start with! But its hard to figure out how. Most of the public infrastructure we use to survive is beyond our control. Drive or take the bus? Which is better? Or walk, but the extra food you consume is a worse contributor to your footprint! So remain a couch potato and work from home. But illness, depression and early decrepitude cost society too, which has its impact on CO2 footprint...

Can't reduce them to zero. CO2 capture and sequestering, or the same effect through other means that don't have externalities, is required to go CO2 neutral on a personal level.

The Nature Conservancy has a carbon offset program that I use. They're credible. The money goes towards purchasing and managing land for forests and net carbon removal. It's surprisingly cheap.

They seem to have changed their site, though, and I can no longer find the page that allowed a direct carbon offset donation.

Also, here in Oregon, you can pay the electric company a small fee (for me, about $11-12 a month) to guarantee that your electricity use is 100% offset by carbon-neutral generation (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear).

Also in Oregon, you can pay the natural gas company a fee (for me, $5.50 per month) to offset your natural gas usage with "bio digesters." I'm more skeptical about their efficacy.

It depends on what you mean by offset. If you're okay with carbon stored in the biosphere by trees then there are plenty of programs. If you want to put carbon back in the geosphere (since trees eventually rot or burn) sending money to climeworks is the best thing available right now. Their DAC + geologic storage approach is expensive at around $1k/ton, but highly credible.

Not okay with planting trees; they will live on the whims of politicians and are too likely to be cut down later. It would have to be in the form of permanent reforestation, and I don't think anyone can credibly promise that.

The climeworks program looks like exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for, however, so thanks for pointing that out. My CO2 emissions are on the order of 10 tons per year, going by the average per capita number, so that would be around $10,000 per year, with no tax deduction available (my marginal tax is 40%). Also, looks like their pilot plant sequesters 50 tons per year, corresponding to the output of five people.

But it's very much the right type of idea.

Would this or any portion of this be considered a business deduction? Eg a marketing expense where you can show social responsibility for prospective customers?

Nan from Stripe's Climate team here! You might be able to deduct it as a business expense, but you’ll want to talk to your tax advisor first. We have a little more on this in our FAQ: https://stripe.com/docs/climate/faqs

I don't know much about spaceflight, but with SpaceX's rapidly reducing the cost of launching objects into orbit, would it make sense to block some small % of heat/radiation from the sun with mirrors or shades? We could use the LaGrange point or could focus on blocking light hitting the poles, to decelerate ice loss there? I wonder when that cooling would make sense financially and how it would be enacted.

Probably plausible; that's basically what happens with the particulate matter from volcanic activity just on a finer scale i think.

On the flip side if we had a big volcanic eruption do we have any way to scrub particulate matter on a large enough scale to prevent catastrophic cooling?

This is a great initiative depending on where the money goes, but fundamentally the race to solve global emission is doomed to fail.

European countries like Sweden or Iceland have low footprint because of the population lifestyle and the energy coming from abundant renewable source.

If the fund go through « iterative » innovation I don’t see how this is supposed to solve anything ? There is countless studies on those topics.

Based on what you said, there are two ways to strike the problem:

1. "population lifestyle": consumers must change their habits and companies must change their products/factries to reduce footprint

2. "energy coming from abundant renewable source": invest in renewable energy sources

Both of them need funding. Stripe is requesting funding for this. How is this not helping?

"There's countless studies on those topics." isn't anywhere an argument.

Why not direct the money to the planting of trees?

We won't fix this climate catastrophe by placing all of the eggs in one basket.

I agree.

Trees eventually rot or burn, carbon stored in the biosphere can be a useful "capacitor" for reducing atmospheric carbon, but in the long run we really need to put it back in the geosphere where we got it from.

Rotting trees (and the leaves they drop) add carbon to the ground, creating organic soil.

There are some quotes half-way down the page. One of them is from someone called Cabel Sasser. He has the title of Co-Founder, but it doesn't say of what. The company logo is just a P. Anyone have any ideas?

Cabel Sasser is a cofounder if Panic. (https://panic.com/)

Thanks. Not sure why Stripe thinks that they have a recognisable logo.

Does anyone else remember when Hacker News had a badge at the bottom of each page for "CO2Stats Green Certification"? Would've been around 2009.

I am curious to know what the business case looked like to get "climate" added as a feature to the product roadmap in a for-profit company.

Corporate green-washing initiatives like this just make our economic system look good, while doing no meaningful good. These corporations have political power, but they don't use it to solve this crisis.

Yet another way to feel like you're doing something while doing absolutely nothing, or maybe even worse.

Keep it up people!

I mean donating money to CarbFix for example is not exactly doing nothing?

Giving money is doing something.

Giving money is making yourself feel good. Whether that actually achieves anything is another question altogether.

But giving money to achieve something is difficult because you need to invest time and effort to investigate where to give and to whom.

Not every thing we do has to solve every problem immediately and entirely. Incremental progress is good.

As should be known in a community of programmers, it's misguided to blame tools from their potential abuses. Every single tool for the ecological transition can be misused for green-washing, from solar panels to electric cars to carbon taxes.

Let's welcome and improve the tools, while keeping an eye on how people use them.

Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel? Simply fund reforestation efforts. Plus many wildlife species will be saved from extinction. For example, orangutans in forests of Borneo island.

EDIT And besides, humans will survive climate change, we are 7.8 billion. But we made 1000s of species go extinct. So I say carbon capture is the wrong problem to solve.

This is exactly the sort of effort that this revenue redirection goes to.

You can see their applicants: https://github.com/stripe/negative-emissions-source-material...

Droneseed, for example, is directly applicable

> Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel?

Trees haven’t been carbon sinks for hundreds of millions of years [1].

They absorb carbon while growing, but release it in decay. Short of planting and burying gigatonnes of forest, trees aren’t going to be our way out of this.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

What about trees used as building material?

Extends the period during which some carbon is sequestered but still ultimately returns to the atmosphere - Typical wood building construction periods are in the order of 50 years expected lifespan. That's with treated woods too, which introduce issues with environmental contamination from their treatment methods. Untreated lumber construction is more in the order of 10 years useful building life and another 10 years (guesstimate) breakdown period.

> They absorb carbon while growing, but release it in decay

Can you backup this claim? I haven't been able to find anything conclusive.

This is the furthest I've gone: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9089/does-o... https://www.gardenmyths.com/forests-remove-co2/

Have there been any reputable studies on the subject? Is this the consensus?

The problem is scale. Doing a lot of carbon capture with trees doesn't mean you're growing a nice biodiverse forests, it means you're growing vast tree plantations that you periodically chop down and sequester, e.g. with biochar.

A while back I saw a paper in Nature claiming that we could use trees to absorb up to 1 gigaton carbon annually, but more than that and we'd seriously impact biodiversity. There are probably other estimates around, but regardless of the exact threshold, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have technology able to do the same thing with a thousand times less land area. Then we can let the forests grow undisturbed.

To your edit: climate change itself is making species go extinct, so it's not like we can solve the extinction problem without addressing climate change too.

I take serious moral concern with the notion that we can "spend our way out of climate disaster" as these initiatives ultimately suggest.

Furthermore, this makes individuals feel better about doing something (having agency). This is a false sense of making a difference; we need sweeping, fundamental changes to address climate change, not at the individual level, but at the state level and beyond.

> we need sweeping, fundamental changes to address climate change, not at the individual level, but at the state level and beyond.

If that isn't happening, what's your next suggestion?

Those aren't mutually exclusive though. Even in the most optimistic decarbonization scenarios we would still need to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere to avoid >2 degrees of warming.

Do you think the existence of these small efforts makes the larger efforts harder or easier? More or less likely?

My personal belief is that the larger effort looks a lot like early COVID lockdowns. We more or less did exactly what we need to do: Driving only when absolutely necessary, only purchasing exactly what was necessary, furloughing most industry, turning the lights off at the local big box stores, grocery stores only open 10-5, etc... To me, these smaller efforts feel like they distract from the more grim reality that our behavior needs to drastically change.

The term for this is "moral licensing". It is dangerous path i.e. I jogged 30 mins, I can have this Snickers bar now...

If Stripe were to go ahead and take a few pennies off of its own cut, I'd be OK with that.

Removing carbon from the atmosphere is a fight against the second law of thermodynamic. To win a fight against Entropy one needs energy, and typically a lot of.

My question is simple: where do we find enough energy to capture the carbon that was emitted during the 200 last years? Because we consume already too much energy i fear..

Uranium?

Wind, solar, tidal energy. Your question is like number zero on the list of carbon sequestration questions, obviously they have thought about that problem.

They have thought about it but not solved it. We haven’t solved our current energy needs, or anywhere even close to that with renewable, clean energy. We don’t know how to scale it so that > 50% of grid power can be from intermittent renewables.

So power large scale carbon sequestration is still an unsolved problem.

And until we're fully transitioned to carbon neutral energy, isn't that energy better spent replacing CO2 emitting energy sources?

Who do I give 1% of my profits to to replace a nearby coal plant?

The crazy thing about it, I think, is that removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than where it's readily concentrated like power and cement plants, is picking the worse amount of entropy to fight.

There isn't that much entropy on CO2 dispersal through the air. At least not when compared to the original burning of the fuel.

There is only one of those 4 projects that try to reverse the burning reaction, and it uses solar energy (gathered by algae). The others won't see this problem.

Meanwhile, this page has a pointless colourful simulation/animation going on that immediately makes my laptop’s fan speed up as it makes the CPU consume another few watts, and makes scrolling janky too.

Climate by Stripe is nonsense. We need action and mindset change, not another fee. Eventually people will be arrested by carbon offsetting fraud, fake projects and ecosystem destruction. Wait for it...

Kudos to Stripe and the team behind for this proposal. Unfortunately, it's only available for US companies. Hope they will expand it soon.

Yes, we’re starting with U.S. businesses at first and working to quickly expand to more countries. Stay tuned!

Are you working with Tomorrow ("Tmrow") [1] at all? They're doing something similar with their Bloom Climate [2] product in Europe (their product helps businesses measure their impact and offset accordingly). Also the folks who built and run https://electricitymap.org and who Google is using to schedule compute workloads around low carbon intensity electrical generation [3] [4].

Definitely understand there is a "Faux Pax" (mea culpa) element about mentioning competitors in what looks very similar to a Show HN, but there's a lot of climate work to be done so I hope y'all can connect if you haven't yet.

[1] https://www.tmrow.com/

[2] https://bloomclimate.com

[3] https://www.tmrow.com/blog/announcing-our-partnership-with-g...

[4] https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center...

Disclosure: No relation except as a volunteer contributor.

I can't believe how easily people have been persuaded that anthropogenic factors play any significant role.

While things like this are valuable, it still places the onus on consumers to change their behavior to combat climate change. Not until large polluters are charged for their carbon production, or are compelled to contribute to carbon removal will this have a net benefit. This is conscience-friendly capitalism at best.

this is such a gimmick.

the earth can heal itself if we stop polluting it. removal isn't the answer we have to stop producing it.

> the earth can heal itself if we stop polluting it

Nope, we're currently moving gigatons of carbon from the geosphere to the atmosphere and a significant amount of that carbon will remain for tens of thousands of years. If we miraculously stop emitting tomorrow, we wont have fixed the problem, we would just stop it from getting worse. Source: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2010/12/common-climate-mi...

If we want to return the climate to pre-industrial, we need aggressive emissions cuts to net zero AND massive carbon removal later this century.

"In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence (Latin: indulgentia, from indulgeō, 'permit') is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins".[1] The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and all of the saints".[2]"

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

Unlike sin, CO2 is fungible; if you put it in here and take it out there, the net really is zero.

If sin were a global problem where the total amount of sin in the world caused suffering, and indulgences actually reduced the total amount of sin in the world, the system of indulgences would make perfect sense.

This is legitimately strange. Between this and their magazine, what does this have to do with payment processing?

It's a company, companies are allowed to do something besides their core focus.

What’s strange about it? I’d not be surprised if some sizable fraction of Stripe customers wanted to help reduce the effects of climate change.

I would say it's more a corporate (arguably moral) obligation to help transition to a more sustainable society in balance with the natural world.

WOAH - That logo looks 100% identical to scotch.io. Even the animation... Not suggesting anything but wow what the odds.

Great program. Not enough organizations / people prioritizing climate and always great to see efforts by a business.

Also, FWIW “Carbon Capture” is a weird space and a bunch of young crazy tech worth looking into for engineer minded folks (direct air capture for example).

Lot of love, hate, skepticism from people, industry, scientist, activist, NGO, legislators but regardless offsets markets (even a global one) or cutting back is definitely not enough we need to do.

For the downvotes:

https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-the-new-scotchio-animat...

Call it what it is an attempt to pull at the heart strings of customers by associating with the cause of the year. (Similar to companies putting 'fight cancer' ribbons on their products).

What I want is a company to focus on giving me a good experience and helping me when there is a problem that's what matters to me. Not 'we are part of the solutions to societies ills' theater.

Stripe, what’s wrong with you? Climate, are you serious? If your developers have some free time - please fix UI bugs in dashboard.

What the hell? They are trying to do something good, and that is your response?

AND THEY ARE ONE OF THE BEST DESIGNERS IN THE WORLD

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