Hacker News Reader

"Emissions" has become synonym for "net emissions" in non-technical discourse. I'm not sure what to think about that: on one hand it can be confusing as you said, but on the other hand, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter if someone takes a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere and then re-emits it. After all, net emissions is the interesting number for climate change.

I appreciate the original comment’s explanation- it’s helpful to understand how the marketing points can potentially obfuscate the real/technical points.

I also think your feedback is here accurate, and beyond that would take the side of ringing relevant.

If when they ‘re-emit’ they’re replacing what would otherwise be gross emission, that’s a net reduction, and a good thing.

Is good the enemy of great? Jim Collins and many corporate managers would agree yes. At a global/societal scale? I think it’s probably more debatable, at least.

I remember learning reduce>reuse>recycle and I think this falls somewhere in the middle which might make it an ethical conundrum; but unless we expect to the whiskey company to reduce whiskey production, it seems to me like we should likely applaud the effort.

It's also lack of systems thinking.

When you turn a product liability into an asset, you increase the margins of the primary product, meaning you want to produce more of your primary product.

When that growth is coming at a cost to your competitors, then this is an overall win. But if it increases the overall supply, then it gets very hard to call it a carbon reduction, in the same way that vehicle fuel efficiency and safety have also increased total miles traveled and total land converted into housing.

I don’t see how doing something like this increases the global demand for whiskey/hard liquor. Also if one distillery can do it, so can others which is also an overall win.

It doesn't necessarily change the demand, but it changes the supply curve by making it cheaper per unit to produce whiskey. Previously, you could sell whiskey, and the waste was garbage. Under this hypothetical scheme, now you could make money on the waste, too, reducing the price of production.

Would this be an example of the Jevons paradox?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I can't really tell. Certainly jevon's paradox adjacent.

Reminds me of Kingsford Charcoal.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)

You are assuming that having more supply will mean they need to immediately lower their prices. Glenfiddich is a premium brand. Have you once seen Apple lower prices on their MacBooks because they had too many in stock?

This stunt just got them a huge amount of free advertising.

I haven't thought about Glenfidfish since my Playboy days.

(I took a class on advertising in college. In one assignment, we were told to pick out the sexual imagery in magazine ads. Glenfiddish seemed to have a lot.)

It doesn't increase the demand. What it means is that if Glenfiddich needs more fuel to meet its own fuel demand, it will have to do so by creating more whiskey, even without demand for the additional whisky.

Or they could just buy fuel like everyone else. If their biogas is cheaper than fossil fuels they can buy then they’ve stumbled onto something much bigger than whiskey.

Yes, I expect the only reason it would be cheaper is because it's waste stream that they would otherwise discard. So yeah, it wouldn't make any sense for them to produce more whisky just to produce more fuel - they would want to use as much fuel derived from waste as they can and purchase any deficit or sell any surplus...

> When you turn a product liability into an asset, you increase the margins of the primary product, meaning you want to produce more of your primary product.

Which brings up an interesting question: what software product liability can be turned into an asset that increases the margins of the primary software product?

Technical debt, security gaps, defects, etc. are difficult liabilities for me to imagine turning into assets that increase the margins of the primary product. There are certainly external actors who could treat those liabilities as their assets.

Technical debt is great for a consultancy brought in to clean it up.

Security gaps are great for black hats who monetize penetrations based upon them.

Defects are great for outsourced support organizations who manage the ticket flow based upon them.

Without significant scaffolding surrounding those liabilities that far exceeds what nearly any organization I have known is willing to put up (think: US shuttle program levels of scaffolding), I cannot think of lower hurdle means to turn product liabilities into assets. In the manufacturing world, some product liabilities like in the OP's article are waste stream conversions, where the application of more technology turns low-grade embedded energy into some more useful form.

Software "waste stream" seems to demand significantly more technology than industry is willing to accept in most foreseeable futures.

No "drinking for the planet" then? Disappointing.

the average person will take this to mean this use of a sustainable, renewable fuel will reduce the carbon footprint of the distillery... I don't see the problem

it definitely is reducing greenhouse gas emissions because the source of the energy is byproducts of plantstuffs they grow anyway for the purpose of making their whiskey

Isn’t fossil-derived carbon the problem? The whole point is that fossil carbon was sequestered. How does using non sequestered carbon in place of sequestered carbon not massively reduce the rate of atmospheric CO2 increase in the long run?

The CO2 emitted is not a concern because it's carbon from the current environment. Just like it's fair to call wood-fire heating carbon-neutral (even though it's not so great from a particulate standpoint)

> Just like it's fair to call wood-fire heating carbon-neutral (even though it's not so great from a particulate standpoint).

As long as you grow these trees specifically for burning. Once you start chopping down forests without replacing them, you're still adding to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

> As long as you grow these trees specifically for burning.

I don't think anyone's chopping down ancient forests in the West anymore.

https://thenarwhal.ca/topics/fairy-creek-blockade/

It's still happening in Canada. :(

For the most part, you're right. Monoculture tree farms with straight rows of fast growing pine trees as far as the eye can see are now the norm, for better or worse.

>The CO2 emitted is not a concern because it's carbon from the current environment.

Nope, it doesn't work like that.

Source: Business very related to this exact activity.

If you grow 2021 grain (taking CO2 into the grain’s carbon), then burn part of that carbon back into CO2 in 2021, how is that not strictly better than taking millions of years old carbon and turning it loose into the atmosphere?

It's definitely better than doing nothing, but an hypothetical company doing business as usual and then buying the necessary carbons offsets from permanent carbon sequestration projects would be better for the atmosphere.

Of course, the ideal scenario would be a company that does both things (reduce + offset).

That’s not at all clear to me. Are you saying that a company which burns 1 ton of carbon from 2021 grain is worse than a company that burns 1 ton of carbon from fossil sources and buys permanent sequestration to offset 1 ton?

That’s breaking my engineer brain.

Yes. Because the net effect of the latter is zero carbon on the atmosphere.

Isn’t the net effect of the first also zero? (No net carbon was added to the atmosphere than was there on Dec 31, 2020.)

Close to zero as growing the grain was not "free" conversion from atmospheric CO2 to glucose or w/e.

There are net emissions from all the equipment and processing involved. But of course, if buying carbon offsets is a valid way to offset burning coal, it is also a valid way to offset all the truck, tractors, etc associated with liquor production. So you are correct.

In what way? Regulations that don't consider the source?

Because the CO2 goes back to the atmosphere.

Didn't the CO2 that went into the tree come from the atmosphere in the first place?

Yes, and life and ecological systems adapted around particular levels of it. Man put too much back in recent years (see [1]) so we'd like to take it off there because the vast majority of current research points to it being a bad thing for the weather dynamics of the planet.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

But if it came from the atmosphere, and goes back into the atmosphere… why isn’t it carbon net zero? Out -1, in +1, net 0. Wasted energy to harvest trees? But you also waste energy extracting fossil fuels, and offsetting carbon.

It is always net zero if you're pedantic and say the earth is a closed system plus conservation of matter.

But the whole premise (i.e. the concern) is that there's too much CO2 as an atmospheric gas and it would be better if some of it were instead somewhere else.

If you take from the atmosphere but then put it back it doesn't really help alleviate the problem.

> But the whole premise (i.e. the concern) is that there's too much CO2 as an atmospheric gas and it would be better if some of it were instead somewhere else.

Yeah, everyone gets that.

Burning wood is net zero. The point is we don't want net zero - we want net negative.

>Burning wood is net zero.

Nope, when you do that, you're moving CO2 into the atmosphere.

I get your point, "but what if you somehow made that wood explicitly to burn it", but the whole idea is to sequester carbon and keep it out, remove it. Fossil fuel's CO2 also came from the atmosphere, no sane person would suggest that burning it is net zero.

Whew, but looks like you have US' EPA on your side: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni...

Burning fossil fuels is the main issue with CO2 emissions because that it adds CO2 into the atmosphere by releasing carbon that was sequestrated underground.

On the other hand, burning renewable plant matter is pretty much neutral: The plant absorbs carbon from the atmosphere while growing and that carbon is released back into the atmosphere when the plant is essentially burned to release energy.

The main problem with biofuels is that they may compete with other crops for land, etc. But if they are produced from plant waste that was already being produced anyway then they are a pretty good option.

It's already a metonym for CO2, and I'm already not happy about that.

There's lots of other tailpipe emissions worth asking about. Isn't that how Europe wasted years trying to make clean diesel?

Not to mention tire and break emissions which are still considerable on any vehicle.

That carbon is not a green house gas so its okay :P

But seroulsly, a review found on pubmed¹ made me realise that brakes and tires emissions are an understudied public health threat. Breaks emissions accounts for 16% to 55% of the PM₁₀ emitted by an ICE car and those particles are an healthy mix of iron, copper, barium, lead, inorganic carbon (probably as soot and graphite, I would be terribly surprised if it was as diamonds and graphene) and various unlisted and unstudied organic compounds!

1- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4315878/#Sec8ti...

P.s. I tried to link directly to the conclusion but the pubmed reader sometimes show a seemingly random page... so the correct page is 40

My hybrid uses the brakes significantly less than a nonhybrid ICE. The motors do a lot of the stopping work instead of the brakes. It’s easiest to see this going downhills. My cars recharging while other cars are using brakes. Tire wear though is definitely not abated.

They've also banned certain materials from brake pads that were causing problem. Copper is a no-no in the time between when my car was built and I last talked to someone about replacements (my car didn't need it because while it's an ICE, the computer is smart enough to do engine braking much of the time).

Is tyre wear really a comparable concern?

Think about how many times you refuel your car between tyre changes. Contemplate the volume of fuel burned versus the volume of material scraped off your tyres over their lifetime. Whatever the environmental cost of tyres, they cannot compete with liquid fuel.

It’s more about PM2.5 and similar particulate pollution. But absolutely there are bigger concerns. Tire and brake pollution gets brought up as a false equivalency between ICE and EV car emissions often. Just wanted to add a factoid about how electrified vehicles really are more efficient.

It's not just how much stuff is consumed. Different materials break into different size and shape particles. Tires may wear out slower but the particles they release may cause more damage.

> but it absolutely still produces lots of CO2. It is definitely not cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 95% or 99%! The important difference is that the carbon is not from fossil sources. This is vital! But CO2 is still being emitted!

Isn't the presumption here that otherwise the CO2 would have been emitted anyway when the waste decomposed in landfill? So using it as fuel doesn't emit additional CO2 beyond the energy used processing it.

Cogeneration is generally good, but it's not perfect. It tends to include perverse incentives. As someone pointed out in a recent thread, when you sell the byproduct you have an incentive to keep producing that byproduct. No incentive to remove it, reduce the volume, or reduce consumption. "The fuel is free anyway, so who cares?"

Landfilling organic waste leads to methane forming during decomposition, which is a substantially more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

More potent but shorter lasting, by a lot. Once CO2 is in the atmosphere you are stuck with it for centuries.

Yes, but CH₄ degrades into CO₂ and water (in the presence of oxygen).

Shh. You are going to spoil HN poo pooing another renewables initiative with your science.

No they didn't... They're only correcting gameswithgo's mistake - it still agrees with what's being talked about in the article...

Of course, all that carbon comes from the crops grown to make whiskey. So it's 99% from the atmosphere on the first place, so emitting it is really "re"-emitting it.

And it the waste were just dumped, it would likely produce a lot of methane, itself a greenhouse gas...

I think most people would roughly understand “reducing carbon” as meaning “renewable” or “sustainable”, while the more technically informed will recognize it’s shorthand for “fossil-derived carbon”. Relatively few will be confused.