Stripe is kick-starting market for carbon removal
wsj.com
wsj.com
Carbon removal is not a substitute for reducing emissions. However even if we stop emitting tomorrow there is still an excess of emissions in the atmosphere that must be addressed. Nature can do it in theory but it would take millenia and there is a chance that we - as humanity - have tipped the scales too far.
Carbon removal is expensive and inefficient - for now. This is how technology starts and will come down an innovation and cost curve with enough demand and investment. Do not try and extrapolate the cost and efficiency now to the total removals - there will be constant innovation and new methods that we haven't discovered yet.
There is no silver bullet. Trees, DACS, bio-oil and whatever else - nothing can do this on its own and we need to support as many of these as possible to work together.
If you want to do something may I suggest looking at how you can reduce your footprint and - if you can afford it - look at removing your carbon footprint instead of merely offsetting it with cheap carbon credits. Set yourself a realistic price per ton and check out https://carbonremoved.com (disclaimer - my project that I made to remove my own footprint) to remove it.
We also need system change so talk to people, educate them (and yourself) and vote for politicians who support a green agenda rather than those who block it.
Normally, governments would invest those few millions. But government spending seems to have become almost completely broken recently and isn't generating that kind of result anymore.
As well this direct air capture is slightly better than CCS (read: pretty bad) but is also a red herring in terms of climate solutions that will provide a lot of value. I say this because large amounts of money will get diverted into this kind of investment that hasn't proved to be particularly successful but has an easy to understand narrative.
Can you elaborate on this assertion?
That and there are way too many people who are now building carbon accounting software and the benefits that will accrue to it (similar to greenwashing). If only we could get some people to work in areas where there was real world impact instead of LP returns :)
1. A government, any government, puts aside about €500 million.
2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent enough plan and a convincing group of people to execute it gets €250k. Total budget for this phase is €50 million, so this funds 200 ideas.
3. If ANY measurable progress has been made once the money runs out, your group gets another €500k. Expect 50% of the companies of step 2 to fail. Total budget for this phase is again €50 million, for (now) 100 ideas.
4. If the money from 2. or 3. turns out to be spent maliciously, the government will haunt you to get you to pay it back (there are existing protocols in place to deal with this).
5. If the money from 3. runs out, there is a go/no-go decision. In case of "go", you get €2 to €5 million to really have a go at it and build the real thing. In case of "no go", it stops here. You are obviously free to take your idea and try to find other investors for it. Weeds out (say) 50%, so now left at 50 ideas - total budget about €175 million.
6. For the companies that get the "go" in step 5, observe their performance. If it's promising, give them another €10 million. Again you probably only fund 50%, so that's 25 ideas for about €250 million.
7. Profit.
Tada, a working process that probably gets your country a fairly large number of actually competitive companies that can end up employing thousands of people and at the same time help save the planet.
Germany could run a competition like this for €6 per person. The EU could fund it for €1 per person. Heck, even the city of New York could fund it for the low, low, price of €20 per person. This is eminently doable.
This is basically ARPA-E: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/faqs/general-questions. I've written a bunch of these, and they're more straightforward than many federal applications.
https://www.petaluma360.com/article/news/petaluma-earns-1m-g...
The applicants form a consortium, usually a heavy hitter followed by some universities and smaller firms. They usually promise something that they are already working on in the context of a thematic package that the ministry puts up for grabs. The research is usually done by the university, while the large company moves the money around citing 'management' workloads. The small companies don't really do much, or present past results as cutting edge R&D.
To your number 4, you forget that all systems involve people, and in the small world model everybody in the industry kind of knows each other. It's very easy to wine&dine, then show some fancy demos to scruffy suits in Brussels and get away with doing absolutely nothing at all.
In my personal opinion this is more or less a consequence of all innovative and intelligent people going to work at FAANG for ads and whatnot, the rest of them being locked in the politics of academia.
We cannot physically replicate the Azolla Event or the Carboniferous Period. There's no better form of carbon storage than coal, gas, oil. And it needs to just stay in the ground.
Otherwise I guess if we're looking at terraforming, we should consider iron fertilization.
We indeed need a lot more options for carbon removal, and directly investing in companies who want to make that happen is a very necessary first step.
It's the same reason why people reassuringly pointing to the amount of Thorium or Lithium in the ocean isn't useful.
Without that, this strategy is pointless.
How do you get India, China, all of Africa to stop producing CO2?
The US could go net zero and the effect wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop anything.
Don't we already have tariffs on China? I am a little hazy as to whether Trump's were repealed or not. IIRC, the political opposition was from all those companies manufacturing there -- e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc.
It's certainly something I would support more of, but the problem here is that targeting tariffs to specific countries has shown to be ineffective, as there are global supply chains, so goods are shipped from China to Vietnam to Taiwan to some other place and finally to the U.S. So it's not simple as to say impose a tariff just on Chinese goods coming into America.
IIRC, after Trump's China tariffs were announced, Vietnam suddenly became a huge exporter of the most targeted items, and it was pretty clear they were just relabelling items from China as "made in Vietnam".
This is covered in this WSJ story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-tariffs-on-china-are-b...
Global trade and capital flows are not really bilateral. It is very much a US vs Rest-Of-World, or at best US versus Regions.
So one option to reduce cheating might be to segmenting the world into zones:
US - Canada
US - Latin America (add everything south of the border)
US - Europe
US - Asia (throw Africa here, due to China/Africa ties)
US - Russia/Middle East/North Africa
> probably 70+% of the global economy
US + EU GDP is 36 Trillion, Global Economy is 76 Trillion, so about 40% of Global GDP.
But probably US + EU is one party to a good 70% of Global Trade. Not sure for how much longer.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
So IMHO all these carbon removal efforts are just the next magic technology that's proposed in order to keep us from effecting real change. We already know how to stop climate change (rapidly decrease our CO2 output), but instead of doing that we're chasing solutions that might never become viable. And once it will become clear that CO2 capture won't work the next magic solution will probably be geo-engineering, which is just as unrealistic IMHO.
BTW I'm not saying that CO2 capture or geo-engineering will never work, just that it probably won't work in the timespan that's available to us.
Right now carbon capture as a technology is in its infancy.
But I have to point out that a lot of proposed techniques only work at certain concentrations (e.g. all the limestone techniques I’ve seen) and even the ones that don’t change their const structure (e.g. require more energy/g removed).
None of which means we shouldn’t be trying. I’m working on CH4 removal myself, even though there is less of it than CO2
That seems easily worth it, and ignores the possibility of lower costs in the future, this working in tandem with efforts to decrease emissions, etc.
We need it to undo the damage we've already done. Will it be expensive as hell? Probably. But we need to do it. And if we cut emissions hard and fast we won't need to do carbon removal in panic but can do it more slowly.
I keep hearing this like there is nobody working on this problem. There are a significant amount of resources being dedicated to this problem. Is it enough? No, of course not. These types of global coordinated efforts are more difficult than any technological problem we have ever faced.
In developed countries, per capita CO2 emissions are decreasing at a steady rate. Adoption of EVs and renewables will accelerate this decline.
The problem is in the developing countries (especially China and India) where these rates are increasing. But we can't exactly tell these countries to stop developing. So our only option is to continue to develop technology that will make it cheaper to use renewables over fossil fuels. And that's all well under way.
Carbon capture is just another tool for us to explore that may scale as more entities adopt it. The idea that because it costs too much to do now, we shouldn't explore it is silly. Solar was not financially feasible just a decade or two ago. Battery storage was the same.
Point is, we should explore every option. That does not mean all our progress in EVs and renewables stops, it's just another avenue for us to reduce our carbon footprint.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
The US in particular has reduced per capita emissions significantly and continues to do so.
The reason I pointed out China and India is that they are still developing and a large chunk of their population has yet to modernize. In the process, they will significantly increase their emissions. I am not blaming them. Any other country would do the same in their place.
My point is that the only way we can reduce their coming impact (and all of the other developing countries) is by developing renewables and battery storage tech to be a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
From everything I've read, India isn't a big problem from a CO2 perspective but from an oceanic pollution perspective from trash dumping.
Asia produces 53% of global emissions. Per capita numbers are meaningless here. If the citizens of Liechtenstein were emitting 1,000 times much CO2 per capita as people in Asia, Asia would still be where you need to start if you were serious about reducing C02 emissions.
I know, I know, but it's not fair!
Explain that to the air.
But then, of course, the energy to run that process needs to come from a renewable, non-carbon emitting source, or else the whole thing is moot. So my question is that if we had all this renewable energy to run carbon capture systems, wouldn't it just make more sense to have this renewable energy put to use to offset fossil fuels in the first place?
The problem of course is that no matter how cheap CO2 capture gets, it's not likely to beat dumping it to the atmosphere for free.
Or if you chop the trees down and use them as building materials. Your hardwood floors and wood wall paneling are also sequestering carbon!
It seems to me that virtually all of these problems reduce to the problem of finding a plentiful, climate-neutral energy source. (If only we had already invented such a thing in the 1940's....)
Carbon capture could be done where the renewable energy is, and it doesn't need to be done on a set schedule. If you are using wind to power carbon capture and it isn't windy, you say OK I'm not capturing any carbon today and you wait until the wind picks up. You can do it anytime and anywhere land and energy is cheap.
Another thing is the cost of converting existing infrastructure. You're not going to scrap every internal combustion engine overnight, and you're not going to remake the food chain overnight, you're not going to stop people from clearing forests overnight, and you're not going to stop producing cement overnight. Or in the next quarter of a century.
No we don't. Even if we stopped all emissions starting today, climate change would not be stopped, it's already too late for that.
Now, assuming the most ambitious but realistic reduction plan, we will still be emitting massive amounts of CO2 over the next few decades, so we are guaranteed to have to endure significant global warning.
And this is why we need both reduction and removal. Reduction is the most efficient medium term solution by far, but long term we absolutely need removal as well.
I wish people would stop pitting reduction vs removal, wind vs solar vs nuclear etc. There isn't a single technology or policy that will save us, we need advances on all fronts and the solution will come from a mix of many different complimentary contributions.
However you are right that we need to be careful to not use the possibility of future carbon removal as an excuse to not reduce our GHG emissions.
Agreed. Twenty years ago, we had the luxury of being able to "pick and choose" the "right" path forward. Unfortunately, the wrong path was chosen, so we now have to do everything we can to mitigate the looming disaster. The cost of doing too little is just so very, very high. (And yet, doing too little seems to be exactly the path we're on.)
Yeah all we have to do is convince China, US, and India to rapidly decrease CO2 output, no big deal at all.
Who knew it could be this simple? All we have to do is go nowhere, buy nothing, sell nothing, eat nothing, do nothing, and freeze to death in the darkness.
If we were to charge that, then many people would likely find it more efficient to switch to electric cars and so on. But for those applications where it's very expensive or infeasible to cut emissions (e.g. long-haul jets), having tech like this available makes net-zero feasible anyway.
Besides, at this point we're going to need to actually reduce atmospheric CO2, and as you point out it's a hard problem, so we'd best start scaling the tech for it now.
The US is expected to spend a total of $6T on COVID relief with the passage of the Biden Plan (around $4T was already spent under the Trump administration)[1]. It's debatable whether or not this spend 'worked' as intended.
Investing in carbon removal will create entirely new industries. Rather than paying people to stay at home, it will create skilled tech jobs for Americans. In terms of justification, emissions reductions alone won't stop climate change at this point. It will take centuries for natural processes alone to remove our historical greenhouse gas emissions [2].
[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/us-spending-on-covid-rel... [2] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/14/981333730/carbon-emissions-co...
I see no reason to believe that development of carbon removal tech has had any impact on CO2 emission reduction efforts.
This is actually a huge point of debate in a lot of countries.
Yes, but we don't know how to do that. The technology exists now in many domains; with adequate public will and money we could probably rapidly electrify surface transportation, for example, and maybe electricity production (though long-duration storage is probably still a ways from production readiness), but the technology to produce concrete or aluminum without emissions just doesn't exist yet at anything other than (at best) the concept stage. Likewise for trans-oceanic shipping, or long-haul aviation, or fertilizer production, or... (etc., etc.). People think first about cars and electricity because they're tangible in people's daily lives, but industrial CO2 is a big, very much not-yet-solved problem.
Work is absolutely happening in all of these domains, but it will take time and resources, and we don't know which efforts will or won't succeed, or if any will succeed fast enough to meet IPCC targets for keeping warming below 1.5C without carbon capture as well.
The are plenty of ways to deal with CO2 from an engineering perspective. They just have no political support. In America, if a solution costs $1 a month per person, the majority of the public is in favor, if a solution costs $10 a month per person, the majority of the public is opposed.
We offer subscriptions and one-time purchases for a carbon removal portfolio with direct air capture, olivine, bio-oil and forestation. The removal mix is currently defined by us but we're building the option to make this fully customizable.
In the mean time you can email me at ewan@<the domain above> and I will be happy to answer any questions or build you a fully custom portfolio.
Sounds like a good thing to me, but I don't know much about it. (Monoculture issues?)
Mineralization (Climeworks) is much more expensive per ton but is assured to stay sequestered in inert, stable form.
One of my other thoughts, is that things like a direct-air carbon capture facility require a big upfront investment. What do you think about a "fundraiser" to make one possible. I.E., it would be gratifying to donate money, knowing it would be going directly to the construction of a new long-term carbon capture facility. I would then be confident that my donation would be going towards new sources of carbon removal.
(Ha -- Kickstarter for carbon capture???)
Actually a lot of carbon removers are currently trying to sell removals for the future. Shopify and Stripe are both spending money for removals that will only be taken out of the atmosphere in some years.
For us we try to focus on products that are actively delivering at the moment. We want our customers to actually be able to say their footprint has been removed.
I think though an 'innovation' plan or similar for methods that are maybe only at prototype phase could be possible. We just have to decided what happens if the project is unable to deliver in the future.
Direct air capture is different in that it provides little value with a large capex. I hate how proven technologies are in the background but because a highly successful tech company decides to splash money in climate tech all of a sudden low quality technology is getting all the headlines.
Over the course of history, how we evaluate companies and value them has changed. The concept of valuing companies based on quarterly earnings growth, is a relatively new concept and is not a necessary attribute of capitalism. So let's change how we evaluate companies.
What if we evaluated companies based on their environmental benefit or impact again? Tax break their environmental impact, tax break their environmental benefit?
I want to see "Ford company announces third quarter results, sequestering 100b tons more than expected".
I think what you're talking about most closely aligns with charities, and how charities talk about their societal impact they're able to have. Even then, the discussion seems to generally come back to impact per dollar.
I'm not sure how we can replace thinking of incentives in a financial sense with their societal impact, but it would be great if we could.
I would perhaps put forth the idea of a "hours/years saved" metric vs. some next best alternative? Good luck to the accountants on this one.
And the preface was attempting to say that judging a company by it's quarterly finances is already arbitrary, and flawed, and a relatively new concept. I can't find the link but I think it was suggested and socially adopted only in the last 40 years as the True Metric to evaluate companies.
Maybe not quarterly earnings but there was always some sort of financial metric.
Because financial metrics cut through the BS. If you read HN and reddit you'd think Zuckerberg is some sort of terrorist hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, conspiring 24/7 to compromise the mental health of Americans, whereas in reality if Facebook is ubiquitous in our lives, there's a clear reason for it.
And even if Zuck mandated a maximum Facebook time per day per user, you'd have people creating burner accounts to circumvent that.
That's how people love Facebook, and it shows on quarterly earnings, nothing but perfection ever since they went public.
Same goes for Google and Microsoft.
The market for techno-utopianism is alive and well even without laws which mandate things such as forceful carbon sequestration, all you have to do is look at the price action of Tesla and Bitcoin.
Plus once you make a law it's very hard to remove it, just look at the Patriot Act.
Americans don't care about terrorism the same way they did back in October 2001, but still the Patriot Act is as harmful to privacy as it was back then.
There is no guarantee that Americans will care about climate change, 10 years down the road...matter of fact it's more likely that people will forget about it altogether once they'd start losing their parents to heart disease, cancer, alzheimer and not glamorous climate change
Negative externalities are not 'BS' though, and may well eventually get internalized at some point, which would then be quite pertinent to the financials.
An example would be a company that has high profits because it eliminates waste by dumping it in the river. Their financials are good, but they don't tell you the whole picture, because sooner or later, something is likely to be done about the waste dumping.
I think of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act together. They were both reactions. Homeland Security isn’t going any where. It’s likely Space Force isn’t going any where even while it is still considered a punch line
Then everyone is paying the direct cost of fixing the damage they do, and the money is going to people who fix the damage.
Yes we can burn it. /s
Then we can capture it from the air, making profit both ways. It's the perpetuum mobile of business.
The problem is that it's not cost-effective to produce methane via the Sabatier process when you can just drill it out of the ground.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
Anyone know what's going on with this?
> The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer.
why not focus on implementing already existing ecologically sustainable inventions and strategies?
what i read here: rent-seeking tech founders aim to funnel profits they collected from the taxing of economic activity [1] towards a privately-funded lottery of hoped-for future tech.
the techno-fix is dangerous because it 1) ignores existing systemic dysfunction:
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for [trade secrets,] copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [2]
and 2) it covertly wields the lone genius myth [3], that supposedly the Stripe brothers are intellectually superior and can make better funding decisions compared to a democratic body of scientists.
check out this awesome video of just one ecological solution: Life in Syntropy with Ernst Gotsch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
the work of Million Belay of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is also impressive and worth checking out: https://afsafrica.org/
and this video narrated by Jeremy Irons, and with Vandana Shiva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-bK8X2s1kI
and this book by her: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43890614-oneness-vs-the-...
this is what global north capitalists are doing instead, Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas by Joakim Demmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isiYYVmvn2U
[1] Rent-seeking as a service by Wendy Liu, https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86
[2] Peer-to-peer economy and new civilization centered around the sustenance of the commons, http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...
[3] The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato, https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state
the underlying strategy here is about starving or buying out competitors until one brand name becomes a literal verb. that is to say: the usage of a proprietary product or service becomes so ubiquitous that we are conditioned to rely on the profit-seeking monopolizing Silicon Valley/Wall Street juggernauts in every aspect of our daily lives. so it's no longer "i'm getting a taxi to your place", it's now "i'm Ubering to your place". or "i'm going to search the internet using a search engine" has now become ”i'm going to google".
so to use tech platforms as an example: the client-server software paradigm obscures and hides all algorithms, protocols, and personal data behind a black box server/software/system. in another article, Wendy Liu writes:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us." [1]
the most exciting emergent project where i am starting to see the development of fully distributed protocols/software become a reality is the holochain framework. the team behind this open source library are aiming to make it as simple to use as Ruby on Rails was to make centralized apps. other projects in the dweb space that i'm following are activitypub, DAT and SSB. i've heard the above described shift referred to with different names: platform cooperativism, protocol cooperativism, platform socialism, protocol socialism and more. i am personally most excited about the holochain framework, because of the way it uniquely combines proven existing tech: Git, DHT's, etc.
[1] https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...
Groupon skews heavily to the former (because it adds no efficiency anywhere and is just various brands engaging in zero-sum price competition for eyeballs), Uber skews heavily to the latter (because Uber is barely profitable and brings significant operational efficiency due to their algo and the physical network effects).
I'm not sure I agree that non-profit is the way for some of these firms. Would either consumers or drivers be better off with a non-profit Uber? What's the incentive to make things extremely efficient? There'd be no centralized entity skimming off the top, but at the same time there might be an efficiency cost which is even bigger. So I'm skeptical.
I definitely do think a non-profit would be a great thing to replace AirBnb, Groupon et al.
Two side comments. One, those tech alternatives are very interesting to read about. Two, expensive drugs are because of the government (or because of lobbying), arbitrageurs would love to import some cheap insulin from overseas but doing that is illegal.
humans can produce environments conducive environments for the discovering, developing and researching of science and technology, without having a profit motive, or having society split up in owners and non-owners. i'm not sure about you, but today's world is hell-ish to me. i hate the inequity i see today.
note: i'm a bit tired so excuse the long quotes and links.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.
Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide." [1]
> What's the incentive to make things extremely efficient? There'd be no centralized entity skimming off the top, but at the same time there might be an efficiency cost which is even bigger. So I'm skeptical.
incentives are built into the universe, the process of discovery with colleagues is the reward/incentive. getting credit and therefore being trusted further with more democratically awarded scarce material resources could be the reward. the returns that capitalist firms supposedly need to get 'back' is not legitimate because nearly all of those inventions were made possible due to publicly funded research grants and loans. in our future socialist system with a distributed socialist version of a google/search-engine/global-index, we wouldn't need to manipulate people to buy new products ('advertising'), and everyone could use the latest inventions in a modular fashion (that is, only upgrade various components. goodbye planned obsolescence and single use hardware/products). another perspective: it's important to remember that today capital dictates what tech is popular and useful, not actual popularity or effectiveness. abolishing Silicon Valley and the global north IP regime is the only strategy that cuts at the root of this problem. besides that, the most important point is that the waged (non-property owning) knowledge workers are the ones providing the value, not the executives and property-owners (in this case intellectual property).
"In Mazzucato’s account of the enormous success of federal scientific and technical research as the foundation of the most revolutionary of today’s technologies, the most telling example is how dependent Steve Jobs’s Apple was on government-funded breakthroughs. Apple’s earliest innovations in computers were themselves dependent on government research. But by the 1990s, sales of its traditional laptops were flagging. The launch of the iPod in 2001, which displaced the once-popular but more limited Sony Walkman, and in 2007 of the touch-screen systems of the new iPhone and iPad, turned the company into the electronic powerhouse of our time. From that point, its global sales almost quintupled and its stock price rose from roughly $100 to more than $700 a share at its high.
These later breakthroughs were almost completely dependent on government-sponsored research. “While the products owe their beautiful design and slick integration to the genius of Jobs and his large team,” writes Mazzucato,
'nearly every state-of-the-art technology found in the iPod, iPhone and iPad is an often overlooked and ignored achievement of the research efforts and funding support of the government and military.'
A major government-funded discovery known as giant magnetoresistance, which won its two European inventors a Nobel Prize in physics, is a telling example of such support. The process enlarges the storage capacity of computers and more recent electronic devices. In a speech at the Nobel ceremony, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science explained that this breakthrough made the iPod possible. Other major developments by Apple also had their “roots” in federal research, among them, Mazzucato writes, the global positioning system of the iPhone and Siri, its voice-activated personal assistant.
Apple is only one of many such stories. In the early 1980s, the federal government formed the often-forgotten Sematech, the Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology consortium, a research partnership of US semiconductor companies designed to combat Japan’s growing lead in chip technologies. The US provided $100 million a year to encourage private companies to join the effort, including the innovative giant Intel, whose pioneering work on microprocessors in the 1970s had been central to the electronics explosion.
Virtually all experts acknowledged that Sematech reestablished the US competitiveness in microprocessors and memory chips, leading to a sharp reduction in costs and radical miniaturization. The tiny integrated circuits with huge memories that resulted are the core of most electronic products today, long exploited by major companies like Microsoft and Apple. Their development was critically aided by military purchases in their early stages when commercial possibilities were still in their infancy." [2]
i think we're stopped from seeing the above truths because we are now so embedded in this inorganic hyper-commoditized and highly-privatized society. it has gotten to the point where education itself has been turned into an 'experience' commodity, something only for the wealthiest members of society, despite self-directed schools starting to show us that children are innately curious. every child is born wonderfully curious, yet meeting walls instead of bridges sets the boundaries.
> expensive drugs are because of the government (or because of lobbying)
the framing of 'Govt. vs. Private sector/corporations' misses the point that both solely benefit (and are directed by) the propertied class. we live in a bourgeois democracy. there is no democracy for the working class when it comes to e.g. money creation, or the many laws and economic agreements that are lauded as the emancipatory backbones of a supposed 'end-of-history' [3] democratic society.
these are some of the sources and authors that helped me earlier on my journey to understand the dynamics i describe:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/32603498
[1] Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[2] Mariana Mazzucato, https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
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have you seen the latest Einstein blog post? it's hot https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
> humans can produce conducive environments ... without having a profit motive
The real question is whether the profit motive is optimal (and to what extent) for orienting people towards some goal X relative to other approaches.
This is a highly complicated empirical question, with an answer that probably differs by domain.
If you want to orient people towards genocide, the profit motive is probably the wrong way to go about things, although it can help a lot along the way. Stoking fear and disgust and team loyalty is king here.
If you want to orient people towards creating an iPhone and get it into a billion hands, or a reusable rocket with low marginal cost, the profit motive would rank extremely highly on the list, if not number 1.
> incentives are built into the universe
Moreover the nice thing about profit motive is that, in general (although not always), it's aligned with consumer satisfaction, and so maximizing this selfish thing leads to a better outcome for the counter-party as well.
> [profits] are not legitimate because [of public externalities]
> the most important point is that the waged (non-property owning) knowledge workers are the ones providing the value, not the executives and property-owners (in this case intellectual property).
> stopped from seeing the above truths because we are now so embedded in this inorganic hyper-commoditized and highly-privatized society
> "even as the Chinese workers ... are driven to suicide" [1]
This is the beautiful concept of economic surplus post-trade. Socialists take a 1-dimensional look at the "low wages" and are upset, but they forget what the alternative would have been without these "low wages"; more poverty, more suffering.
Further, so called "low wages" always lead to high wages a few generations down the line, due to the virtuous cycle of better nutrition, increasing tax revenues that feeds into education and infrastructure, etc.
Western socialists arrogantly risk stifling this virtuous cycle in poor countries. Imagine if nobody was allowed to use cheap Chinese labor 20 years ago, and therefore no FDI came in because it wasn't worth it to pay 5x market rates? Their economic growth would've been stunted and they would have more poverty today, not less.
> Einstein
It's telling that the bitcoin defense is 99% whattaboutism – but have no fear readers, I scream into the void about those other things too.
ps: I'm trying to go from screamer to proactive these days. I was already frugal and dropped car use, I'm also thinking into starting clubs to make more walk/bike use, recycling/upcycling repair shops and the likes. Do you have similar ideas ?
I also complain a lot at community meetings for new development in my immediate area (things like reducing parking in new buildings, including bike storage, EV charging, better public transit infrastructure)... I've found some of this stuff more fulfilling in that the impact tends to extend beyond what I'd be capable of doing alone... sometimes it's fruitless, but sometimes it works.
In contract, PoW cryptocurrencies have pure waste built in as a necessary component. They're literally waste incarnate, made into code and used to provide trustless consensus. It's a feature, that has to scale with the size of the network, and participants are encouraged to create more waste.
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[0] - Let's for the moment ignore the negative-sum game cancer the advertising industry is. But even advertising tries to be efficient at micro level.
[1] - In fact, it's a major source of modern problems with the market economy. Companies optimize way past the point it makes sense, because the consequences are borne by someone else (e.g. customers). See e.g. the whole field of value engineering.
Market might be a minimizing function of some sort but it's a blind one. Very often groups could do 4x more for 4x less just with a change of mindset alone.
Have you seen the average enterprise's stack?
That is not an exaggeration, and is more likely to be a severe understatement.
Every time I see a thread on HN about crypto it makes me want to buy BTC or w/e because people are so unbelievably disingenuous on here that it probably still has a lot of steam left. The side that needs to be misleading to make their point is rarely the correct side to be on in my experience.
Netherlands uses 108,800 GWh per yer. Global aluminum smelting is 8x that, but no single smelter comes close to producing 1/8th the worlds aluminimum.
This is patently false. The Netherlands has an aluminium smelting plant[1].
Why would you say something so obviously disproven?
[1]:https://aldel.nl
And please don't say PoS. PoS is centralized by default. If you are going to be centralized, why do crypto at all?
I know scores of people who hold ETH. I know like 2 people that have tried mining it.
Let's burn the planet down for that, hell yeah.
It's something I personally think about a lot, and I know many others do. Here's a community of people that discuss this topic a lot if you're interested: https://climateaction.tech/
Global Financial System: 263.72TWh
Bitcoin: 113.89TWh
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GFS deposits: US$404.1 trillion
Bitcoin: US$1.1 trillion
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GFS energy per US$: 0.65 Wh
Bitcoin energy per US$: 103.53 Wh
And this is calculated just for the value of deposits, if we do it again for number of transactions it's even more scathing.
We should do an attempt with just US dollars. It looks like there is about $40 trillion in actual physical/digital circulation (i.e. not investments in things like crypto, buildings, stocks).
Driving even an electric vehicle uses ~250-300 Wh per mile (we can round down to 250Wh).
Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup have about 738k (we can round down to 700k) employees and the average US commute is 32 miles (we can round down to 25). We'll assume ~235 days of work a year.
25 * 0.250 * 700000 * 235 = 1,028.1 TWh to commute for bank employees of the top four US banks per year
Which is about 25.7 Wh / $. We can safely assume this is significantly lower than reality already since we only counted the top four US banks and rounded all of our figures down. This also doesn't count any other industry required to keep USD working (like datacenters, as referenced in the paper you linked).
Edit: I'm not trying to prove you wrong or anything, I'm just genuinely curious if this "bitcoin is worse" statement is correct.
Your calculation comes out to 1.028 TWh
1 TWh = 1,000,000,000 KWh
Commute: 1.028 TWh
Data centers: ~3.3TWh per trillion (for USD) = 132 TWh
ATMs: 470,135 independent in the US (1.27MWh each per year) = 0.597TWh
Banks: ~98,000 in the US (PDF wasn't clear, using 60MWh each per year) = 5.88 TWh
Card networks: ~1TWh/yr (just assuming "half" of global)
Total: 140.5TWh/yr
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FB.CBK.BRCH.P5?location...
https://blog.sfgate.com/lifestyle/2020/08/31/its-electric-ho....
I think your calculation of 3.5 Wh/$ is closer to the real number. When I put $70Tn instead of $404Tn in I get 3.71Wh/$
When you game on your 3080 GTX at max graphics in VR, you wouldn't call that wasted computation because it provided utility to a human in the form of entertainment.
Proof of work provides utility in the form of trustless proof, allowing a decentralized network to actually work. The computational work carries meaning which is valued by network participants.
The reason mining consumes so much aggregate energy is because it is the most profitable use of energy at the moment. Part of this is because the cost of energy for fossil fuels in not accurately represented in its price.
Tax payers / governments subsidize the fossil fuel industry in billions every year, including coal which is used in coal power plants. A carbon tax is also not implemented. So externalities are not captured in price.
It should fairly obvious how energy sources change once those issues are addressed.
It will be hella regressive, but that’s the reality. Most poor people are polluting the planet disproportionately to their output.
I bet if the internet was invented today we would hear the same energy arguments.
BTC is old, the possibilities have been proven but I think it's totally fair that we try to get somewhere more efficient than what we have now.
The incentives are very different, I don't think you can compare them like that.
Miners and companies like Google both make more money the less power they use. However, in the case of Google power consumption is a side effect of their business.
To put it another way: if you overnight doubled Google's datacenter capacity you would not double their revenues. But if you doubled a bitcoin miner's capacity there would be an immediate change in the amount of revenue being made.
This means that for miners there's a very clear incentive to use whatever resources you can at your disposal, because the more power and hardware you have the more profit you can make.
In a podcast, I heard one of the founders describe it as a first step at creating a 'non-extractive' economic system.
That's why market design is important.
Open markets require boring stuff like properly aligned incentives, contract law, property rights, transparency and auditing, fair & impartial courts, right to appeal, and so forth. Your basic sanity checks.
Maintaining and protecting a balance is never easy. We can only hope to minimize cheating.
All the alternatives are much worse. The popular criticism of market failures are often because the obvious safe guards were eliminated or ignored.
The rest is just bookkeeping, which can happen on any kind of ledger, distributed or otherwise.
Talk of backing a currency traditionally refers to some mechanism that guarantees people will continue to value it in the future:
- a currency is "backed by gold" if it is exchangeable for hunks of metal by whoever holds some of it (the future value of those hunks being taken as granted)
- a currency is backed by a government if that government guarantees that the currency will remain sufficiently scarce and that it will be a/the means of paying taxes due to that government.
In this case, though, you just mean that a coin is minted each time a ton of co2 is sequestered, right? And you would need some other mechanism to generate demand for the coins?
Exactly.
If if it were so critically needed, why is there no market demand for this product? Should the countries with low carbon production endlessly subsidize high carbon producing countries?
The hysteria around climate is starting to look much like Corona hysteria. Next will be the carbon passport.
If Stripe was serious about climate change, they would support the development of nuclear energy, stop flying on airplanes, move their data centers to cold climate locations, etc