Live dashboard of carbon dioxide removal purchases | Hacker News Reader

Live dashboard of carbon dioxide removal purchases

cdr.fyi

150 pointsKortaggio87 comments

Fantastic! This site provides an intuitive overview of carbon dioxide removal purchases sourced from six different market places and two registries. Metrics include carbon credit sales and deliveries, prices, names of suppliers and purchasers, and the method of carbon dioxide removal (e.g. direct air capture or biochar production).

I find this site useful to get an overview of the development of voluntary carbon markets and their recent rapid expansion. Voluntary carbon markets are fractured into several market places and registries, so getting an aggregate overview over all markets was somewhat difficult prior to discovering this site. Thank you for the submission!

I'm very surprised if they're able to actually get really good quality data on what constitutes removed carbon. Most carbon offsets for example are a scam, in the sense that one of the most common 'offsets' is for example paying people to not cut down trees - that they may or may not have been planning to cut down in the first place. There's no international standard or monitoring bodies, and the registries are generally incentivized to make the people paying them (industry) look good.

The whole concept is silly, we don't offset crime for instance. I can't just pay someone in advance to not punch someone so that I can do it.

Offsetting is just a way of propping up existing unsustainable business models in the eyes of ESG investors. It's greenwashing.

I'm not saying none of this is real, but I'm sure it varies dramatically and the data is probably epically unreliable.

Here's some write-ups from Greenpeace [1], NRDC [2] to the Center for American Progress [3].

[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/carbon-...

[2] https://www.nrdc.org/stories/should-you-buy-carbon-offsets

[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cftc-should-rai...

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36190299

Taking the site at face value, the claim is removal (not offsets). However, even at face value, the amount of carbon removed is far less than what has been sold.

(I agree that offsets seem unhelpful at best, just not sure it's worth deep diving on that when this isn't obviously about offsets.)

Is there a difference between removal and offsets? I tried to research the consensus but couldn't find anything. For instance the dashboard shows Microsoft purchase 2,819,637 tons of 'removed carbon' - surely to offset their own activities no? Am I missing something obvious, or is this just re-branded carbon offsets?

I think the conceptual ideal of the offsets marketplace is that it is equivalent to removal, but in practice, I don't think it lives up to that. E.g., as a sketchy offset seller, one can sell the promise not to cut down the same tree repeatedly and that dilutes the carbon offset. Or sell credits against a forest you weren't going to harvest anyway.

Removing carbon seems fundamentally different -- if the carbon is actually removed as sold, and measured correctly.

(What Microsoft is doing isn't selling into the offsets marketplace.)

I disagree with your sort of moral argument against buying offsets / removal. I think it's fine to pressure companies into paying for externalities (either via ESG shareholder advocacy or regulation) and this is just one flavor of that.

Removal subsidizes the development of the technology, whether or not it's just zeroing emissions. So regardless of the instant impact, it's progress towards the long term commercial viability of large scale sequestration.

Removal: We take a specific measure to grab carbon from "the environment" and "tow it outside the environment" (capture it in some somewhat-permanent form).

Offset: We go to this poor village and teach them about the importance of not deforesting their surroundings, generously guesstimate how much deforestation that avoids, generously guesstimate how much carbon that will avoid releasing, then sell offsets (twice, because why sell them only once).

Removal is a subset of offsetting, but generally considered a) more concrete, b) actually removing carbon vs. preventing hypothetical future emissions, and as a result, c) more verifiable.

yes, CDR.fyi only tracks high-permanence removals (v. low-permanence solutions or avoidance)

As I recall, there are a variety of economical methods to remove carbon. In particular, olivine coating of beaches promises to be both cheap and effective.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90510254/ever-been-to-a-green-sa....

I do not see a world in which all carbon emissions are eliminated, but a net zero world seems to be close. An efficient means of offsetting individual carbon expenditures is necessary for this task.

Olivine? This is mined, which means eco-system destruction from wherever it is being mined from. It means fossil fuel inputs to mine it, process it, transport it. What's the ratio of carbon-stored to carbon-released here? Any studies on the effect of of both marine animals and the beach/dune/fringe dwellers on this?

Economical? Maybe. Actually effective? Doubt it.

People are so in love with the idea of a technical solution, because deep down they don't want to give up their SUVs, their large families, their expensive gadgets and cheap food. It ain't never gonna work that way.

If people were serious about solving the climate problem, they would have smaller families, drive smaller cars, cut-out air travel, stop buying plastic shit they don't need, stop upgrading their phone every year ...

... but I'm not seeing many people doing it. Pretty much nobody in fact.

If it can make your day a little happier: I change car/gsm/whatever when they die and can't be repaired anymore (my PC is 13 years old for example, it's alittle too weak for rust-analyze, but well :-))). I haven't taken a plane in 20 years; use the train when possible. I buy online less than once a year. I don't have a swimming pool.

But I'm not involved in politics, so I don't spend much time on helping others to change. And my house's insulation is not good (old house).

> “And my house's insulation is not good (old house).”

Depending on where you live and how you heat your house, fixing this one thing might be more effective at reducing emissions than everything else you’re doing combined.

Would paying for such upgrades for people who cannot afford them be considered cost effective carbon dioxide removal?

no, because it does not remove carbon dioxide, but prevent future emissions.

Isn't the net result the same? Is it better to pay (for example) $500 to remove a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, or to pay $100 to prevent the same amount of CO2 from being emitted in the first place?

If CO2 removal costs us more than emissions reduction technologies, isn't it a false economy?

> Any studies on the effect of of both marine animals and the beach/dune/fringe dwellers on this?

https://www.projectvesta.org are doing those studies, they've been on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403570, that thread answers a lot of your questions. It's based on very sound-looking science, pioneered by Olaf Schuiling in the Netherlands (see here for more explanations: https://greensand.com/en/pages/werking-olivijn-steen).

> What's the ratio of carbon-stored to carbon-released here?

There's about a 4% loss, mostly due to crushing the olivine and shipping it around. https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_978/1/.

According to Schuiling's calculations, about 7 cubic kilometres of olivine a year would offset all of humanity's emissions. For reference, the largest mine in the world is the Bingham copper mine in Utah, which is (IIRC) about 23 cubic kilometres. So, it's a lot, but it's within the reach of current technology. Schuiling estimated it would take an industry roughly the size of today's oil industry to operate, probably around a million employees. Again, it's big, but it doesn't require any new magic air-sucking machines or anything like that, it's just what we already know how to do, on a scale that we already do it. And hopefully we'll have lots of coal miners out of work soon who would know how to do it.

> olivine coating of beaches promises to be both cheap and effective

The problem with all these novel get-carbon-credits-quick ideas is that they are difficult to verify. How do we know that the outputs aren't taken in by some other ecological process and spat back out as CO2? How do we know the process doesn't reach some saturation point? How do we know how well it generalizes to all coastlines?

... and if we find out 5 years from now that it's bunk, do those carbon credits get revoked?

The the reason you can’t offset violent crime in the same way is that no amount of violence is acceptable but some amount of carbon emissions is acceptable.

Also in some cases damages are used to offset wrongdoing, especially in civil litigation which is a better comparison.

Another way to put it: CO2 is fungible. If I put a ton in the air and take away a different ton, nobody cares that they're not the same exact CO2.

If I shoot one person in the face and then prevent a different shooting, several people care about the difference.

> no amount of violence is acceptable

I would argue this is false and that if you live in a western country, someone else is performing violence for you and your ideals, so that you can live a relatively peaceful way of life

I should have been more specific: no amount of assault is acceptable. Although the other follow up that brings up the fungibility of carbon emissions versus the fungibility of assault is better I think.

So they are not even removing carbon from atmosphere? Huh

I thought the same thing, but none of the carbon sinks listed in the database are offset companies. They are all actually producing biologically stable physical chunks of fixed carbon.

Incidentally: We own some trees that we will not cut down, but that would not have been cut down by others.

There is a scam carbon offset site that will pay us for each year we don’t cut down an existing tree (if I remember right, it’s the biggest carbon offset market; can’t remember the name, but that’s not important, if you care, I’m guessing one of the articles in the comment I am replying to names and shames them).

Is there a tax efficient way for me to sell scam carbon offsets, then funnel the money into actual carbon capture businesses? How much would the brokers take?

(Or, better, is there a set of criteria that could be encoded into law to shut down the offset scam industry?)

What if I bought up a bunch of coal on the open market, and sold carbon offsets against it? For each offset sold I’d bury the corresponding coal again, permanently preventing it from being burned.

Seems like this could be quite profitable, especially since I can sell 2.86 tonnes of carbon offsets for each tonne of coal.

Perhaps we could go a step further, skip the intermediate steps, and just pay coal miners to leave the coal in the ground?

>Most carbon offsets for example are a scam, in the sense that one of the most common 'offsets' is for example paying people to not cut down trees - that they may or may not have been planning to cut down in the first place. [...]

>The whole concept is silly, we don't offset crime for instance. I can't just pay someone in advance to not punch someone so that I can do it.

Governments do something similar though: gun buyback schemes are basically the same thing. Sure, maybe that gun that the government bought would have been used to commit a crime, or it was held by a responsible gun owner who wouldn't have committed any crimes to begin with.

Not sure guns are the same thing. 200-500,000 guns are stolen each year in the US and then used to commit crimes. Really anything you can do to reduce the number of guns in the US is strictly a good thing. [1]

> The large number of guns stolen each year suggests that theft may be an important source of “crime guns.” Indeed, it appears that while gun theft is often not the proximate source of firearms for most criminals [...], it is often the ultimate source-the way guns initially enter into the illegal market.

It's not 'maybe a responsible gun owner would or wouldn't use it for crime' so much as reducing the surface area of a massive vulnerability.

[1] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/32630640/5385318...

Harvard sounds like a reputable source. But I didn’t even need to click it to know that would be a David Hemenway link.

That guy is an absolute propagandist. A complete fraud given a platform by Michael Bloomberg who single handedly funds the majority of gun control efforts in the USA.

If you do any research on him at all, you’ll find he was center of the Clinton Admin and 1994 Congress efforts to push gun control, including weaponizing the CDC, funding compete junk studies where data was never released and extremely unethical methodology like a phone survey of 250 people who filed police reports that mentioned someone was shot in a home to conclude that for all people and all reasons “you are x% more likely to die if you own a gun in your home” (eneter Hemenway, and data never released), and all the other lies they used to push the Clinton AWB, which they were severely punished for in the 1996 elections.

Hemenway is a liar and a hack. I would highly suggest finding sources that stay far away from him.

Without addressing anything you wrote, here's three other sources that yields the same results, including one from the ATF. Regardless of your opinions regarding the author there is plenty of data that backs up this assertion.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5385318/

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/stolen-gunsare-fueli...

[2] https://www.atf.gov/firearms/national-firearms-commerce-and-...

If you're trying to convince someone that is pro 2a of anything, the ATF is hardly a source of authority. They're pretty high up there in the list of reviled 3 letter agencies.

heh, it's sort of a cult at this point. It's more for the audience.

If you are OK with no addressing content; For your reference… NIH, ATF, and Washington Post are all anti-gun organizations.

For your ATF link, it’s all University criminology depts sourcing data, typically universities are anti-gun; and the sociology depts especially so.

It is very difficult to get unbiased results on guns. And ultra easy to see authority and confirmation biases. If you are mindful of that fact, the landscape and topic takes on a new dimension.

Why is the link that direction? Could it be that universities, etc are anti-gun because the data shows they are harmful?

Overall I find it odd that this standard is applied this way. No one accuses Universities of being anti cancer when they publish a study on how cancer harms the body. Or for example dismissing any study on the effectiveness of a vaccine because the group doing the study are pro vaccines.

Yes thanks to the power of imagination guns actually shoot candies and rainbows, thanks for setting me straight. The number of stolen guns shouldn’t be controversial lol

Exactly this is a feel good program that does nothing to address or resolve the actual issues.

Is your critique of the current system or the idea in general?

Would you feel the same way if the voluntary markets became less voluntary with a true carbon tax?

The companies on that list capture carbon dioxide from the air as a service for money, and they would not exist or be scaling their operations without demand.

>> they would not exist or be scaling their operations without demand.

Same applies to bomb makers and it doesn't make war good. Demand does not prove value to humanity, though it is counted as GDP.

Absolutely! I didn’t pass a judgement on those companies, just pointing out that you need some form of demand (greenwashers) in order to have any supply (CDR companies) because it’s the classic two-sided marketplace chicken-and-egg bootstrapping problem

The purpose of the market can also be clear (removing CO2 from the air) while simultaneously the “value to humanity” is unclear (hard to measure)

appreciate the feedback! we built CDR.fyi to answer a very simple question:

how big is the CDR market today and are we on scaling at the pace necessary to achieve global climate targets?

Co-founder of CDR.fyi, thanks for all the feedback and love for what we're building!

Carbon removal is definitely a unique market in the early innings, and our goal is to provide transparency into the market at it scales.

One important note: CDR.fyi aggregates purchases, deliveries, and verifications of carbon removed and stored for more than 100 years

So, burning a gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2, so 100 gallons produces one ton.

At your current spot price ($29), that means it costs $0.29 per gallon of gasoline to capture the released carbon.

I’m pretty optimistic about the viability (and necessity) of carbon capture, but that seems too good to be true.

In particular, it would mean that we don’t need to stop using fossil fuels, since that is rounding error vs. the price of gasoline.

Is anyone actually delivering captured carbon at that price yet?

>At your current spot price ($29), that means it costs $0.29 per gallon of gasoline to capture the released carbon.

The graph is deceptive because eyeballing the average rate gets you ~$300, not $29. There might be something funky going on with the averaging, because if you click into the individual producers, the price you get is on the order of hundreds of dollars, not tens of dollars.

If you tap on today’s spot price (which is nearly the lowest price on the graph), a tooltip pops up and says $29.

I tapped it because I wasn’t sure if the Y axis started at zero. (It does.)

Edit: Macroalgae is at $8. Is that in production yet?

to even list the price as a primary factor is also bad - you need to list how much carbon is created by your method for each unit of carbon you capture. This probably has to be based on the average carbon cost for energy a the location you are doing it (since even if you are all renewable on paper that renewable energy could be used to displace use of fossil fuels).

Surely they include emissions. Otherwise, I'd like to register my box fan as a carbon capture device.

The site confuses permanent and "we don't really know if permanent" removal technologies. The latter are a lot cheaper, but it's really deceptive.

I don't think this helps the field. "We turned carbon into rock" is really a whole different thing from "we put carbon into the soil and hope it stays there fingers crossed".

(Update: Here is some background why some of those methods are sketchy https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/soil-rev... )

"more than 100 years" really isn't a lot when we talk about climate change and storing emissions.

Carbon offsets is like a doctor telling a grossly obese patient to mitigate the problem with periodic fat removal. This gives the patient a false hope that he doesn't need to completely change how he lives.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but carbon offsets/removals are not the only thing that we (the human race) are trying. In your analogy, the patient has also been changing their diet and exercising more by electrifying transportation and switching to renewable sources of energy. Whether it's too little, too late is another matter.

The patient has switched to an electric toothbrush, but continues to absorb 3 fridges of food every day, almost 1.5x more since he started talking to the doctor.

Merits and criticisms aside, carbon offset has a striking semblance with the sale of indulgences practiced by the Catholic church in the middle ages. Some patterns of thought seem ingrained in us.

The difference is that indulgences goes to some random organization that doesn't use it in a way that offsets/mitigates the damage (eg. you doing adultery and then paying the church $$$ doesn't result in the adultery being reversed), whereas carbon removal actually reverses the damage (at least in theory). In that sense I see it as closer to cleaning up your own mess.

It’s more like telling them to exercise to burn off the fat.

That will be extremely hard at first, since they are probably starting from zero. However, as they get fitter, they will be able to burn more calories per day via exercise.

Of course, diet + exercise is much better than just one or the other.

We have to remove ~ 25% of the carbon currently in the atmosphere, or we’re screwed.

We definitely can’t reach that goal without carbon capture. We almost certainly can’t reach it without cutting emissions by >> 90%.

But these are not carbon offsets. This is carbon removal and storage for 100+ years according to https://www.cdr.fyi/methodology

Is 100 years long given the stakes? Why not put a guarantees in thousands of years?

I couldn't find anything on that website about what a "carbon removal purchase" is. Apparently it's something that people just know about.

"Carbon removal marketplaces are the bridge between companies that sell the removals of CO2 from the atmosphere and businesses or individuals, who are willing to purchase these removals, in order to offset their emissions and help mitigate the climate crisis." [0]

[0] https://carbonherald.com/top-10-carbon-removal-marketplaces-...

I'm suspicious that this is missing a lot of data, and if it's only a portion of the market and biased in which data is included, that would make it less useful.

Google is one of the leaders in terms of corporations buying offsets, and my understanding is that they have a high bar in terms of quality/effectiveness. They offset all carbon emissions and have back-dated that to the beginning of the company. And yet they're nowhere to be seen on this.

Am I missing something about what this data is supposed to show?

I agree that this is likely missing data systematically.

However note the difference between carbon offsets vs carbon removals. I don't know what kinds of offsets Google bought but given that they started buying them >15 years ago, they were probably not removals.

That's true, but my understanding is that removals are a subset of offsets, and considered higher quality offsets. Given that Google seems very committed to doing this at scale and in an evidence based, audited, method, I'd be very surprised if nothing of theirs comes up in this.

Disclaimer btw, I do work for Google but nothing to do with this. The company policy on this however is a strong factor in me choosing to work here.

I couldn't tell from the site, is this "offsets" or actual carbon sequestration? And because sometimes the difference is fuzzy, is it paying for stuff that would have happened anyway, or is it somehow net removal?

I saw a "method" chart but it had no labels on my phone so maybe it's addressed there.

I had the same question.

There’s an explicit breakdown in one of the graphs, Suppliers and a graph on Price Per Method. They cover both obvious approaches to Direct air capture (DAC, Electrochemical Ocean Capture) and less obvious ones (BioChar, Biooil, Mineralization, Enhanced weathering, Biomass removal, Macroalgae).

I suspect that the inclusion of some on a reference dashboard will increase their legitimacy, and lower the case for approaches not included here. I also expect that companies will start favoring the cheapest approach.

Voluntary carbon markets typically trade in both avoidance and removal (i.e. sequestration) credits. Since this site is called Carbon Dioxide Removal I would assume listed trades only cover sequestration, and my cursory review of the listed removal methods appears to confirm that only sequestered carbon trading is listed (but the methods section does not state this explicitly).

Regarding "is it paying for stuff that would have happened anyway, or is it somehow net removal?": One of the requirements for generating carbon credits is additionality, i.e. a project should only receive carbon credits if it were not viable without the revenue from those credits. But as you point out, determining additionality is rather difficult and often fuzzy.

Good question!

CDR.fyi aggregates purchases, deliveries, and verifications of carbon removed and stored for more than 100 years

CDR.fyi does not track things like "avoided emissions" (like switching your fleet from gas to EV) or lower-permanence solutions (like planting trees)

(Methods show up on that chart when you hover, but good UX feedback there :)

So a one stop shop to look up which corps invest in ESG-mandated feel-good BS? Noice.

If it's atmospheric capture or un-gamed diversion of emissions, I think it's a win. If it's carbon offsets tied to an existent forest or whatever, I agree with you.

Those seem to be mostly serious approaches, i.e. no offset on historical forests, but they include some approaches that are not as obvious as direct air capture.

What is the problem if this were ESG-mandated. Can you point me to any writing on the subject? I want to understand.

If this is a serious comment it should be very easy for you to look up criticisms of esg investing. I'm not sure what you're hoping for from the OP.

I looked up some criticisms, which boiled down to:

- 79% of Americans support ESG investing.

- Republicans are more likely than Democrats to oppose interference in ESG investment strategies.

- Some Republicans, especially DeSantis, are trying to start an anti-ESG culture war, but it hasn’t had much impact on investment holdings.

- Some Democrats think ESG is a scam because some of the stuff it screens for doesn’t actually improve the environment or social justice. (For instance, some ESG indexes measure resilience against climate change instead of taking action to avoid climate change).

So, I’m really not seeing what point you are trying to make.

The above is mostly from Forbes, who are obviously pro-business. The critique about ESG not being progressive enough is from the Atlantic.

On the nose.

I can't actually see a way to see for a given corporation, how much of their purchased offsets have been delivered and by what methods, so I guess it doesn't work for that.

hmmm...were you able to click/search for the company?

check this out: https://www.cdr.fyi/purchaser/microsoft

Capturing carbon is feel-good BS now?

Purchasing carbon capture credits is. The dashboard states front and center 1.9% delivered, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the all time peak.

That's not what this site shows. The numbers are way too low, this cannot include the (indeed) BS like paying a farmer 10 bucks not to remove a tree in the next year or planting trees and pretending on paper like they'll all grow to maturity.

Also confirmed in the discussion elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36190193

Baseless criticising of a good thing is what I'd call BS, rather than the companies showing up on this site...

(To be clear, prevention is better than capture from a very simple return on investment perspective, but if these companies would rather pay someone to clean up their mess than do it themselves, and are willing to pay that capture premium.. be my guest. Net zero is net zero. If they price themselves out of the market because capture is so costly, that's their own problem.)

The delivery curve is pretty clearly exponentially increasing, so yes, it would make intuitive sense that delivery is at an all time peak, because delivery is rapidly increasing.

It would be much more concerning if the all time peak was historical, and it was post peak. That would indicate something negative.

Being at an all time peak is a strongly good sign.

No. It has always been feel-good BS.

Why are sales up so high this year? Hasn't this been a market for years?

Microsoft apparently.

More details in the Microsoft deal

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/15/23724418/microsoft-carbon...

> If that all sounds like a tricky balancing act, it is. Previous research has found that burning woody biomass can create more CO2 emissions than what’s captured. That’s because only capturing smokestack emissions fails to account for all the pollution that might come from cutting down the trees and transporting the wood. Plus, it can take a long time for trees or plants to grow mature enough for people to rely on them to draw down a significant amount of CO2.

Carbon removal at large scale is really a big scam through and through, isn't it?

The whole carbon credit process seems very scammmy to me and greenwashing away the problem.

How is this independently audited? If Google or Facebook buys 1B USD of carbon credits, which is supposed to remove X tons of co2, can I go to an independent government or private org and ask if the actual measure of co2 went down?

This is removal not traditional credits.

Removals often have a LCA that takes into account any emissions produced during the process and sells active CO₂ removal.

Is that price volatility real?

If I make my own charcoal can I also be added to the list?

depends on how many tons you're willing to make and whether you follow science-backed protocols :)

- Biochar: https://fs.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/7518557/Supplier%2...

- Biooil: https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/a-new-proto-protocol-...

How many tons? I own a forest that was historically used for timber, but I am thinking about making biochar at the small single tons level, and burying it into the soil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com