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Comment by ResearchAtPlay | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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?

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