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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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)

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