Meta to Buy Almost 7M Carbon Credits | Hacker News Reader

Meta to Buy Almost 7M Carbon Credits

carboncredits.com

27 pointsBrajeshwar52 comments

Does anyone know if carbon credits actually work? In theory, they seem great. In practice, I’d expect them to be rife with abuse.

They buy the credits to offset responsibility. Their purchase is supposed to go to investment/efforts from others to offset the carbon rather. As you can predict, there's a lot of racket and bias between point A and point B on this money.

It's true that the incentives are all mixed up in this industry. The ability to cheat is very high and there's little to no third party verification (and in a lot of cases the offset technique is novel and frankly seems to need some peer review).

But that's not the same as saying "there's a lot of racket and bias". In fact my impression is that most of these firms are sincere and not cheating at all. But over time, this is absolutely going to need some regulatory attention.

One of the larger carbon capture forests burned down recently so :shrug?

https://www.ft.com/content/3f89c759-eb9a-4dfb-b768-d4af1ec5a...

I like how by the end of the article the economists are just suggesting adding like a 20% buffer to the calculations rather than talking about more fundamental problems.

IIRC around 75% of carbon offsets are "non-additional" i.e. bullshit. Of course Meta is only buying the "high-quality" ones so maybe it's not too bad. https://www.offsetguide.org/high-quality-offsets/additionali...

In Australia if you install a moderate number of solar panels on your roof at home, you'll be paid between a few thousand dollars and several thousand dollars through a carbon credits system.

It can work out to close to half the cost of the installation, and combined with other incentives (like getting near free electricity for your own consumption) it means you'll generally recover your upfront investment in full after about five years. Solar panels last 20+ years, so it's a very good investment that has lead to Australia having the highest update of rooftop solar in the world.

Without the carbon credits scheme, it'd probably still be a good investment to install rooftop solar, but you'd be waiting a lot longer than five years to get your money back, and the longer timeline increases your risk substantially (what if severe weather destroys your solar panels?).

Yes - they are rife with abuse. People and companies routinely make promises about how much carbon they've saved that don't reflect reality. But they are also great — they absolutely encourage and fund investments that reduce our global carbon footprint.

Just because a system isn't perfect, doesn't mean it's a bad system.

That's a rare example where it can work (I don't know anything about Australia but will take your word for it). Most carbon schemes are not about subsidizing solar panels. The majority of it is very questionable as other users have pointed out with examples.

Most people care about the environment and are worried about climate change. Most also understand very little about geoscience. There is a lot of pressure on governments and corporations to just do "something" about it, but few concrete demands. That's why deceptive practices and outright scams are so common, especially in so-called carbon offsetting and carbon removal schemes.

Having a bit of relevant scientific background, I've sadly seen more than once how questionable carbon offset companies infiltrate communities and corporations to get them to buy in. Some of them spend a lot of time lobbying and advertising on a grassroots level to get cooperation deals. Warning folks has not worked in the cases I've tried because as soon as you question it you're viewed as a climate skeptic who does not care about global warming and getting into hours long discussions with non-experts trying to explain to them why a certain promise can not work in reality the way it's described on the carbon credit website is pointless. Their promises and beautiful pictures of green forests and blue skies are a lot more persuasive sadly since it's professional marketing.

“I’m going to give you 100 million dollars today to do fucked up shit for the next 10 years so you guys can stop annoying me” is basically the gist of these schemes.

They also get to sell the credits in a few years once the price has gone up, right?

Are they not consumed?

They are. Once purchased, they're retired and not sold again

They are secular indulgences. Complete fraud used to facilitate bribery and shift blame.

The industry is rife with abuse (the Guardian is doing important work highlighting low-additionality offsets [1][2]) but carbon credits are still important. For instance, I work at Recoolit (https://www.recoolit.com/our-work) and we have no other way to pay for our work besides the voluntary carbon markets.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/24/chevron-...

One of the problems with carbon credits that's hard to work around is the fact that if I avoid wasting a tonne of CO2, I get credited for saving our environment. If I sell a carbon credit to fund the activity, someone else also gets credited for saving our environment.

So every tonne of CO2 avoided counts twice. It's a way to inflate the progress that actually happens.

Of course they do. Every couple of days you see headlines like "Solar exceeds coal and nuclear". /s

If you like the video format, Wendover has a very good 20 minute video on the topic, discussing the pitfalls and how non-obvious failure modes of carbon offset schemes can be: https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY

I’ve heard the idea that carbon credits create a fairly unique scenario where both sides, the buyer and the seller of the credits, aren’t that strongly incentivized to call out fraud.

In regular “marketplace” transactions, the buyer wants the genuine product and will be upset if they are defrauded.

In a carbon credit market, the main thing the buyer cares about is the paper, not the thing that the paper is supposed to represent. Certainly, many buyers of carbon credits do care about it being legitimate. But it is more of an altruistic caring, compared to the strong feelings that come up when one gets ripped off.

Because of this dynamic, everything else held equal, there is going to be more fraud.

There's a lot of well known issues with carbon credits (many are not actually additional, there's double counting, accountability issues, etc). But is there an alternative solution for companies to do? Let's say Meta builds a new data center. Inherently there is a climate cost for this (even in some crazy hypothetical world where it's mass timber, etc) and so there needs to be some sort of offset to be carbon neutral. Is the recommendation that every company has their own individual technology efforts doing their own carbon offset? That feels less effective than contracting out to other companies, which can pool resources and efforts. What is an actionable step that a company can take?

IMHO, companies should work directly to limit their scope-1 and most of their scope-2 emissions. they should buy carbon credits to offset their scope-3 (and maybe some of their scope-2) emissions.

the scope-3 emissions of one company are the scope-1 emissions of another company, so the hope is that, as everyone tackles their own scope-1, we reduce emissions to 0 (which is the goal).

more on emission scopes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gauravsharma/2023/06/11/underst...

quick summary:

* scope 1 -- direct emissions, for meta this might be nothing

* scope 2 -- carbon emissions made indirectly by a company to facilitate its daily operations via energy and utility purchases, the most obvious examples of which being power, heating and cooling. for meta this is probably most of their emissions. meta should be involved in PPA (power purchasing agreements) to directly fund renewable energy to run their operations. buying credits to offset powering their datacenters by burning coal would probably qualify as "pointless greenwashing"

* scope 3 -- indirect emissions, excluding those included in scope 2, both up and down the value chain. for meta, this would be stuff like flights they buy for their employees to travel to meetings. this is the kind of thing that should be covered with carbon credits, meta should not be, like, building electric airplanes.

Huh. I would argue companies should also work to reduce their “scope 3” emissions by reducing unnecessary travel and maybe even reducing commutes of their employees.

absolutely.

i think the problem with this whole space is, it's entirely voluntary, or sometimes we have carrots like tax incentives for building renewable energy infrastructure.

i think that instead, for scopes 1 and 2, we should have regulation that phases out dirty technologies. in my industry (refrigerants) the montreal protocol is a great example of how to force the phase-out of polluting technology. we know this can work (i wrote a blog post about this at https://www.recoolit.com/post/refrigerants-what-are-they).

for scope 3, i think it's hard to regulate "buy fewer flights". or, like, "buy flights only if it's really important to have an in-person meeting". this is where carbon pricing comes in -- then we can use market incentives to force companies to only buy the important flights.

For the record, I think this is primarily targeting scope 3, at least based on their most recent Sustainability Report. But I agree that focus on driving 1 and 2 to 0 and shrink 3 as much as possible is the best approach.

Build a datacenter, also build X wind turbines. Carbon credits allow for a lot of diffusion of responsibility. Investing in concrete projects with easy to calculate effects seems much better.

Be more clear about what, specifically, they think they are doing to compensate.

Not "we are offsetting our carbon" but "we know this is bad for the environment so we are trying to contribute to a better world by also investing in X".

Carbon credits can be a reasonable way to help richer nations help poorer, more polluting nations transition to greener alternatives.

However more often than not they are indeed "a scam". Credits have been around since the 70's and have had questionable impact on the growing climate crisis.

If I were a benevolent dictator of a nation, I would take the following approach:

    - Start with the legal requirement for every business to understand their Scope-1 and Scope-2 emissions. Scope-3 will need to also be understood in the future to ensure no loopholes but that's much easier when the supply chain understands their scopes 1&2;
    - Set a net-zero target for all businesses that requires overall emissions reductions and leverages carbon removal for any avoidable emissions;
    - Treat emissions accounting the same way as financial accounting, requiring annual submission to the state and penalizing fraud/mis-representation;
    - Offer tax incentives for carbon credits however set stricter standards (credits must have a certain amount additionality and/or be demonstrating help to reduce emissions of other businesses within this imginary nation);
    - Carbon credits cannot be used to reach the net-zero targets set above;
    - Future goals/incentives can encourage businesses to

The overall aim is to highlight the hidden costs of unsustainable practices, effecitvely eliminating the green premium that currently exists for more sustainable products/services. Companies should then prefer cleaner practices and suppliers to keep their own costs down which accelerates the fly wheel towards a sustainable future.

Now of course there are issues (e.g. the supply of CDR is small and expensive or the availability of clean energy) with this approach, however nations can help encourage development here (e.g. with the IRA) as well as private investors. Then of course there is the consumer society to contend with who wants lots of cheap produce but that's why the "dictator" part...

This article seems to have a climate contradiction when it comes to "credits" versus "removal".

"carbon credits" are the most common, cheap, questionable credits from verifiers such as Verra and Gold Standard.

"CDR" is "carbon dioxide removal" which actively sucks and stores CO2 from the atmosphere. This is an emerging space pioneered in the private markets by companies such as Stripe, Microsoft and Shopify and the Frontier fund.

This article mentions "CDR credits" (and is on a website "carboncredits.com") and the partner Aspiration is slim on the details on their website.

As far as I can gather, Meta has purchased 7M of traditional, nature (i.e. planting trees) "carbon credits" and the role of Aspiration is to use "satellite imagery", "AI" and measurements to monitor the progress of this growth.

It is worth noting that Meta is also a participant in the Frontier CDR fund that is helping stimulate the negative emissions market.

My two cents on this: I think nature based solutions have an important role to play in restoring ecosystems and sequestering carbon. However I'm skeptical of the need to invest so much in the monitoring & verification of the vegetation growth. It feels this is mostly for companies to feel they are getting something for their money rather than trusting organisations to help nature. Instead it would be a better use to turn these technological monitoring solutions on to finding deforestation and ecological damage to limit that.

a few clarifications (in the industry but not involved with this deal):

* carbon removal credits are a subset of carbon credits

* they are generally considered higher-quality than most other credits (which are "avoided emissions"). This is because, for example, turning on a direct air capture machine, is clearly something that would not happen without the sale of carbon credits.

* there's not always a clear line between carbon removal credits and non-removal (ie "avoided emissions").

* unfortunately the carbon credits that have come under the most fire (nature-based solutions like forestry) are also, technically, closer to being "carbon removal" -- and some sellers play up that ambiguity, to their advantage.

Although most in the CDR industry don't refer to their negative emissions tonnage as 'credits'.

Continuing the DACS example, they are not issuing 'carbon credits' that are verified by Verra or Gold Standard. There is no existing standard for verifying removals.

I would say the majority of the CDR industry is trying to distance themselves from the term 'credit' as it implies a 1:1 relationship however reductions and removals just can't be seen as the same.

The best deep dive on the implementation of carbon credits, in my view, was this recent documentary produced by ABC's Four Corners

So many competing interests. It's an insanely complex issue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7x4TWazWJg

They're bullshit. Both Meta and carbon offsets.

The only way to reduce using the sky as a communal sewer is to either stop emissions or capture the crap already in the air until the rate is net negative.

Meta has amazing engineering, but they just have comically bad marketing and PR. More and more people are realizing that carbon credits are just a scam compared to a decade ago

John Oliver with a quite informative video about why many carbon offsets/carbon credits schemes are most likely not genuine in their attempts to offset carbon emissions.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0

Completely meaningless virtue signalling. This will contribute zilch to combatting the climate crisis. Lame. This is a tax write-off, right?

Any business expense is a tax write off, in the common parlance. Businesses are still better off not spending the money, but you’re right that they get somewhat of a tax benefit, meaning that they bear only part of the burden, and the government effectively kicks in the other portion.

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

Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes.

Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. Nuclear energy is both expensive and dangerous, and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn’t mean it’s clean. Renewable energy is better for the environment, the economy, and doesn’t come with the risk of a nuclear meltdown.

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/issues...

Carbon offsets are still an accounting scam.

If they are, a source with less antipathy to the practical nuclear alternative would be more compelling. Instead Greenpeace espouses a dogmatic position on both issues.

I don't make a blanket judgment on a claim based on some other claim. GP's stance on nuclear has nothing to do with the fact that carbon offsets are an accounting scam designed to virtue signal to the public and allow these mega corporations to continue with business as usual.

> ... doesn’t come with the risk of a nuclear meltdown.

I would love to see what they say about the ecology disaster from dam/hydroplant, air flow problem from wind mill, or dirty mining for solar panels.

One of these things is not like the other...

It's a little odd to describe taxes that aren't paid as a government contribution.

Sorry, former tax lawyer. We tend to be fairly candid about the way the tax system works.

How else would you describe it?

It's the same as if the government collected taxes from you, then paid you to do whatever thing you did

I'd describe it as the government letting you do what you want with more money than it normally takes from you.

If you had an employer that required you to pay it half your salary in January and gave it back to you in December along with the other half, would you say that it was kicking in half your salary for you to spend as you please?

Carbon credits are pointless greenwashing. Whatever helps people think they’re making a difference without actually inconveniencing themselves.

Carbon credits are an important way to pay for things there's no other way to pay for. I work with Recoolit to prevent refrigerant emissions (more at https://www.recoolit.com/our-work) and there's literally no other way to pay for our work, which can prevent gigatons of CO2e

My take on this specific example is that when a device is found to be leaking refrigerant, the owner, installer, and manufacturer should all be fined.

Personally, I think what you guys are doing is awesome.

The problem I have with carbon credits is that it's just as easy for you to take the refrigerant and just release it into the atmosphere. Or you could just take the carbon credits and no do anything. Or you make some honest effort for half the credits, but then not do anything for half of the other credits you sell.

Who audits you? Who regulates your carbon credits?

Or carbon credits can more like a rent rather than a more permanent solution: "We'll pay the farmers to not burn these acres of the amazon rain forest for another year." What happens when the farmers want 10x more money next year? Are you going to pay them?

I would like a source on how it is useless greenwashing. I work in an investment banks that take investor money and turn them into solar farms that we then sell for massive profits. Sometimes we build entirely new farms, sometimes we buy old ones and renew them, which thanks to advances in tech is also very profitable.

Anyway, paying for these things is a complicated process which among other things like favourable loans involve a bunch of subsidies. Some come from governments, some come from NGOs like carbon credits. I’ll be the first to admit that NGOs are absolute amateurs compared to government support, and it would be much, much, healthier for the climate financing if Facebook were paying a climate tax and not buying carbon credits. But, and this is really important, that’s obviously not as easy as it sounds. It would require an EU and US level corporation of their respective member states to prevent companies from playing each state or country out against each other. That will probably happen eventually, but in the mean time these NGOs help enable progress. It’s not optimal, there’s a lot of issues with some of them cheating or skimming, but it’s still better than doing nothing. World change is this complicated mix of policy, public opinion and money, and while you may get on a box in speakers corner and yell at this, it’s simply how the world operates and will continue to operate for long enough that you’ll have to play into the system if you want to make an impact. If something better comes along at some point, great, but what is the current alternative? For Meta it would likely be to do nothing. Public opinion, corporate image and their internal culture are important to them, but it’s it like they have an issue doing bad things when it’s necessary for them to make money

Now, the reason I ask for a source on carbon credits being usless is genuine. Because as I said, some of these NGO concepts are frauds, and if Meta just bought 7m frauds then I think we would all like to know. If it’s just “like your opinion, man” then that is alright too. I think it’s fair to call a lot of these things for public relations as it would likely be better for the climate if Meta just didn’t build their new datacenter.

I just dig a study done for a joint article by The Guardian and Die Zeit , using different data sources [0], that concludes as much as 90% of carbon credits might be worthless.

[0]: https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=q...

This subject triggers generally mid-brow responses from people that have gotten far enough in the insight porn genre that they realize that the carbon offset / credit markets are not entirely well-managed and have decided that offsets are totally bogus.

If you're someone legitimately interested in the subject, I suggest you avoid this comment thread. Very few informed participants. Mostly blog post outrage candidates.

If you would like to compare, I have a few ChatGPT HN comments generated here which you can compare with the rest of the thread to see if you are served well by reading human responses: https://pastebin.com/yrhxqRkc

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