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Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

I've voluntarily paid for carbon offsets for every flight I've taken since 2018 or so (it's a checkbox on the airline site I use most), and the added cost to me is really minimal.

And yes, I do realize carbon offsets are sort-of a scam, but willingness to pay for them is sort-of a signal as well, and it's the best one can do, I guess? I also realize that commercial passenger aviation is not a significant polluter, percentage-wise, and that the industry already has incentives to improve their carbon footprint (simply by reducing fuel demand), which it has been readily taking advantage of as soon as it was feasible (737-NG is very much a thing, as are similar Airbus upgrades).

But still, 'polluter pays' is a sound concept. The global (water-based) shipping fleet would do good to take notice...

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Water-based shipping is extremely efficient. (However, they should be forced to install pollution controls on their internal combustion engines instead of just injecting raw exhaust into the ocean.)

Of course, reducing their carbon footprint would also be good, but it's currently only 3% of global emissions:

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/maritime-shipping...

The carbon impact of the stuff on the ships is likely much higher. For instance, this BBC article breaks it down for food, and, for ocean-shipped stuff, the carbon emissions of transporting the food is rounding error:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...

The only real exceptions to the rule involve highly-perishable food that has to be flown in next day, but that doesn't have anything to do with ocean transport.

As far as I can tell, carbon offsets are a complete scam (vs. putting the money directly into stuff that reduces carbon production).

If anyone knows how to pay an existing company to extract carbon from the atmosphere, and store it in a biologically inactive form for > 1000 years, then I'd love to hear about it.

>>If anyone knows how to pay an existing company to extract carbon from the >>atmosphere, and store it in a biologically inactive form for > 1000 years, >>then I'd love to hear about it.

They're called trees.

If global warming were about reducing carbon dioxide, we would be planting them in every available square inch of open ground.

We could but global warming makes even that pretty difficult. Trees don't fare so well in droughts or extreme heat.

Though I suppose there's still plenty of areas that are viable and some that were previously too cold becoming moderate.

But trees are also not super great for carbon capture. At night they exhale CO2 as we do and they don't absorb a lot. Even if we did cover every practical inch with them it would still take so long to capture it all that the worst of climate change would have long happened.

    > it's the best one can
    > do, I guess?

You could just cut out the middle man and pay to sequester carbon directly, why do that with an airline at the point of sale?

Some quick searching suggests that on hour of air travel is approximately 100 kg/hr of CO^2 per person.

A 2x4 that's 12ft long weighs around 10 kg, burning a kg of wood releases around 1.5kg of CO^2.

So, to a first approximation if you take a coast to coast flight in the US you'll come out around even if you buy around 35 (100x5.5/15) 2x4's, and then find some way to store those permanently.

That's around a 10ft wide wall of 2x4's stacked side-by-side.

Of course buying processed lumber just to store it is really inefficient, which is where carbon credits/offsets etc. come in.

>and it's the best one can do, I guess?

There's a ton of things you can do with greater impact than sending money to some rainforest that has been there for 1,000s of years anyway.

Also, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed....

> the added cost to me is really minimal. And yes, I do realize carbon offsets are sort-of a scam, but willingness to pay for them is sort-of a signal as well

Do you not see the contradiction? They are minimal because they are a scam. And it isn't that some are legitimate and others are scams. Carbon offsets fundamentally misrepresent the actual costs of carbon. The cost of getting someone to promise not to cut down trees that would have emitted 1T of CO2 if clear-cut and burned in the open air is fundamentally different from the fractional cost of redesigning air travel to not emit 1T of CO2 in the first place.

Think about it: Are there enough trees about to be clear-cut and burned to offset all the other emissions we need to cut? If so, we could just prevent climate change by saving all the forests. We can't. We have to actually reduce emissions by far more than offsets are saving. In the meantime, offsets create incentives for people to actively plan to burn carbon that they otherwise wouldn't have burned, so that they can be paid to not burn it. This doesn't reduce emissions, it is just an accounting trick. It doesn't lead to a net reduction in carbon.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/climate/offset-carbon-foo...:

"But the biggest problems are structural, related to something called additionality.

That’s technical jargon for a simple concept: A carbon offset needs to fund reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If you pay someone to preserve a grove, but they were never actually planning to cut it down, then you’re not offsetting your emissions. And it’s difficult to establish the facts in these cases with the level of confidence required for offset programs to work.

Part of the appeal of carbon offsets is the notion that it’s possible to meaningfully combat climate change while living our lives and structuring our society in the same way we always have. For that reason, some experts see carbon offsets as actively damaging, inasmuch as they give people cover to avoid reducing emissions at the source."

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