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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

The plan that was shelved was about carbon offsets, these have not proven to be particularly effective so maybe not too big a deal.

The greater loss is that the new CEO had already scaled down Shell's investment in renewables, setting a target of 4.5% of the total investments in renewables by 2025[0].

Some other Oil&Gas companies seem to be a bit more inclined to actually invest in renewables, or at least pay lip service to it, e.g. ENI aims at 30% by 2025[1].

Remains to be seen how much will actually be invested.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-boost-dividend... [1] https://www.eni.com/en-IT/media/press-release/2022/03/pr-cap...

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If there are x offsets available, and demand is x + 100, then when Shell buys offsets, they're not really fixing the problem at all, they're just shifting blame right? They're saying "since we spent this money on the offsets, our carbon emissions were good (or at least 'less bad'), but the other company that couldn't afford or wouldn't bother with the offsets is bad even though there were only enough offsets for one of us".

Honestly, this upsets people?

Buying offsets is not shifting the blame, it's paying someone else to fix the problem. The reason for that should be that you either have no cost effective way to offset the carbon yourself, or there is a very attractive market for the offsets.

If demand were x+100, and theoretically some company wouldn't be able to afford to buy the offsets, it wouldn't somehow have ended up with the blame of Shell, they would just have found no one to solve their problem for them and would have to fix it themselves.

Of course this is assuming that whoever is selling the offsets is actually performing the task of carbon offsetting effectively, something that many believe is not actually happening so that puts things into even more murky waters.

The increase in demand drives up the price of offsets, which increases supply and investment in better carbon capture techniques and scaling. Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage, and enhanced weathering as offset generating technologies that are currently too expensive to be widespread, but with higher carbon prices would become practical.

> The increase in demand drives up the price of offsets,

Except there are limits which the demand, for the most part, can't overcome.

> Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage,

All of these things are energy intensive, aren't they? So as energy becomes more expensive, so do they. Demand never gets quite so high that it's worth it to pay for this, because the price is always rising. There's another alternative in such situations... "just don't buy carbon offsets". The PR hit's cheaper after all.

A lot of carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere, something needs to do it at scale. The IPCC says we’ll need global cumulative net-negative emissions of 380 GtCO2 from 2050 to 2100 to return to 1.5°C after a likely overshoot. Focusing solely on emissions reduction will lead us directly to a global warming induced dystopia.

the bigger problem with carbon offsets is that the underlying system that is supposed to be backing the units aren't actually offsetting any carbon. wendover has a nice video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

Is anyone surprised by this?

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