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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

When they say "commercial"... How does this thing make a profit? Carbon permits? Negative electricity costs? Or is it in fact some kind of non profit?

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It seems companies (eg Microsoft being the big customer in this example) pay to offset their carbon emissions so they can use that fact for marketing purposes.

Last I read about this topic, it was way more efficient to just buy better ovens for Ruanda and Nigeria [1] instead of trying to capture carbon. Was there any recent technology advancement that changed this?

1: https://www.atmosfair.de/de/save80/ - just an example, there are many ways of reducing co2 emission.

I'd be hard pressed to find it again, but I remember watching a video years ago talking about the issue of buying new ovens for poor Africans in villages not actually working to reduce carbon as intended because what ended up happening is that they would just use now two stoves, the old one and new one, at the same time instead of tossing the old one and only using the new one. Great in theory and a seemingly easy low-hanging fruit, but may fall apart in practice, unfortunately.

Really? They're stove-limited rather than fuel-limited? Even if so, it's fixable by simply giving them as many of the new stoves as they want. It's merely a marginal inefficiency in the program.

or allow them to trade an old stove for a new one rather than give them for free.

Yes, we need that too.

This happens a lot in climate policy discussions - "what about this other solution?" The answer is always "yes, that too!"

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