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Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

What is their basis for the "Carbon Removed" stat?

Hilarious, should be carbon added by all this unnecessary consumption made easy by them.

Define necessary consumption. You cannot, because everyone's wants, needs, and desires are different. People will consume. If they do, behaviorally nudge them in ways to offset the harm (verified carbon offsets; not junk ones of course). Similarly to how certain cohorts loudly complain that EVs are not a component of a climate change mitigation plan. Almost 90M cars a year are sold globally; no one cares if they don't think they're the answer, they're going to get sold, so make sure the units that move are EVs.

TLDR Provide solutions not opinions, opinions are like startup ideas without executive behind them: worthless. Direct air capture is the gold standard for carbon offsets. It is expensive, hopefully it will get cheaper, but we must start somewhere until the entire supply chain electrifies.

Well you dismissed the idea of defining it before the commenter had a chance, so are you really making an honest argument here? If a policymaker wanted to ban “unnecessary consumption” they would come up with a list of what that is and whether your purchase would be banned or not would depend on whether you’re buying something from that list, which they can also incrementally grow over time.

I encourage someone to try it to speed run their political career to provide us the natural experiment we can observe.

Constituents will accept taxes and other disincentives (see alcohol), they will not tolerate some political rep telling them what is unnecessary consumption and banning their desired products (broadly speaking, there are always exceptions and nuance).

Walk the pavement like you would for a day running for office, ask your potential voters if they would like this policy. I’ve canvassed multiple times for US political reps, so I have an idea what this looks like.

A small amount of fiat to offset harm is far more palatable. Look at this dashboard spin. Don’t yell at humanity, provide it better options.

The politician’s career is irrelevant. We’re just talking about whether it is possible to define and you’ve been given a rational response suggesting it might be. Heck, it might be possible to ask AI to generate a list of items or criteria.

Many EU governments and the UK have defined lists of untaxed goods, mostly staple foods.

The UK:

> Food and drink for human consumption is usually zero-rated but some items are always standard-rated. These include catering, alcoholic drinks, confectionery, crisps and savoury snacks, hot food, sports drinks, hot takeaways, ice cream, soft drinks and mineral water.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-...

If you had two chickens, should you give you neighbor one?

Can you define it then? Are Kitchen appliances unnecessary spending? What about designer clothes? VR Headsets? Video Game Consoles?

Sure. You can start by making unnecessary consumption mean “net pollutant” products where the cost of producing them and the waste they create exceed the value that customers pay for or gain from the product, so easy suspects are the types of inventory which are always left over and unsold even during huge sales and promo periods.

They are just pointing out how funny it is to have any sort of environmental savings metric for a sales event known for impulse FOMO purchases.

But that’s the entire point. It isn’t funny, it is legitimate effort to offset the harm caused by consumer demand that won’t go away. My problem is that it is flippant, ignores the nuance, and is borderline ignorant. It has no place here, whereas the math around the topic does. Curiosity and discovery over shitposting.

I agree, but there's another side of the coin that's perhaps best demonstrated by "Climate-friendly" burger patties. We'll do anything to roleplay that we care instead of the hard things.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/8/23863100/tyson-c...

That said, I don't think responsibility falls on Shopify here. But I did find myself nodding along with them as I find myself scrolling Amazon for "deals" on things I don't even want!

> consumer demand that won’t go away

We created it, it didn't exist even 100 years ago... let's not act like this is some sort of universal law we have to abide to

Id define it as people's needs and not their wants and desires

The site needs to be hosted without TLS at the very least.

Blaming a reduction in transaction costs for increased consumption is seriously missing the mark. I don't know if there's data for this, but I can imagine that by improving the online shopping experience Shopify could have reduced the amount of unnecessary physical shopping trips thereby indirectly reducing carbon emissions.

This analysis out of MIT would support that theory: https://ctl.mit.edu/pub/thesis/environmental-analysis-us-onl...

Fortunately, you are not the dictator of "necessary" consumption.

Looking at Fig 2 in the Executive Summary pdf, most of the CO2e emissions for physical shopping is from customer transportation to store - between 50-80% for the various scenarios they considered. For online shopping about 50% of the emissions are from packaging.

The main lessons I see are

- If you drive, then switching to online will reduce emissions by about 30%.

- If you don't drive, and instead bus or walk to shopping stores, then your emissions will be about 10-20% of the car-drivers or online shoppers.

https://www.shopify.com/climate/bfcm (From the link on the dashboard when you click that stat)

> All orders made through our platform over the Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping weekend will ship carbon neutral.

> Here's how it works: A rigorous formula built by Shopify data scientists calculates the estimated carbon emissions for each Black Friday Cyber Monday shipment. We then team up with Shopify Sustainability Fund partners to remove CO2 emissions equal to the BFCM shipping footprint.

> The result? You can ensure carbon-neutral shipping on all of your BFCM orders.

Which is BS, of course. There's no way to really measure this.

Would you mind sharing your credentials and domain expertise on the topic?

Well you can somewhat calculate the CO2 emitted by a parcel shipped from X to Y. Of course it will depend on loads of factors, like did they use a plane, a truck, a barge with one guy sitting inside rowing gently down the stream, etc… so im not sure how exact their numbers will be.

Basically it means nothing anyway, but companies love to tout how “green” they are, dont they?

I get that its virtue signaling but who is the intended audience who would actually believe it and appreciate it?

Good point, better not try.

They basically pay someone else to “remove carbon” and can the throw this magic number in there. So yea…

Why pay someone else when you have your own “carbon removal” program and just pocket the profits?

Of course, you’ll still need to purchase the Certified Genuine Carbon Credit Approved Organic Green Sticker (R) (TM) (501c3) (NGO) (LLC) to prove you are worthy to sequester other people’s consumption sins.

I see lots of criticism in this thread and elsewhere about that carbon removed stat. I would love to see more productive criticism, where people make suggestions on how they could do it better, instead of just criticizing a company of this scale at least doing something. Or examples of companies that are doing a better job of it.

Personally I'd prefer if they didn't call it carbon removed unless they were actually doubling the shipping carbon removal, and they should call it offsets unless it's all coming from some of their direct capture partners (which iirc Shopify does buy from).

>I would love to see more productive criticism, where people make suggestions on how they could do it better

Not do it at all, because it's obviously bullshit. Even in the best of cases, it's a speculative con. The only purpose is to make people feel good about consuming more, which they do to distract from their miserable and alienated existence in late-capitalist society.

> which they do to distract from their miserable and alienated existence in late-capitalist society.

Is that so?

It's a cool thing to add to your company website.

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