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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

These voluntary carbon offset things are only ever going to be a step in roughly the right direction.

It feels wrong somehow to be trying to turn them into a perfect way for committed individuals to opt into paying the full price for their individual contribution to only one aspect of the problem.

Instead we should perhaps take a step back and try to assign the costs of the whole system to everyone, regardless of whether they want to volunteer to pay more to make things happen faster.

It interacts poorly with EV or heat pump adoption where volunteering to pay for the last 5% of green electricity could tip the balance against those purchases. But buying them would lower your carbon footprint at even much lower percentage of clean electricity.

Are green conscious consumers ready for the complexity of paying for 95% clean energy?

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The easiest approach is to charge for greenhouse gas emissions at the source.

Set the price to be 2x the cost of direct air carbon capture, then put the money in a fund that pays for cheapest environmentally responsible capture first.

This would lead to ev’s and heat pumps being drastically cheaper than older technologies.

While they’re at it, federalize the price gouging oil companies. We have signs at gas stations run by international megacorps here in California complaining that we have the highest fuel taxes in the US. The taxes are listed on the pumps, by law.

If you subtract them out, and compare the results to other states, you’ll find that we’re being price gouged dollars per gallon by the industries.

(The excuse for this is that there was months-long supply chain shock 20+ years ago. Of course, the prices never went down after that shock…)

Anyway, screw them. We have EVs now, and as bad as PG&E’s rates are, it’s still saving us hundreds of dollars a month.

Direct air capture can't be purchased at any price to even soak up 1% of our emissions.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t purchase it for x tons of carbon and use that to set the price.

That’s not how markets work though. For instance, just because one share of AAPL sold at $270 does not mean all 15 billion outstanding shares can be sold for that price. If a sell order was put in for even 10k shares you’d quickly find out that you might find a 270 bid for some of that but not all. Order flow is an important tool , bid/ask is misleading without it

Setting the price that high would mean starvation for a lot of people and this isn’t feasible. Ramping the price up slowly is probably too slow to avoid the worst tipping points, so we need pricing signals together with other policies for the most effective climate action.

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