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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.

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> Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.

I would have said that it's something done to improve the health of the planet, but sure.

You don't make a billion dollars thinking like that. Dude's playing a different game.

Business doesn't have goals beyond money. Any good it does is completely incidental.

That's a wild oversimplification

Sometimes it's good to look beyond myriad of narratives to see what actually makes a thing tick.

Would you please like to tell everyone how that's oversimplified?

> Would you please like to tell everyone how that's oversimplified?

People aren’t one dimensional. Simplifying businesses into perfectly-rational automatons is high-school economics.

Businesses aren't people and people's motivations aren't businesses motivations. Business are automatons, just running on carbon instead of silicon and if they are not perferct they are just bad.

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who saw the profound irony in this. I don’t think anybody of their own free will would pay someone to inject processed agricultural waste into the ground. And honestly, I’m not that upset that bureaucratic inertia has obstructed a process where working people get tax farmed for 50% of their earnings to give people like this his next “multibillion-dollar exit“. Especially when the benefits require so much confidence in extremely simple models of an extremely complex system that they are essentially articles of faith.

Now the cynic in me reads this article is an appeal to his creditors. Maybe they thought that because he made money in software, he must just smarter than everyone else and would clearly be a virtuoso in any market, kind of like a Buckaroo Bonzai. However, now their millions have vanished with nothing to show for it, and he needs to convince his creditors that it’s not he who is wrong, but the world who is wrong.

> company's business is regulatory arbitrage

This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.

It’s not pork because I like it?

The problem is that dealing with regulators takes years and millions of dollars, reducing competition and societal benefit. He's quoting $200m in additional health costs borne mostly by Medicare/Medicaid. Regulations aren't a useful part of the system if they're gunked up.

The thing is, we really don't need people competing at selling carbon credits because it's an industry that literally only exists due to badly written regulations so it's hard to come up with a ton of sympathy.

Saying it exists only due to badly written regulations is rather bold assertion. It exists, because companies damage what isn't theirs. It is a regulation to protect property rights.

Companies are polluting shared resources. Classic tradegy of commons.

Credits is one of things we have come up that does work.

Sure, we could just ban it outright and say goodbye to industrial civilization. Most people don't agree with that.

Doesn't that go away as a cost if the government stops paying for healthcare? I heard they were doing this in the US?

The government pays for healthcare for about 43% of Americans. The rest mostly get it from work.

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