jackdeansmith

Even an EV powered 100% by coal is creating less emissions than a gas powered vehicle, the reason for this is that electric drivetrains are very efficient.

I've seen a decent amount of extension cord -> street parking rigs in the Seattle area. Seems fine for trickle charging but I sure as hell wouldn't use a no-name generic extension cord from amazon.

I dig the idea of self reliance and preparedness, but like you pointed out, fossil fuels and small generators solve the problem really well. In most places in the US, the grid is pretty reliable so optimizing the system for those handful of days/year doesn't seem prudent. Granted, some places (looking at you California) have a lot of work to do on reliability.

100% agree about grid modernization and resilience being high priorities, but as I pointed out in another comment, the economies of scale for renewables are really really massive (utility scale solar is about half the unit cost of residential and commercial rooftop solar). Transmitting power long distance also partially solves intermittence problems with renewables by allowing overcapacity in one region to power extra demand in another. A bunch of good points for sure, but if I had to bet, I would guess that the future of our energy system involves far more long distance transmission and large installations.

In the US at least, transmission loss seems to be on order of 5% of total energy distributed. Source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3#:~:text=Th....

The economies of scale seem to be much larger. For example, utility scale solar seems to be about half the unit cost compared to residential and commercial solar: https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.ht...

Why de-centralized power generation? I was under the impression that the electrical distribution system is very efficient in the US and economies of scale make large scale renewables much cheaper.

The term you're looking for is "enhanced weathering"

Plastic recycling is mostly B.S., it's difficult and so energy intensive that it's usually better for the environment to landfill the old plastic and make new stuff. Metal and paper recycling is very environmentally sound though.

> Perhaps the lockdown, no-travel policies should be rescinded, given the news regarding the vaccines.

Exactly the opposite, with a good vaccine only a few months away, putting everything on pause makes even more sense.

> "And have neglected to acknowledge that many of our seniors — the most vulnerable among us — don’t even want that kind of ‘safety’ because it costs precious moments with their families."

> "They already achieved quantity in life. What most of them want more than anything is quality."

I'll tell you one thing, spending your last moments in a chaotic hospital where your loved ones probably wont event be allowed near you, isolated from human contact by layers of plastic and respirators is NOT the definition of quality I have in mind.

If sin were a globally distributed problem where:

1. the aggregate amount of sin in the world caused suffering

2. indulgences actually reduced the aggregate amount of sin in the world

then the indulgence system would make perfect sense. I agree there are problems with offsets and many of them aren't credible, but this indulgences metaphor has never made sense to me.

If Tesla makes a hot hatch I will buy it immediately, don't want to get my hopes up about this ever coming to the US through

WFH has positive externalities due to less transportation demand, if your goal is to provide assistance to low income people this is a much worse way to do it than a simple progressive tax/redistribution scheme.

Doesn't seem like there's a lot of research, but the one study I could find seems to agree that specifically the climate impact of natural fur is quite a bit higher than faux fur: https://www.cedelft.eu/en/publications/download/1538

He runs this website which claims that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming: https://globalwarmingsolved.com/faq/#physics. Calling him anything more than a crank is extremely generous

This is the organization pushing this "research": https://www.ceres-science.com/index.html

I'll leave the hopefully scientifically literate crowd here to see how reputable they are. I skimmed the paper, it seems to be making a "there's no free lunch"/"renewables aren't magic free energy" so let's just keep using fossil fuels argument. None of the authors are economists, physicists, or climate scientists, yet they make assertions that are very much the domain of those experts. I expect better from the HN crowd.

Not affiliated with stripe here, but I'm guessing because tree planting can't scale up to the level of removal that's necessary and renewable energy is already pretty far down the cost learning curve. Stripe has limited capital compared to govts and large institutions and is being strategic about which projects need early investment to bring down costs.

Even one we reach net-zero emissions (which I agree, is proving to be an incredibly hard task politically) we still have the problem of a century of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Getting our climate back to pre-industrial is going to require carbon capture ramping up dramatically later this century.

These projects will only make sense to operate at truly large scale once we've already shut down all the coal plants. I think what stripe is trying to do here is make early investments so that when we really need it to scale, the costs are low and the tech is mature.

Somewhere in the middle I'd guess, I'd say more like photovoltaics about ten years ago. There's still a lot of room for improving efficiency and manufacturing cheap hardware.

As far as nature based solutions go, this study on the potential for afforestation is a good place to start: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.14887/. Simply put, there isn't enough land to plant enough trees to get us out of this mess. That doesn't mean that planting trees isn't useful, I think the paper makes a good case for why it's cost effective and buys time, but it isn't enough alone.

My personal take is that the cheap carbon credits are indeed a more cost effective use of money right now, but it's low hanging fruit that we will run out of soon.

If sin were a global problem where the total amount of sin in the world caused suffering, and indulgences actually reduced the total amount of sin in the world, the system of indulgences would make perfect sense.

> They paid $775/ton. Coal is $30/ton.

That's the whole problem, the cost of coal needs to come up and that's something that's in policy makers hands. Stripe is trying to reduce that $775 by investing early in these projects.

> Capture requires energy that could be used to reduce carbon emissions demand. 2nd law of thermodynamics says you can’t win this game.

Assuming all energy comes from coal, which isn't even remotely close to true.

> The best carbon capture technology is plants and plankton.

Plants and plankton are useful for capturing carbon and storing that biomass, but that's not a long-term storage strategy. All plants die and decay, returning carbon to the carbon cycle. If we want a long term solution, we need to put carbon back into the geosphere where we got it from.

> the earth can heal itself if we stop polluting it

Nope, we're currently moving gigatons of carbon from the geosphere to the atmosphere and a significant amount of that carbon will remain for tens of thousands of years. If we miraculously stop emitting tomorrow, we wont have fixed the problem, we would just stop it from getting worse. Source: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2010/12/common-climate-mi...

If we want to return the climate to pre-industrial, we need aggressive emissions cuts to net zero AND massive carbon removal later this century.

Trees eventually rot or burn, carbon stored in the biosphere can be a useful "capacitor" for reducing atmospheric carbon, but in the long run we really need to put it back in the geosphere where we got it from.

It depends on what you mean by offset. If you're okay with carbon stored in the biosphere by trees then there are plenty of programs. If you want to put carbon back in the geosphere (since trees eventually rot or burn) sending money to climeworks is the best thing available right now. Their DAC + geologic storage approach is expensive at around $1k/ton, but highly credible.

> the grid is still awash with coal power!

Not really, coal is quickly vanishing from the US electricity sector due to cheap natural gas and renewables. I see no reason that trend won't continue. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

> So, does it makes sense to deploy this in areas with a ton of green energy available on the grid? Maybe... but those areas have lower PPM carbon in the air, so it's not the right place to run the machine anyway.

Global carbon dioxide concentrations are not evenly distributed, but the distribution has much more to do with climate patterns than where the emissions happened. The atmosphere is fairly well-mixed. Across the whole globe, concentrations are significantly higher than pre-industrial levels. Source: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/82142/global-patter...

> Perhaps instead of all this wasted effort and engineering time, we could just replace the damned coal plants and stop emitting carbon itself.

Once the world reaches net-zero emissions, we can't celebrate and say we've stopped the problem. We just stopped it from getting worse. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, if we want to return the climate to pre-industrial, massive negative emissions will eventually be necessary. Engineering work on negative emissions will not be wasted unless we give up on that goal completly.

> The ONLY solution is to take carbon spending to ~0 and only then focus on removing it from the air.

I object to the "only then". Cutting emissions is absolutely the top priority, but we're going to need to scale up carbon removal dramatically by around mid-century. By starting soon we can bring costs down and get the tech ready for when we really need it to scale.

This article makes a major mistake when addressing the benefits of a traditional 401k. When you contribute, you avoid paying taxes at your marginal rate and when you withdraw (for most people at least, who will fund their retirement primarily through 401k withdraw) you pay taxes at your overall rate. The article also treats tax uncertainty as if it only applies to income taxes while it's completely plausible that taxes on capital gains could be increased in the future as well.

> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free

Payments are also about establishing trust, which goes wrong a lot. You can in practice make payments very cheap with some cryptocurrency schemes, but don't get fraud protection, chargebacks, and customer service that credit cards provide (unless you introduce another party in the middle taking a cut).

It seems to me the innovation required to actually reduce costs would replace the credit card system, not build on top of it.

You need battery mass to capture energy on decent, why lug that mass around when there's cheap energy available down on the ground where you're going?