4,381 karma · joined January 14, 2011
steve at snewman dot net
https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/ – AI blog https://climateer.substack.com/ – climate blog
And no, definitely the complication was not worth it in the long run. :-) That project got way more complicated than anyone wanted (not that there's anything unusual about that).
(IIRC, the requirement stemmed from the need to support the various applications that were being folded into / integrated with Google Drive, such as Photos which of course allows a photo to appear in multiple albums.)
The emissions from a coal plant somewhere across the ocean affects my weather here in California. In an anarchy, are you saying I would get a voice in the operation of that remote coal plant? How would that work, exactly?
1. Party A is planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as cutting down an acre of forest, or operating their diesel bus.
2. Party B is also planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as operating their cement plant.
3. Party B pays party A to halt / avoid their carbon-emitting activity.
Note that nowhere in this scenario is anyone removing any CO2 from the atmosphere; they're just jockeying over who gets to keep emitting.
If you're thinking, "but merely by existing, the rainforest is actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere", then that's a separate, complicated topic and not what I'm trying to address here. If you prefer, strike out "preserve an acre of forest" and substitute "replace my diesel bus with an electric bus".
> what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2?
Again, to avoid getting bogged down in complicated analysis of the carbon dynamics of forests, let's focus on the diesel-bus example. Each year, I can pay the bus owner to continue leasing an electric bus, rather than the diesel bus, for that year. I can keep "offsetting" my cement plant forever.
But I see a lot of companies trumpeting use of offsets in the context of their own individual plan to achieve reduced or zero emissions. This is where the problems come in:
1. It is often presented as a a complete solution, rather than a helpful interim step. A company announces plans to offset their emissions, and then declares victory. But it is only a half victory; between the offset seller and the offset purchaser, only half of the total emissions have been addressed.
2. It removes the incentive to start developing solutions for the more difficult categories of emissions. It will take time to decarbonize, say, steel manufacturing. But we need to start developing pilot projects today. If the steel manufacturers can say "we're addressing climate change, we've purchased offsets", then no one is paying for those pilot projects.
I shared some more thoughts about this in an older post: https://climateer.substack.com/p/focus-on-2050.
The problem with carbon offsets is not some moral question about my offloading my guilt to another party. The problem is that there's double-counting. Going back to the scenario, "suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop". Let's break that down:
1. Initially, X is emitting greenhouse gases. I'm not sure moral terminology is helpful here, but for the sake of discussion, we can say X is "guilty".
2. Initially, Y is also emitting greenhouse gases, they are also "guilty".
3. X makes a payment to Y, and Y halts their emissions.
If we say that Y is no longer guilty, because they stopped emitting, then we must say that X is still guilty.
If we say that X is no longer guilty, because they purchased an offset from Y, then we must say that Y is still guilty: they started out guilty, and they sold off the rights to their compensating action (halting emissions) to X.
We started with two guilty parties, and only one compensating / atoning action was performed. There is no coherent framework in which it can be said that both parties are now innocent.
I agree that some carbon offsets / credits are "high quality", i.e. represent actual, durable reductions in someone's emissions. They can help with the important projects you mention.
When the result is to durably sequester carbon from the atmosphere, I also agree that this is a good contribution toward net zero. I don't know anything about mangrove planting, but that sounds like it might fit. Certainly the Climeworks project someone mentioned elsewhere in this discussion fits.
The problem is with "avoided emissions" offsets. Suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop. That's a half solution, but it is often treated as a complete solution: X looks good because they bought an offset, and Y looks good because they're no longer emitting anything. That's the shell game.
Concretely, let's consider rainforest preservation. This is critically important, and plausibly (I don't actually know a lot about it) requires payments to relevant actors in places like Brazil. So yes, as a society, we need to come up with money for those payments. But we need to come up with that money in a way that doesn't let some other polluter permanently off the hook for their emissions. If an airline pays to protect some rainforest, says "hey look an offset", and declares victory, how will we ever address the airline's emissions? We've done some good in the short run (we accelerated the effort to preserve the rainforest), but then we arrive at a dead end.
Cap-and-trade systems avoid this problem, if all of the buyers and sellers of credits are part of the system, and the cap is gradually reduced to zero. But if a company says "my plan to reach net zero relies heavily on purchasing offsets", outside of a cap-and-trade system that eventually squeezes avoided-emissions offsets to zero, then we're back to the shell game.
I agree that offsets based on sequestration, as you mention, are a completely legitimate tool. I mentioned that briefly in the post, but didn't dwell on it as the post was getting too long already.
The deep problem with the more common "avoided emissions" credits is not that they're low quality (e.g. "protecting" a forest that might just burn down) -- though some are indeed low quality. The deep problem is that if I pay you to halt your emissions, who is going to pay me to halt mine? That's the shell game aspect. We start out with two emitters, we halt one, we never do anything about the other. One emitter is "done" because they're no longer emitting, and the other emitter is "done" because they've purchased an offset. The model is broken at its core.
Offsets do allow for a certain amount of optimization, which is a good thing. However, cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax, are better ways of reducing emissions while allowing for optimization. And unlike offsets, these other approaches can actually take us to net zero.
It's also worth noting that in practice, regardless of the policy frameworks we apply, we will not get to net zero unless we start climbing the learning curve for every GHG-emitting sector of the economy (except for those where the best long-term solution is hard offsets via sequestration). A flaw in all of the models that allow optimization via trading of credits (offsets, cap-and-trade) is that they allow us to defer those critical early steps. If all the cement plants buy offsets for the next 10 years, then we don't start learning how to decarbonize cement.
> a prohibitive "net zero" goal, which is neither achievable nor a worthwhile target.
Citation needed.
The mainstream consensus – as embodied in, for example, the IPCC reports – is that it is extremely important that we get to net zero greenhouse emissions. In fact, many scenarios envision that we can+should go to net negative emissions for a while, to draw down some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere.
And with the ferocious progress in solar, wind, batteries, and an exploding plethora of other fields, net zero is starting to look very feasible. It's too bad we didn't start sooner, but we will get there.
This addresses the arctic circle and hunter-gatherer examples. Obviously there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in life. Solar panels won't work above the arctic circle, EVs won't work in an area with no roads, hydropower won't work in a desert. But if I install a solar panel, that doesn't interfere with your ability to also install a solar panel.
"Not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries" would be a real problem if true, but my understanding is that it is not true. Of course we have a lot of work to do in developing mineral sources, scaling up battery production, and so forth. But I have not seen a credible source indicating that it cannot be done. Do you have any such pointers? (The actual trends so far have been very strongly in the opposite direction: the more batteries we produce, the cheaper they get.)
As for this:
> He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will.
The limitations of offsets are different than the limitations of, say, solar power. It's absolutely true that solar power can only be part of the solution, but when you put solar power together with wind and storage and (pick your favorites) geothermal, nuclear, etc., you can get to a complete solution for power generation. In this picture, solar is providing an important contribution.
Offsets, conversely, cannot be composed with other tools to achieve a complete solution. If a cement plant operator pays to preserve a forest, who is going to address the (ongoing!) emissions from the cement plant? Not the cement plant operator; they already did their part, they purchased an offset.
Even for jet travel, we may be able to whittle away at the problem with electric planes (or trains!) for short routes, and hydrogen for medium routes. Long routes may have to rely on artificial carbon-based fuels, as you say.
If you want to say that the airline is not at fault, because they purchased an offset, then the cement plant operator is at fault: they never offset their own emissions, they only offset the emissions of the airline.
1. How long will the carbon remain bound / out of the atmosphere?
2. How quickly can you scale, and what are the limiting factors that (if eased) would allow you to scale faster? (Hiring, refining the tech, refining the business proposition, finding customers, building hardware, ...)
I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages, are game changers when you're trying to manage a large collection of information.
Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm not sure whether this is literally true or just something about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it makes a difference.
As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's not very good at handling cross-block selections, using cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor, but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put some energy into this.
The Princess Bride (even better than the movie)
Agreed that net metering was deliberately designed as a subsidy, and that there was nothing hidden or underhanded about this, it was (and remains) all quite overt.
And yet. The inspiration for this post was a discussion on my town's email list, where a lot of people were talking about net metering as if it were the natural and obvious way of doing things (and thus were very upset at the proposal to weaken it). They either never heard that it was designed as a subsidy, or have forgotten (whether through motivated reasoning or the simple passage of time).
I think this is a form of tech debt. You have an algorithm that's not adapting to new circumstances, the clean solution is too difficult / expensive, so you just hack some of the parameters of the existing algorithm to give good-enough answers in the current circumstances. Eventually everyone forgets the history and assumes those are the "correct" parameters, and resists changing them even if the system has moved out of the circumstance under which the parameters gave an OK result.
> the author is complaining that the retail price of electricity doesn't reflect the variable costs
I think you mean "doesn't reflect the fixed costs"? And yes, it might have been better if I'd taken the time to introduce the terms "fixed cost" and "variable cost".
This is exactly the point: launch costs are coming down, and there is widespread anticipation that they will start to plummet as the next generation of launchers comes online. If/when Starship (a) becomes available + (b) has any significant competition, launch costs could plummet by an incredible factor.
> Why would a variant which has apparently evolved to evade the vaccine continue to react to prior vaccination?
This is over-simplified. In particular, "react to prior vaccination" is conflating a bunch of different things, involving antibodies, B cells, T cells, etc. My understanding is that (1) such data as we have seems to generally point toward protection-from-infection being badly eroded but protection-from-illness/death being only moderately eroded, (2) if you're boosted, protection is less badly eroded, (3) all of this seems to fit with our general understanding of how the immune system works. I don't have the domain knowledge to unpack that further.
My understanding is that protection-against-infection and protection-against-death rely on different aspects of the immune system. The primary protection against initial infection comes from antibodies, which are narrowly targeted. Other systems are more flexible, but don't kick in quickly enough to ward off a mild infection.
And the takeaway is still: get vaccinated, get boosted.
This is the key point. So many debates about "more X" vs. "less X" when what we mostly need is "better X". Anti-Covid measures; almost any sort of "security"; government programs of all sorts. And, yes, very much regulation.
Scott Alexander has had some nice riffs on this theme, though I can't come up with a specific link at the moment.
> Ben Thompson points out that this is all pretty approximate; ConstitutionDAO will not give its token holders fractionalized ownership of the Constitution...
> Also, not to be like this, but there is an original copy of the Constitution on permanent display at the National Archives; it is already “in the hands of the people,” in the sense that (1) it is owned by the U.S. government and (2) the U.S. government is, when you think about it, sort of a decentralized autonomous organization made up of the citizens of the U.S.? The citizens can kind of tell the government what to do? By voting? When you think about it? I don’t know. I’m sure that in five years ConstitutionDAO token holders will vote to change the Second Amendment to say “putting laser implants in your eyes is now mandatory” and somehow that will have the force of law.