I'm partially curious and partially skeptical. Is this "a step in the right direction" in the same way as recycling? (i.e. people thinking 100% of recyclables actually get recycled vs the reality being a lot of it end up in landfills or worse, and the parallel overproduction of plastics turned into a worldwide ecological disaster)
I don't understand how we are comparing Energy generation with specifics about how it is generated and Plastic Recycling...what's that have to do with Energy production?
GP already provided some "devil-in-the-details" line items to poke holes at carbon offsets (e.g. are all types of emissions being considered correctly)
The parallel that I'm drawing is that recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems, but what ended up happening is that people's impression of recycling and their actual implementations turned out to be woefully out of sync. One can argue that the long term damage of this discrepancy is that people will mindlessly buy plastic bottles of coke, ultimately contributing to the microplastics problem because they've been largely trained to think that recycling plastics works (instead of a hypothetical alternative reality where people might instead bring reusable containers to stores to buy things).
> everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst
Curious to hear some of these examples.
If you look at Japan, for example, they obsessively went all in on recycling. Look at how many different types of recyclables they have, the new electronics craze, the apartment complex obasans that would bring your unsorted garbage back to your unit door as a form of passive-aggressive social peer pressure, etc.
I distinctly remember being taught about recycling in school, and reading about it in children's books, but reduce and reuse were at best afterthoughts, if mentioned at all.
Governments spend a considerable amount on recycling education (e.g. pamphlets about what can and cannot go in a recycling bin), but the taxation incentives I'm aware of don't really paint a super convincing reduce/reuse-oriented strategy.
Granted, I was just a child in the 90s, but I remember all the messaging on TV from cartoons and movies was "recycle, recycle, recycle". I didn't hear anything about"reduce" and "reuse" until I read about it on the internet a few years ago. There were some mentions about making sure not to waste resources, but it wasn't a named thing like recycle was.
I think it is that Google says its carbon footprint is "zero", just like folks who maybe recycle 100% of everything they buy from the store, but in reality much of that isn't actually recyclable even if it has the logo on it. Thus this statement should likely be taken with a grain of salt.
I figure it's more money ("demand") going towards carbon offsets, which should mean increasing development in offsetting ("supply"). Whether that's R&D on carbon capture, greater economic viability for carbon free energy, or greater incentives for halting deforestation, it should all be a net good in a march towards drawing down carbon emissions.
One of the problems with the offset approach is it's not that repeatable. Only a certain number of companies can buy carbon offsets before there aren't really any more offsets to buy, and we have to start actually reducing the carbon to begin with.
Separately, one of the things that gets to me with companies like Google claiming a zero carbon footprint is that if you look at its corporate headquarters, it's mostly parking lot, and some building. The first time I visited Google's HQ, my first impression was just all the parked cars and no way to get to the HQ without Uber/Lyft. Same with Facebook. That picture alone seems wrong to me from an environmental standpoint. Why isn't there a train station there with electric trains instead of a parking lot?
(Google's Boston (Cambridge) office, on the other hand, is right across from a subway station which totally feels right.)
If history is any indication, I feel that what will happen instead is that someone else will start to sell "carbon offsets" for cheaper that secretly aren't quite following the spirit of carbon offset in some obscure overlooked sense. Then when the cat is out of the bag many years down the road, the big corps get to shrug and say "hey I did my part buying them" in some corporate speak that makes them sound good, and the rest of the public gets to feel smugly superior by tweeting at each other that Chinese carbon offset sellers or whoever aren't being ethical. Meanwhile the world continues to burn down, rinse and repeat until food/resource wars start.
Don't they basically have a massive fleet of buses that cart in all the kids to work who cannot afford to live within 10 miles of the place? Are those buses natural gas?
With any reasonable passenger load, yes. It's fair for people to take that for granted and the burden of proof should be on someone trying to argue the opposite, that cars would be greener in this case.
Oh, sure, they exist, but why are there still parking lots almost full of cars?
And also, 10 miles is a really long distance. Most people consider anything more than 1 mile un-walkable for a commute, so what about all the people between 1 to 10 miles?
And what about visitors, contractors, interviewees, partner company employees, and everyone else who can't take the bus? Why aren't the buses a part of the local transit agency, and why does the local transit agency not even bother running frequent route anywhere near Google, Apple, Facebook, et al.? Why aren't there air-conditioned express Wi-Fi VTA buses, or better yet, fast (>80mph) electric trains, plying up and down 101 and 280 serving all the tech companies in one go, stopping at each HQ, considering they are almost all right next to either highway? That would be a low-carbon world.
Also, one of the inherent problems with employee shuttles instead is that they compete with public transit, and also reduce the flexibility for employees to go to other places after work. I've known many employees regularly go to FLAG companies via the shuttle but drive to work on days they have dinner appointments with friends. To a great degree this also propagates the cycle where public transit becomes progressively worse in coverage and maintainence, and progressively more for low-income individuals only.
Compare to many other public-transit-first countries which have trains/buses that are actually fast, clean, nice, comfortable, and not worse than taking a company shuttle + you have the flexibility to go whenever you want, as well as wherever you want after work.
> Why aren't there air-conditioned express Wi-Fi VTA buses, or better yet, ultra-fast electric trains, plying up and down 101 and 280 serving all the tech companies in one go, stopping at each HQ, considering they are almost all right next to either highway? That would be a low-carbon world.
You are describing something close to the original vision behind BART [1] that was proposed in 1956, but bear in mind that a significant number of people - predominately in the wealthy suburbs - opposed such a vision for a variety of reasons, and many of those same voices hold sway today.
> Why aren't there air-conditioned express Wi-Fi VTA buses, or better yet, ultra-fast electric trains, plying up and down 101 and 280
Rather than 280, they should serve 880, which goes to more affordable housing in the East Bay.
Last time I was in mountain view they were maybe 40-50% full, even by the 'main' campus - also they have a ton of free bikes to ride around, very rarely did I see Uber or Lyft (your point is well taken)
FAANG could easily pay for this and it would be approved almost without push back, but will they? And like in Demolition Man, there is a Taco Bell at every stop. Only Taco Bell.
Offsets are better than nothing, but they're not sustainable. Low-hanging fruit will be used up at some point, and actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere is really expensive (most optimistic figure I've seen anywhere estimates $50/ton for the mid-to-long term). So the incentive is to push for actually zero emissions instead of net zero.
And as sibling comment mentions, climate change is bad for business too, so that's the incentive for net-negative.
I get that, but they haven't actually arrived at zero. They've arrived at their version of zero, and thus have incentive to get to actual zero, since they're already at "zero".
Maintaining "net zero" takes a lot of work/money. It's not something you can do once. Every time you put carbon into the atmosphere, you have to go buy an offset. Over time those offsets get more expensive.
You can sell the negative carbon as offsets to others. Lots of products are greened up by just buying offsets instead of really doing something, so there is lots of money in it.
Well presumably customers care. Azure positions itself in some markets as the ethical choice - large parts open source, actually net zero carbon, AI ethics board and terms that rejects dicey cases, etc etc. Argue against the usefulness or real impact of these moves all you want, the point is that they show the image MS is trying to build.
But speaking a bit more broadly, you'd get a good idea from the Wikipedia page on corporate ethics. It's a whole field of study.
I actually agree wholly - I think we should pass regulation. But I don't understand why we don't regulate zero carbon and that's that. Beyond that, presumably it'd be the government's responsibility to purge remaining excess carbon from the atmosphere.
> Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity
Mostly, it does.
> think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)
Those laws are at odds with capitalism, because they limit the control of private capital owners over the application of that capital in favor of social direction or limitation by the State on others’ interest.
Now, you can support that as necessary for the good of society or oppose it as an infringement on the liberty of owners, but in either case you shouldn't mistake it for capitalism.
The post is presuming that limitations can not be placed on capitalism. As it is verbally used, capitalism is compatible with regulation. For example, slavery and child prostitution are illegal in essentially every capitalist economy.
