Whenever carbon removal is mentioned there's always a bit of a push back (cost, effort, excuse to keep emitting etc.). So I'd like to address some of these:
Carbon removal is not a substitute for reducing emissions. However even if we stop emitting tomorrow there is still an excess of emissions in the atmosphere that must be addressed. Nature can do it in theory but it would take millenia and there is a chance that we - as humanity - have tipped the scales too far.
Carbon removal is expensive and inefficient - for now. This is how technology starts and will come down an innovation and cost curve with enough demand and investment. Do not try and extrapolate the cost and efficiency now to the total removals - there will be constant innovation and new methods that we haven't discovered yet.
There is no silver bullet. Trees, DACS, bio-oil and whatever else - nothing can do this on its own and we need to support as many of these as possible to work together.
If you want to do something may I suggest looking at how you can reduce your footprint and - if you can afford it - look at removing your carbon footprint instead of merely offsetting it with cheap carbon credits. Set yourself a realistic price per ton and check out https://carbonremoved.com (disclaimer - my project that I made to remove my own footprint) to remove it.
We also need system change so talk to people, educate them (and yourself) and vote for politicians who support a green agenda rather than those who block it.
For me, carbon removal is a quite good answer to the international crisis of the commons. A constant difficulty with international efforts for carbon reduction is that different countries think they should have different 'budgets' for carbon, or are under an unfair burden. On top of this almost any significant enough country can effectively destroy the communcal effort to reduce emissions. Carbon removal is almost the only hope for rich nations to unilaterally reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
It's amazing to me the impact they seem to be having with...a few million? With all the VC money getting thrown around these days you'd think some of it would get tossed towards unproven climate change solutions.
1. A government, any government, puts aside about €500 million.
2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent enough plan and a convincing group of people to execute it gets €250k. Total budget for this phase is €50 million, so this funds 200 ideas.
3. If ANY measurable progress has been made once the money runs out, your group gets another €500k. Expect 50% of the companies of step 2 to fail. Total budget for this phase is again €50 million, for (now) 100 ideas.
4. If the money from 2. or 3. turns out to be spent maliciously, the government will haunt you to get you to pay it back (there are existing protocols in place to deal with this).
5. If the money from 3. runs out, there is a go/no-go decision. In case of "go", you get €2 to €5 million to really have a go at it and build the real thing. In case of "no go", it stops here. You are obviously free to take your idea and try to find other investors for it. Weeds out (say) 50%, so now left at 50 ideas - total budget about €175 million.
6. For the companies that get the "go" in step 5, observe their performance. If it's promising, give them another €10 million. Again you probably only fund 50%, so that's 25 ideas for about €250 million.
7. Profit.
Tada, a working process that probably gets your country a fairly large number of actually competitive companies that can end up employing thousands of people and at the same time help save the planet.
Germany could run a competition like this for €6 per person. The EU could fund it for €1 per person. Heck, even the city of New York could fund it for the low, low, price of €20 per person. This is eminently doable.
This is already done in Europe in the form of EU and country-specific research/development grants (e.g. ANR in France, BMBF in Germany). While in theory it sounds amazing, in practice it is a very poor way of making progress from my own personal experience.
The applicants form a consortium, usually a heavy hitter followed by some universities and smaller firms. They usually promise something that they are already working on in the context of a thematic package that the ministry puts up for grabs. The research is usually done by the university, while the large company moves the money around citing 'management' workloads. The small companies don't really do much, or present past results as cutting edge R&D.
To your number 4, you forget that all systems involve people, and in the small world model everybody in the industry kind of knows each other. It's very easy to wine&dine, then show some fancy demos to scruffy suits in Brussels and get away with doing absolutely nothing at all.
In my personal opinion this is more or less a consequence of all innovative and intelligent people going to work at FAANG for ads and whatnot, the rest of them being locked in the politics of academia.
Sadly your experience matches some of my own (in particular there are companies which purely exist to take part in these funding programmes which is a bit of a perversion of the aims).
There are some great exceptions, and it's unfortunately really hard to design the right balance of admin overhead to programme effectiveness (intuitively I suspect many smaller companies / startups / research groups that could potentially create great work are put off by the admin overhead).
2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent enough plan and a convincing group of people to execute it gets €250k. Total budget for this phase is €50 million, so this funds 200 ideas.
There are some programs like this. My town just one $1m to tackle climate change. I had a very small part in the proposal process, it was exciting to see the news yesterday.
That's not too far off from how EU funding programmes work (slightly different structure to the funding rounds but similar idea). LIFE which is one of the current programmes targeting climate change has a current budget of €5.43 billion: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/find-funding/eu-fu...
Climate tech (ie hardware and software solutions) is a bad fit for VC money outside of carbon accounting software (which adds little value) benefits.
As well this direct air capture is slightly better than CCS (read: pretty bad) but is also a red herring in terms of climate solutions that will provide a lot of value. I say this because large amounts of money will get diverted into this kind of investment that hasn't proved to be particularly successful but has an easy to understand narrative.
> Climate tech (ie hardware and software solutions) is a bad fit for VC money outside of carbon accounting software (which adds little value) benefits.
I think what OP is saying is that documenting the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere does nothing to actually remove it, and hence is of little value to anyone except whoever invested in the company and makes money licensing the software.
Exactly - while it does allow for measurement where the likely candidates are for scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3 emissions it doesn't do anything to actually solve the problem (which is a hardware problem).
That and there are way too many people who are now building carbon accounting software and the benefits that will accrue to it (similar to greenwashing). If only we could get some people to work in areas where there was real world impact instead of LP returns :)
Research is relatively cheap. It also has a very low probability of success (on each initiative) and very long time horizon. Investor really don't like those two.
Normally, governments would invest those few millions. But government spending seems to have become almost completely broken recently and isn't generating that kind of result anymore.
The best way to spend money on carbon removal is to lobby politicians to initiate carbon taxes, or at least to place tariffs on nations without them.
We cannot physically replicate the Azolla Event or the Carboniferous Period. There's no better form of carbon storage than coal, gas, oil. And it needs to just stay in the ground.
Otherwise I guess if we're looking at terraforming, we should consider iron fertilization.
I was prepared to be annoyed at the announcement of another carbon credit swap or some other virtue signaling scam. I like Stripe's approach here, I hope other companies take note. Feels like the difference between charities that promote awareness vs. those that are actually supporting research.
The carbon removal plant in the picture is from climeworks where you can subscribe to carbon removal, if anyone is interested. Cost about $1000 per tonne https://climeworks.com/roadmap/orca
Thanks for posting this, I just subscribed. They should include a way to invite others to check it out, send personalized invites to the emails I enter.
Capturing carbon at the point of emission (e.g the exhaust stream from CCGT plants) seems orders of magnitude more important than any attempt to remove atmospheric carbon. In the atmosphere CO2 is at 400 parts per million. That's a lot of irrelevant gasses to move around a process to capture a very dilute component.
It's the same reason why people reassuringly pointing to the amount of Thorium or Lithium in the ocean isn't useful.
Reducing our personal carbon footprint (e.g., everyone becomes a vegan) isn’t enough, but reducing our collective carbon footprint (via making pollution economically infeasible via carbon pricing) is significant. If we can actually remove carbon at scale, that’s great but for now that’s a pipe dream—we should absolutely invest in it, but we shouldn’t pin our hopes on it while we continue polluting.
Farm runoff (specifically roundup) is one of the greatest dangers humanity faces but absolutely no one is willing to talk about it. The ocean is the largest co2 sink in the world and we’re killing everything that allows that to occur with commercial biocides.
It turns out you aren't the first person to have considered this problem, and the answer is well-understood: border adjustments. Basically, these are tariffs on imports from countries which don't have an adequate price on carbon. If you want to do business with the West (probably 70+% of the global economy), you need to clean up your economy.
Don't we already have tariffs on China? I am a little hazy as to whether Trump's were repealed or not. IIRC, the political opposition was from all those companies manufacturing there -- e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc.
It's certainly something I would support more of, but the problem here is that targeting tariffs to specific countries has shown to be ineffective, as there are global supply chains, so goods are shipped from China to Vietnam to Taiwan to some other place and finally to the U.S. So it's not simple as to say impose a tariff just on Chinese goods coming into America.
IIRC, after Trump's China tariffs were announced, Vietnam suddenly became a huge exporter of the most targeted items, and it was pretty clear they were just relabelling items from China as "made in Vietnam".
Global trade and capital flows are not really bilateral. It is very much a US vs Rest-Of-World, or at best US versus Regions.
So one option to reduce cheating might be to segmenting the world into zones:
US - Canada
US - Latin America (add everything south of the border)
US - Europe
US - Asia (throw Africa here, due to China/Africa ties)
US - Russia/Middle East/North Africa
Then apply tariffs just based on the zones, rather than specific countries. Of course I am speculating, but I do know that country-specific tariffs are very, very leaky, and even in this system, there is a lot of incentive for China to pay some nation in North Africa or Latin America to import stuff and put its label on it, then export to the U.S. For a big tariff, it would certainly be worth it. That's why I prefer interventions in the capital account rather than in the current account. The US has much better control over the global dollar system than over the global trade system.
> probably 70+% of the global economy
US + EU GDP is 36 Trillion, Global Economy is 76 Trillion, so about 40% of Global GDP.
But probably US + EU is one party to a good 70% of Global Trade. Not sure for how much longer.
Indeed. There are also some U.S. government efforts in this area, like the "Direct Air Capture Combined With Dedicated Long-Term Carbon Storage, Coupled to Existing Low-Carbon Energy" program: https://www.fedconnect.net/FedConnect/default.aspx?ReturnUrl..., but they remain small.
We currently produce around 50 gigatons (50.000.000.000) of CO2 per year. The cost estimates for removing one ton of CO2 range between 100-10.000 USD. Let's assume we can really get to 100 USD. That means just in order to capture a single year worth of CO2 output will cost us 5 Trillion USD (5.000.000.000.000), which is around 6 % of the worlds' GDP. And that doesn't even take into account if we'll actually be able to do it (which I strongly doubt).
So IMHO all these carbon removal efforts are just the next magic technology that's proposed in order to keep us from effecting real change. We already know how to stop climate change (rapidly decrease our CO2 output), but instead of doing that we're chasing solutions that might never become viable. And once it will become clear that CO2 capture won't work the next magic solution will probably be geo-engineering, which is just as unrealistic IMHO.
BTW I'm not saying that CO2 capture or geo-engineering will never work, just that it probably won't work in the timespan that's available to us.
I keep hearing this like there is nobody working on this problem. There are a significant amount of resources being dedicated to this problem. Is it enough? No, of course not. These types of global coordinated efforts are more difficult than any technological problem we have ever faced.
In developed countries, per capita CO2 emissions are decreasing at a steady rate. Adoption of EVs and renewables will accelerate this decline.
The problem is in the developing countries (especially China and India) where these rates are increasing. But we can't exactly tell these countries to stop developing. So our only option is to continue to develop technology that will make it cheaper to use renewables over fossil fuels. And that's all well under way.
Carbon capture is just another tool for us to explore that may scale as more entities adopt it. The idea that because it costs too much to do now, we shouldn't explore it is silly. Solar was not financially feasible just a decade or two ago. Battery storage was the same.
Point is, we should explore every option. That does not mean all our progress in EVs and renewables stops, it's just another avenue for us to reduce our carbon footprint.
No, the problem is not mainly China and India. China emits just half as much CO2 per capita as the US and has already effectively halted further increase several years ago [1]. India is at 1/10th of the per capita emissions of the US. You can of course explore every option but there's already an option that works, so we should start implementing that.
I am well aware that the US, Canada, and Australia have the highest CO2 emissions per capita. They all have a lot of work to do. I am not dismissing their major contribution to the problem.
The US in particular has reduced per capita emissions significantly and continues to do so.
The reason I pointed out China and India is that they are still developing and a large chunk of their population has yet to modernize. In the process, they will significantly increase their emissions. I am not blaming them. Any other country would do the same in their place.
My point is that the only way we can reduce their coming impact (and all of the other developing countries) is by developing renewables and battery storage tech to be a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
Asia produces 53% of global emissions. Per capita numbers are meaningless here. If the citizens of Liechtenstein were emitting 1,000 times much CO2 per capita as people in Asia, Asia would still be where you need to start if you were serious about reducing C02 emissions.
Per capita is great and all, but the population is still 4.5x for China and 4x that of the US for India. If we're being honest, a lot of those emissions probably would be coming from the US if so much manufacturing hadn't moved to China over the last few decades.
From everything I've read, India isn't a big problem from a CO2 perspective but from an oceanic pollution perspective from trash dumping.
> We already know how to stop climate change (rapidly decrease our CO2 output)
No we don't. Even if we stopped all emissions starting today, climate change would not be stopped, it's already too late for that.
Now, assuming the most ambitious but realistic reduction plan, we will still be emitting massive amounts of CO2 over the next few decades, so we are guaranteed to have to endure significant global warning.
And this is why we need both reduction and removal.
Reduction is the most efficient medium term solution by far, but long term we absolutely need removal as well.
I wish people would stop pitting reduction vs removal, wind vs solar vs nuclear etc. There isn't a single technology or policy that will save us, we need advances on all fronts and the solution will come from a mix of many different complimentary contributions.
However you are right that we need to be careful to not use the possibility of future carbon removal as an excuse to not reduce our GHG emissions.
> I wish people would stop pitting reduction vs removal, wind vs solar vs nuclear etc. There isn't a single technology or policy that will save us, we need advances on all fronts and the solution will come from a mix of many different complimentary contributions.
Agreed. Twenty years ago, we had the luxury of being able to "pick and choose" the "right" path forward. Unfortunately, the wrong path was chosen, so we now have to do everything we can to mitigate the looming disaster. The cost of doing too little is just so very, very high. (And yet, doing too little seems to be exactly the path we're on.)
That means just in order to capture a single year worth of CO2 output will cost us 5 Trillion USD (5.000.000.000.000), which is around 6 % of the worlds' GDP.
That seems easily worth it, and ignores the possibility of lower costs in the future, this working in tandem with efforts to decrease emissions, etc.
Exactly, 6% of GPD is shockingly low cost to pay for net 0 annual growth in CO2. Now that doesn't mean you can practically deploy that capital but it makes me more bullish on carbon removal.
The main idea carbon capture as I always understood it is that it will become cheaper per ton as more is invested. Just like how solar panels lowered in price drastically over the past decades.
Right now carbon capture as a technology is in its infancy.
I’m not commenting to contradict you (I agree with your point on a macro scale).
But I have to point out that a lot of proposed techniques only work at certain concentrations (e.g. all the limestone techniques I’ve seen) and even the ones that don’t change their const structure (e.g. require more energy/g removed).
None of which means we shouldn’t be trying. I’m working on CH4 removal myself, even though there is less of it than CO2
> “We already know how to stop climate change (rapidly decrease our CO2 output)”
Who knew it could be this simple? All we have to do is go nowhere, buy nothing, sell nothing, eat nothing, do nothing, and freeze to death in the darkness.
This is not a helpful stance to have. There are developments and solutions for industries, processes, and individual households all drawing to the same goal. Renewable energy generation looks to be pricing coal and gas powered energy generation out of the market by being cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain, for example. Bonus, it comes with its own industry.
Another way to look at it: burning a gallon of gasoline emits about 20 pounds of CO2, or a hundredth of a ton. So at $100/ton, charging purchasers to clean up their emissions would cost a dollar a gallon.
If we were to charge that, then many people would likely find it more efficient to switch to electric cars and so on. But for those applications where it's very expensive or infeasible to cut emissions (e.g. long-haul jets), having tech like this available makes net-zero feasible anyway.
Besides, at this point we're going to need to actually reduce atmospheric CO2, and as you point out it's a hard problem, so we'd best start scaling the tech for it now.
The thing I'd like to understand about carbon capture is that, I would assume that once the process is scaled and costs come down that most of the cost would come from the energy to run the process.
But then, of course, the energy to run that process needs to come from a renewable, non-carbon emitting source, or else the whole thing is moot. So my question is that if we had all this renewable energy to run carbon capture systems, wouldn't it just make more sense to have this renewable energy put to use to offset fossil fuels in the first place?
I don't see scaling direct air capture of CO2 beyond demo facilities until we are near zero CO2 emissions. But fixed concentrated CO2 streams should have had CO2 capture decades ago.
The problem of course is that no matter how cheap CO2 capture gets, it's not likely to beat dumping it to the atmosphere for free.
The best carbon capture technology is to plant trees. As in, billions of trees per year, which is carbon negative only if the net number of trees is growing. Maybe even get creative on the biology side of things to make them easier to plant in harsh environments.
Genetically engineered ultratrees in the Sahara! Of course this would have impacts on rainfall patterns in Europe and South America and might backfire (the large amounts of Saharan dust apparently helps form raindrops and new soil in both places)
For many uses, renewable energy needs to be stored and/or transmitted. If you use wind energy to heat your house, you need a way to transmit that energy from where it is windy to your house, and you need a back up plan for when it isn't windy. Many times that back up plan is energy that produces CO2.
Carbon capture could be done where the renewable energy is, and it doesn't need to be done on a set schedule. If you are using wind to power carbon capture and it isn't windy, you say OK I'm not capturing any carbon today and you wait until the wind picks up. You can do it anytime and anywhere land and energy is cheap.
Another thing is the cost of converting existing infrastructure. You're not going to scrap every internal combustion engine overnight, and you're not going to remake the food chain overnight, you're not going to stop people from clearing forests overnight, and you're not going to stop producing cement overnight. Or in the next quarter of a century.
I'll do you one step better: you could use that energy source to produce closed-loop hydrocarbon fuels (e.g. methane via the Sabatier process).
It seems to me that virtually all of these problems reduce to the problem of finding a plentiful, climate-neutral energy source. (If only we had already invented such a thing in the 1940's....)
> We already know how to stop climate change (rapidly decrease our CO2 output)
Yes, but we don't know how to do that. The technology exists now in many domains; with adequate public will and money we could probably rapidly electrify surface transportation, for example, and maybe electricity production (though long-duration storage is probably still a ways from production readiness), but the technology to produce concrete or aluminum without emissions just doesn't exist yet at anything other than (at best) the concept stage. Likewise for trans-oceanic shipping, or long-haul aviation, or fertilizer production, or... (etc., etc.). People think first about cars and electricity because they're tangible in people's daily lives, but industrial CO2 is a big, very much not-yet-solved problem.
Work is absolutely happening in all of these domains, but it will take time and resources, and we don't know which efforts will or won't succeed, or if any will succeed fast enough to meet IPCC targets for keeping warming below 1.5C without carbon capture as well.
You are correct in that it's not a feasible approach to neutralize emissions. But that's not why this tech is so important.
We need it to undo the damage we've already done. Will it be expensive as hell? Probably. But we need to do it. And if we cut emissions hard and fast we won't need to do carbon removal in panic but can do it more slowly.
I mean 6% of GDP is a lot, obviously, but it's also just as obviously a cost that can be paid. The important questions are:
- Is it more expensive than simply reducing emissions?
- Is it easier (politically or economically) to deploy?
I see no reason to believe that development of carbon removal tech has had any impact on CO2 emission reduction efforts.
World GDP is growing (well in non-pandemic years) at 3% or so a year. If the cost of removing a year's CO2 is 6% of GDP, then the world has the choice of giving up a couple years growth to 100% keep CO2 in the atmosphere from increasing. Or giving up 3 years GDP growth to start decreasing it back to where it was in the pre-industrial era.
The are plenty of ways to deal with CO2 from an engineering perspective. They just have no political support. In America, if a solution costs $1 a month per person, the majority of the public is in favor, if a solution costs $10 a month per person, the majority of the public is opposed.
>That means just in order to capture a single year worth of CO2 output will cost us 5 Trillion USD (5.000.000.000.000), which is around 6 % of the worlds' GDP.
The US is expected to spend a total of $6T on COVID relief with the passage of the Biden Plan (around $4T was already spent under the Trump administration)[1]. It's debatable whether or not this spend 'worked' as intended.
Investing in carbon removal will create entirely new industries. Rather than paying people to stay at home, it will create skilled tech jobs for Americans. In terms of justification, emissions reductions alone won't stop climate change at this point. It will take centuries for natural processes alone to remove our historical greenhouse gas emissions [2].
If you - as an individual or a company - also want to kick-start the market for carbon removal then check out my project https://carbonremoved.com
We offer subscriptions and one-time purchases for a carbon removal portfolio with direct air capture, olivine, bio-oil and forestation. The removal mix is currently defined by us but we're building the option to make this fully customizable.
In the mean time you can email me at ewan@<the domain above> and I will be happy to answer any questions or build you a fully custom portfolio.
Lots of governance issues. Is there long term management of the area reforested? or is it done quickly and poorly and the benefits are overstated? There’s also no guarantee the forest stays standing, but the money has already been collected.
Mineralization (Climeworks) is much more expensive per ton but is assured to stay sequestered in inert, stable form.
As a company we want to support a portfolio so we generally recommend a minimum of 2% in every method but I do understand your concern about forestation and we do have a 'tech only' plan in the pipeline to address exactly that.
One of my other thoughts, is that things like a direct-air carbon capture facility require a big upfront investment. What do you think about a "fundraiser" to make one possible. I.E., it would be gratifying to donate money, knowing it would be going directly to the construction of a new long-term carbon capture facility. I would then be confident that my donation would be going towards new sources of carbon removal.
Interesting take - maybe something we should branch into ;)
Actually a lot of carbon removers are currently trying to sell removals for the future. Shopify and Stripe are both spending money for removals that will only be taken out of the atmosphere in some years.
For us we try to focus on products that are actively delivering at the moment. We want our customers to actually be able to say their footprint has been removed.
I think though an 'innovation' plan or similar for methods that are maybe only at prototype phase could be possible. We just have to decided what happens if the project is unable to deliver in the future.
I think private companies and corporate American might be the way to go about trying to alleviate climate change. We are already seeing some effects on automobiles too where major US companies are trying to move towards EVs. In the current political climate I doubt the US government would able to do much but corporate America can maybe move the needle.
One reason car companies are moving to EVs is the coming regulatory pressure from governments on fossil fuels and car emissions. They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's just sad we've gotten to the point where we are unable to solve any problems using government means. If you talked to someone in the 60s and told them about the future, they'd be astounded.
Also note Stripe probably has a deal in that they will get equity in the company. By signing on as the first deal they will signal to others to join in and over the next decade if it is successful they will make money on a good exit. Its similar to how Amazon was an early client to Plug Power - good lots of good stock and thus their investment was free at the end of the day.
Direct air capture is different in that it provides little value with a large capex. I hate how proven technologies are in the background but because a highly successful tech company decides to splash money in climate tech all of a sudden low quality technology is getting all the headlines.
(This is all a rough idea in my head, with no sources to back up claims, but putting it out there nonetheless)
Over the course of history, how we evaluate companies and value them has changed. The concept of valuing companies based on quarterly earnings growth, is a relatively new concept and is not a necessary attribute of capitalism. So let's change how we evaluate companies.
What if we evaluated companies based on their environmental benefit or impact again? Tax break their environmental impact, tax break their environmental benefit?
I want to see "Ford company announces third quarter results, sequestering 100b tons more than expected".
> The concept of valuing companies based on quarterly earnings growth
Maybe not quarterly earnings but there was always some sort of financial metric.
Because financial metrics cut through the BS. If you read HN and reddit you'd think Zuckerberg is some sort of terrorist hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, conspiring 24/7 to compromise the mental health of Americans, whereas in reality if Facebook is ubiquitous in our lives, there's a clear reason for it.
And even if Zuck mandated a maximum Facebook time per day per user, you'd have people creating burner accounts to circumvent that.
That's how people love Facebook, and it shows on quarterly earnings, nothing but perfection ever since they went public.
Same goes for Google and Microsoft.
The market for techno-utopianism is alive and well even without laws which mandate things such as forceful carbon sequestration, all you have to do is look at the price action of Tesla and Bitcoin.
Plus once you make a law it's very hard to remove it, just look at the Patriot Act.
Americans don't care about terrorism the same way they did back in October 2001, but still the Patriot Act is as harmful to privacy as it was back then.
There is no guarantee that Americans will care about climate change, 10 years down the road...matter of fact it's more likely that people will forget about it altogether once they'd start losing their parents to heart disease, cancer, alzheimer and not glamorous climate change
Negative externalities are not 'BS' though, and may well eventually get internalized at some point, which would then be quite pertinent to the financials.
An example would be a company that has high profits because it eliminates waste by dumping it in the river. Their financials are good, but they don't tell you the whole picture, because sooner or later, something is likely to be done about the waste dumping.
Permanence of the status quo adjusting would make more sense. Even if the Patriot Act technically expired, I would think a lot of the extra powers granted have had staying power. I’m not saying I’m right about this for sure.
I think of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act together. They were both reactions. Homeland Security isn’t going any where. It’s likely Space Force isn’t going any where even while it is still considered a punch line
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't introducing tax breaks simply be reducing the problem back to financial metrics?
I think what you're talking about most closely aligns with charities, and how charities talk about their societal impact they're able to have. Even then, the discussion seems to generally come back to impact per dollar.
I'm not sure how we can replace thinking of incentives in a financial sense with their societal impact, but it would be great if we could.
I would perhaps put forth the idea of a "hours/years saved" metric vs. some next best alternative? Good luck to the accountants on this one.
I'm trying to say the market would judge Ford, primarily, by its quarterly environmental impact instead of its quarterly finances. Stock goes up when they've sequestered carbon, stock goes down when they're burning carbon.
And the preface was attempting to say that judging a company by it's quarterly finances is already arbitrary, and flawed, and a relatively new concept. I can't find the link but I think it was suggested and socially adopted only in the last 40 years as the True Metric to evaluate companies.
I think we're making baby steps in that direction. I don't know the details as much as I like, but Certified B-Corporations are a thing https://bcorporation.net/
Companies will be evaluated that way if the government intervenes in the carbon market and fixes the price. But profits will still be the metric, as it should be. You'll just get much better alignment between profits and the environment.
Is carbon directly useful? If I could extract it from the air at a hypothetical zero cost, would there be a market of people wanting to buy my carbon (bricks? powder?)?
> Stripe Inc. is signing up to pay for carbon-removal technologies that haven’t been invented yet.
> The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer.
why not focus on implementing already existing ecologically sustainable inventions and strategies?
what i read here: rent-seeking tech founders aim to funnel profits they collected from the taxing of economic activity [1] towards a privately-funded lottery of hoped-for future tech.
the techno-fix is dangerous because it 1) ignores existing systemic dysfunction:
"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for [trade secrets,] copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [2]
and 2) it covertly wields the lone genius myth [3], that supposedly the Stripe brothers are intellectually superior and can make better funding decisions compared to a democratic body of scientists.
I read the whole of [1] and it doesn't actually explain why these companies are rent seekers. Just puts the label on them with no stated justification.
the companies are rent-seekers because they gained an overwhelming market share (read: monopoly) using their VC war-chests and positioned themselves as unavoidable middlemen. this can be anything from a gig economy app like Uber or DoorDash, to the proprietary pharmaceutical recipes 'owned' as intellectual property produced under a brand name and sold with a massive markup far in excess of the material ingredient costs, as well as the 'cost' of labor under our current system. we know this because the same meds that are sold in America often cost orders of magnitude less in European countries.
the underlying strategy here is about starving or buying out competitors until one brand name becomes a literal verb. that is to say: the usage of a proprietary product or service becomes so ubiquitous that we are conditioned to rely on the profit-seeking monopolizing Silicon Valley/Wall Street juggernauts in every aspect of our daily lives. so it's no longer "i'm getting a taxi to your place", it's now "i'm Ubering to your place". or "i'm going to search the internet using a search engine" has now become ”i'm going to google".
so to use tech platforms as an example: the client-server software paradigm obscures and hides all algorithms, protocols, and personal data behind a black box server/software/system. in another article, Wendy Liu writes:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us." [1]
the most exciting emergent project where i am starting to see the development of fully distributed protocols/software become a reality is the holochain framework. the team behind this open source library are aiming to make it as simple to use as Ruby on Rails was to make centralized apps. other projects in the dweb space that i'm following are activitypub, DAT and SSB. i've heard the above described shift referred to with different names: platform cooperativism, protocol cooperativism, platform socialism, protocol socialism and more. i am personally most excited about the holochain framework, because of the way it uniquely combines proven existing tech: Git, DHT's, etc.
I think there's a decent degree of truth to this rent-seeking framing, but many of these companies are also legitimately value adding as well, and the ratio between these two things differs by company.
Groupon skews heavily to the former (because it adds no efficiency anywhere and is just various brands engaging in zero-sum price competition for eyeballs), Uber skews heavily to the latter (because Uber is barely profitable and brings significant operational efficiency due to their algo and the physical network effects).
I'm not sure I agree that non-profit is the way for some of these firms. Would either consumers or drivers be better off with a non-profit Uber? What's the incentive to make things extremely efficient? There'd be no centralized entity skimming off the top, but at the same time there might be an efficiency cost which is even bigger. So I'm skeptical.
I definitely do think a non-profit would be a great thing to replace AirBnb, Groupon et al.
Two side comments. One, those tech alternatives are very interesting to read about. Two, expensive drugs are because of the government (or because of lobbying), arbitrageurs would love to import some cheap insulin from overseas but doing that is illegal.
> many of these companies are also legitimately value adding as well, and the ratio between these two things differs by company.
humans can produce environments conducive environments for the discovering, developing and researching of science and technology, without having a profit motive, or having society split up in owners and non-owners. i'm not sure about you, but today's world is hell-ish to me. i hate the inequity i see today.
note: i'm a bit tired so excuse the long quotes and links.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.
Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide." [1]
> What's the incentive to make things extremely efficient? There'd be no centralized entity skimming off the top, but at the same time there might be an efficiency cost which is even bigger. So I'm skeptical.
incentives are built into the universe, the process of discovery with colleagues is the reward/incentive. getting credit and therefore being trusted further with more democratically awarded scarce material resources could be the reward. the returns that capitalist firms supposedly need to get 'back' is not legitimate because nearly all of those inventions were made possible due to publicly funded research grants and loans. in our future socialist system with a distributed socialist version of a google/search-engine/global-index, we wouldn't need to manipulate people to buy new products ('advertising'), and everyone could use the latest inventions in a modular fashion (that is, only upgrade various components. goodbye planned obsolescence and single use hardware/products). another perspective: it's important to remember that today capital dictates what tech is popular and useful, not actual popularity or effectiveness. abolishing Silicon Valley and the global north IP regime is the only strategy that cuts at the root of this problem. besides that, the most important point is that the waged (non-property owning) knowledge workers are the ones providing the value, not the executives and property-owners (in this case intellectual property).
"In Mazzucato’s account of the enormous success of federal scientific and technical research as the foundation of the most revolutionary of today’s technologies, the most telling example is how dependent Steve Jobs’s Apple was on government-funded breakthroughs. Apple’s earliest innovations in computers were themselves dependent on government research. But by the 1990s, sales of its traditional laptops were flagging. The launch of the iPod in 2001, which displaced the once-popular but more limited Sony Walkman, and in 2007 of the touch-screen systems of the new iPhone and iPad, turned the company into the electronic powerhouse of our time. From that point, its global sales almost quintupled and its stock price rose from roughly $100 to more than $700 a share at its high.
These later breakthroughs were almost completely dependent on government-sponsored research. “While the products owe their beautiful design and slick integration to the genius of Jobs and his large team,” writes Mazzucato,
'nearly every state-of-the-art technology found in the iPod, iPhone and iPad is an often overlooked and ignored achievement of the research efforts and funding support of the government and military.'
A major government-funded discovery known as giant magnetoresistance, which won its two European inventors a Nobel Prize in physics, is a telling example of such support. The process enlarges the storage capacity of computers and more recent electronic devices. In a speech at the Nobel ceremony, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science explained that this breakthrough made the iPod possible. Other major developments by Apple also had their “roots” in federal research, among them, Mazzucato writes, the global positioning system of the iPhone and Siri, its voice-activated personal assistant.
Apple is only one of many such stories. In the early 1980s, the federal government formed the often-forgotten Sematech, the Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology consortium, a research partnership of US semiconductor companies designed to combat Japan’s growing lead in chip technologies. The US provided $100 million a year to encourage private companies to join the effort, including the innovative giant Intel, whose pioneering work on microprocessors in the 1970s had been central to the electronics explosion.
Virtually all experts acknowledged that Sematech reestablished the US competitiveness in microprocessors and memory chips, leading to a sharp reduction in costs and radical miniaturization. The tiny integrated circuits with huge memories that resulted are the core of most electronic products today, long exploited by major companies like Microsoft and Apple. Their development was critically aided by military purchases in their early stages when commercial possibilities were still in their infancy." [2]
i think we're stopped from seeing the above truths because we are now so embedded in this inorganic hyper-commoditized and highly-privatized society. it has gotten to the point where education itself has been turned into an 'experience' commodity, something only for the wealthiest members of society, despite self-directed schools starting to show us that children are innately curious. every child is born wonderfully curious, yet meeting walls instead of bridges sets the boundaries.
> expensive drugs are because of the government (or because of lobbying)
the framing of 'Govt. vs. Private sector/corporations' misses the point that both solely benefit (and are directed by) the propertied class. we live in a bourgeois democracy. there is no democracy for the working class when it comes to e.g. money creation, or the many laws and economic agreements that are lauded as the emancipatory backbones of a supposed 'end-of-history' [3] democratic society.
these are some of the sources and authors that helped me earlier on my journey to understand the dynamics i describe:
I disagree with most of what you've said here, although I enjoyed reading it and learned a few things.
> humans can produce conducive environments ... without having a profit motive
This is an answer to a malformed question. It's not a question of whether people can be successfully oriented without a profit motive. We know the answer is yes. People can be oriented around altruism, team affinity, wanting to impress colleagues, racism and fear, etc.
The real question is whether the profit motive is optimal (and to what extent) for orienting people towards some goal X relative to other approaches.
This is a highly complicated empirical question, with an answer that probably differs by domain.
If you want to orient people towards genocide, the profit motive is probably the wrong way to go about things, although it can help a lot along the way. Stoking fear and disgust and team loyalty is king here.
If you want to orient people towards creating an iPhone and get it into a billion hands, or a reusable rocket with low marginal cost, the profit motive would rank extremely highly on the list, if not number 1.
> incentives are built into the universe
Incentives are bio/psycho. They're evolved and in the brain. Resources are a strong motivation and incentive. They contribute to status (ego), survival, attractiveness (for men), which are things that motivate our species.
Moreover the nice thing about profit motive is that, in general (although not always), it's aligned with consumer satisfaction, and so maximizing this selfish thing leads to a better outcome for the counter-party as well.
> [profits] are not legitimate because [of public externalities]
This is a separate question to whether the profit motive is the best way to orient people towards a goal. That's for a separate discussion around private property.
> the most important point is that the waged (non-property owning) knowledge workers are the ones providing the value, not the executives and property-owners (in this case intellectual property).
This is just not true. Entrepreneurship and capital are scarce factors of production. 20,000 engineers aren't going to magically self-assemble and operate effectively and efficiently together and invest billions of their own money in servers etc towards some common goal. We see some entrepreneurship and managerial skill donated for free in FOSS, but nothing like what we see when a profit motive is involved. Also, a lot of the value in businesses are inherent in the network, relationships, brand, the idea itself, etc, which are only tangentially related and attributable to labor.
> stopped from seeing the above truths because we are now so embedded in this inorganic hyper-commoditized and highly-privatized society
This society is also hyper-prosperous and well-off, on almost every metric, with long lives and happy people. The empiricist in me is the main reason I reject these overly critical perspectives. If the world is so good relative to all of human history, things just can't be as bad as this narrative suggests. [Climate change is a problem that demands its own solution.]
> "even as the Chinese workers ... are driven to suicide" [1]
This is a nonsense thing to say. China is (including Apple's workers) so much better off thanks to Apple and firms like Apple. Have a look at their median GDP per capita or any other metric you can think of. They've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
This is the beautiful concept of economic surplus post-trade. Socialists take a 1-dimensional look at the "low wages" and are upset, but they forget what the alternative would have been without these "low wages"; more poverty, more suffering.
Further, so called "low wages" always lead to high wages a few generations down the line, due to the virtuous cycle of better nutrition, increasing tax revenues that feeds into education and infrastructure, etc.
Western socialists arrogantly risk stifling this virtuous cycle in poor countries. Imagine if nobody was allowed to use cheap Chinese labor 20 years ago, and therefore no FDI came in because it wasn't worth it to pay 5x market rates? Their economic growth would've been stunted and they would have more poverty today, not less.
> Einstein
This was before all the failed experiments with communism. Empiricism showed he was wrong about QM and wrong about this. I like to think he would have revised his opinions had he come back in 1990 and seen the new data. He even predicted the failure mode; "how is it possible ... to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening?"; but underestimated just how difficult (probably impossible) it is avoid in practice.
Yes, you're right. It's Stripe's job to shut down proof of work by not allowing them (which wouldn't matter). I for one am glad Stripe is funding ideas in this space that are not proven out.
Why do we have this attitude towards crypto but not towards the enormous mountain of energy required to power non crypto servers as part of normal professional software businesses.
We care about both. All the major cloud platforms are putting a lot of work into powering their data centers with as much renewable energy as possible, and surfacing carbon information to engineers using the platforms. See the feature Google just released, for example: https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint. It's even a somewhat mainstream topic - I'm pretty sure I've seen NYT articles about the carbon footprint of Zoom calls and Netflix streaming.
It's something I personally think about a lot, and I know many others do. Here's a community of people that discuss this topic a lot if you're interested: https://climateaction.tech/
When you game on your 3080 GTX at max graphics in VR, you wouldn't call that wasted computation because it provided utility to a human in the form of entertainment.
Proof of work provides utility in the form of trustless proof, allowing a decentralized network to actually work. The computational work carries meaning which is valued by network participants.
Crypto provides utility by being decentralized, permissionless to participate in, and censorship resistance.
The reason mining consumes so much aggregate energy is because it is the most profitable use of energy at the moment. Part of this is because the cost of energy for fossil fuels in not accurately represented in its price.
Tax payers / governments subsidize the fossil fuel industry in billions every year, including coal which is used in coal power plants. A carbon tax is also not implemented. So externalities are not captured in price.
It should fairly obvious how energy sources change once those issues are addressed.
Yeah, the utility is obvious. We just need to internalize GHG mitigation costs and then prices will hit the correct place. It’s unfortunate, but the most effective way to do this would be to actually tax power sources and power generation at source, which means fuel taxes.
It will be hella regressive, but that’s the reality. Most poor people are polluting the planet disproportionately to their output.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this doesn't seem to include the daily commute for bank employees, the waste from each bank, and the collective volume of mail delivered.
That's a fair statement. I'm not really even sure what the $404 trillion is after trying to look up where you were going with that (all assets globally).
We should do an attempt with just US dollars. It looks like there is about $40 trillion in actual physical/digital circulation (i.e. not investments in things like crypto, buildings, stocks).
Driving even an electric vehicle uses ~250-300 Wh per mile (we can round down to 250Wh).
Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup have about 738k (we can round down to 700k) employees and the average US commute is 32 miles (we can round down to 25). We'll assume ~235 days of work a year.
25 * 0.250 * 700000 * 235 = 1,028.1 TWh to commute for bank employees of the top four US banks per year
Which is about 25.7 Wh / $. We can safely assume this is significantly lower than reality already since we only counted the top four US banks and rounded all of our figures down. This also doesn't count any other industry required to keep USD working (like datacenters, as referenced in the paper you linked).
Edit: I'm not trying to prove you wrong or anything, I'm just genuinely curious if this "bitcoin is worse" statement is correct.
Yep, my bad! So commutes aren't as significant a contributor as I thought. I ran through some more calculations trying to only use the US, and it looks like the Wh / $ is somewhere around 3.51. Is there any other category of use that isn't being included? This is a pretty stark difference, even being many times more than the first calculation.
Commute: 1.028 TWh
Data centers: ~3.3TWh per trillion (for USD) = 132 TWh
ATMs: 470,135 independent in the US (1.27MWh each per year) = 0.597TWh
Banks: ~98,000 in the US (PDF wasn't clear, using 60MWh each per year) = 5.88 TWh
Card networks: ~1TWh/yr (just assuming "half" of global)
OK the main discrepancy is from the Data center calculation. The Galaxy PDF lists the top 100 banks as owning $70Tn of deposits. I calculated using the galaxy energy number but divided by total deposits wheras I should have only used the data for the top 100 banks as they did.
I think your calculation of 3.5 Wh/$ is closer to the real number. When I put $70Tn instead of $404Tn in I get 3.71Wh/$
> not towards the enormous mountain of power required to power non crypto servers as part of normal professional software business
The incentives are very different, I don't think you can compare them like that.
Miners and companies like Google both make more money the less power they use. However, in the case of Google power consumption is a side effect of their business.
To put it another way: if you overnight doubled Google's datacenter capacity you would not double their revenues. But if you doubled a bitcoin miner's capacity there would be an immediate change in the amount of revenue being made.
This means that for miners there's a very clear incentive to use whatever resources you can at your disposal, because the more power and hardware you have the more profit you can make.
Because crypto isn't usable and never will be. It isn't built to handle processing charges of $0.30 plus 3% on a $10 transaction and that it what it is competing with. Instead it is simply speculation and gambling and pump & dump. BTC already uses more power than several countries. Visa uses a fraction of that for a better and more functional system.
And please don't say PoS. PoS is centralized by default. If you are going to be centralized, why do crypto at all?
Second layer technologies are the solution to that problem. We can build systems on top of bitcoin that have some tradeoffs but allow for exponentially more transactions at lower fees. Lightning is one example of these second layer systems. Custodial wallets like Coinbase and others are a poor, but simple and easy example.
From a physical or a regulatory perspective, any of those second-order systems are going to be subject to the same money-transmitting laws in place across the world. So you can reimplement the existing money-moving tools with no significant benefits to anybody except the creators of the money-moving tools, who can take a vig instead of a bank or Visa.
Why can we not be critical of new inventions? Should we not be trying to make things better? To me thats like making the argument that because we have coal plants today means we should have no problem generating XY new plant because it's not worse than what we have now.
BTC is old, the possibilities have been proven but I think it's totally fair that we try to get somewhere more efficient than what we have now.
If the work Bitcoin is doing could be done by a single desktop PC from 2004 then... the work would be being done by a single desktop PC from 2004. But clearly it is not.
Every time I see a thread on HN about crypto it makes me want to buy BTC or w/e because people are so unbelievably disingenuous on here that it probably still has a lot of steam left. The side that needs to be misleading to make their point is rarely the correct side to be on in my experience.
Luckily Bitcoin has second layer systems being built on top of it, which allow it to leverage that 2-3 on-chain transactions per second to process thousands of millions more transactions off chain either through decentralized systems like Lightning or centralized custodial wallets.
Honestly, even though I don't like the insane power usage of PoW cryptos, I don't like the waste of the normal economy either. There's so much waste ... but anyways that would require its own thread I guess.
The important difference is, normal economy[0] profits off efficiency. There's waste, but that waste means companies are making less money than they could be. Everyone is incentivized to eliminate the waste. In aggregate, the market strives towards minimizing waste[1].
In contract, PoW cryptocurrencies have pure waste built in as a necessary component. They're literally waste incarnate, made into code and used to provide trustless consensus. It's a feature, that has to scale with the size of the network, and participants are encouraged to create more waste.
--
[0] - Let's for the moment ignore the negative-sum game cancer the advertising industry is. But even advertising tries to be efficient at micro level.
[1] - In fact, it's a major source of modern problems with the market economy. Companies optimize way past the point it makes sense, because the consequences are borne by someone else (e.g. customers). See e.g. the whole field of value engineering.
I have a weird opinion on this. Markets and industries are complex multilayered systems. Each subsystem tries to be somehow efficient but actually it's not. People are slow, the tools they use are often slow (unless you have serious knowledge and resources on optimizing logistics, throughput, management), their partners are too, and asking optimizations from them will cause friction.
Market might be a minimizing function of some sort but it's a blind one. Very often groups could do 4x more for 4x less just with a change of mindset alone.
I don't disagree. I'm not claiming the market achieves total efficiency, just that it tries. Much like a submarine is a bubble of air at pressure of 1 atmosphere resisting much higher pressure outside, it is possible (and even common) for low-efficiency areas to remain stable under market pressure, but the overall gradient is still clear. In contrast, PoW schemes use inefficiency as a fundamental component; they're wasteful by design, and it's considered a feature.
I don't think it's only whattaboutism, it's mostly that crypto is becoming a meme complaint and even whattaboutism is thrown as reflex "what about you".
ps: I'm trying to go from screamer to proactive these days. I was already frugal and dropped car use, I'm also thinking into starting clubs to make more walk/bike use, recycling/upcycling repair shops and the likes. Do you have similar ideas ?
I already do things like you mention... walk most places, reuse/repair when feasible, buying less packaged food, avoiding leisure flying (I used to travel often)... but individual impact is fairly minimal, so I've been putting more effort into supporting local political candidates who prioritize the climate.
I also complain a lot at community meetings for new development in my immediate area (things like reducing parking in new buildings, including bike storage, EV charging, better public transit infrastructure)... I've found some of this stuff more fulfilling in that the impact tends to extend beyond what I'd be capable of doing alone... sometimes it's fruitless, but sometimes it works.
I'm trying to skip politics because I think it's fluff and too laggy. But I'm still at theory level. Ideally I'd find a few open warehouses to set up stuff. Tools, materials, gather smart / knowledgeable people, teach and viral spread the new habits. Hopefully it will cost next to nothing and happen faster than politically impeded initiatives.
I can't claim numbers but even if you have the fastest and leanest information system, the rest of the economy might be problematic, the human layer is really bad. I stopped counting how many time we asked people to come back another day (more car use) because the old paper+digital system is not made for high throughput. Our servers are probably super fast.. but the apps are not useful, the system is not useful, thus lots of waste above.
I wonder if you could have some kind of (cypto?)currency that has its price backed by 1 ton of carbon captured. You can get one by paying the market price for it, or by capturing 1 ton of carbon. So if you want to offset your carbon footprint you can just go to a CarbonCoin marketplace and buy the appropriate amount of CarbonCoins. Could the crypto craze be exploited to save the environment?
This is a major plot point in Ministry for the Future, pretty much exactly how you describe. Great book, and it's a good idea that I think has some real-world support from economists and others. Here's a site about the idea: https://globalcarbonreward.org/
What does it mean to be "backed by" carbon captured?
Talk of backing a currency traditionally refers to some mechanism that guarantees people will continue to value it in the future:
- a currency is "backed by gold" if it is exchangeable for hunks of metal by whoever holds some of it (the future value of those hunks being taken as granted)
- a currency is backed by a government if that government guarantees that the currency will remain sufficiently scarce and that it will be a/the means of paying taxes due to that government.
In this case, though, you just mean that a coin is minted each time a ton of co2 is sequestered, right? And you would need some other mechanism to generate demand for the coins?
> In this case, though, you just mean that a coin is minted each time a ton of co2 is sequestered, right? And you would need some other mechanism to generate demand for the coins?
The economical scheme makes a lot of sense, but it seems like the practically hard part would be to prove to the world that carbon capture has actually occurred. I don't see how blockchains would help there.
The rest is just bookkeeping, which can happen on any kind of ledger, distributed or otherwise.
good idea but also sounds like it could be gamed. eventually people will be printing themselves carbon dollars for carbon they could have emitted, but didn't
Rulesets more complicated than tictactoe have edge cases, holes, exploits.
That's why market design is important.
Open markets require boring stuff like properly aligned incentives, contract law, property rights, transparency and auditing, fair & impartial courts, right to appeal, and so forth. Your basic sanity checks.
Maintaining and protecting a balance is never easy. We can only hope to minimize cheating.
All the alternatives are much worse. The popular criticism of market failures are often because the obvious safe guards were eliminated or ignored.
That would require people changing their habits like eating less meat to free up the land. Apparently it’s still controversial for some people that it’s time to adjust some behaviors.
This line is telling: "Governments are going to need to be purchasers to get things moving, get the cost down and improve the technologies," he said.
If if it were so critically needed, why is there no market demand for this product? Should the countries with low carbon production endlessly subsidize high carbon producing countries?
The hysteria around climate is starting to look much like Corona hysteria. Next will be the carbon passport.
If Stripe was serious about climate change, they would support the development of nuclear energy, stop flying on airplanes, move their data centers to cold climate locations, etc
