Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aVx1uyD5pYWW 2506 days ago
>This leads to Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment. We will seek to purchase negative CO2 emissions at any price per tCO2, starting immediately. We expect that the best price will initially be very high: almost certainly more than $100 per tCO2, as compared to the $8 per tCO2 we pay for offsets. We don’t expect to be able to sequester all of our carbon emissions, both because the relevant technologies are not yet operating at sufficient scale, and because it would be financially infeasible for Stripe. And so we commit to spending at least twice as much on sequestration as we do on offsets, with a floor of at least $1M per year.

What is the difference between sequestration and offsets?

2 comments

Sequestration means literally filtering CO2 out of the air. Offsets are essentially just a contract that someone who would otherwise have created emissions, won't. For example, instead of deforesting an area I own and selling it for wood, I might sell an offset contract and keep it intact.
In this context offsets are paying to reduce new CO2 emissions while sequestration is getting rid of previously emitted CO2.