[RedNifre]

Of course not, my software does not put CO2 or CO2 equivalents into the atmosphere.

What matters is keeping the atmosphere balanced or even remove greenhouse gases from it. The way to do it is to have serious carbon certificates, as in coal power plants need to buy carbon certificates before they emit CO2 and the certificates get destroyed after, Brazil gets certificates for having a rain forest, which they can auction off internationally to motivate them to not destroy the rain forest and also to make planes fly etc. If my software costs too much electricity, it will either mean that people switch to cheaper electricity (renewables, since they don't have to buy the certificates), or they will switch to a different software that consumes less of their expensive coal power.

If all green house gas emissions have to be set off by certificates first (or by 1.1x the certificates, to lower the green house gas levels), you won't have to worry about where the power for your software comes from, since it's all accounted for already and if your software really costs too much electricity, the market will regulate it.

[jen729w]

None of this works.

Our carbon emissions continue to grow. Every year is larger than the last. The largest year for emissions in human history was 2022. The next will be 2023, and then 2024 will beat it.

Our rate of growth is slowing, but we continue to grow. It is possible that by 2050 we stop beating our previous records. Possible. Probably not.

That wasn’t a typo. We will continue to emit more carbon than we did the previous year for at least another 25 years.

Certificates are bullshit. Brazil ‘selling’ its rainforest carbon offsets to China is bullshit.

There isn’t a resolution here. There’s no answer, currently. It looks like we’re just fucked. We have decent power generation solutions but no grid to accept them. China and the like want to grow, they want to use coal, and who are we to say no? We did it. Should we expect them not to?

No individual can make any difference at all while the major economies of the latter half of this century invest — as in, start to build, today — dozens of coal-fired power stations. It might even be hundreds. It saddens me to think about looking it up, so I’m not going to.

Worrying about the carbon cost of your app is a nice thought, but nothing more. It’s functionally pointless.

[RedNifre]

Right, I was talking more about how it SHOULD work. As you correctly said, it doesn't work at all right now. As in, no CO2 can be emitted, before buying the offset first. It's the only solution I can see, but I agree that it's unlikely to be implemented like this.

As for "China and the like want to grow", they shouldn't and the countries who already emitted a lot of CO2 should have a certificate debt that they need to pay back, slowing their economies down, which would also let the others catch up.

[quickthrower2]

An international carbon price would be awesome, yes.

As long as the carbon sinks are genuine. Planting a tree that later dies or burns is not carbon negative.

[RedNifre]

Not a carbon "price", just an auction of CO2 ton equivalents to keep the atmosphere balanced: Before a plane lifts off, the CO2 equivalent offsets need to be bought at the global auction house. This would make the market regulate the price of CO2 emissions.

(Not sure how the certificates work in reality right now, probably some BS like giving each country a "CO2 budget" in certificates for free, pretending adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would be fine or something like this)