[PaulHoule]

Funny but Exxon could become a ‘net zero’ company without fundamentally changing its business.

You see, companies get charged for the carbon they emit, not the carbon that their customers emit.

An oil refinery is an ideal place to implement carbon capture because it is a concentrated source of emissions and is already using technology such as amine strippers that one would use for carbon capture. Refineries burn a lot of fuel to produce hydrogen and process heat and those could be replaced with green hydrogen or pink hydrogen, heat could be derived from resistive heating, nuclear HTGR or adiabatic compression in turbines. What CO2 is produced can be pumped underground into saline aquifers.

The Biden administration is interested in subsidizing such development in the ‘Refinery Row” of the U.S. South and it is something they are equipped to succeed at because they have the geology, industrial concentration, skills and attitude to pull it off.

A net-zero Exxon would still have to decarbonize production and that is harder than the refinery but they could buy some offsets (or themselves implement with direct carbon capture, BECCS, etc.) It would be a lot cheaper than buying offsets for their customers but who knows they might sell those too.

[mullingitover]

The idea of Exxon becoming “net zero” is a howler and we can’t let them get away with it.

We need to price the carbon emissions at the source. If they want to pass on the external carbon costs to their customers, so be it.

[Dylan16807]

> The idea of Exxon becoming “net zero” is a howler and we can’t let them get away with it.

Get away with what, a talking point?

> We need to price the carbon emissions at the source. If they want to pass on the external carbon costs to their customers, so be it.

What if a power company buys a bunch of natural gas, with emissions already paid, then captures the burned carbon instead of emitting it?

[wizofaus]

> then captures the burned carbon instead of emitting it?

Presumably the only reason they would is if they could get paid carbon credits for doing so.

[Dylan16807]

They'd better be able to get credits for it! It would be pretty awful to charge for emissions whether they emit or not, because then they have no incentive to decrease emissions.

But giving them credits seems pointlessly complicated to me, compared to just saying "no emissions, no charge".

[PaulHoule]

Or alternately get charged carbon taxes if they don’t.

[plagiarist]

Stop making destruction of the ecosystem an economic externality? What's next, pricing human rights abuses to prevent US companies from profiting off of foreign slave labor?

[dathos]

I think you fail to realize how the profitability of this industry subsidizes a lot of issues that look to be crisises on their own. Plastics being too cheap to make so we don’t really do recycling or reducing to name one.

[bboygravity]

I find it interesting that people seem to think that storing CO2 under ground under high pressure for an unlimited amount of time is totally fine. "What could possibly go wrong?"

But at the same time somehow storing nuclear waste in specially designed containers sitting inside granite mountains is somehow extremely irresponsible and not an option?

Do most people actually realize what happens when that stored CO2 comes back up for whatever reason in x amount of years (all the way up to 100's of millions of years). I mean both the short term (everything in a certain radius that doesn't fly dies) as well as long term effects.

[mjbeswick]

The irony is that people are forgetting where all that carbon came from in the first place, before plants captured it from the atmosphere!

Humans are contributing to climate change, but the climate had constantly changed throughout history. During the peak to the Roman empire, parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today. The climate cooling is one of the likely contributing factors behind the collapse of the Roman empire, as agricultural output fell as a result.

Climate change is bad for current human settlement and farming, as what is currently primar land for living and farming will change. Such a charge would have dangerous global economic and political consequences.

[defrost]

> parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today.

That's not a change in global average tempreture though, that's a local variation.

> but the climate had constantly changed throughout history.

'History' is written history, and no, global climatic parameters haven't changed in written history.

I believe you might be thinking of geological time - and yes, on long time scales climate has changed - and changed with cause just as a stone moves subject to force.

In this particular moment of time climate has started to change within the past century after remaining stable for tens of thousands of years and the root cause of that change is human activity changing the insulation properties of the atmosphere.

[mjbeswick]

There is historical data which suggests that there has been two ice ages in the time of modern humans. The climate only appears to be stable when observed over a short timespan.

I don't think there is any doubt that human activity is contributing to climate change.

It's ironic that modern civilization and population numbers aren't possible without fossil fuels, but their use will ultimately cause it's demise.

[jmopp]

Consider that during the first ice age, humans had not left Africa - and during the second ice age, much of North America and Europe were uninhabitable