[_b]

I once worked somewhere where I found some evidence that the offsets we were considering buying were probably junk. The CEO agreed, bought them anyway, and proudly proclaimed to all staff how we were now a net-zero company. Junk offsets are cheaper.

[GenerocUsername]

Feels like modern form of absolving sins.

All you need is charismatic preacher to bop you on theforhead and say you are saved.

[anonporridge]

It is. A modern instantiation of buying indulgences from the Catholic Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence

A hug part of the power of religions, such as christianity or ESG, is that it provides a mechanism to allow normal people to engage in evil but feel forgiven or justified.

"If someone can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities."

[Dylan16807]

Getting some carbon out of the air isn't an absurdity.

There are lots of evils that can easily be undone (in multiples!) with cash. Like littering.

[anonporridge]

Getting fossil fuel sourced carbon permanently out of the atmospheric carbon cycle with currently available tech (i.e. planting trees doesn't work because they burn and decompose) is an absurdity.

Perhaps the best you can do is mitigate warming factors, like investing in burning previously vented methane, but that might be risking triggering a Cobra Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...

There's no realistic tech on the horizon that can actually reverse novel carbon emissions. Even if we had that kind of carbon capture tech, we would likely need to devote at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.

The adults in the room aren't talking about reversing carbon pollution on human timescales anymore. They're talking about planetary heat engineering to adapt to a more densely insulated Earth. That means adapting to a changing environment on the ground, as well as possibly limiting the amount of solar energy entering the system in the first place.

Humanity is entering childhood's end. We can't depend on our mother to do all the work of providing a safe cradle for us anymore. We either grow up and take ownership by proactively managing our environment, or we die. The teenage years are usually painful.

[Dylan16807]

> at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.

Several orders of magnitude? That's not right at all.

If we more or less stopped emitting carbon, and devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.

Even if you include the growth to replace all current energy use, you don't even need a single order of magnitude.

Also it's entirely possible today to do things like make carbon-bearing liquids and stick them in a dead oil well, using local solar power to run the equipment. Something doesn't have to scale to the entire planet to be a real thing that some entities could pay for and legitimately be net negative on carbon. Geoengineering is almost certainly more cost-effective, but that's a different issue. Paying for $5 of cleanup every time you toss a piece of litter isn't cost-effective either, but it does legitimately improve things.

[jamie_ca]

World renewable at around 12% * in 2022 [1], Nuclear is 9%. "2x current renewable and nuclear" for reclamation involves tripling current installations, and then it's another nearly 5x increase on current installations just to "stop emitting carbon".

Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... * "electricity production", probably excludes direct-use such as vehicle transportation

[anonporridge]

> devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.

Some quick and dirty back of the envelope math.

According to this source, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption, oil, coal, and nat gas, the big culprits, currently account for 137,000 TWh of energy use per year, or 76.5%. Bump that up to 82.5% if you include traditional biomass burning.

So, only 31,000 TWh per year come from renewables and nuclear. One third of that is hydropower, which is largely tapped out and certainly doesn't have exponential growth potential. So, we currently have about 20,000 TWh of renewable and nuclear generation capacity as a civilization, compared to 179,000 total consumption.

So, just to maintain current civilization standards without fossil fuels, we need to grow our renewable nuclear fleet by a little less than a single order of magnitude. Does it make sense to devote any of our renewable fleet to renewing atmospheric carbon if we are still emitting any of it? Seems like the more prudent action would be to use 100% of renewables to decrease emissions in the first place, because emission/extraction is always going to be an inefficient process.

Now, this doesn't account for the fact that most humans in the world are still incredibly energy poor. Your refrigerator uses more energy than the total use of the average person in Nigeria, which is expected to become more populous than China by the end of the century. Let's say that we agree that US levels of energy consumption is too high to target, and we would like a world where everyone has a European standard of living. The average European consumes about 38 MWh per year, US is double at 79 MWh, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use.

This means by the year 2100, human civilization would need control of about 400,000 TWh of energy to accommodate an expected population of 10.4 billion humans. Therefore, we need a 20x increase in the renewable and nuclear fleet just to serve all humans with a good standard of living without any fossil fuel consumption.

Now that we have people taken care of and we're not adding more carbon, we can start talking about removing carbon.

Back to the first data source, human civilization has currently consumed an aggregate of 5,341,110 TWh of fossil fuels since 1800. Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. Dedicated our current fleet of renewables, that would take 178 years. Let's assume that by the year 2100, we have 100,000 TWh of excess energy and we somehow have the political will to devote 20% of collective energy to the reversal project. That would take 53 years to remove the carbon added as of 2023 assuming 100% efficiency, and not accounting for the growing rate of carbon emissions until 100% carbon free. Given the fact we've been way overly generous with efficiency assumptions, we're looking at a project that takes multiple centuries.

So to your initial point, I am wrong. Not really several orders of magnitude, but between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude even in the most generous case where we don't make social progress eliminating poverty and just maintain the status quo. And that's assuming the crisis isn't that urgent and we can lazily take on the order of centuries to remove all the carbon we've added.

[zigzag312]

Fun analogy, but the link you provided seems to contradict your interpretation:

> An indulgence does not forgive the guilt of sin, nor does it provide release from the eternal punishment associated with unforgiven mortal sins. The Catholic Church teaches that indulgences relieve only the temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin ... an indulgence is not a permit to commit sin, a pardon of future sin, nor a guarantee of salvation for oneself or for another.

[Spivak]

It's not a terrible idea as a way of funding work to scrub atmospheric carbon for companies who don't want to or can't do it themselves. I just wish we were more strict about only including sellers that remove (not reduce) carbon from the atmosphere in a directly measurable way.

[IKantRead]

> scrub atmospheric carbon

I've seen this phrasing frequently in regards to carbon sequestration and it always seems to wildly understate the real problem with removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

CO2 isn't some unnecessary byproduct of creating energy, compared to say soot in wood burning. The CO2 created is an essential part of the carbon cycle by which all living things store and release solar energy. CO2 + H2O + (Solar) Energy => Hydrocarbons + O2. This is how energy is stored on our planet from the energy in a high calorie soda to petroleum (okay technically sugar is not a hydrocarbon, but the idea still holds).

When we extract energy from foods, burning organic material, or fossil fuels we do so by reversing that equation: Hydrocarbons + 02 => CO2 + H2O + Energy

To "scrub" carbon necessarily requires more energy than we got out of the process in the first place. Photosynthesis, for example, is only 4% efficient. Which means it takes about 25x as much solar energy to build the log you burn then the heat and light you experience burning the log.

"Scrubbing" CO2 fundamentally requires tremendous amounts of energy, and more than we got from the energy source in the first place. There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale.

[Dylan16807]

When I see people talking about processes where the end goal is removing carbon from the atmosphere, it's generally two setups.

The first setup is growing a lot of plants, turning them to charcoal, and burying it. This does require lots of energy, but the plants do it for you. You don't have to input the energy.

The second setup is a process that uses CO2 but doesn't generate fuel, so it needs much less energy than creating hydrocarbons.

[edhosodhi]

> There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale. any efforts to combat this issue? or approach it through a different perspective entirely ? seems like a fundamental/ circular problem, where in search for energy, optimisation for the long term (sustainable conservation of fossil fuels) you need to input more energy or ‘value’ than you get ‘value’ out of it

[VyseofArcadia]

As soon as a coin the the coffer rings carbon dioxide from the air springs!

[candiddevmike]

If only there was a way for the government to incentive folks to stop consuming and companies to stop producing by rewarding folks who don't with some kind of monetary compensation.

[j_walter]

Sounds like your CEO is a piece of shit. Luckily not all companies operate this way and being directly involved in my company's net zero initiative I know we investigate every single carbon offset we purchase and its rarely the cheapest option. In some cases it's a little frustrating when you see things like "this offset is we won't cut down a forest in Alaska for the next 10 years" as that is piss poor, but there needs to be better regulations and oversight...and the government doesn't care because they are getting their piece of the pie too.