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Comment by andrewwhartion | Hacker News Reader

Quick 'back of the envelope' (literally) calculations:

Toyota Camry [0] Dual VVT-i engine gets 7.9L/100km and 183gm/km emissions. That roughly works out as 2.3kg CO2 per 1L petrol.

Therefore, a tonne of CO2 is produced for every ~430L petrol. Petrol is around AUD $1.40/L, so about AUD $600 of petrol.

Carbon credits [1] are worth about $14 euros per tonne of CO2, which is say AUD $19.

Therefore 'carbon neutral' petrol adds about AUD$20 to AUD$600 worth of fuel, or about 3-4%.

Sound about right? I could stomach that, considering the fuels price goes up and down all the time anyway...

[0] http://www.toyota.com.au/camry/features/economy-and-environm...

[1] http://www.goldstandard.org/blog-item/carbon-pricing-what-ca...

EDIT: formatting...

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Your comment sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I was confused about how burning 1L of fuel, which weighs ~1kg, could possibly produce ~2.3kg of CO2.

(This page confirms Toyota's number: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=307&t=11 )

The answer, which took me far too long to realize, is that the oxygen pulled from the air makes up the bulk of the mass of the CO2. Oxygen has an atomic mass of ~16 to Carbon's ~12, which means that 1kg of pure carbon can be combined with oxygen to produce ~3.7kg of CO2.

So yes, your calculations sound about right. Contrary to my first impression they do not violate the law of conservation of mass.

Yeah, I did a double take when I saw the number as well, then realized there's an O2 in CO2..

This is a lot lower than I expected. I wish governments would just add this as a tax directly. But seems almost impossible in the current political climate.

This is what confuses me, if it only costs 10% more to fix the problem, why the hell is it still a problem?

Because politicians choose the spend the money elsewhere since, so far, it doesn't give enough votes.

Exactly! It's maddening.

You can start paying off your CO2 right now. This is a side project of mine: https://earthboost.org

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't think that's how carbon credits work? Paying 10% more for gas doesn't magically reduce the CO2 emitted. I would expect that at some point, someone has to actually not emit CO2 for this to work.

The carbon credit _is_ the (market-based) mechanism by which someone else has to not emit, or sequester, the CO2. [0]

Of course, it relies on there actually being a cap on carbon in the first place...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit#How_buying_carbo...

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