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Comment by quicklime | Hacker News Reader

If I've calculated correctly, this service costs $1100 per ton. A flight from New York to London emits about 1 ton of co2.

The site talks about averages, but averages can be deceiving. Most people don't fly, and those that fly fly a lot. If you fly, you should probably try to overshot the average (by a lot) when you offset.

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I flew from UK to Canada recently, and KLM was offering to "offset my CO2 emissions" for something stupid like $5. Surely....that's not actually a thing? What can they do for $5 that would offset so much CO2?

Did you read the fine print?

Plant several trees.

I figured they must be planting a tree for that $5 and it seems I wasn't far off:

https://klmtakescare.com/en/content/be-a-hero-fly-co2zero

absolutely nothing. If the cost of carbon removal was 5$/ton, we wouldn't be having this climate change problem whatsoever.

In europe the carbon cost is EUR24/ton right now.

The quality of offsetting programs varies drastically. For example, if I just say I'm going to offset your emissions then do nothing, I can offer that service for $1EUR/ton. At the other end of the spectrum would be something like methane recapture tents over abandoned mines, where there is no risk of addition or gaming (because it costs so much to build mines in comparison to what this earns). And in the middle is something like planting trees. It's not clear where on the quality spectrum the program you're referring to is, but I would guess it is not going to be at the high end.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we are only looking at low-hanging fruit right now. That's actually one of the really appealing things about this climeworks idea. It can be scaled indefinitely. Carbon capture from mines and manure digesters can only scale so much, because there are only so many abandoned mines and only so much undigested animal manure.

If someone had a $5/ton carbon removal machine, they would be demonized as standing in the way of the policies that advocates want.

That doesn't make sense. Wouldn't that even be a boon? You would end up with less resistance by those who proclaim doom by empirical evidence, as a provided solution theoretically would exist.

If you actually care about an actual threat, yes, that would be awesome. My point is that the most vocal advocates aren't that, that they want restrictions on fossil fuels regardless of AGW and this is just the latest pretense, so they have to demonize any easy way out.

Actually, you can buy carbon credits for less than that if you make bulk purchases. It's usually for preventing emissions from occurring rather than capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

But we couldn't keep this price so low if we scaled this to world emissions - the price of carbon offsetting is low now because we're still picking the low-hanging fruits of carbon offsetting.

when was that ?

Last week.

Examples: forest protection programs in low-wage countries, investing in renewable energy on high-carbon-intensity grids, distributing enhanced ovens to reduce wood consumption...

Carbon offsetting is cheap currently, but won't always stay so, getting more expensive as we exhaust the low-hanging fruits.

If there were 200 passengers on that flight then $5 per passenger neatly comes down to 1k USD as mentioned above.

1 ton is for one passenger (yes, flying is a climate catastrophy). So the 1k USD is for one passenger.

Is that number per passenger?

Of course! How would a transatlantic flight only emit 1 tonne of CO2?

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