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Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

This is like rich countries moving factories to third-world countries where industry emits more CO2. They pretend to be responsible for less and less greenhouse gases even though they consume more physical goods, with larger carbon footprint. Worst, they feel fine flying and buying SUV because their not that dirty compared to people in undeveloped countries whose carbon footprint keeps increasing.

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They aren't displacing factories to third world countries. They're displacing dirty power with cleaner power. Obviously this won't be sustainable forever, but it's a good start.

Not necessarily. They are buying renewable power, however, the actually generation that power their data enters come from the grid and includes coal and natural gas. When the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, they are powered by coal, nukes, hydro, and natural gas.

Google would need to build its own grid to have it only use its own wind and solar. That is not reasonable.

Pretending to have an "all-time carbon footprint" to be "zero" isn't reasonable either.

Displacing dirty power with clean power cannot bring your carbon footprint to zero. Your cleanest power cannot not emit. Google may become cleaner but that isn't the point.

Isn't rest offsets? Like they helping cut emission from non Google things and using that to offset what they can't eliminate from their own emissions.

It still reduces emissions on the whole.

Ofcourse it can, you can pull carbon directly out of the atmosphere and have negative emissions. Energy consumption of sequestation coupled with carbon footprint of solar/wind/nuclear works out to be nagative.

The IPCC stipulates negative emissions in the second half of the century.

Lastly, our carbon budget is not zero, if everyone kept to carbon budget of 3 tons of CO2 per person we'd never have climate change to begin with.

At least in europe, both have happened. A meaningful portion of the gains have been from deindustrialization of one kind or another.

This isn't an indictment of all carbon reduction. Most meaningful policies will have reshuffling. There are no perfect moves.

That said, it's important to try and get into the nuance, be skeptical. In this case, the guts are in the "what does carbon offset really mean?"

Any carbon accounting system (tradable credits, carbon taxes, etc.) is abstract. You can achieve "carbon neutral" by buying credits or by actually reducing carbon. FWIW, I think there definitely is a value to DIY as opposed to carbon accounting stuff. IE, powering your own data centre with clean energy is superior to using gas electric and offsetting that with purchased credits.

I've always been bewildered by the west's push to 'de-industrialize' it seems to be a terrible strategy to combat climate change and serves only to enrich corporations while weakening a country's geo-political position. Nations need to be able to produce things or they become dependent on other actors who have a track record of acting in bad faith, see China and Covid 19 PPE shortage as one example.

At least in the context I was speaking to, I don't think it was a "push." Deindustrialization (esp heavy industry) had been happening for a while. Environmental issues were one of the pressures, though that precedes the climate change agenda.

It just happens to be the case that when you look back at carbon reductions, deindustrialization is one of the key contributors. Clean energy too. A lot of europe already had a lot of clean energy though.

But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean. Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts. Those high end molten salt solar plans take natural gas to startup. Most "wood chip" plants burn the same fast growing trees used by paper mills.

CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. The massive amount of plastic particles in the ocean. Colossal e-waste from electronics only designed to last two years.

Real, meaningful changes that will stop environmental devastation require reduction of consumption. Unless Google finds a way to reduce their data center footprints, the CO2 numbers are most likely just cooked books; displacing CO2 with other environmental disaster.

We need to consume less things.

> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts

That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only

> Natural gas to startup

That's strictly cleaner than running the region on natural gas only

>CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste.

Lakes of toxic sludge are bad, but they're a localized problem. Atomspheric CO2 balance threatens to crash the global ecology for everything larger than bacteria. Of the things you've listed, the risk factor for killing everyone is CO2 --> ocean plastic --> e-waste --> toxic sludge lakes.

> We need to consume less things

That'd be cool, but unfortunately, have you met humans? We've been trying the "Consume less things" approach my entire life; it doesn't take. We need the consumption to be more efficient and less environmentally impactful.

Looking in the mirror is enough. How much did you (and me, its nit about you specifically) spent as a student? 1k/month? How much you earn after tax? 5k? So if after 10years of work less than half a million on your account you spent on uneccessary things. (Ok... its all spent for the kids...)

Why the downvote. Seriously, if we believe we need to consume less, it might be a good idea to put it into perspective what that will actually mean for each individual. I am including myself into this as well.

> > Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts

> That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only

True, but from a CO2 and climate standpoint that's strictly dirtier than nuclear. And reducing emissions by enforcing good insulation norms, taxing the hell out of kerosene, etc.

Nuclear, of course, has its own dirty issue in sequestering byproducts (discounting the occasional meltdown, which---thankfully---is still generally a localized problem relative to CO2 emission's global threat, although it's not very localized... Chernobyl threatened much of west Asia and Europe in the worst-case scenario which, thankfully, didn't materialize).

It's a little hard to weigh those costs vs. benefits, since nuclear byproduct sequestration is relatively cheap but the consequences of failure are relatively high (dirty bombs). On the whole, I'd peg the risk factors for solar and wind as lower, but I'd still prefer to see nuclear plants replace fossil fuel plants if other options aren't available.

This is a problem of means. We don't have infinite resources to spend. For instance Germany spent 300 billions euros on wind and solar power since 2000. They decided to stop using nuclear, and are still burning masses of coal, and are still quite far away from clean electricity.

Would they have invested 300 billions in nuclear, Germany would run on 100% CO2 neutral electricity today, with an hefty margin (arguably 200 billions would have been enough).

Then while everybody speaks about electricity, they conveniently forget that it represents only 20 to 25% of all of our energy needs. The remaining 75-80% for industry, agriculture and transports are almost 100% fossil-fueled...

I understand your argument, but honestly, as someone living in a heavily polluted area, I couldn't care less about the CO₂ problem. When you have the immediate concern of people dying 15 years earlier than they might have, when your throat burns 300 days in a year, and you often can't see much farther than 400 meters, I would be very happy if we could just switch everything coal powered to natural gas.

As someone who also lives in a heavily polluted area, I agree, but I can also move.

Nobody can move away from the consequences of CO2 saturation. There's no second planet to move to.

Peaker plants are far dirties than base load plants.

I actually help run a solar farm part time. Most of my work is to use a petrol powered snipper to cut all the weeds that are growing around it, and I wonder if cutting down trees to make way for solar lots is really the future? It's quite a big block of land that could be a forest or a park.

Also, the thing is that panels expire after 20 years, so new ones will need to be manufactured and the process to make them and mine the materials to make them is not exactly clean I guess..

if not for the problem of mitigating sand erosion, deserts seem well-suited for solar farms. I believe the statistic is that all the necessary power to power double humanity's electric consumption could be generated from a tiny patch of the Sahara---big enough to be seen from space, but tiny in the grand scheme of things (1)

(1) This is, of course, the foolish way to go about it, since distribution costs would be enormous and that kind of centralization is dangerous for a robust system. But it's a fun thought experiment to visualize the scale of the problem and the gap between the inefficiency of the modern system and potential improvements.

Hawaii has one of (if the not the) largest solar farms in the world — and they use sheep for weed removal. We definitely should be reforesting land, but land that is already pasture has a lot of potential for regenerative agricultural practices which greatly increase the prairie’s carbon-capture potential. Particularly if animals are incorporated intelligently. One study showed that the panels themselves can actually help improve pasture soil.

Sheep produce methane which is far more harmful per unit mass than co2. I'm guessing sheep (especially plural) are less efficient than a fossil-fuel trimmer (maybe not after accounting for the carbon used to manufacture the trimmer?), but you could probably replace it with an electric trimmer and be even better off. Reasoning about carbon is hard.

It’s definitely tricky to reason about carbon. One potential improvement is the incorporation of seaweed into a ruminant’s diet, which can reduce their emissions by a third. There’s also progress being made on breeding sheep and cows that emit far fewer greenhouse gases. But it’s important not to ignore that the animals themselves play a key role in improving the soil (with proper management), which can lead to the storage of tons of carbon annually.

Methane dissipates in the atmosphere within ~12 years, CO2 takes hundreds to thousands of years.

Oh, interesting. TIL. Reasoning about emissions is hard.

Battery operated trimmers have got very good. They used to be underpowered, but now they are as powerful (or more) and a lot quieter. I suggest that you ask for a modern battery replacement. Just make sure you get the battery in a backback, the battery is slightly heavier and lasts longer so you don't get as many breaks

> But a ton of the "clean" power isn't clean.

Emphasis on a ton — not all. Nuclear basically is. And as of this millennium at the latest it’s been safe. The nuclear deaths in the US add up to a grand total of 0 (zero). That’s better than eg. wind can say — at least one turbine has burst into flame during maintenance, forcing the workers to choose between burning or leaping to death. Google’s Ivanpah solar plant has also killed thousands of birds by burning them so they plummet out of the sky (not to mention the endangered desert tortoises who lose their habitats when land is bulldozed for solar, or human injuries from falling of roofs while installing solar panels).

And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years. And deaths from natural disasters are declining.

Both Fukushima and Chernobyl raise serious questions about the safety of nuclear power, unfortunately.

> And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years.

Have they looked into what's going on in the west coast of the US right now?

Again, as of the last millenium at the latest. Chernobyl was last millenium. Fukushima was a tsunami. There were 0 (zero) deaths from radiation there (and ironically, perhaps there were deaths from irrational fear of it — from the rushed evacuation — perhaps it would be better named FUDushima). And tsunamis don’t happen in the US.

The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, piling up fuel year after year until it was too big of a hazard for humans to handle. https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-15420...

> Fukushima was a tsunami

Tsunamis, by themselves, don't contaminate ocean-water with radioactive material to a density high enough to create a 10-km no-fish-zone. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00664/fukushima-fishin...

And while Chernobyl didn't happen in the past 20 years, I think it's naive to consider nuclear power safe when a continent-threatening disaster occurred in the past 40 years. "One massive disaster per generation" makes people justifiably leery. Personally, I think the grand calculus may tilt slightly in nuclear's favor over fossil fuels, but the risk can't be swept under the rug.

> The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, piling up fuel year after year until it was too big of a hazard for humans to handle

This is a concern, but I think we shouldn't discount that the hottest years recorded in California history of record-keeping have been, with only a couple exceptions, the most recent years (https://www.climatesignals.org/sites/default/files/resources...). The "natural" fire cycle will get further and further from its historical nature as ambient temperatures climb and rainfall diminishes.

> Tsunamis, by themselves, don't contaminate ocean-water with radioactive material to a density high enough to create a 10-km no-fish-zone

OK, fair enough, I think it may be a good idea not to build nuclear reactors in potential direct paths of tsunamis, or at least not on the seashore <20 meters above sea level, when there’s a local fishing industry, to minimize economic risk. But if the fact that the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake in the recorded history of the world, causing the only nuclear “disaster” to share the same maximum classification as Chernobyl, killed at maximum one person singular, a thousand times less than an average year of rooftop solar https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... § The safety issues with Rooftop solar installations / http://www.osha.gov/Publications/Construction_Fatalities/Con..., “raise[s] serious questions about the safety of nuclear power,” I don’t know an appropriate adjective to describe the questions raised by one form of solar killing 3 orders of magnitude more yearly.

(Edit: On fires)

Heat may exacerbate fires, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t burn what isn’t there, and there simply wouldn’t be anywhere near as much flammable undergrowth, etc. if firefighters didn’t fight to prevent nature from removing it in smaller, safer quantities. The number of deaths from natural disasters relative to population is decreasing and there’s no reason for the west coast to be an exception (other than blaming the weather and ignoring inconvenient facts and logic).

Forest fires don't generally move fast enough to cause mass death. The property damage in the West coast, however, is extraordinary.

>...Personally, I think the grand calculus may tilt slightly in nuclear's favor over fossil fuels, but the risk can't be swept under the rug.

Slightly?

No one except the Soviet Union said the Chernobyl style plants were reasonable designs. That kind of design would have been illegal to build anywhere else in the world.

The death rate from Fukishima is far less than the death rate from any properly working fossil fuels source (or wind or rooftop solar for that matter). One estimate is that worldwide use of coal causes up to 800,000 deaths a year - this is much worse than all deaths from nuclear, including the bombs that were dropped on Japan!

https://endcoal.org/health/

A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009:

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/

No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could've let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would they have covered it if 200 thousand were evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

> Have they looked into what's going on in the west coast of the US right now?

Despite the current fires, wildfires are down and have been for decades. A lot of the current wild fires stem from reducing the number of controlled burns we use to do.

Also there is quite a significant amount of arson:

https://archive.is/GWLYq, https://archive.is/cFPbd, https://archive.is/xHiFO, https://archive.is/mhKtG, https://archive.is/US23e, https://archive.is/JyfJe, https://archive.is/owMeD, https://archive.is/rl2cm (and there are a ton more)

> wildfires are down

14 of the 20 worst wildfires have occurred in the past 15 years, and the size of fire season is growing.

https://laist.com/2019/10/28/california-fires-explained-why-...

> don’t believe

Didn't, in thirteen years ago, when that survey was conducted.

Please do provide a more recent survey of comparable experts if it’s possible.

> CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on. There are so many other forms of pollution that are so much worse. Factory cities in China that have lakes of toxic sludge waste. The massive amount of plastic particles in the ocean. Colossal e-waste from electronics only designed to last two years.

CO2, and other greenhouse gasses, are exactly what we should be focusing on. Sea level rise alone is more urgent than everything else you've mentioned, let alone unpredictable weather changes and their potential for causing war.

> Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts.

There are lots of known ways to deal with this, including grid scale batteries and demand-response, both of which are now reaching the electricity market.

What we need is the political and cultural shift to support massive investment in these technologies. There will be room for natural gas as a bridge fuel, but coal has no future. And yes, it's not happening fast enough, and no snap of the fingers will do it.

> CO2 is a stupid thing to focus on

Only if you're willing to ignore the clearly visible impacts of global warming amplified destructive events worldwide. The waters are rising and the global warming denial island is getting smaller with every passing year.

> We need to consume less things.

We need to consume less-carbon-intensive things (hyphenation intentional). We can start by consuming longer-lasting things, consuming things whose materials are more readily recyclable, and reducing waste (where no utility is derived from the consumption). But the first step is to reduce the carbon intensity of things we already consume.

Very well said.

I wonder (actually I really dont - it is clear that it doesnt) if 0 emission include also creation of silicon resin, PCBs, wiring, electricity,... And to back up parent claim - where where they produced?

I am not saying it is nothing - surely better than nothing - but it is "a tad" spitting into the sea.

The major footprint comes from heavy industry that is creating the materials so google can actually operate and if I would be sarcastic - they actually create a greater need for materials where its production produce large amount of emissions.

I would even claim, that they would do far more if they would stop showing ads. The electricity footprint on world wide scale must be enormous - not from google serving them but actually reaching destination and browsers processing them - and not all electricity is coming from "green" sources.

I can claim 0 emission for myself except from (sorry, I just had to say it :D), farting and breathing. But once I start to count in how my food was produced, how the goods I am using were produced etc. this is just not true. Anyway as a decades long vegetarian, strictly driven on public transport or bicycle (:D) I do my best here.

This is just publicity stunt from google PR and it doesn't really mean anything.

But looks like it worked. BBC cached it and is doing an article about it.

Your 0 emission statement suffers from exactly the same criticism you're firing at Google. How was your bike built? How was your bus/train built? What's powering your bus/train? Also the assumption that a vegetarian diet is 0 emission is wrong - you're relying on a massive (oil-fueled) production system that emits a lot, to provide you with the food you buy. Sure, it's less than would be necessary if you ate meat but it's certainly not 0 emission.

Edit - I need to read more carefully, OP already went into this, apologies.

I think that I have explained it very well and I have put it there as an example why the claim from google is a fallacy.

> once I start to count in how my food was produced, how the goods I am using were produced etc. this is just not true.

I wasnt clear enough?

Sorry - I think I read too quickly (assuming you didn't edit your comment?).

Nope, I didnt. This was the whole point why I even put the statement there.

Reduced to 0 is 0 net emission.

Compare: a company dedicated to nothing but planting trees can reduce its carbon emissions extremely quickly, well past the point where they're at net negative carbon emission, even though it probably took gasoline to drive the trees out to the planting site, the laborers eat food, the truck was made in a factory, etc.

Emissions embedded in durable goods, that is the heavy industry you are talking about - are not actually that major.

Heating, electricity, transport and food are by far the majority of our emissions. Industrial processes are like 15% of uk emissions or so

Does the 15% count in the production of any of the industrial processes that have been simply displaced to other locations?

I don't get the analogy - could you explain more?

Disc: Googler.

Google's energy consumption to make goods is zero. Achieving similar zero carbon foot print is next to impossible for lower profit margin fertilizer production. ( i.e. third world countries, as a whole, are working at quite less profit margins, and because of that, have trouble achieving similar zero carbon footprint. Ultimately All the profits are moving to west.

I rephrased my comment (hopes it help). Another mediocre analogy on the subject that you may find both relevant and funny:

"I spread germs all over town today but I bought coronavirus offsets so we’re all good". via https://twitter.com/WeiZhangAtmos/status/1245890907511181312

Isnt this effectively what all governments are doing?

Paying people to stay home so that other people with essential roles can carry on with less chance of spreading covid?

No. That would be the case only if essential workers were using their government-issued permit to go to night clubs without mask nor physical distancing, and pretend to not spread germs because others are staying at home.

Hrm, that's not a bad idea. Perhaps if we use the market to fix the pandemic. The Invisible Hand covering your mouth when you sneeze.

As far as I can tell the only problem with offsets is that it's difficult to account for. If you buy offsets for 1 ton of carbon, it's difficult to ensure that the offsets represent carbon that would actually be added to the atmosphere if not for that funding. Is your comment just extreme pessimism about the efficacy of the auditors or are you remarking that one can't offset their carbon (i.e., co2 isn't fungible)?

I don't think the analogy works; what would a coronavirus offset be?

Here's why offsets are bullshit. Imagine that I go and plant trees every weekend, because I like them and because I don't want to see my world burn. I'm planting trees, everyone is happy. One day, someone contact me and say "I like your work! Would you like to receive 50 cents for every next tree you plant? I want to support you. Just print a paper certifying that I'm supporting your work". I can't refuse that offer, right? I'm getting paid to plant trees! My new treelover friend is happy too: he's saving the world, and he can travel all over the world without remorse, since he's offsetting his flights.

Your analogy misses a critical component: Your 50 cent stipend is typically attached to doing more than you were doing before.

And while the point of your analogy is clear, your neighbor could only travel the world without remorse if they fund a huge number of new trees.

Offsets are not as illogical as you make them sound.

>typically attached to doing more than you were doing before.

I'd love to read the details.

Here [0], Easyjet pretend to be offsetting 100% carbon emitted during their flights: https://www.easyjet.com/fr/developpement-durable

Where are the huge Easyjet forests? Planted just so the rich can fly?

I'm sure they have some kind of contract, somewhere, but I can't verify that. And of course any "new" tree can be attached to an offset, that isn't the problem. How can a third-party says that this tree wouldn't have been planted otherwise, when whole world has no choice but go greener/cleaner? All those who make genuine efforts would be stupid not to take the cash (prisoner dilemma). Carbon offsetting is buying time to slow down changes in devastating behaviors.

Are you being willfully obtuse or do you seriously believe the only way (or even the most effective way) to lower carbon emissions is by planting trees?

He's saying when companies buy carbon offsets, they're potentially just giving money to people who would've planted the trees anyway.

Right, but (1) there's no evidence to support this, the whole point of offset certification is to prevent this sort of fraud and (2) there are lots of more effective carbon offset initiatives than planting trees, so of course we shouldn't expect to see massive new EasyJet forests.

You have accidentally made a point in favour of paying for planting trees while from the tone of your post the reader is lured towards the conclusion that it's somehow bad.

To be clear, this isn't an indictment against carbon offsets, it's an indictment against fraud, because your hypothetical carbon certifier is committing fraud. Carbon offsets are supposed to represent a decrease in emissions or sequestration that would not otherwise happen without that funding. A proper example would be funding someone to go around $somePoorCountry (where wood fuel is common, highly polluting, and bad for respiratory health) and replacing their wood-burning stoves with electric stoves, and then revisiting that country every few years to make sure those new electric stoves are still in use.

Weird time to flex, right?

Reminder: Tesla is only profitable because it sell carbon tax credits to makes of ICE vehicles so they in turn can produce the less efficient cars which are basically just status symbols.

I have heard about similar things about hybrid car sails in the EU.

But I wasn't able to find any articles wrt. that anymore, so it might be wrong or outdated.

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