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Comment by snowmaker | Hacker News Reader

Actually, Boom is planning to be carbon neutral by having their planes burn only fuel made from extracted CO2.

First, do we have any reason to believe this "plan" is anything else than a noncommittal greenwashing statement? What will prevent the next CEO from silently dropping it to reduce costs?

Second, we don't really know how to make carbon neutral fuel. There are all sorts of ecological issues with existing biofuels. Other methods have very low yields. And in any case, we can't make enough clean fuels, so what we really don't need is yet another very wasteful way of using them.

Aerospace engines typically cannot run on biofuels. Boom re-engineered their engines so that they can.

and the fuel used to extract those CO2? That's the worst empty promise I've seen.

Sure Teslas don't emit CO2, but electricity generation does, and until electricity generation is carbon neutral, all "we're carbon neutral because we used electricity to create our fuel" is patent bs.

That doesn't make it carbon-neutral. That's like saying that if I have a baby and kill someone, I'm neutral in my effect on the population. It doesn't work that way...

(Also, you don't make fuel from CO2.)

This is the commonly accepted definition of carbon neutral.

>commonly accepted

No, it's a marketing slang. It's like saing E-mobiles are CN just because they are E.

>That's like saying that if I have a baby and kill someone

But that IS actually Carbon neutral.

EDIT: But just if you compose the dead body correctly otherwise methane...even worse

That's a really weird claim to me. Is your objection that the plane isn't carbon-neutral because it still has carbon emissions, and the claimed "neutrality" isn't an inherent aspect of the plane but rather a choice by the company to offset the emissions elsewhere?

What, in your opinion, is carbon-neutral?

Is burning wood from a sustainably-managed forest carbon-neutral in your eyes?

If you add and subtract one person from the population, your effect on the population is neutral.

You're also a murderer, of course. I don't see the "you're a murderer" equivalent in a conversation about carbon dioxide.

The point is that the two actions don't offset each other when evaluating each one of them.

The point is that birth and murder do not offset each other while removing CO2 from the atmosphere and then returning it does.

This is not hard to understand, unless you're motivated to misunderstand it for some reason.

Not, the removal and the addition don't offset each other - in the sense that someone _else_ emitting some CO2 and you planting a tree don't offset each other. The contribution to CO2 sums up to zero (or not exactly zero but nevermind) - but the _actions_ don't offset each other.

Weird / false analogy; CO2 is a molecule and has no (moral) value.

It's more like taking water from the ground, drinking it, and sweating / pissing it out again.

But I too don't see how they can make fuel out of CO2, they're probably doing something with carbon neutrality, planting trees or something (or more likely: giving some money to one of many shady companies that claim to plant trees. You know, a bit like plastic recycling)

There are some companies attempting make petroleum from air:

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...

The key word is "attempting". That's great, and we should encourage such efforts. But it's premature to base industrial projects on this.

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