It's a small step in the grand scheme of things... But it's a huge step (and commitment) coming from a single company.
I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view.
Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys.
As a side note: I personally think that the way we look at environment and impact is plainly wrong. E.g. it is much more effective to plant trees (called "afforestation") rather than sequester CO2. Here's some old but decent sources [0], [1]. Can't find a proper source, but afforestation, when done together with habitat restoration, can be even cheaper than these numbers, when done in certain areas of Africa, South America and Central Asia.
If Stripe wants to go the proverbial extra mile, it should consider "educating" people on the subject AND take consequent action, as opposed to "just" taking action following conventional wisdom.
No one is saying don't plant trees. Fuck yeah, plant all the trees! But that won't wont be enough. Sequestration will get better, but one of the big things it helps with is locality. CO2 isn't homogenously spread across the globe. It also doesn't spread very well. Concentrations vary drastically over the year and so do plants' ability to capture carbon. Carbon can build up in certain regions. Worse, it can pool where we can't grow trees [0]. Places where we can't get enough water to introduce new populations of trees (without significant carbon costs, defeating the purpose. Also the local ecosystem) Cities. The Arctic. The ocean. I'm all for planting trees (even beyond CO2, I just feel better around trees) but people need to stop making the trees vs sequestration argument. It's trees + sequestration (air and ocean) + promoting corral development + more. (This same argument applies to a lot of things, especially in climate. It's not a "this vs that" argument, it's "this PLUS that".
Sequestration is also good for catching carbon at potential emission sources; it's easier to grab CO2 out of the atmosphere at the point where you're burning methane than to let it out in the atmosphere and then try to catch it again.
(Or, in some interesting experiments, even before emission; there's work on splitting methane from natural gas into carbon and hydrogen and just burning the hydrogen. Gets you something like 66% of the energy of burning the methane completely, and with no CO2 emissions.)
Re: your second point, splitting methane into H2 and CO2 is not something that's being investigated at lab scale, it's how 95% of global hydrogen production today is done. We're talking close to a trillion cubic meters per year from steam methane reforming.
It's just that most of the time, resulting CO2 is just released instead of being stored. But that is changing, fast.
I was specifically referring to pyrolysis, where unlike steam reforming no oxygen is introduced and so the carbon comes out as solid graphite. Scaling the process, and running it in a continuous-operation reactor, is still an area of active engineering work (see e.g. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d36a/ff0a2db0f99a92c2debd5b...), mostly focused on designing the physical system so that the solid carbon comes out nicely during the reaction instead of gunking up the works.
What are the benefits of pyrolysis versus steam methane reforming (SMR)? My immediate thought would be that you leave energy on the table, and that storage at scale is harder when the end result is graphite. Moreover, SMR is proven technology at very large scale.
One advantage is that it produces high-purity graphite, which is a moderately expensive commodity, used for electronics manufacturing (especially power components in batteries), structural carbon composites, and machine lubricants.
The percentage of carbon captured is also damn near 100% - quite a bit better than gaseous carbon capture techniques I've heard of.
You do leave quite a lot of energy on the table (losing somewhere between 30% and 50%), so this is a technology that is only economically viable with high emissions pricing. But that seems like the way Europe is going anyway.
And yes, SMR is the proven and clearly superior technology right now; I'd call this TRL 4/5 right now. But with another decade of development?
Aha, so it's targeting "CCU". Then OK, I can maybe see there is a point initially, but not at anything near the scale we need.
Global graphite production from mining is at 1 megatonne/year, while synthetic is a few hundred kilotonnes/year. We need CCS to operate at tens of gigatonnes per year, that's four orders of magnitude beyond all the graphite the world needs.
This is the problem with anything CCU - there just aren't viable options with consumption at the gigatonne scale.
At the gigatonne scale, nothing is easy to store. Fill the entire Hoover dam with graphite, and you've stored 6 gigatonnes. We need to store tens of gigatonnes per year for a hundred years.
Trees will actually do the trick. I looked for an international business that would plant a 1000 trees for me which would offset my entire carbon footprint for my entire life. Didn't find anything except a local one in Iceland [1] in Icelandic only (good luck with Google Translate).
I can offset my footprint for 800$/year and I think it's going to be my New Years resolution. No more carbon from me.
Finding land and planning trees for it should be a global business. There are a lot of people like me with disposable income that would invest in something like that.
Please also include a resolution to reduce your carbon emissions.
Remember that planting trees only work if you have the guarantee that in the future these trees will not be burned. Also, some natural decomposition also emits CO2
Planting trees can delay/slow down climate change. What happens in a decade when planting trees does not scale anymore and we've kept increasing our emissions in the same time?
I am about 50 years old. Planting trees scales for at least 50 years. Something on the order of 1000 trees will offset the entire footprint of a upper-middle class non-jetsetter (eats meat, travels 2-4 times per year, car, modest house).
There are a lot of technology promises on the horizon that will hopefully solve the next inflection point, but that's not my climate crisis, it will be the next generation. Hopefully by then the human race will have developed fusion or other energy technologies.
Next time, could you get a video from someone who's actually seen a tree?
That video was just awful. It's only redeeming feature was that it was short. Here's what he got wrong:
1. The mass of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 3E+12 tonnes (not tons). Around a third of that is additional from humans, so around 1E+12 (cf trillionthton.org - they were a bit optimistic). That's pretty close to what he had, only out by a factor of 2, but purely by chance (there's a fair bit of that).
2. He rounded down the population, so the figure of 130 tonnes per person is again, pretty close.
3. The 0.33 tonnes per year from just breathing is beyond stupid. Unless you're drinking gasoline and eating coal, then all the CO2 you breathe out came from the atmosphere in the first place. It came from growing plants. This is just lazy and ignorant. It's not like he even uses this figure anyway.
4. Typical per-capita CO2 is not "10-ish tonnes per year" for a developed country. That's the high end. The UK is hardly a shining beacon of green policy, and even it is at 6.5 tonnes per year. What's more, we're trying to improve on that. 5 tonnes per year is closer to what the average person can easily manage without sacrificing anything.
5. Not all CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere. A large part are absorbed by the oceans (hence ocean acidification). He should know this.
6. Great, now we've got the bizarre rectangular tree. Was the volume of a cylinder too much work to look up? Anyway, it's actually oddly difficult to get the total mass of a tree (not that he tried), because lumber yards tend to only care about the trunk. I found a site that gave a complete measurement of an oak, including canopy and roots. It came out to around 20 tons, around 10 tons dry biomass, giving around 5 tonnes carbon.
7. Carbon. Not CO2. Multiply by 44/12 to get the CO2 required. That's 18 tonnes CO2 per tree. Let's drop that down to 10 and say we have small trees.
8. Wait, what? He didn't even use the volume. He just guessed 1 tonne C02 per tree!
9. When trees die, they leave a gap in the forest and new trees grow. How else would forests last for thousands of years? Once you've planted the trees they will replace themselves. What's more, the wood could be used for building or furniture which means it will retain the CO2 even longer. What's even more, giving ourselves a hundred years or so breathing space while we reduce and reverse emmissions is absolutely worth it.
Huh, I didn't mean to type so much but there was so much wrong with that video that I just kept going.
With you until the last point. When newly planted forests mature, a lost tree is not generally replaced. Trees around the 'gap' grow into the gap and take the sunlight, getting larger in the process.
In this way a stand of small trees becomes a much-less-dense stand of very large mature trees.
Don't know how it affects the analysis - is a mature forest more carbon-dense than a newly-planted one?
Yeah, I did oversimplify that. I guess I was really saying, that if your trees live for 100 years, say, it's not like the whole forest disappears once the 100 years are up.
And, of course, if it's used for forestry, the trees will be continually removed and new ones planted.
Nearly every day on here there's a thread about empty/meaningless work and feeling like we're not contributing anything that will matter 50 years from now - and I often participate as I feel this way quite strongly. This is the kind of work that's meaningful. This is a huge commitment to well-thought-out climate healing and using wealth for actual tangible good. Stripe already deserves a place above FAANG for their incredible work culture [1] but this goes even beyond that and would be fantastic to contribute towards. I'll be checking their careers page often, in case they get into hardware.
The founders of Project Wren (https://projectwren.com/) went from building HR Software to building software to combat climate change.
We need profitable enterprises focused on this large global problem! I think the tides are starting to shift and would love to see the smartest minds of our generation focused on this issue!
You know, I would love for an option that just asked how old you are and just let you pay to offset your expected life's worth of tree replanting (this might just be the closest thing I've ever seen).
The big polluters, like airlines, energy, transportation, and chemical companies are the ones that will have to take these steps to see any effect. Every bit helps, of course, but the cost of implementing something like this is doable for some, while for many would mean extinction, or fundamental changes to their business model.
I think we need to implement world-wide tax on pollution to avoid some crazy externalitiees.
For example, cheap flights used frequently are a ridiculous luxury we cannot afford. I know lots of people that use budget airlines more than once per month to make weekend trips across Europe.
The amount of CO2 they are putting into the atmosphere is simply insane. A bit more than doing the same trip by car, for each passenger.
Planet Money had an episode about "revenue-neutral carbon tax", where all the money collected is returned back to the tax payers, to spend however they want.
The point of this tax is not to raise money, but to change behavior. This, a family that drives to work and school every day will pay more carbon tax, but this will be offset by the tax refund (or lower income tax). And a family that finds ways to reduce their carbon footprint will benefit from the tax refund and able to spend it on other things.
WA state had a carbon tax initiative but the revenues went to environmental efforts, and it failed. I think if it were made revenue-neutral, or heck, even made as an overall tax-cut to please the fiscal conservatives, I think it would pass (although it would face pushback from environmentally minded about not doing enough).
I like it a lot, but the problem is the major industries that will be heavily impacted/closed down as a result. They have immense political power, and I don't see any way around that. Hope I'm wrong.
And that's of course just one country out of 200. There is no local solution to global warming!
They tried that here in Canada, and it is both too small to have much impact, and getting massive pushback from the Conservative party.
You have to keep in mind that even if it’s revenue neutral, explaining the scheme to taxpayers is going to be difficult, and your opponents are going to try their darndest to make it sound unappealing, even if it means spreading misinformation.
The trouble is “polluters” is everyone in society. People who use a lot of carbon feel personally attacked bu such a tax...because itmis in fact directly affecting them.
A carbon tax is my top priority. There’s no sense denying the opposition though. The yellow vest protests in france were from a fuel tax.
We already know we can produce jet fuel from captured CO2 from the air. The trick is making it cheaper, particularly energy-wise. We can't dedicate half the world for solar panels to make fuel.
Honestly, this is a problem with a lot of technologies. Especially in the green sector. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep funding research into it and trying to make it cheaper, but also a reason to be cautious.
I think it’s on all of us, including all the corporations. We should have a carbon tax to disincentivize mass c02 production - at the moment all the profits are private and all the losses (to the environment) are public. If they want to pay someone who’s planting trees for carbon caps then that’s fine for me. Just solve the damn problem. Who’s standing in the way? Shareholders of the above companies (and by proxy, the lobbyists and politicians). Because protective action doesn’t get them gains. It requires government action.
Because you are acting like this would punish the company. It might to an extent but in reality consumers would hurt the most. That in my opinion is why it doesn't happen.
Not as much when the carbon tax is tax-neutral. In Canada we started getting back a carbon tax credit. Consumer impact is still there but a lot more mitigated.
Right but it's not going to punish consumers equally. It will hurt the poor a lot more than the rich imho. Essentially a regressive tax moving the burden for the climate change problem to the poor.
Netflix made had $5.8B in revenue from small $10-20 subscription users!
Today, for $20 a month you can offset your own carbon footprint! This matters because the more resources that goes into fighting climate change allows innovation. Even by generating more demand for carbon credits and offsetting, new businesses can thrive and grow by fighting climate change!
It’s a great project but they could be more clear about that 20% cut they take and why it’s double what they partners take. How does it scale? 20% makes sense when you are dealing with, say, 100m of donations, but not so great when it’s 1B. At 1B they’d be taking 200m for what? Hiring the best talent in the world, to do what exactly? I don’t know, I wish them well and hopefully they get more clear about their cut and lower that over time. I think if you are really going to make an impact you must be targeting few billions of donations and 20% is just unreasonable.
I like it, but why do I have to give my email for emission calculation? It's off-putting, I don't want even more spam. And I will tell them where do I live and how, will they package it with my email and sell it to ad companies as a handy profile?
Sorry to be paranoid, but most startups (uber, airbnb, paypal, not to mention facebook ...) are evil and exploitative.
Wren co-founder here — we ask for your email so we can send you a report on your footprint (if you choose) or come back to the onboarding flow later. We're spinning the calculator out into an open resource soon though!
Finally, we just started two months ago and have not sold user information to ad companies nor do we ever plan to. That sounds like an evil and unnecessary way to go about not accomplishing our mission.
Short summary: There is no free lunch. Almost everything is expensive, natural systems (afforestation and land use change) are cheaper but more variable. The cheapest negative emission technology is not to emit in the first place.
I've actually been slightly interested in buying some cheap land outside of town and slowly planting trees to forest it over the next decade. The goal would be to plant enough trees to cover the carbon footprint of me and my entire family.
What I don't know is where I can find out which trees are particularly suited for carbon capture. From what I've read, fast growing trees will capture carbon quickly, but only if you harvest them, prevent rotting of the wood, and replanting a new crop.
Slow growth trees will store more carbon, but it takes a longer time for it to accomplish it.
I suppose it's like one of those "Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick two" situations. Is it better to capture a lot of carbon quickly to help the planet ASAP, or to kick-off the planting of trees that will capture carbon for the next 300 years?
Even when that's decided, how do I pick which trees aren't just suited for my area (relatively easily with native tree guides), but also well-suited for carbon capture and survival in an increasingly chaotic climate and ecosystem?
Don’t you then need to worry about enforcement mechanisms to keep those trees from getting cut down? If they’re all harvested after say n decades, there’s no net effect on climate.
Forests have evolved into recycling ecosystems. When a tree dies naturally, it gets decomposed by various fungi and other organisms which, over time, release the stored CO2 back into the atmosphere. So the CO2 is released one way or another. What matters is that the living tree stores CO2 in its wood. Cutting and replanting might even increase the amount of stored CO2 because any wood that's used in the building industry is wood that doesn't decompose for decades to come. Wood you cut down to burn right thereafter probably reduces the storage capacity, but it's not zero due to the living trees!
Forests used to be real carbon sinks meaning that trees would just die without decomposing, because life hasn't figured out yet how to decompose it. This is how coal was formed around the globe.
Maybe some better technology to sequester CO2 emerges. But planting trees is a good approach for the start. If we want to slow down climate change, the CO2 sequestration industry will have to become huge within the next decades.
Burying biochar (the superset of charcoal, basically) in old coal mines or other geological structures is a feasible way for long-term storage. The carbon content can be up to 90%, depending on the method. Biochar can be made from nearly all forms of biomass as long as it's dry enought.
I think, they would be happy to keep their jobs and get paid for several decades to come. Also, the coal companies wouldn't have to write off their investments, since some of their technology could probably be reused.
How does it follow that there's no net effect on climate (or amount of atmospheric carbon) if the tree is cut down? I can only see that if the timber is burned for fuel. If someone instead carved the timber up into N skateboards, modulo waste, the carbon would stay with the skateboards.
Skateboards don't stay skateboards forever. Eventually they'll be thrown out, where they'll degrade & eventually decompose, re-releasing the stored CO2.
True, but my model of CO2 is that its damage is proportional to the area under the curve (quanity CO2 * time in atmosphere). So deferring that C02 release by 10 years is strictly a win, b/c you haven't incurred the climate effects of that C02 for those 10 years.
It depends entirely on where the skateboards and other wood-derived waste ends up. If it's not properly disposed of (e.g. litter), then it will release most/all of it into the atmosphere. If it's incinerated, it's all released. If it's in a landfill, it depends on whether and how effectively the landfill is sealed.
If you cover an area with trees that is today not covered with trees, that area will absorb CO2 from the atomsphere.
Even if the trees die or are cut down, as long as new ones are allowed to grow, that area will absorb roughly constant amount of CO2.
Now, if we can harvest some trees regularly, and use them to replace plastics or fossil fuels, then that's a win for the environment even if those harvested trees end up releasing their CO2 back to the atmosphere, because we didn't introduce any _more_ CO2, we just recycled what we already have.
What? You want them cut down and used in carbon storing areas, like construction. Trees capture way more carbon while growing, so ideally you cut them down and replant them.
How long do you think this climate crisis will last?
If you think it will be over, or at least completely unrecognizable, in 50 years your - in itself valid - concern doesn't matter.
If I imagine people 50 or 100 years ago trying to plan to solve our problems in 2019, knowing what they did then, I don't think they could have accomplished much of anything of substance, even with the best intentions and the commitment of huge resources.
When a tree grows, it captures carbon. If after N years it is cut, in most cases that carbon is NOT going to go back to the atmosphere. Most CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels (oil, etc), NOT from voluntary wood burning.
Wood burning is not the only way to release that CO2 back into the atmosphere. Just cutting a tree and letting it decompose also releases the same carbon. You need to store it in wood form, or bury it deep.
Note that you do not have to wait for Google: You can just start searching using Ecosia (https://www.ecosia.org/) which use their revenue to plant trees around the world and are also a "negative emissions" operation. (Yes, the results are not as good as Google's, but for me they are good enough in the vast majority of searches, and for the remaining I can still hop over to Google.)
They should add a button "Try this search on Google instead" at the bottom of the first page, then I would probably try them. Otherwise it's too much of a hassle, especially on mobile, tbh.
You can add "#g" to any search and it will directly redirect to Google (similar to DuckDuckGo's shebangs). This works very well on Desktop, but I agree that it's a bit of a hassle on mobile...
No, you are not. Trees naturally capture carbon in the form of wood. I noticed that distinction too in the post and assume they meant "modern" carbon sequestration engineered by humans.
There's also a big middle ground. For example, some semi-green power is generated by breaking wood into flammable gases + carbon ("biochar"), then burying the carbon and burning the gases.
* “almost certainly more” than 84% of stripe’s emissions will not be sequestered because it’s “financially infeasible”
* no mention of stripe’s actual carbon footprint
* talk of startups and trillion dollar industry “by the end of the century” but no mention of government intervention / green new deal to turn the tide in the next decade before it’s too late
Verdict: free market ideologues are not ever going to be leaders on climate. We need massive mobilization at the federal level to hit the necessary emissions reductions within the next 12 years if we are to avoid a catastrophic rise in temperature.
>As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets.
The sequestration is in addition to those offsets. They’re trying to advance sequestration technology by boosting demand. They’ll be offsetting and sequestering more than 100% of their emissions. The excess cost referred to sequestration, not offsets.
Government has done basically nothing for 30 years. I really, really want governments to take it seriously, tax carbon, etc. but I welcome private companies stepping in to try things too.
Not sure who you're arguing with, as the post you're responding to literally only addresses sequestering. Offsets alone are not a solution to the urgent need to turn the tide on climate change. They offer an easy way for CO2 emitters to sort of greenwash what they're doing and keep doing it.
"Private companies trying things" is fine but as we can see from the reactions to this press release that the standard for private companies trying things is incredibly low and nowhere near what's required to hit the IPCC targets.
We agree on one thing though: government has not done nearly enough historically. Of course much worse could be said for industry, the primary source of CO2 emission (along with the military) and fundamentally incentivized to exploit externalized costs and pollute our planet.
> We need massive mobilization at the federal level to hit the necessary emissions reductions within the next 12 years if we are to avoid a catastrophic rise in temperature.
That doesn’t really make sense IMHO, global warming isn’t a US problem, it’s a worldwide issue. Let’s say the US becomes a benevolent dictatorship with the mission to reduce CO2 emissions by any mean necessary (and is somehow successful), you still have the global problem. And then what, do you go to war against other countries?
You do your part, other countries try to do the same, and various means and strategies are implemented and shared globally.
This “but we can’t fix it all alone, it’s a global issue” thinking mode has to go. All contributions are important in reducing the speed of warming, whether your neighbour participates or not.
Interestingly, the longer you wait, the more you can expect people with more extreme agendas to pop up around the globe because they will see the point in coercion to save the world. Early investment at a massive scale is worth it.
> This “but we can’t fix it all alone, it’s a global issue” thinking mode has to go.
Ok, why? It is a global issue, that’s not something we can ignore. You can change your way of thinking if you want, but I don’t see why you would ignore that point. I find it disingenuous to say “if the US government doesn’t do X in 12 years then we are doomed”, because it’s not true. Of course I’m not saying that nothing should be done, and I never said it cannot be fixed (or dealt with), that’s just you putting words in my mouth. But the US government has a terrible history at dealing with other countries, and creating a giant mess all around. Just imagine Trump deciding to focus on climate issues, I cannot see how that wouldn’t result in a complete disaster with international conflicts.
I think that we should keep the framing on the global aspect, and think about it as a common goal.
I don’t disagree with the rest of your comment, I completely support any effort at a local level.
Come now, think creatively here, this going to war nonsense is a total straw man argument. Carbon-based import tariffs, sanctions, and having a very strong, innovative US clean tech to export/sell its tech to other countries who need but dont have the R&D budget.
How is it a straw man argument? I’m not a US citizen, I look at the country history at dealing with international actors. The country has a terrible history at cooperating with others in a peaceful way, or even consider common interests. If for some reasons the US government decides to that its mission is to tackle climate issues, I don’t think it will take long before they come with a rational for a climate war.
> Carbon-based import tariffs, sanctions, and having a very strong, innovative US clean tech to export/sell its tech to other countries who need but dont have the R&D budget.
Sure, that’s all fine. That’s really not what I would expect from a country that systematically refused to collaborate on climate issues with others, but that would be great.
Given how the US is one of the worst polluters, both in absolute and relative terms, and how at a policy level it is way behind, a "benevolent dictatorship with the mission to reduce CO2 emissions by any mean necessary" would have a huge global impact.
For people really into carbon removal ---
Check out AirMiners, the largest community of entrepreneurs, researchers, and funders exploring opportunities in negative emissions and carbon removal. Folks from every major carbon removal startups like Climeworks, Global Thermostat, etc.
I'm really interested in the topic and would love to just lurk and read what people say on there for a while, but the text in the signup form makes it sound like a person like me wouldn't be accepted, since I don't have super concrete plans to make that my next profession (although I'm generally interested in exploring this field if I really started thinking that my skills would make sense there).
Let's say I'm a regular web developer and know nothing about climate science, carbon removal, or any related science or technologies, but might be interested in donating my time and and skills.
Glad you asked! Basically, imagine I told you not much had been built and climate folks don't really "get" software.
It's true. The same revolution that connected software and biotech is coming to the climate. There's tons of super duper obvious stuff that has yet to be built.
You would probably guess there's a great website for tracking carbon levels in the air. Like that's super basic right?
This is probably a really sensitive topic but.. Donating your time to help get politicians elected who are serious about doing what's necessary may be the best thing you can do.
The technology options today are good enough. We can start building wind turbines and solar panels right now. We can insulate homes right now. We can replace oil and gas heating with heat pumps right now.
Storage only becomes a problem when a quite significant chunk of the generation is intermittent. But even then, today's batteries are good enough for overnight storage, and for longer term storage we can use power-to-gas processes.
Shameless plug here but anyone interested in helping us prototype test an app to track/gamify/offset daily carbon emissions? We are a start-up in Singapore called CAPTURE :) all about helping people become aware of the impact their daily actions can have on their carbon footprint, make it fun and add a little competition, then for what you can't reduce - we will offer in-app offsetting via CAPTURE forests, where you'll be able to track your individual trees and watch your forests grow via a monthly drone update! Would be super grateful for any feedback. Early stages but testers/those interested please sign-up at www.thecapture.club
Bravo to Stripe's continued leadership and exemplification of what a modern corporation can and should be. The CCS area I've been most fascinated by recently is listed as their first area of interest: natural carbon sinks via land management practices.
I've been reading a little more about mob-stalked, heavily mobile grazing techniques (rotating cows/buffalo/ruminants daily) which increases the grass productivity per acre, thus capuring more carbon in the grass --> soil. If anyone knows of any resources/studies comparing the carbon sequestration of grasslands, which have incredible biomass cycles over several decades, vs managed forests which do not see the same level of biomass turnover, I would love to see them.
I'm surprised by the size of the commit. If $1M is the floor for what a Stripe-sized org is willing to spend, how expensive would a carbon tax actually be? Are there good estimators for my impact as a consumer and how much I need to commit to this?
Basically I want to know how much it costs to feel ok about my flights to go skiing.
The highest ClimeWorks plan, if it's trustworthy (can't personally vouch for it) is approx 1 USD per kg CO2 captured, or $1k per ton.
That's pretty expensive. But at $100 it starts to look a lot more favourable when compared with a personal footprint - 30 tons emitted would be $3K, perfectly achievable for someone who's talking about flying to go skiing.
It's a bit of a red flag that they sell their highest plan, 600kg a year, as "approx. 100% of a global average footprint". While that's probably true, the median human does not fly. A one way flight London->New York generates almost this much per passenger.
The mean emissions of those willing to spend 600 EUR/year to offset their travel are going to be at least an order of magnitude higher. You're better off feeling guilty and reducing your travel by 10% (in terms of personal emissions).
I do admit it's tricky, because if everybody is scared off by the true price tag (my lifetime emissions as an Australian would easily be $500k), the technology will never get a chance to get economy of scale and lower prices. That's really what you're paying for when you sign up for the plan.
so, the average total carbon emission per person is 4.5 tons, and your flying alone is 13?
Isn't it better that you/we change your/our air spending habits? I don't believe that we can offset our carbon footprint fast enough with carbon sinks while still maintaing the same levels of carbon emission.
Reality of course is that if there is significant upfront economic costs then very few people are going to buy into the scheme, I think innovation is our best bet and if $100 per ton is a price point where people are in then that's probablly the best pragmatic choice.
However, needless transport seems a great target for emission reduction, we still need to get around, but "commuting" while emitting carbon would seem the easiest way to reduce carbon emissions, we have all the tech we need for that (public transport/remote work/online shopping/ride sharing/EVS/reduced work weeks) just no incentive to change.
If you add the cost of $100 per ton to the price of the plane ticket, you would see some amount of travel reduction naturally.
What travel reduction we would have would, at that point, pay for the appropriate sequestration.
Honestly, it sounds like we should just require everyone to buy 100% sequestration for their carbon production (priced into the goods and services). Add a phase in over, say 10 years to.
I'd like to see companies actually track how much CO2 goes into the production of their products. Imagine if everything you buy had the equivalent of an EnergyGuide sticker for CO2 emissions used in the production of that thing. It would lead to companies trying to optimise their products to reduce CO2 used in the manufacturing process.
Agree. This should be legislated just as calories are today. You could ratchet up the severity of the legislation slowly; initially you might allow estimates, over time you could start to audit the supply chain etc.
Some items do already expose this information, but it's pretty much all stuff for the eco market.
Though I remember Walkers' crisps doing this ten years back. 80g for a packet of crisps. Or about 3kg CO2 per 1kg crisps. Doesn't include final transportation though.
Yea, that makes sense, then gives you an easy path to charging a tax with revenues going to offsets or sequestration based on the number on the sticker.
I agree that the correct solution is to just whack a carbon tax on flights.
It's ideal if people voluntarily reduce - I've committed myself to not flying except in case of family emergency - but ultimately that's not going to solve the problem because it's a tragedy of the commons.
Express it as an overhead on ticket price. You're using terrapass, so I plugged some numbers in and it out to about 20-30% based on what I can remember paying for typical domestic economy seats. If you fly on more expensive flights, it's even cheaper.
That sounds tolerable to me as a price of saving the planet. Certainly it's not an economy-busting impossibility given that it's in the range that can be reasonably borne by normal middle class individuals.
Yeah. The major problem I think comes about with stuff like Ryanair flights for ten quid where the carbon tax might well whack up the cost by orders of magnitude.
I think it's incorrect to categorise limiting flying as 'economy busting' in any sense to be frank - what percentage of flights are things like people visiting relatives?
It might be a bit of a shame, but economy busting is surely hyperbolic, it's primarily a leisure activity.
> Ryanair flights for ten quid where the carbon tax might well whack up the cost by orders of magnitude.
It would be nowhere near that amount. I used a flight estimator which says a return flight from London to Malaga would emit 0.3 tonnes of CO2.
Project Wren charges $10 - $20 per tonne, so it would cost the same as the ticket at most, even including the cut Ryanair inevitably would take. If you take a more normal ticket price, it would be an insignificant extra.
Sorry if I sound too negative but I think carbon offsetting is the very quintessence of what one would call green washing. There is no way around changing our life styles. If you don't want to feel bad about flying, take a train.
This is an amazing pledge and very powerful statement.
However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. The main counter argument being that CCS technology enables the status quo of fossil fuel burning to continue.
On the other hand, there are some heavy industries (steel production?) that do not have any alternatives to coal burning in order to operate and CCS can offset the carbon footprint in these industries. I would however not call this "negative emissions" but rather "emission-free" or similar.
What is your opinion on CCS? Can people convince me in either direction?
There isn't some intrinsic moral sin to burning carbon. There are just practical problems with having too much in the atmosphere. If you can remove carbon, especially if you can also convert it back into fuel, that solves the problem.
(Carbon isn't the only emission from burning coal -- it contains sulfur and thorium too. But these can also be mitigated with some expense. And if you're converting CO2 directly to fuel, there's no increase in pollution at all.)
I would argue there is a moral "sin" in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because (in your words) it leads to "practical problems", i.e. anthropogenic climate change.
If you can remove the carbon again, then it is still a "sin" unless you pay to have your share removed. If it can then be converted to fuel again that is an added bonus.
Of course, this whole process needs to occur at a massive scale because we are releasing so much carbon dioxide and want to remove more than we are currently emitting.
(P.s. I don't like the word "sin" in this context because of the theological connotation it implies, but I hope the message is clear)
no, this is too simplistic. extracting carbon from the ground is neither free nor reversable so this analogy isn't appropriate here. even if one could turn it back into whatever it's original form was (impossible to do without additional energy due to thermodyamics/entropy), the site of extraction is way worse for the wear.
No one cares about the "worse for the wear" problems of digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia. The whole problem is the CO2 that ends up in our air on the other end of the process.
> However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions.
So... let's put off saving the planet because someone has moral qualms? No. This is a legitimate emergency. If we have something that has a net positive impact, we need to do it and stop arguing about it on the internet. Nothing is without tradeoffs, and some are simply going to have to be made. There are no easy solutions. We have seven billion people to feed while we manage to undo all the damage too, remember.
I'm not saying capture solutions are the best choice, mind you. I'm saying that decision needs to be made with numbers and not "morals".
It's a fair question, but I'll ask you "what's the alternative?"
We can't plant enough trees. Nor can we always plant them in the most needed places (North, where carbon accumulates). We can't build even public transport (which is still positive emissions). We can't get everyone to go vegan (which still is positive emissions. Even lab meat won't make negative emissions). We can't stop air travel and shipping without significantly affecting people's lives (including their ability to live, as drugs, equipment, and experts aren't all created locally). We can't get everyone to leave their homes and concentrate into cities.
Even if we could do all that, we'd still be positive. Worse, how do we get every country in the world to do the same? It seems infeasible to me. And it doesn't address the problems like that carbon builds up in certain areas that we just can't even plant trees.
But here's the thing. The argument isn't "planting trees vs CC", it is "trees + CC". Actually it's more! It's about using every available method we have at our disposal. There is nothing wrong with burning carbon actually. The issue is burning so much that we are destroying the plant. Destroying the planet is the issue. If we have negative emissions total (and aren't creating carbon hot zones) then who cares how much we emit? As long as it's captured and doesn't damage the planet.
Leaving CC off the table is like telling a bunch of starving children that they can't have hamburgers because some of them might eat too many and get fat. The concern is completely missing the point of the problem.
I think it depends what the lower limit of this technology is in terms of cost-per-ton. If the technology can get 100X cheaper, it would be immoral not to pursue it. If it only gets 2-3X as cheap as it is today, it might create the moral excuse you cited and be a net-negative.
My instinct is it could be an extremely important technology for fighting climate change. And while it develops it's important to continue to insist that it doesn't excuse the emissions it might offset.
Limiting climate change to 2C is such a hail mary at this point that we should look favorably on anything, no matter how imperfect, that moves us in that direction. There are no silver bullets, we need to do everything at once.
While I agree that there are no silver bullets and multiple approaches are required, I don't agree that we need to pursue everything that may help.
First, a lot of R&D must be done (for all types of solutions) and the money to fund this can only be spent once. So we need to pre-select some promising ideas (could still be many ideas, but not all ideas).
Second, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. While I am pretty neutral / undecided on nuclear power, some argue that the (potential) problems it brings along are not worth the risk, even if it is a carbon neutral method of power production.
Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before)
(I would like to emphasize here that I am not arguing about the extent or existence of a climate crisis. I am aware of the literature and agree that immediate action is required to limit carbon emissions)
Even if you could snap your fingers and make perfectly renewable energy, we still have the problem that there's a bunch of carbon in the air that used to be in the ground, and that's not going away unless we do something about it.
> Third, CCS technology disincentiveses investment and R&D into fully renewable energy production (the point made before)
Eh, renewable energy is getting quite cheap. If you add the costs of CCS into fossil fuel, I think you'll still have plenty of incentives to invest on renewables, and to use fossil as a last resort only.
That does nothing to reduce consumption. Oil isn't zero sum. If you make the market less efficient prices will rise a bit, but production numbers will still match demand. Fracking taught us this.
If you want a simple solution, buy a farm and bury the output. Simpler than storing a bunch of oil, even. But not very effective relative to land use.
I'm a big 'ol fan of Stripe, but large scale change isn't going to happen through corporate self regulation.
I wish tech companies that insist they want to make large, positive changes would come to terms with the fact that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary. I would be far more aggressive in my support of this effort if it was explicitly "we're doing this effort to cover our own tracks and we're contributing to a PAC that will support politicians who prioritize sensible environmental policy."
I disagree. While there is no guarantee large scale change will be fully driven by corporate self regulation, I'd argue that corporate self regulation, and initiatives like this, have the potential to be substantially more impactful than waiting on help from dysfunctional big government.
yes we need political levers to move, but I'm not holding my breath, and I welcome any and all corporate efforts.
>I wish tech companies that… want… large, positive changes would [accept] that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary.
I agree that corporate self-regulation is the laziest political solution. But instead of doubling down on a mistake, let's get all company hands off the political levers and have real separation of corp and state. Company influence on politics is an arms race that entrenches the most powerful firms, many of which are fundamentally opposed to climate change regulation.
Absolutely, agreed. But unilateral disarmament isn't the way to do so. If Stripe has a nice post about vehemently supporting politicians and policies that aim to get corporate money out of politics, they will quietly get my upvote and thoughtful nod of approval.
You can't throw a wifi-enabled juicer 5 feet without hitting half a dozen companies that are trying to be 'technological catalysts'. You're giving extra credit for unproven rate of return, which I'd still argue won't amount to meaningful change unless the political status quo is aggressively challenged.
The reason you spent $Xmil on a PAC is the same reason we (inclusive, hopefully) vote. Will one significantly contributor turn the tide? Probably not. But it requires good (corporate) citizens to put up or shutup instead of leveraging a tweak on a pet environmental project to gain a positive press cycle.
>This leads to Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment. We will seek to purchase negative CO2 emissions at any price per tCO2, starting immediately. We expect that the best price will initially be very high: almost certainly more than $100 per tCO2, as compared to the $8 per tCO2 we pay for offsets. We don’t expect to be able to sequester all of our carbon emissions, both because the relevant technologies are not yet operating at sufficient scale, and because it would be financially infeasible for Stripe. And so we commit to spending at least twice as much on sequestration as we do on offsets, with a floor of at least $1M per year.
What is the difference between sequestration and offsets?
Sequestration means literally filtering CO2 out of the air. Offsets are essentially just a contract that someone who would otherwise have created emissions, won't. For example, instead of deforesting an area I own and selling it for wood, I might sell an offset contract and keep it intact.
I've seen a lot of tech companies carefully analyzing impact of commute. Essentially re-locating closer/central to employees like using the commutestudy tool.
100% public transit commute is a long term goal, so work/live distance should be as short as possible short term.
Why is this a goal? Public transit isn't inherently cleaner. What makes it environmentally more attractive than personal ownership of electric vehicles, or a transit system subsidized by the government instead of run by it?
Even personal elec vehicles is a dumb way for millions to get to/from work in the future. Its very 'western' and old way of thinking. In 100yrs ppl will be either walking/biking/public transit or remote.
I'm in the process of setting up a new consulting business, and one of my major commitments is to donate a significant percentage (at least 10%; likely more) of profits towards CO2 reduction / capture efforts.
Interesting that they are willing to pay any price the market offers, and expect to pay over $100/t. I wonder to what degree large scale burying of biomass would be effective? It'd be effectively the same process that created the hydrocarbon fuels we use today, which would be fairly effectively sequestered if we didnt drill them out of the ground.
That paper avoids mentioning BECCS, the most extensively researched plan for carbon sequestration: reducing wood to charcoal, burning the syngas you produce during the process to generate electricity, and then sequestering the charcoal.[1] The Kyoto protocol for limiting global warming to 2C requires massive use of BECCS.
Pros: The output material has a higher carbon content, so you're locking up less water, and it's completely biologically inert, so you can just dump it into an open pit instead of burying it, where wood would otherwise rot and release its carbon back into the air. However, you're in real trouble if your giant pile of charcoal is ignited somehow, which can be harder to put out than you'd think.[2]
Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood. Running a biomass power plant has higher operating costs than just shoveling wood into a hole.
BECCS requires a particular set of incentives in order to be economical. You need both very expensive electricity and also a high carbon sequestration subsidy. If solar+battery storage is cheap, direct burial makes more sense.
> Cons: Syngas still has some carbon in it, so you're generating more emissions than if you just buried the wood.
It's a crop, though. That carbon you put into the atmosphere got sucked out by the tree you baked to begin with. Use renewable biomass (a "farm" in the jargon) and this problem goes away.
You have 1000 tons of green wood, which contains 400 tons of carbon.
Should you bury it, and sequester all the carbon, or BECCS it, emitting maybe 50 tons of that carbon back into the atmosphere, which you will eventually have to spend more money to capture again?
Burying wood costs money, and doesn't produce anything useful. BECCS produces some electricity, but that electricity is so expensive there's only a handful of pilot plants in the entire world. Which is better?
The problem with burying biomass is that it gets metabolized by bacteria into CO2 and (worse) methane, which escapes into the air. Some landfills manage to capture most of the methane, but on the 100-year time scale it's not clear that burying is very effective.
The study I linked addresses that point - they suggest that "only 0–3% of the carbon from wood are ever emitted as landfill gas after several decades". I don't consider myself qualified to evaluate that claim, but it certainly seems plausible, given that wood clearly decays far slower than, for example, kitchen scraps found in household bio-waste.
Data centers are factories without smoke stacks, they are voracious consumers of energy and since "cloud" everything computing is the name of the game at least for medium term, tech companies would do a favor if they focus on tackling the datacenter related issue.
Also chip fabrication is a dirty dirty dirty business, as the consumers of the computer hardware, we as an industry has responsibility to pollution reduction of this process.
Planting trees is good, giving aid money is good, but cleaning your own shit is better!
I'd argue that "the cloud" makes traditional computing more efficient. Since their motto is "pay for what you use", it automatically aligns with motives for the most efficient use.
Not to mention that the usage of computers has reduced the need for much more power hungry methods. We can now efficiently calculate much stronger, lighter, easier to manufacture parts and building patterns.
There is no need to drive/ride/walk to a place to hear the message, radio broadcasting is much more effective, even though it itself consumes power.
I personally wish more companies worked like this. I know in about six months once i sort out the spend rate for engineering at my startup i am going to be looking at if we can give back either to environment or to open source. There is an inevitability as the old die off and the young more hyper aware we forge ahead to a less pollution intense world.
They might make up for their electricity bill 1:1 but they'll never go neutral on the amount of carbon wealth they consume in payment for their services.
Imagine I have a business where I busk for money with my guitar outside of a coal plant and a single coal minor is my patron. I may be "carbon neutral" but in fact I owe my whole existence to coal being mined and burnt. Coal is my life blood and the sole source of wealth in my life. I may as well mine the coal myself and play guitar for myself, and if you consider me and the miner to be a unit it's obvious the two of us are living on coal and the fact that he does all the work while I play guitar hardly means anything.
Companies like stripe are sufficiently separated from coal and oil that they can believe they don't suck at the teat of fossil fuels, and that the only coal wealth they consume is whatever powers their light bulbs and servers. But ultimately you can track back the wealth that comes their way - all of it - to operations that generate quite a bit more emissions.
We can run subsidies and credits in little isolated corners of our economy, but it's like running a refrigerator in a closed room. Ultimately you're just burning wealth which creates a greater load on the wealth-generating machine that is the fossil fuel industry.
Real advances that make it possible to generate wealth without fossil fuel money in subsidies should be celebrated. These tech guys taking $1m of their $100m in profits (the coal miner pays the busker using stripe) to pay their $1m light bill is a shell game
Major respect to Stripe for starting this program, as this helps solve a real problem in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field. At Project Vesta (thanks for the shoutout[1]), while we have a plan for individuals to pay for their CO2 removal by donating directly for a specific tonnage of olivine to be placed on a beach in their name, all of the investors/fund advisors who have approached us and are interested in getting into the CDR field, have generally been limited in that they can only make investments into an organization if there is a way to get a financial return. They can't put money in non-profits, even to potentially help "save the world," as they are still operating with a fiduciary responsibility and for-profit motives. If no one is paying for carbon removal, there is no business. For scientists and others trying to create carbon removal solutions, this represents a major problem, as no matter how good or cheap their CDR technique is, they also have to come up with a market of who will buy their CDR "product."
So even though many groups/companies want to get involved in CDR, if there is no market for paying for "CDR as a product," investors will not put money in. Having Stripe and other companies guarantee payment for carbon dioxide removal would actually make a real difference in helping to spur the CDR market. Companies would be able to point at who will buy their "product" and at what price, and then investors would be able to invest.
Creating a carbon price is the most obvious and simple solution to make the "free market" solve a problem created by the inefficiency of the "free market" in the first place, of not pricing in the real world cost of the externalities from each tonne of CO2 released. The emitters should have to pay because each tonne of carbon put out into the atmosphere causes economic damage in terms of health effects and more. Some 30,000 people die prematurely in the US each year due to air pollution, yet most emitters do not pay these costs[2].
This is termed the "social cost of carbon" (SCC) and based on estimates from the U.S. governmental Interagency Working Group in 2013, each 1 metric ton of CO2 released is said to have an SCC of around $37 (2007 USD).[3] So even though there is a consensus among most scientists and economists that there should be a carbon price, and companies technically owe around $37/tonne, no one is sure when it will occur or at what price it will be at. This uncertainty and lack of a large scale market is what prevents major private investments into large scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies.
It is particularly frustrating because if the free market was truly rational, polluters would be paying for the externalities on their CO2 emissions, and the CDR field would blossom. By creating a market themselves and also offering to pay at a range of prices (even though there may be cheaper options available), Stripe can help foster CDR companies when they are most vulnerable, helping them breakthrough their technological learning curves and achieve scale. At the very least, just keeping companies subsidized and advancing technologically until the world corrects this economic error, is a worthy cause.
Having a guaranteed CO2 removal price would allow these companies to just focus on their technology and not have to individually force the global economic system to price carbon, in order to be viable. So again, great job Stripe in starting this, and to other companies/organizations, please start similar initiatives.
If anyone from Stripe is reading this, I do hope a significant amount of support goes to Project Vesta. I have not seen a better sequestration strategy, in that olivine weathering is both a long term CO2 sink, and -also- helps deacidify the oceans. I have no affiliation with Project Vesta, I'm just very excited by it.
My question for the Vesta folk is, what is the current status of the project? There is a timeline on your website but no indication of how close any of these stages are to being a reality. What are the blockers, who can help, when will you "start shipping", as it were?
Thanks Eric. This well-captures what we hope to do. Please drop me a message at christian@stripe.com -- I'd love to talk about how our projects can work together.
Hi Christian, first of all I think it's a great commitment.
May I ask what measures stripe has taken when it comes to energy efficiency to reduce emissions - often this can be cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards.
Do you know, and are at liberty to disclose, how much energy your datacenters consume and what measures to reduce their footprint have you taken?
Also, I read on stripe's homepage that you heat using natural gas. While this can result in rather low emissions it hugely depends on the source of the gas - if the leakage rate is too high (with fracking it often is) , it can even be worse than lignite especially when looking at shorter timeframes (20-30 years opposed to the 100 which is often used for the co2eq factor)[1] so alternative heating options if available might reduce the emissions.
What kind of margins do they have that enables them to just throw money around like this? Is the payments industry that big of a cash machine to allow this kind of spending that has nothing to do with their core business?
Best thing you can do to limit carbon emissions is run an efficient business that gets a high ROI. Dollars to doughnuts, $$$ spent tracks with barrels of oil burned to crank out those goods/services consumed.
Our normal state should be doing good for the planet, and not bragging for doing the right thing. For starters, Stripe staff should fly far less, invest in remote working, or research how to make payments with the lowest carbon footprint. Cash is the baseline. I hope that there isn’t an hidden agenda of carbon credits as a business.
When the market doesn't favor doing the right thing, companies trying to do it die quickly, outcompeted by those who don't care. That's one reason why this has to be a gradual process, involving carbon credits and companies bragging about doing a bit of the right thing, and hopefully having that bragging be positively received.
At least in terms of priority, the damage is done and is already in the atmosphere. imo, we need to first focus on cleaning that up and getting some form of homeostasis before it gets much worse, WHILE working on solar/nuclear/renewable tech to make sure we don't just relapse and make the problem worse again.
I'm optimistically hoping that's the route we'd take anyways. Money tends to say otherwise tho. =(
Thats the opposite of realist. A realist would observe that the stripe founders own and manage stripe, that their investors probably do share the same ideals as them, that HR is challenging and this obviously wins favor, that people involved understand the global optimum (not damaging the planet) can be greater than the local optimum (maintaining low expenses for stripe) and on and on.
Well as they own they company, it technically is their money. I think the bigger point you're missing is how our society's corporate leadership needs to shift their mentality and follow along with Stripe. Solving this problem isn't the sole responsibility of philanthropic individuals.
So they're basically going to pay for the CO2 emissions at around 100$ per tonne (10 cents per kg), right?
Well, we can calculate the C02 exhaled by a typical human, as [1] 36.84 mg = 0.03684 kg of CO2 per breath. (0.03684 kg @ 10c per kg) Therefore each breath you exhale is worth 0.003684 cents....
I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view.
Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys.
As a side note: I personally think that the way we look at environment and impact is plainly wrong. E.g. it is much more effective to plant trees (called "afforestation") rather than sequester CO2. Here's some old but decent sources [0], [1]. Can't find a proper source, but afforestation, when done together with habitat restoration, can be even cheaper than these numbers, when done in certain areas of Africa, South America and Central Asia.
If Stripe wants to go the proverbial extra mile, it should consider "educating" people on the subject AND take consequent action, as opposed to "just" taking action following conventional wisdom.
[0]: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf
[1]: https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf (afforestation "price" starting at ~$50/ton)