LastWeekTonight
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
23:38 · 5.9M views · Aug 22, 2022
A Last Week Tonight segment explaining carbon offsets, what they claim to do, and how they may worsen climate change. It looks at perverse incentives and questionable projects.
HN points to it as an informative explainer on why many carbon offset schemes are not genuine.
5 comments from Hacker News
It's complicated, but John Oliver did a good segment on it. this video Planting trees is not an easy solution. [LINK] A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee that what you pay for will be around in X years and policing us extremely difficult. X is traditionally 100 years. If I sell you a carbon credit and then cut all my trees down, what happens? Another is fraudulent sites - people selling credits for sites that already exist, we're already planned for protection, etc.
John Oliver with a quite informative video about why many carbon offsets/carbon credits schemes are most likely not genuine in their attempts to offset carbon emissions. this video
In theory, it's great. In practice perverse incentives and little to no regulation make it worthless. A John Oliver explainer: this video
Supposedly Cleantech/ClimateTech is hiring a lot now[1], according to some articles I saw pop up recently. I did try to investigate Cleantech jobs last cycle, back in mid 2021, and didn't have a great experience, personally. Most of the jobs posted seemed to fall into one of two buckets: 1 - Startups that "helped companies go carbon neutral", i.e. they accept money from the business, skim some off the top (for their business), and funnel it towards various clean initiatives, then send some certificate to the company showing they've offset X amount of carbon. It just doesn't seem much different than a grift to me, and there's various issues with carbon offsets that John Oliver goes into here[2]. Also regardless of whether it's a grift or not, that sounds like totally uninteresting tech to work on. 2 - Startups that bill themselves as helping companies get more efficient, i.e. help improve their logistics or make their electric grids "smart" to save energy, etc. Problem with that is that already seems like something a company wants and tries to do anyway, and while yes in the short term it does seem like that results in wasting less energy and saves resources, in the long term, it just allows the company to ramp up further and use even more energy and resources. Like two companies with the most efficient logistics in the world are Amazon and Walmart, and that just let them become even more massive. So wading thruogh all that to find more interesting Cleantech companies I found
John Oliver had a piece on that [0] over a year ago. Companies want the most CO2 offset per dollar to present themselves as neutral as per their greenwashing campaign, so naturally they buy those from the lowest bidder. And those are the ones least likely to be legit, so it's mostly only scams that get the business lmao. [0] this video