Wendover Productions
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2022–2023
22:57 · 1.9M views · Jun 3, 2022
Wendover Productions examines why carbon offsets so often fail to reduce emissions, covering specific examples and the perverse incentives in offset schemes.
Recommended in greenwashing and offset threads as a well-sourced, detailed explanation of how offsets underdeliver.
6 comments from Hacker News
I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon offsetting creates: this video Here is the list of sources for that video if you're interested: [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [LINK] [9] [LINK] [10] [LINK] [11] [LINK] [12] [LINK]
> Filecoin - A commodity market for storage that's currently 0.0011% the cost of S3. This actually proves that there isn't a real use case of Filecoin aside from speculation. Amazon isn't making 99.9989% profit margins on S3, nor is it possible for Filecoin to be a hundred thousand times more efficient than S3. This means that Filecoin's storage product is so uncompetitive that you need to subsidize it a hundred thousand times just to get people to use it. > Toucan - Tradable Carbon Credits All the other use cases listed look like parodies of crypto products with plenty of buzzwords, and no real substance. However, this one is especially nonsensical. From their website: > Working with top DeFi protocols and the community we enable carbon credits to be used as collateral, yields and money, as well as a huge range of novel applications. That's literally missing the point of buying carbon credits. The only use case for buying carbon credits to blackhole them immediately, so that you can feel like you're offsetting your emissions. There is no reason to resell them. Even if you did want to resell them because you overestimated your carbon footprint and have some left "unused", no buyer has any reason to believe you. If there is anything carbon credits need, it's more centralization and trust, not less. Excellent relevant Wendover video about carbon credits: this video
> Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades. well i don't really understand how you can lump all those together but ok... they're still not the same. as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem hard (or hard enough) to scam in this business sector - i.e. having the same assets accounting for different offset purchases, or just conflating assets bought for different puroses with offsetting. furthermore, it just deviates us from what should be the true goal: reduce fossil fuel consumption. not to mention how big business just offload this shady business cost to the end consumer. i'm taking the chance to share some content by people that present their points of view on this issue much better than i do: this video , this video , [LINK] , [LINK]
Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver. this video
the bigger problem with carbon offsets is that the underlying system that is supposed to be backing the units aren't actually offsetting any carbon. wendover has a nice video on it this video