Climate Town
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
10:36 · 415K views · Oct 7, 2020
Climate Town's comedic explainer on carbon offsets and whether companies can buy their way out of climate change. It argues that offsets won't save us, while granting they are not bad in principle.
HN shares it as an entertaining, well-argued critique of carbon offsetting in threads on greenwashing.
4 comments from Hacker News
Carbon footprints are a scam: [LINK] Carbon offsets are a scam: this video Hearing people talk about these give me the same vibes as techbros talking about stocks and crypto.
> 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: [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , this video
While I'm not saying this whitepaper is wrong, keep in mind that this is done by Carbon Engineering who receive funding from people and organizations like N. Murray Edwards[1], Chevron Corporation, Occidental Petroleum and BHP[2] which either have hands deep in the oil or mining market, among other things. There is financial incentive to provide results that are in-line with what your funders want, and it's nothing new that this kind of thing has been, and still is being done. It's just hard to prove often. So as with all science, consult multiple whitepapers, including ones that don't have direct or borderline not indirect funding from those who have financial incentive to get a result that increases revenue or similar, to get a clearer idea of the probability that the topic isn't incorrect or what have you. As an aside, whether it's right or wrong (since it's a heated topic), I feel these videos demonstrate at least the possibility of companies playing with these kinds of things. They're amusing to watch, if nothing else, in my opinion: [LINK] and this video [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]
See also: this video ("Carbon Offsets! Can't we just buy our way out of climate change?" from the Climate Town channel)