Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as an informative explainer on why many carbon offset schemes are not genuine.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2022 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends russdill · 2022-09 · on “Companies are buying large numbers of carbon offsets that don’t cut emissions”
In theory, it's great. In practice perverse incentives and little to no regulation make it worthless. A John Oliver explainer: [this video]
Recommends d4nyll · 2023-06 · on “”
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]
Recommends joshvm · 2023-09 · on “Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“”
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.
Cites cableshaft · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: Plans for Weathering the Tech Recession?”
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[
Cites moffkalast · 2023-09 · on “Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“”
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]