Comment on Microsoft buys more than a billion dollars’ worth of excrement, including human poop, to clean up its AI mess — company will pump waste underground to offset AI carbon emissions

LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• ik5pvx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  In the eyes of the board of directors, sure . Plantings a billion worth of trees would probably have been too green

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  • Saprophyte@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Technically it’s more common to pay investment firms with forest land to not cut down the trees they weren’t going to cut down to begin with.

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• justsomeguy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s usually nonsense. I remember some carbon offsets being a guy owning a forest and essentially selling his inaction as a carbon offset. Give me a million dollars so I don’t chop all those trees down which I totally would’ve done otherwise. It’s just pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.

  In this case I can imagine their calculations being wildly off. How much CO2/methane does a ton of poop actually release? How much CO2 is released to transport that ton and build the facilities that hold it?

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    There’s even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

    The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

    And bog land isn’t exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

    It’s complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

    The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn’t consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

    But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.

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  • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah i was expecting the externalized cost route with this one.

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• stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Some poop releases methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than Co2.

  Fun fact, when striking oil, you often encounter methane pockets as well, the gas is commonly just burned in a giant flare, this is mainly done for safety, to prevent gas from accumulating on the ground and risking an explosion, but also far reduce the greenhouse effect of the gas.

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  • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The thing is that these carbon credits make it so that things which would otherwise reduce CO2 in the atmosphere don’t happen unless some money changes hands. Most of the time credits effectively do nothing.

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    • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeap, CCs are mostly BS.

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• ook@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  No. Carbon offsetting is a scam and does not do shit for the environment.

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• Saleh@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Depends on how the wastewater would have been treated before.

  Wastewater treatment does release CO2, however the sludge can be fermented to biogas. So in relative terms not that much. Also the sludge contains phosphate that could be recovered for fertilizing or chemical industry purposes.

  It would probably be far more effective to build renewables with that money than to bury things for which a treatment process already exists.

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