Havoca day ago
Spent some years being a (financial) auditor and the ESG stuff always seemed particularly sketchy. The type of operations where you start with the answer and figure out a way to get the facts to fit
The founders still blame "woke" scientists for outing their scheme and doubting their "science." Of course, neither founders have any prior scientific or engineering experience. It's maddening talking them. I've met never anyone who is both anti-science but calls themselves scientists. Huh?
EDIT: I should add that they have pivoted to AI, as you of course expected.
Makes me wonder how many other companies if not entire industries largely exist for money laundering and don't otherwise actually do anything.
Without a truly adversarial process (like, say, the US IRS), where there's a party that is actively incentivized to _find_ problems rather than to _not get caught overlooking_ problems, it is never going to drive quality beyond the bare minimum plausible deniability level.
Companies can keep doing what they do and pay off someone else on the other side of the world for the promise that this third party will do something to compensate for what the company is doing. This is never truly auditable and enforceable, and it doesn't need to be, the point is to have a compliance tick-box that you did your best to clean up your act.
They're just saddling someone else with that "debt", and much like with actual debt, usually it all ends up in a bankruptcy where none of that is ever recovered. Except it's worse with carbon credits where creative accounting is allowed from the start.
Just like the oil car that goes back and forth between the USA and Canada and somehow makes an investor money (duty drawback or “shuttle trade”).
It's one thing of we're talking food production and housing. Completely different if we're talking McDonald's happy meal toys.
Like, does the same argument apply to noise pollution? Are we alright installing a factory next to the symphony hall so long as the factory "owns" their land?
I think as our technology and understanding of the world grows we ought to change with it.
Driving around in an electric car "generates" carbon credits while biking or staying at home doesn't. None of these activities remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's just completely willy-nilly politics.
All prices are made-up. We pay in currency which lacks intrinsic value, and simultaneously multiplying or dividing all the numbers by ten wouldn't effectively change anything.
Moreover, we aren't really "pricing carbon" in the first place; we're placing a Pigouvian tax on polluting. It's not as if someone will pay (or be paid) to take the carbon off the producer's hands. In fact, as you highlight, there is no consumer who could do so.
Moreover, "technology to remove carbon" is completely irrelevant to setting the level. Determining the right level is the same kind of optimization problem as price discovery, but it's neither based on supply-and-demand for the carbon itself, nor on compensating anyone for dealing with the carbon. It's based on figuring out what keeps the economy going while moving the world towards net zero.
(Although we do have such "technology" — for example, the trees that people are planting to get these credits. The credit is paid for an action that demonstrably removes CO2 from the air, and is scaled according to the expected removal and how much would be charged for polluting that much.)
Nope. Most prices are in large part dictated by market forces. Including the price of money.
Yes. As long as currency exists, that's making it up. Because there's no intrinsic reason for the notes to be worth what they are. Which is to say, market forces can drive a ratio like, say, (GDP / M2) according to current level of trust in government or the level of economic activity etc., but when we measure the numerator and denominator in "US dollars"[0], there's no intrinsic reason for that unit to be the size that it is.
A simpler way to see this is to note that we could just as easily measure both in "US cents". Or in "Lincolns" (a unit equal to 5 USD)[0]. Or whatever, as long as we're consistent.
We just don't.
[0] I'm Canadian actually; this is an attempt to make the post more relatable to a larger number of HN readers.
My favourite remains digesters being heated by burning non green methane to produce green methane which will be more valuable thanks to the carbon credit. But big oil tells us it’s renewable, pinky swear.