I’m also from the UK and I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits.
Many of the other founders I know with the “drive and hunger” as you put it, have already made the same jump.
Yes, this is where the *nuance* mentioned at the start of my reply comes in.
It *should* include all scopes, including upstream emissions from purchased goods and services from abroad. But in many countries their country-level carbon inventories still have huge gaps.
UK Legislation implements the GHG Protocol scope system in the UK's carbon accounting regulations that businesses must follow for reporting their emissions (e.g. SECR), and government guidance for calculating emissions all follow the scope system too (e.g. BEIS Conversion Factors guidance). So it is very disappointing if the UK's carbon accounts has got gaps (but I wouldn't be surprised).
While there's a lot of nuance to this: in carbon accounting it is standard practice to account for the same emission more than once. Carbon inventories are broken out into three different scopes, the first two scopes concern fuel and electricity generation emissions, and the third scope includes everything in your value chain (both upstream and downstream). Therefore the country producing the EV battery would report on the emission in their Scope 1 and Scope 2 inventory, and the country utilising that EV battery would report it within their Scope 3 inventory.
It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission (since ascribing blame is a never-ending game of finger pointing), it is to make every business/consumer responsible. The country creating the emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise, and the country consuming that emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise their full - including international - supply chains.
Neither investment in EVs and repairing transmission issues live in isolation and both can be invested in at the same time. Solving one issue might also help solve the other (e.g. charging EVs can occur at non-peak times which balances energy demands, and in future EVs could be used as batteries to discharge into the grid during peak times).
but event "emissions" isn't a simple calculation
No one is claiming that it is, but there are standardised reporting practices to ensure proper coverage of emissions when published. These are the Scopes 1, 2, and 3 (which includes 12 sub-scopes), listed in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. They are the GAAP of the sustainability industry and is required by every major reporting mechanism (e.g. CDP, etc).
All the items you listed are covered within the scopes, include power generation, fuel processing (typically called well-to-tank), transmission loss, emissions embodied in purchased assets (e.g. construction emissions of a vehicle), employee commuting, waste, etc.
Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant?
A common claim by climate-deniers that has been widely debunked for almost every power network in the rich world (where electric cars are most common). If I remember correctly, only two countries in all of Europe were found to have lower emissions with a petrol engine than plugging into a dirty grid.
I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though.
Woke? Not thought through? You wrote a long comment about carbon reporting when you clearly don't know the first thing about how carbon is reported or calculated...
I realise I’m just replying to a troll’s cherry picked list at this point, but come on you’re not even trying.
All of those chips and fabs all rely on ASML? Those manufacturers you list literally couldn’t make the chips they make without an EU company being the backbone of their work.
You can’t think of global scale European applications. SAP, the worlds third largest software company by revenue? Representative of the EU’s tech sector, probably not, but it goes to show your either ignorant of the wider industry in the EU or being deceiving.
> Open banking and SEPA. Are these technologies? I think they were just regulations.
Turns out regulations can be a good thing? Our banking infrastructure ‘just works’, instantly, EU wide, with low fees and technology first.
> Wake up.
People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
Our business has an API that can be used for displaying dynamic information at point of sale (i.e. dynamic in that it cannot be cached and will need a DB call).
While we encourage our customers to try and use us asynchronously, we have a number of enterprises that don't and therefore demand incredibly fast response times with low latency. They pay us accordingly, so as a result we have geolocated databases (in our case though, we are using AWS Aurora replication).
Agreed. I work in the sustainability industry, and forestry carbon accounts for a small minority of offsets available. It also has plenty of well documented flaws so we often steer out customers clear of it.
Yet the media and every blog writer loves to talk about offsets as though the only projects available are plopping trees in the ground.
The vast majority of offsets fall into filling the funding gap for renewable energy, methane capture and burning (a fun one to explain, but results in a net reduction), biomass use, and on and on. The simple fact is offsets are one of the greatest funders of decarbonisation in low income nations.
It’s also worrying how high this post was voted considering the authors apparent lack of understanding for how the carbon certification or economics work. Examples seemingly missed out include the fact that most certification schemes require buffers for forestry carbon to cover the unknowns in this type of project, or the economics idea that if every offset was purchased it would force offsets to go up in price until they encourage carbon reduction.
I agree, it makes no sense to have them stored in the same password manager.
One of the things I like about 1Password is that we were able to switch off the built in TOTP for our whole organisation, and force all TOTP codes to go via Duo Security. Thereby forcing a separate 2FA app.
Totally agree, it’s crazy to have your 2FA and password manager be the same application. You can actually disable 1Password’s 2FA and tie a different 2FA. I’m not sure if it’s just a business/teams feature, but we are able to require everyone at the company install and use Duo as their primary 2FA as part of their 1Password activation.
There are a long list of illnesses caused by vitamin deficiencies, including Scurvy, Rickets, magnesium deficiencies and iron deficiencies (as well as others). These can be life threatening too, so survival is very much a question that should come up.
> The author mentioned his uncle who just ate bread, butter, and cheese for every meal, and I’m not sure how you can even survive off of that. Surely it’s lacking something important with no fruit or vegetables.
Exactly, wouldn’t you end up with scurvy from the lack of vitamin C?
Every extra tonne of CO2 does cost $196+ (I’ve seen credible estimates as high as $400), but through offsetting you could verifiably ensure that more tonnes are avoided for far less.
As a crude analogy, if there is an oil spill (causing $$$ of damage), it would still be cost effective to plug the next oil spill for $.
Don’t get me wrong, the ideal scenario would be to not cause the first oil spill at all (in this crude analogy), but given that this seems impossible in our society, an offsetting tax on plane tickets could be a highly cost effective lever instead.
Apparently the meat is made using Foetal Bovine Serum (which requires the slaughter of cows), and chicken cells (which do not require the slaughter of a chicken). [1]
So technically a vegan would not be happy eating it. I'm however curious about the ratio of slaughter to end product (e.g. is it one slaughter to 10kg of end product, or one slaughter to 1 tonne of end product), since that may sway some vegans/vegetarians.
> you might award carbon offsets for replacing a coal plant with solar, when that would have happened anyway just because the economics worked out better
It depends on which organisation verifies your offset, but the big three (Gold Standard, Verra VCS, and United Nations), all require _additionality_. That is where you have to prove that the offset financing is making the project happen, rather than market forces.
It’s not a flawless process, but in many cases offsetting is helping to accelerate the transition away from carbon intensive emitters.
As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits.
Many of the other founders I know with the “drive and hunger” as you put it, have already made the same jump.