Microsoft buys back all the crap they sold us for years.
Microsoft burying the steaming pile of poop that is teams will be enough to “offset” all their data centers.
Greenwashing is a fraud.
I thought the billion dollars of excrement they bought was OpenAI
self-five 🙏 ohhhhhh
I’m surprised they had to outsource that as they have been producing so much shit for decades.
Can’t make this shit up.
Apart from the questionable practice of buying CO2 credits (or whatever the practice is called), pumping shit underground does not seem like the best way to save the ecosphere. It could’ve produced energy and/or useful products in various ways but oh no, that would have been too expensive.
This prevents it from being dumped at a waste disposal site, where it would eventually decompose and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
This is the only reason this practice is deemed carbon-emission-friendly. Color me skeptical.
My first thought was…how is this a good thing, we get a lot of our water from ground water…and now we’re pumping toxic shit into the ground. The fuck
Devil’s advocate says: 5000 ft is probably below groundwater level. But tbh idk. Hell, they could even use spent oil reservoirs.
use spent oil reservoirs
Ok, that lead to some giggles thinking about some company drilling in the future thinking they were about to hit a strangely untapped oil field.
Add a hundred years of methane pressure build up and that could be really interesting gusher.
Watching Landman or you just familiar with the lingo?
Oh, was I using the correct lingo for hundred year old methane powered shit gushers? I had no idea. Lol!
to offset AI carbon emissions
Does it actually do that?
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?
Yeah i was expecting the externalized cost route with this one.
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.
In the eyes of the board of directors, sure . Plantings a billion worth of trees would probably have been too green
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.
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.
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.
Yeap, CCs are mostly BS.
But that’s fertilizer! WTF?
“To reach the golden temple you and your companions must first pass through the vast Caverns of Corruption.”
Fight shit with shit.
Meanwhile I’m out here pooping for free like a chump!
What about the nutrients in the waste? Why not compost it, capture the methane offgassing, and store that?
using human waste as fertilizer isn’t a good idea.
human waste contains everything that a person has consumes. this includes disease causing pathogens and parasites.
if it were to be used as a fertilizer it would need to go through multiple stages of expensive processing and testing to ensure safety. it’s far more cost effective and safer to use food by-product like fish cuttings to create fertilizers.
Engineer here. We arent talking about directly tossing it on fields. We are talking about having it be anaerobically fermented at high temperatures for about 30 days, with the biogas captured and used for energy.
the new thing to do then is burn the remains and recover the phosphate from the ashes, where certainly no biological threat remains
These type of plants are currently built on many larger wastewater treatment plants in Europe
Pathogens are less of a problem, they die off before they cannot infect a plant. But chemicals from medication and contraceptives, as well as heavy metals, are.
less about infection and more environmental. some people don’t wash their produce and get sick because of it.
Treated waste water sludge is very commonly used here in Sweden albeit using anaerobic digestion rather than regular composting. High temperature composting would kill any pathogens so you can absolutely get permission to use a composting waste system in small scales. For larger scale waste treatment it is with anaerobic digestion, as mentioned.
The captured methane is typically used for fuel, e.g., in public transport.
As far as I know the sludge used for fertilizer needs to be certified under something called REVAQ. Some controversy does exist surrounding safe levels of the various harmful substances and perhaps PFAS in particular.
