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to offset AI carbon emissions
Does it actually do that?
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.
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?
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.
Yeah i was expecting the externalized cost route with this one.
No. Carbon offsetting is a scam and does not do shit for the environment.
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.
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.
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!
Greenwashing is a fraud.
Tecnowashing is also fraud.
Take a failed concept like the gold standard, technowash it, and you get crypto scamcoins.
Greenwashing, sportswashing (saudi arabia), sanewashing (presenting insane ideas as debatable ideas, like debating human rights with someone who is against human rights ends up sanewashing the anti-rights position), small business washing (using ostensibly a pro small business argument to push a fortune 100 agenda), worker washing (treat workers like shit in private but make pro worker noises in public), gender washing (the politician with an anti-woman agenda is a woman so it's OK), minority washing (a fascist pundit is a minority that fascism often targets, so fascism is OK now). Now we can add tecnowashing to the list.
Another example of technowashing is when a real estate company presents itself as a tech startup to inflate its valuation.
All this washing has exploded in recent years.
We truly are in the metaverse era.
They found a way to convert physical shit into virtual shit.
And vice versa!
so the AI stuff causes too much CO2, instead of fixing their own hardware, the best they could do is to offset that CO2 amount by burying shit?
It's poetic... MS AI slings out massive amounts of shit and now the company gets to bury some of it to compensate
What about the nutrients in the waste? Why not compost it, capture the methane offgassing, and store that?
I thought the billion dollars of excrement they bought was OpenAI
self-five 🙏 ohhhhhh
You're off by a factory of 13x
Meanwhile I’m out here pooping for free like a chump!
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time.
So this is what they plan to do with all the game studios they bought over the years.
Can't make this shit up.
I'm surprised they had to outsource that as they have been producing so much shit for decades.
When the planet burns down, the will be the ones who "did something about it"
Idiots!! That stuff ain't worth shit!
shit
Fight shit with shit.
Microsoft has just signed a deal with Vaulted Deep, paying it to remove 4.9 million metric tons of waste over 12 years sourced from manure, sewage, and agricultural byproducts for injection deep underground.
https://investigatemidwest.org/2023/12/07/us-push-to-produce-methane-from-manure-raises-concerns/
“It can provide a substantial portion of global energy needs,” Rudi Roeslein , CEO of Roeslein Alternative Energy, told the attendees. His company has built farm-based methane systems around the country that produce enough fuel to displace 6 million gallons of diesel fuel and 80,000 cars. “If we do this on a large scale in the U.S. we could generate $63.6 billion worth of revenue for farmers around the country.”
Roeslein’s company promises on its website to “restore a balance” to farmland “by using the sustainably harvested biomass to create renewable natural gas.”
A million BTUs (MMBTu) of methane digested from manure is currently worth $3 in the value of the gas
I know where to find a valuable source of methane in 12 years.
How many turds can you buy for a billion dollars. . ?
Damn from that photo it looks like some people have a seriously high fiber diet.
FIFO if you know what i mean 💩
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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