Lyft Announces It Will Make All Rides Carbon Neutral (cnn.com) 37
Lyft announced it will spend millions of dollars to make all its rides carbon neutral. An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money:
The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company announced Thursday that it will pay for a range of environmentally beneficial projects to compensate for the emissions from the millions of car journeys it provides every week. The tactic, known as carbon offsets, is a way for Lyft to do something about climate change without changing its business model. Lyft will fund initiatives including forestry projects, renewable energy ventures and capturing emissions from landfills.
The efforts will put Lyft among the 10 largest voluntary offset programs in the world, according to 3Degrees, the renewable energy company Lyft is partnering with to find suitable projects... Lyft will track how many miles its drivers cover -- and the make and model of their vehicles -- to calculate exactly how many emissions it must offset. The company will not limit itself just to the carbon footprint from when passengers are in Lyft vehicles, but will also include the mileage its drivers rack up on their way to pick people up.
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer believes that within their first year they'll offset over a million metric tons of carbon -- "equivalent to planting tens of millions of trees or taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road."
Zimmer told CNN that "With great scale comes great responsibility."
The efforts will put Lyft among the 10 largest voluntary offset programs in the world, according to 3Degrees, the renewable energy company Lyft is partnering with to find suitable projects... Lyft will track how many miles its drivers cover -- and the make and model of their vehicles -- to calculate exactly how many emissions it must offset. The company will not limit itself just to the carbon footprint from when passengers are in Lyft vehicles, but will also include the mileage its drivers rack up on their way to pick people up.
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer believes that within their first year they'll offset over a million metric tons of carbon -- "equivalent to planting tens of millions of trees or taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road."
Zimmer told CNN that "With great scale comes great responsibility."
If only... (Score:2)
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No, they're not required to maintain records tied to names. In a regular taxi, you can pay cash and not have any record of your ride beyond an anonymous trip log from point A to B.
The individual driver may be required to have a camera, but the footage is usually not uploaded to the "cloud", nor is it correlated with a name unless a crime occurred.
scam (Score:2)
billions of euros in carbon trading scams in europe, those were major news items. carbon trading is the ideal scam system. unless they're going to run their cars on biofuel, or as electric vehicles from a nuke plant or solar or wind or hydro...forget it, it's just stupidity
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what about paying for drivers to buy cars with (Score:3)
what about paying for drivers to buy cars with tech that can use that that?
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Indeed, I'd much rather they spent money on zero emission cars so that I didn't have to breath their pollution.
Taxi companies are finding EVs to be ideal for their needs. Low running and maintenance costs, charging fits in with mandatory driver breaks although many go all day on one charge, and no detours to get fuel. Fitting that into Lyft's business model would be an achievement.
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most have gone back to Chevy Caprice type vehicles
And have they, now. Pray tell, what US-made rear-drive, chassis-equipped gas guzzler have they switched to from the Prius/hybrid Camry??
Yeah, I didn't think so, either.
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Strange, EVs are ideal for that weather. Presumably you have lots of charging for ICE cars to run their engine block heaters already. Even though EV batteries get less range when very cold they don't fail to "start" or anything like that, and handle really well in snow and ice.
It's no wonder that Norway has some of the highest EV adoption in the world. They work much better than ICE cars in that climate.
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The exhaust from modern cars doesn't really pollute, it just exhales carbon dioxide (unless they're diesel). You can't commit CO suicide with modern cars.
And I've never seen an electric taxi or Uber, although Priuses are very common.
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In fact my first Leaf is now a taxi. 200k with no major parts to service, just tyres and washer fluid. It's got an Uber sticker on it but it's registered to some taxi company.
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The exhaust from modern cars doesn't really pollute?! Where on earth did you get that idea? CO levels may no longer be high enough to commit suicide, but there's plenty of NOx, HCs, VOCs and particulates to do some serious damage.
Lyft parking (Score:4, Informative)
That's nice. Perhaps in the meantime they can instruct Lyft drivers on the proper use of parking spots instead of stopping in the middle of roads and lots with complete disregard to traffic around them.
forest at some poor country (Score:2)
They will end up planting trees at the other end of the world. This makes about as much sense as a mass murderer helping to feed some starving kids in Africa so he can claim he is a net benefit to humanity as he saved more lives then he took away...
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So? Last time I looked, the planet only had one atmosphere, in which gasses such as oxygen can move in an event called "wind".
We don't have a problem with "US climate change". There is a reason it's called "global climate change".
Robbing from Peter... (Score:2)
Robbing from Peter to pay Paul... all in the interests of seeming to be something that you're not.
Fuck off, Lyft.
Bad idea. Says it right there... (Score:1)
They're going to do more of the 'cash for clunkers' type things and take working cheap cars off the market.
Kids gots smartphones but there's no ~5k cars around? Works for lyft.
Translation (Score:2)
meanwhile, Lyft's blocking EV bills in California (Score:1)
First off, any effort to reduce emissions is great news. Thanks Lyft for the early Earth Day gift :) It's effectively cleaning up someone else's mess (in this case, capturing landfill methane was one example from the announcement [medium.com]) rather than their own, but it's an improvement nonetheless. If you have to use Lyft or Uber, use Lyft.
That said, a couple notes:
1) Lyft is most likely just offsetting for the ride itself, not for "deadhead" miles between "rides" (without passengers) or between a driver's house an