How One of the World's Biggest Carbon Emitters Got a Factory To Zero Emissions (wsj.com) 35
104-year-old Panasonic got its highest-emitting Chinese factory, which makes lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries, to "virtually net zero" carbon dioxide. The effort took six years, and as the WSJ reports, it shows just how difficult it can be for companies to reduce their environmental footprints to deal with climate change. From the report: The Japanese electronics giant has pledged to eliminate or offset all of the greenhouse-gas emissions generated by its operations by 2030. But even tackling that one factory, which produces batteries in the city of Wuxi, near Shanghai, was tough, company officials say. Panasonic incrementally trimmed its energy consumption through measures such as replacing workers with robots and fluorescent lights with LEDs. When that wasn't enough, it bought carbon credits and renewable energy, finally letting it declare it had neutralized the plant's emissions last year.
[...] Panasonic, one of the biggest corporate carbon emitters in the world according to estimates by the company and outside experts, is just getting started. It has to repeat its Wuxi feat 37 times over to neutralize the roughly 2.2 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions associated with the company's operations. And those emissions are just 2% of the 110 million metric tons Panasonic estimates it is responsible for, when its suppliers and the use of its products are included. While the company has a 2030 goal for emissions from its direct operations, it has given itself until 2050 to deal with its entire carbon footprint -- an amount five times the size of Apple's, and roughly equivalent to half of Spain's annual emissions.
[...] Panasonic, one of the biggest corporate carbon emitters in the world according to estimates by the company and outside experts, is just getting started. It has to repeat its Wuxi feat 37 times over to neutralize the roughly 2.2 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions associated with the company's operations. And those emissions are just 2% of the 110 million metric tons Panasonic estimates it is responsible for, when its suppliers and the use of its products are included. While the company has a 2030 goal for emissions from its direct operations, it has given itself until 2050 to deal with its entire carbon footprint -- an amount five times the size of Apple's, and roughly equivalent to half of Spain's annual emissions.
It didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It didn't (Score:4, Insightful)
So what are carbon credits for then?
Rent-seeking and power-grabbing:
They let:
- governments ignore practicality and pass draconian emissions laws that can't be met by some industries,
- said industries buy their way out of them by paying off oerators of industries that COULD reduce emissions to meet them,
- the over-regulated industry continue to operate (emitting pollution equivalent to the amount the cleaner insustries had reduced emissions beyond what was required)
- people with political and financial connections (such as Al Gore) extract enormous amounts of money for themselves by setting up "carbon credit exchanges" and taking a commission - and/or by selling the exchanges for big bux when it looks lik e their ripoff might not be sustainable, letting others take the risk while they take the money and run
- existing industrial players have an additional advantage over upstart competitors (who might otherwise enter the market with newer processe or equipment having even lower emissions).
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- existing industrial players have an additional advantage over upstart competitors (who might otherwise enter the market with newer processe or equipment having even lower emissions).
If your upstart doesn't have to pay for emission credits because it doesn't have high emissions.
Well that's the entire point of paying for offsets.
Cleaner new companies that don't need to pay them are more competitive and profitable than the dirty old companies that do need to pay them.
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So what are carbon credits for then?
Allowing your factory to continue to throw the same amount of carbon into the air as it did before but claim to be zero emissions.
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They attach monetary value to pollution. Since money is the only thing that most corporations understand, it's an effective way to incentivise them to cut pollution.
That's the actual reason for carbon credits, to monetise pollution. Few if any conspiracy theorists understand this, thus the myriad alternative explanations you'll hear for it.
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Also Panasonic isn't one of the world's biggest emitters.
Re: It didn't (Score:2)
Answer: They didn't (Score:2)
Buying carbon credits might be part of some regulatory scheme to avoid punishment, or taxes, or whatever, but it doesn't reduce your own carbon emissions.
This is just a moron mistaking an artificial legal construct for an actual real thing that happened.
It's nice that they paid somebody else, who did reduce their carbon emissions, for doing so. Maybe it will encourage others to reduce their carbon emissions. That's the theory; that maybe it will help. But also it is well known that maybe it won't. But surel
The scam continues (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to drive up their prices... (Score:1)
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Is there another company that isn't concerned about its carbon footprint that will sell me batteries at a better price? That's where my order will be placed. That way my devices will be cheaper and I can drive my competitors out of business.
Yes. That's why we make it a law to offset your carbon footprint so scummy companies can't do that.
The cleanest companies will survive and the dirtiest ones will not.
It's the entire point of the offsets.
Re: This is going to drive up their prices... (Score:2)
Re: Un-sustain-able (Score:2)
Carbon neutral dystopia (Score:1)
Panasonic incrementally trimmed its energy consumption through measures such as replacing workers with robots and fluorescent lights with LEDs.
Doesn't that solution strike anybody else here as odd (the robots not the LEDs)? What precisely was Panasonic trying to eliminate, the carbs that the workers would be eating or the methane that comes after?
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Re: Carbon neutral dystopia (Score:2)
Offsets (Score:2)
They did a mighty job, but let's remember that offsets are complete bullshit.
Modern secular versions of indulgences, you can buy your way free from sin. It doesn't mean you're not sinning, it just means that someone, somewhere, apparently forgives what you're doing.
They're often certificates issued by some non-representational NGO or government organization, which are then (hand-wavingly) assigned a value and then 'traded'.
Impossible for industry to be 0 emission today (Score:5, Insightful)
Deriding offsets as not really being neutral at all is for sure a fair criticism but also drives the point home more that for heavy industry and manufacturing it's still functionally impossible to be truly carbon neutral.
They need too much electricity to run factories and processes, we talking megawatts per location in many cases. Many chemical processes involve hydrocarbons or byproducts of hydrocarbons (and the factories that produce those byproducts also use hydrocarbons or other dirty chemicals), many of those processes produce CO2 or other GHG's as a consequence. Things like battery production relies on mining that relies on heavy equipment that all still needs fossil fuels to operate not to mention all the metallurgic manufacturing processes that are also mainly fossil fuel powered.
I think that is a piece of the green energy puzzle that is solved by nuclear power generation. It's great that domestic problems like personal transport can be moved to electric and home energy is moved easily moved to sources like solar and wind but heavy industry needs absurb amounts of power and it needs it 24/7. Abundant nuclear energy also would enable inefficent processes like biofuel conversions/manufacturing and metallurgic processes.
Smelting aluminum from bauxite is an electrical process so you could technically do it from solar and wind power but it'd be an expensive battery system or even pumped storage for 17,000 kWh of electricity per tonne of aluminum. A nuclear plant does these types of numbers easily, 24/7
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Also geothermal does them easily too. I think that's why so much of the world's aluminium smelting is done in Iceland.
https://aluminiuminsider.com/w... [aluminiuminsider.com]
If Iceland gets 3.5% return on capital invested in geothermal, and this (in 2010) was below the worldwide average of 9% of other fuel sources that folks invested in -- I wonder what is the return on capital investment in nuclear?
(We also have to talk about the carbon cost of shipping bauxite around the world to get smelted, i.e. the fact that cheap clean power like Iceland's geothermal isn't ubiquitous. I wonder what the future would look like if Nuclear were ubiquitous enough for this to be a clear win?)
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Yeah Iceland is a unique situation as having that amount of easy geothermal is a unique property.
For nuclear my belief is that it will never be a "free market" solution, it's risk portfolio is just too weird and requires so much regulation because of that low probability/huge disaster effect. I think what France is doing is a good direction to look at. As policy continues to make fossil fuel uneconomical I think the market will work with solar, wind and other renewables but nuclear will have to be state
Offsetting? (Score:1)
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Offsetting carbon footprint is basically just increasing the price of the product by adding a "carbon tax" and using that money to pay off officials or to fund climate projects. It has no real cost to the manufacturer as long as they are all required to do it.
If they are all required to do it. The ones that produce less carbon, and thus pay less offsets, will be more competitive. If the 'carbon tax' is high enough, the lest competitive, because they are paying the highest 'carbon tax' will eventually be replaced by their less carbon intensive competitors.
That's the regulated free market Capitalism theory.
Are the people arguing against this. Against Capitalism? Free markets? Or regulation?
Bought Offsets (Score:2)
It doesn't take 6 years to buy carbon credits, all it takes is money.
Goal posts are always moving (Score:2)
The key takeaway here is that it was impossible to meet the arbitrary standards set by know-nothing bureaucrats so they had to buy their way out of a PR problem. Of course, by merely accepting the challenge, they were set up to fail thus having to fork over money to meet the goals which will always be just out of reach.
zero credits (Score:2)
We can't keep offsetting with carbon credits.
We will all have to find new ways to cut our carbon outputs to zero.
Carbon credits are just a dodgy accounting trick.
Just stop it or you'll go blind.
Smoke and mirrors (Score:2)
Literally smoke and mirrors. Carbon offsets may play a role in reducing overall emissions, but they are very often over-sold and their impact is inflated.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/07... [npr.org]