
Stripe: We reached our goal of net-zero emissions in a matter of months - beNjiox
https://stripe.com/environment
======
shoo
It is positive to see stripe is voluntarily doing this.

That said, the analysis ignores net emissions (positive or negative) that may
arise as a consequence of how stripe's business impacts their customers and
the overall economy and environment. This impact is plausibly dramatically
larger than any of the categories like servers or employee travel that were
accounted for.

E.g. thought experiment: suppose your business helps other businesses lift
their revenues by selling more stuff to "consumers". Suppose these other
businesses have a profit margin of around 20%, and your service is priced at
around 10% of the value that it provides your customers.

Then if your business has a revenue of $X, this revenue is created by
generating about $10X of value for your customers, which in turn is their
profit margin from your helping them increase their revenue by about $50X. So
the obvious direct and indirect greenhouse emissions generated by your
business with $X of revenue (including energy use, renting servers, flying
employees about the place) are likely going to be insignificant compared to
the change in greenhouse emissions generated by whatever change in economic
activity was triggered by the $50X lift in customer revenue driven by the core
purpose of your business.

This change in economic activity could be hugely negative from an
environmental perspective (eg if your customers advertise and sell unnecessary
physical stuff to "consumers") or perhaps positive (e.g. maybe you audit your
customers and only take them on if they sell products/services that have a
positive environmental impact compared to alternatives).

It's probably a bit rough to expect individuals or business to be able to
assess and measure this- it'd be much easier everyone participating in these
economic activities agreed to a carbon price.

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sova
No Stripe, you are not carbon neutral, because people turn their computers on
and turn their routers on to connect to your service. That's like saying the
natural gas headquarters is carbon neutral because the plumbing is the
customer's problem. You took a great informational page on Global Climate
Progression but made the headline some pompous clickbait title. Since when is
Global Climate Progression a competition? We're all going to suffer greatly,
so No you are not carbon neutral and I am appalled you'd be so daring to make
such a sweeping claim when clearly every kiosk that runs Stripe contributes to
the problem. Not as much as some things, true, but certainly not neutral.

~~~
GhostVII
I would still consider them carbon neutral, if the kiosks want to be carbon
neutral that is their responsibility. By your logic essentially no service or
company can be carbon neutral because their customers are not.

~~~
sova
Correct. Since we all share one planet it's worthless for half of us to be
carbon neutral.

