Sure, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's easy for me to directly contribute to carbon removal, because of things like this. It's a little more difficult for me to help pump less carbon into the air — I can try to minimize my carbon footprint, but ultimately the thing we need is investment in clean energy and legislation forcing companies to limit their emissions.
My point was that Stripe's massive resources are better spent lobbying/writing legislation/researching how to properly implement a carbon tax than this.
The fallacy here is that because most people intuitively understand the near-impossibility of coordinated legislative action, they assume that it must be MORE difficult than some sort of engineering solution (whose magnitude they do not intuitively understand).
They are wrong. Yes, coordinated action to reduce emissions is nearly impossible... but it's less impossible than the alternative. There's no negotiating with thermodynamics.
I don't think it's impossible. It just seems that way if your only experience with politics is neoliberal US politics over the last 40 years. At some point the dam breaks. In the US neoliberalism is at the same point Soviet communism was in the 80's. It's a complete failure and everyone knows it.
Part of our political system's fiction and ability to make no progress is deeply ingrained in lobbying and expenses that is more PR than impact. I think this is the parent post's point.
We think its a "grand pie in the sky", meanwhile some other countries are making real moves. Corporations meanwhile get to "do something" while in reality doing very little.
Presumably because the Collison brothers recognize that climate change poses an existential threat to the well being of their firm, their customers and their employees, and that because of their awesome entrepreneurial abilities their investors have granted them BDFL powers over Stripe.
