Biden pushing to cancel Keystone XL pipeline as soon as he takes
thehill.com
President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly planning on canceling the permit for the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office.

Let's be fair, if we only get this, $10k in loan forgiveness and $1,400 Biden will be a better president than Obama, for folks in the US, anyways.

    • KantNeverCould [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      There's also the fact that there's no enforcement mechanism on what it means to pay for those credits. You can have companies like Shell just convert their oil fields to have carbon capture stacks and that counts as reducing and offsetting emissions. Maybe they give a little money to an NGO to do "sustainable development" (which turns out about as well as any other NGO-sponsered "development")

        • femboi [they/them, she/her]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Tree planting only has a long term carbon-negative effect if you can ensure that a previously unforested area is permanently converted into woodland. Otherwise you’re just temporarily stashing some carbon in a tree, and when that tree is inevitably cut down for more development the carbon goes right back into the air

            • KantNeverCould [any]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Ding ding ding. The number one thing we could do for the planet is move everyone into "traditional cities". They don't have to be megalopolises, you can still have villages and towns of all sizes.

              There just needs to be a very clear distinction between "people live, shop, go to school, go to places here" and "people don't live here, this is farmland/forest/nature or designated for nasty things we need", and the "people live here" areas need to be very dense.

              That might mean a town of 10,000 that fits into 1 square mile (so you can walk everywhere in town and even into the countryside!), or dense cities with trains.

        • Mouhamed_McYggdrasil [they/them,any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I've been wondering about this since it seems like a great opportunity for grifters to scam people. Like you start a company that plants treats to provide carbon vouchers or wtf to companies who do a lot of pollutin still. Then you also start a company that builds forests for people who just want a forest for whatever reason, like for landscraping or for a rich guy to have a maze in front of their castle to keep the peasants out. Then you charge the carbon-write-off guy, and you charge the forest-maze guy, but you only end up constructing one forest, and billing both of them for it. I have no idea if thats very legal and very cool, if its one of those things like insider trading that Capitalism has decided lifts away too much of the curtain so they have to make it illegal... It sure feels like the latter. I can't really think of any historical analolgues to this situation either, so I'm double-stumped (much like the forest probably will be in a couple years, when the grifter sells it to a third company as a lumber source)

      • jerm [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        They own the NGOs. If they don't own them now, they own them as soon as they give them a project. Ask Greenpeace.