Technology

You're off by a factory of 13x

It's poetic... MS AI slings out massive amounts of shit and now the company gets to bury some of it to compensate

Yes, burying fertilizer traps biomass CO2 and then they can use that as carbon credit equivalent to claim CO² neutrality.
Of course, there's a reason why fertilizer is an inexpensive source of fixated carbon biomass and this means all fertilizer will increase in price by the amount value of it's CO2 carbon credit equivalent

Then maybe the buried fertilizer will become so valuable that it can be dug out and sold as fertilizer again.

I don't see any problems with this plan !

Tecnowashing is also fraud.

Take a failed concept like the gold standard, technowash it, and you get crypto scamcoins.

Greenwashing, sportswashing (saudi arabia), sanewashing (presenting insane ideas as debatable ideas, like debating human rights with someone who is against human rights ends up sanewashing the anti-rights position), small business washing (using ostensibly a pro small business argument to push a fortune 100 agenda), worker washing (treat workers like shit in private but make pro worker noises in public), gender washing (the politician with an anti-woman agenda is a woman so it's OK), minority washing (a fascist pundit is a minority that fascism often targets, so fascism is OK now). Now we can add tecnowashing to the list.

Another example of technowashing is when a real estate company presents itself as a tech startup to inflate its valuation.

All this washing has exploded in recent years.

My first thought was...how is this a good thing, we get a lot of our water from ground water...and now we're pumping toxic shit into the ground. The fuck

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time.

It's usually nonsense. I remember some carbon offsets being a guy owning a forest and essentially selling his inaction as a carbon offset. Give me a million dollars so I don't chop all those trees down which I totally would've done otherwise. It's just pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.

In this case I can imagine their calculations being wildly off. How much CO2/methane does a ton of poop actually release? How much CO2 is released to transport that ton and build the facilities that hold it?

In the eyes of the board of directors, sure . Plantings a billion worth of trees would probably have been too green

No. Carbon offsetting is a scam and does not do shit for the environment.

Some poop releases methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than Co2.

Fun fact, when striking oil, you often encounter methane pockets as well, the gas is commonly just burned in a giant flare, this is mainly done for safety, to prevent gas from accumulating on the ground and risking an explosion, but also far reduce the greenhouse effect of the gas.

And vice versa!

Microsoft burying the steaming pile of poop that is teams will be enough to "offset" all their data centers.

It's also precious cheap carbon credit, don't worry it will only increase world wide fertilize costs by the value of the carbon credits but thing of all the methane they can burn to make electricity.

It's like converting our fertilizer directly into electricity, except its carbon sequestered 5000 feet under ground !

Maybe the fertilizer prices will increase so much it will become worththile to dig that 5000 feet mine and get that fertilizer back in the bio carbon cycle in 30 years when fertilizer costs more than aluminium does today !

using human waste as fertilizer isn't a good idea.

human waste contains everything that a person has consumes. this includes disease causing pathogens and parasites.

if it were to be used as a fertilizer it would need to go through multiple stages of expensive processing and testing to ensure safety. it's far more cost effective and safer to use food by-product like fish cuttings to create fertilizers.