THE VIDEO SHELF · carbon offsets
Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
A Last Week Tonight segment explaining carbon offsets, what they claim to do, and how they may worsen climate change. It looks at perverse incentives and questionable projects.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN points to it as an informative explainer on why many carbon offset schemes are not genuine.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- LastWeekTonight
- Topic
- carbon offsets
- Format
- commentary
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 3
- HN mentions in dataset
- 5
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2022–2023
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
In theory, it's great. In practice perverse incentives and little to no regulation make it worthless. A John Oliver explainer: [VIDEO]
russdill on Hacker News · 2022-09
In Companies are buying large numbers of carbon offsets that don’t cut emissionsJohn Oliver with a quite informative video about why many carbon offsets/carbon credits schemes are most likely not genuine in their attempts to offset carbon emissions. [VIDEO]
d4nyll on Hacker News · 2023-06
InIt's complicated, but John Oliver did a good segment on it. [VIDEO] Planting trees is not an easy solution. [LINK] A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee …
joshvm on Hacker News · 2023-09
In Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are “likely junk“
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.
