Microsoft buys back all the crap they sold us for years.

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.

The thing is that these carbon credits make it so that things which would otherwise reduce CO2 in the atmosphere don't happen unless some money changes hands. Most of the time credits effectively do nothing.

Yeap, CCs are mostly BS.

Microsoft has just signed a deal with Vaulted Deep, paying it to remove 4.9 million metric tons of waste over 12 years sourced from manure, sewage, and agricultural byproducts for injection deep underground.

https://investigatemidwest.org/2023/12/07/us-push-to-produce-methane-from-manure-raises-concerns/

“It can provide a substantial portion of global energy needs,” Rudi Roeslein , CEO of Roeslein Alternative Energy, told the attendees. His company has built farm-based methane systems around the country that produce enough fuel to displace 6 million gallons of diesel fuel and 80,000 cars. “If we do this on a large scale in the U.S. we could generate $63.6 billion worth of revenue for farmers around the country.”

Roeslein’s company promises on its website to “restore a balance” to farmland “by using the sustainably harvested biomass to create renewable natural gas.”

A million BTUs (MMBTu) of methane digested from manure is currently worth $3 in the value of the gas

I know where to find a valuable source of methane in 12 years.

When the planet burns down, the will be the ones who "did something about it"

What about the nutrients in the waste? Why not compost it, capture the methane offgassing, and store that?

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

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?

Yeah i was expecting the externalized cost route with this one.

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.

Idiots!! That stuff ain't worth shit!

Not to forget: It contains a ton of medicine as well. If you want to have antibiotics in your salad, use human waste as fertilizers.

you're absolutely right, I forgot about those and it's probably worse than the parasites.

There's even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

And bog land isn't exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

It's complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn't consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.

FIFO if you know what i mean

Pathogens are less of a problem, they die off before they cannot infect a plant. But chemicals from medication and contraceptives, as well as heavy metals, are.

We truly are in the metaverse era.

They found a way to convert physical shit into virtual shit.

So this is what they plan to do with all the game studios they bought over the years.

Engineer here. We arent talking about directly tossing it on fields. We are talking about having it be anaerobically fermented at high temperatures for about 30 days, with the biogas captured and used for energy.

the new thing to do then is burn the remains and recover the phosphate from the ashes, where certainly no biological threat remains

These type of plants are currently built on many larger wastewater treatment plants in Europe