Slashdot Mirror
Lyft Announces It Will Make All Rides Carbon Neutral (cnn.com)
Lyft announced it will spend millions of dollars to make all its rides carbon neutral. An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money:
The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company announced Thursday that it will pay for a range of environmentally beneficial projects to compensate for the emissions from the millions of car journeys it provides every week. The tactic, known as carbon offsets, is a way for Lyft to do something about climate change without changing its business model. Lyft will fund initiatives including forestry projects, renewable energy ventures and capturing emissions from landfills.
The efforts will put Lyft among the 10 largest voluntary offset programs in the world, according to 3Degrees, the renewable energy company Lyft is partnering with to find suitable projects... Lyft will track how many miles its drivers cover -- and the make and model of their vehicles -- to calculate exactly how many emissions it must offset. The company will not limit itself just to the carbon footprint from when passengers are in Lyft vehicles, but will also include the mileage its drivers rack up on their way to pick people up.
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer believes that within their first year they'll offset over a million metric tons of carbon -- "equivalent to planting tens of millions of trees or taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road."
Zimmer told CNN that "With great scale comes great responsibility."
The efforts will put Lyft among the 10 largest voluntary offset programs in the world, according to 3Degrees, the renewable energy company Lyft is partnering with to find suitable projects... Lyft will track how many miles its drivers cover -- and the make and model of their vehicles -- to calculate exactly how many emissions it must offset. The company will not limit itself just to the carbon footprint from when passengers are in Lyft vehicles, but will also include the mileage its drivers rack up on their way to pick people up.
Lyft co-founder John Zimmer believes that within their first year they'll offset over a million metric tons of carbon -- "equivalent to planting tens of millions of trees or taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road."
Zimmer told CNN that "With great scale comes great responsibility."
If only companies like Lyft could make their services privacy-neutral as well. Allow for private forms of payment, delete user records permanently after six months. Environmentally neutral or not, app-based rideshare is still poison.
billions of euros in carbon trading scams in europe, those were major news items. carbon trading is the ideal scam system. unless they're going to run their cars on biofuel, or as electric vehicles from a nuke plant or solar or wind or hydro...forget it, it's just stupidity
what about paying for drivers to buy cars with tech that can use that that?
That's nice. Perhaps in the meantime they can instruct Lyft drivers on the proper use of parking spots instead of stopping in the middle of roads and lots with complete disregard to traffic around them.
They will end up planting trees at the other end of the world. This makes about as much sense as a mass murderer helping to feed some starving kids in Africa so he can claim he is a net benefit to humanity as he saved more lives then he took away...
Robbing from Peter to pay Paul... all in the interests of seeming to be something that you're not.
Fuck off, Lyft.
They're going to do more of the 'cash for clunkers' type things and take working cheap cars off the market.
Kids gots smartphones but there's no ~5k cars around? Works for lyft.
Lyft now admits how much it overcharges their customers.
No, they're not required to maintain records tied to names. In a regular taxi, you can pay cash and not have any record of your ride beyond an anonymous trip log from point A to B.
The individual driver may be required to have a camera, but the footage is usually not uploaded to the "cloud", nor is it correlated with a name unless a crime occurred.
First off, any effort to reduce emissions is great news. Thanks Lyft for the early Earth Day gift :) It's effectively cleaning up someone else's mess (in this case, capturing landfill methane was one example from the announcement) rather than their own, but it's an improvement nonetheless. If you have to use Lyft or Uber, use Lyft.
That said, a couple notes:
1) Lyft is most likely just offsetting for the ride itself, not for "deadhead" miles between "rides" (without passengers) or between a driver's house and the first or last ride, which may be a large amount. See this CPUC report, p. 11.
2) Another import note is that Lyft is currently opposing a bill (see the 4/20 legislative analysis, bottom of page 4) which
as well as setting interim goals for increasing zero-emissions VMT.
Lyft's opposition apparently is partly because Lyft doesn't have faith in their efforts to increase zero emission miles, and partly from a distaste for rules of any kind ("We're going to oppose any version of the bill that can be seen as a mandate", according to Tim McRae, VP of Energy at Silicon Valley Leadership Group, who argued on behalf of Lyft and Uber during the bill's hearing in committee on 4/17).
The bill is SB 1014, going through the California Senate this session. (And of course, Uber is opposed as well.)