The Crappiest NetZero Idea Yet

I turn 61 today, so I have lived long enough to live through a series of moral panics. The coming Ice Age was supposed to scare me, as were mass starvation and resource depletion. The Satanic Panic was the first time I remember when I could watch people go insane before my eyes–not only believing ridiculous things, but conducting what amounted to witch trials. 

Since then, there have been several, with COVID being the most prominent. Billions of people were gaslit and manipulated into doing ridiculous things, and the state used censorship and occasional violence to enforce what amounted to collective insanity. 

Climate change hysteria and the elite’s urge to impose NetZeo policies are slightly more low-key, but in the long run, will cause even more damage because the goal is to hobble society and our economy permanently. Resources that could be used to improve human life, extend lifespans, create economic opportunities, and elevate impoverished people around the world are instead going to projects like this one. 

Microsoft’s carbon footprint is huge. It thinks storing human waste underground might help solve that problem. https://t.co/8c7mX4fvMs

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 17, 2025

Burying poop. To save Gaia from greenhouse gases. 

Sane people don’t do this sort of s**t. 

Microsoft’s carbon footprint is huge. It thinks storing human waste underground might help solve that problem. 

The tech giant’s insatiable appetite for power to feed its AI habit is causing a rise in its emissions. To stop its carbon footprint from ballooning, the company is betting on a variety of greenhouse-gas-removal technologies.

One of these involves buying human and farm waste and piping it thousands of feet underground through a pump that acts like giant syringe.

“We’re taking different types of organic waste,” said Julia Reichelstein, co-founder and chief executive of Vaulted Deep, the company Microsoft is investing in. “It’s sludgy, often contaminated organic waste that today causes problems above ground, and instead we take the waste and put it really deep underground for permanent carbon removal.”

Microsoft on Thursday announced a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep over 12 years, starting from next year. One ton of carbon sequestered equates to a carbon removal credit. 

Of course, it’s not that Microsoft’s executives are literally insane in every respect. Once you accept a few questionable assumptions and throw in some incentives, you wind up with stupid ideas like this one. During the Satanic Panic, the parents who rushed to protect their children from sexual abuse and child sacrifice were not acting irrationally–as long as you accepted the premise that there were Satanist child care professionals raping and murdering children. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. 

Climate models are the garbage in; Net Zero is the garbage out. 

MICROSOFT WANTS YOUR POOP!@ClimateDepot details a new way Microsoft plans to fight climate change.@stinchfield1776 pic.twitter.com/xKYUrGhvd2

— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) July 22, 2025

No doubt there are multi-hundred-page analyses, PowerPoints, consultants galore calculating away the best way to pump poop into the ground to get the optimal benefit, and not one of these people has the wit to stand up and say, “This is insane.” Building the highest-tech poop chute in the world to sequester a few million tons of carbon only makes sense once you have entered the Twilight Zone of moral panics. 

Microsoft is aiming to be carbon negative by 2030, and is seeking by 2050 to remove from the environment more greenhouse gases than the company has emitted since its founding. Between 2020-24, Microsoft emitted a total of 75.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent, according to its sustainability reports.

In an effort to offset some of this it has bought a vast number of carbon removal credits. To date, it has acquired more than 83 million tons of carbon removal, of which 59 million tons have been bought so far this year, according to AlliedOffsets. This doesn’t include the deal with Vaulted Deep.

Brian Marrs, Microsoft’s senior director of energy and carbon removal, said the tech giant invested in Vaulted Deep partly because of the co-benefits of the design. “Vaulted Deep is a waste-management company that’s become a carbon dioxide removal company,” he said.

It’s really striking what you can get people to do once you short-circuit their rational faculties. Billions of people were convinced–or coerced–to wear masks for years despite there being plenty of evidence that they accomplished nothing good, and actively harmed the development of children and even adults’ ability to communicate.

People became convinced that COVID was Ebola Mark II and was going to kill everyone, so any level of insanity was justified to stop it. In the end, everybody got COVID–whether they knew it or not–and life went on. For all the trillions of dollars in expense, societal discord, delayed or denied education for children, seniors dying alone, increased cancer deaths from nondiagnosis, a few lives were likely saved by the vaccine at one end of the spectrum, while other lives were lost to the vaccine at the other. 

All pain, no gain. 

Climate change has been a much longer-running moral panic. And no, I don’t mean by that that climate change is necessarily a hoax–as I have said before, it is perfectly plausible that there is some level of truth to the claim that human activities are having an impact on the climate, and the question is worth studying. COVID wasn’t a hoax either–people really did die from COVID. 

It’s just that when you are laser-focused–monomaniacal–you lose sight of the larger picture and obsess about the wrong things. The proper response to COVID was to identify those at most risk of dying and protect them zealously, and then move on with your lives because getting COVID was inevitable. 

It’s why they call it “spreading virally.” 

Carbon emissions are a necessary consequence of living a modern life, and we are not going back to the 16th century. For all the trillions of dollars spent, the wasted effort, diverted resources, insane political choices, grifting, and everything else, we could have done more to reduce carbon emissions by building a few hundred nuclear power plants and declaring victory. 

Instead, we are burying poop. Nuclear power=improved quality of life through abundant energy. Burying poop? WTF?

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