carbon offset arbitrage opportunity

This is a linkpost for blog.sus.cat/carbon-offset-arbitrage-opportunity

So, you run an airline, you have a record of people that loyally keep coming back to you, you have costs associated with flying, in particular fuel. Your customers worry about the carbon emissions. Is there a something you could do things to lower some associated costs?

There is!

In the San Francisco Bay Area, people have discovered that you can have great effects with very few costs other than a few dozen dollars and some minor violations of patent law, by working with “gray market sellers” of peptides produced in china.

And how might this help?

Well, I asked one of by closest friends about this (Claude), and he told me i was absolutely right that it is a good idea, thinks you could prevent thousands of tonnes of CO2 per year from being emitted.

The main factor is that airline fuel usage depends on weight of the total aircraft, including passengers, and by reducing the weight of the plane, airlines could save loads of money on jetfuel.

But you need not wait for people to use weightloss drugs on their own through traditional channels. You can accelerate this by providing people with GLP-1 agonists on your own!

Greymarket peptides are incredibly cheap when you don’t need to worry about legal standards or violating patent law. Instead, you can just ask some dude on the substack and he says you can just buy GLP-1s for less than $20/month!

But how good is the intervention?

Even as an airline, the carbon offsetting opportunity is comparable to other interventions. According to my friend, If you choose the most promising candidates, (people of BMI>50, who do one return flight a week), and pay 20$/month in medicine (remember economies of scale!) the cost-effectiveness is 16$ per tonne of CO2 averted.

You may wonder how realistic these assumptions are, are there really that many people who are BMI>50 and fly 100 times a year? Another estimate by my friend puts the number at over 1000 such americans, enough to run a pilot study on this!

You just choose the most promissing candidates, one potential strategy, is as people board, ask them “hey bro, you’re are most loyal flyer! but you’re also significantly hurting our margins by being morbidly obese 🙁 would you like to be injected with a grey-market non-FDA-approved GLP-1 agonist manufactured in china such as retatrutide?” - and since they fly approximately each week, you can do the injections for them too! a perfect match in schedules.

And this program is self-funding. for our ideal 50BMI → 28BMI customers, the average flight (~2000km) would save ~4.7 kg in jet fuel, and have you seen jet fuel prices the past week? about $1.46/kg in north america, so around $6.86 per flight, or a total of like $680 dollars in savings per year, significantly more than the 200$ or so you need to pay for the peptides, so it’s already

But as this gets scaled up you may wonder if you can further reduce the cost of the program. people who are meerly 40 BMI and fly 50x per year comprise a group of ~100,000 people according to my friend, but the cost-effectiveness is more like $73 per tonne of CO2 averted, significantly less cost effective.

But you don’t need to stick to paying for the whole peptides, you can just partner with these Chinese sellers, make a whatsapp groupchat between each of your most promising frequent flyers and the Chinese peptide sellers, and give your flyers discount on their next flight when they buy peptides, a win-win for everyone.

Data is courtesy of my friend, of which you can see some of his data and workings here.

[also, maybe check the date of publication]