landon32

One interesting idea that I don't see talked about enough is the idea of a "Publicly Owned" search engine. Search engines are utilities with strong "successful to the successful" feedback loops similar to power/water/gas companies. Maybe a government should fund the creation of a really good search engine as a benefit to the public.

Good analysis on how to reduce the carbon emissions of cows: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustain...

Basically feed them seaweed and try to manage the land in a way that sequesters CO2 on balance

One thing to keep in mind is people struggling to make ends meet don't have time to learn and will struggle to find motivation to dedicate themselves to something. For me it was quite easy to be ambitious and learn a lot, because my basic needs were taken care of growing up. Others join the workforce at 16 and their income is important for their family.

One cool company working on this in the UK: https://projectwren.com/projects/regenerative-agroforestry

most companies in YC have technical founders who build the products still.

Ask the ones who didn't make it big too. All my friends and batch mates who have done it have good things to say!

[not a lawyer but] Also you don't legally need a ToS—It's fine to go without it for a while (especially while you have 0-100 customers)

Working for FAANG might be lame, but you can find some interesting company to work at without a doubt. I just graduated, and my friends from CS are doing everything from engineering at exciting biotech companies, Product management, building their own startups, and of course many at FAANG :)

It's a skillset that opens you up to a lot of possibilities

Treating this more as investing is very promising and maybe something we'd consider. Currently most of these solutions do not generate a profit that could be an ROI for investors on Wren or a similar platform, but some projects will have an ROI and it would be interesting if we (or someone else) could offer an easy way for anyone to invest in profitable ideas that are good for the climate.

Yeah this is pretty interesting. There's some set of activities (getting everyone on renewables, making clean construction/ag/transportation cost effective, political action, etc) that would actually allow someone to be guilt free. It would be way more money than just offsetting the footprint but it could fully cover all externalities....

That's kind of theoretical still, but perhaps we could crack it

That's really interesting. We haven't seriously considered what it would take to be able to live guilt free without changing lifestyle dramatically. It certainly means doing way more than offsetting, but there is a (perhaps distant) future where people can have an amazing standard of living while still helping our planet thrive.

For instance—if you were to get your community on 100% renewable energy, help politicians who care get elected, fund clean manufacturing/construction companies, and maybe do a handful of other things maybe you could live guilt free. We will have to think about this more, I'm glad you phrased it like this.

This is very clever, we might try that. Thanks for sharing!

Wow, I hadn't heard that story before.

One thing that might help is if we publish all of our spending online in a transparent way. There are probably legal/accounting considerations we'd need there but I'd imagine it would be safe to post that after each year.

So far, we have spent less than $200 on marketing and PR, mostly to test Google Ads. We realized pretty quickly google ads weren't effective so we shut them off. Since we're setup as a business we can't afford to lose money on each ton.

This is a great point, you're right. Thank you for that feedback, we can edit that soon.

Happy to hear it. One thing to mention though: We don't think offsetting is a license to live guilt free. We still have to do more! Hopefully the carbon footprint calculator will give you some ideas for how you can cut down your footprint pretty easily—often something as simple as cutting out red meat or using public transit more often can make a big difference. Also, progress from political action will likely be necessary.

That said, we need to pursue all solutions aggressively right now and we obviously think carbon offsets are a key part of the portfolio that will save humanity from climate change :)

Project Vesta is super exciting! We've seen them on HN a couple times, they're still pretty early but it'd be cool to figure out how we could work together.

Thanks for mentioning them again

Oh that's a great point. You can absolutely use our carbon calculator and then find another project to support. We want to make a really good carbon calculator that's useful to everyone, not just Wren subscribers. Let us know if you have ideas or feedback there.

No you're spot on, historically this has been a huge problem. You can make it illegal to log an area, but people will log anyway.

What's different about the project we listed is that it uses satellite monitoring and drones to very quickly catch illegal logging. So instead of loggers taking out 100s of acres over a few weeks, they can be caught on day one and authorities can be sent to the area. This makes it very difficult to log at a large scale. They also send several patrols each month to walk through the area and inspect on the ground to make sure the forest is as expected.

You're right, we have to be critical of what we're doing because this is such an important challenge for humanity. This is why we're doing it:

People who sign up for Wren usually were not previously considering offsetting their carbon footprint. In 1 month ~200 people have offset their footprint through Wren. We anticipate this number to grow exponentially, and think several million people offsetting their carbon footprint is a reasonable goal for the short term. This is nontrivial—it will be as impactful as the U.S. agreeing to go on track for the paris climate accord again. This would not happen if we did not take a fee.

Planting trees is one of many solutions we're focused on. Project Drawdown has 99 more: https://www.drawdown.org/ and if we were able to enact all of them we'd be carbon neutral as a planet.

We will certainly be doing more math and developing a better strategy. However we think that by launching Wren we have already learned more than months spent strategizing could have taught us—this is at its core a consumer behavior problem so we have to spend our time understanding people.

Keep us posted on more ideas and feedback for maximizing our impact

Great questions.

Monoculture ecosystems are fairly easy to avoid, you just have to plant different types of trees that will thrive. This is easy for the Community Tree Planting project on our site because the farmers are the ones planting the trees and they usually want to incorporate agroforestry techniques as part of their farm, so it's a fairly diverse ecosystem already—they aren't just going out and planting 100s of pine trees.

There's a few strategies to ensure wood isn't harvested. The first one is by making the trees valuable in the ground to farmers—focusing on fruit and nut trees that the farmers benefit from day to day.

Next reason is simple: they're paid to keep them in the ground.

The next is that there's social pressure. These farmers plant trees with a group of other farmers, and if anyone cuts down their trees the whole group loses some of the benefits.

It's a promising model which is why we like this partner.

2 big reasons: 1) There are a lot of solutions to climate change that we could enact today if they had funding. Project Drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org/) may be of interest—it lists all the solutions to climate change we can enact today. It's quite surprising—we don't need CRT, we just need action today. With electing officials, we think that would be the best solution but it's relatively high risk—if we fail to do it, climate change gets worse. (that said electing officials is still super important, more on why we didn't choose that route in (2))

2) We thought this is something we'd be good at relative to our other options.

It would be really cool to work on CRT or clean energy breakthroughs, but we have no science background and it would be years before we ramped up to start making an impact on those technologies.

For policy, we think we can be good active members of our communities and vote etc, but we could not see ourselves spending all of our time lobbying or campaigning or otherwise pulling levers in the political space.

But what we do love doing is building products. We are content doing this all day, and hope that will allow us to make more and more useful products to reverse climate change.

Ah, sorry "hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital." was actually more in reference to the 20% fee.

Although we think impact investors and potentially even VCs can help fund this which is why we haven't become a nonprofit. We are looking at Benefit Corporation as the best legal structure for this, but it will take some time for us to transfer over.

This sort of investment is very cool! I hope to see it becoming more common.

We're focusing on direct offsets because we think long term we'll need a great market for carbon offsets and reduction. We already have too much CO2 in the atmosphere, so everything we can do to literally pull it out is necessary. Clean energy is great but I think we'll need something like carbon offsets/reduction in addition to it.

This is a great question. To be completely transparent, we are considering a flat fee because of the reason you stated.

We originally chose a percent fee because it was an industry standard model that many in the carbon offset space expect. However, we're learning that industry standard here does not mean it's the best possible option.

The big reason why a % fee is good is because for small donations (e.g. 25% of someone's footprint) it makes more sense to scale it. A $4 transaction cost on a $2 impact to the project is crazy.

The tricky thing about our cost structure is that currently we do not have enough revenue to cover our overhead expenses, so even if we're ignoring the per transaction cost we need to find a way to cover our overhead (e.g. a place for us to live so we can hack on this all day)

For carbon offsets, it is pretty different depending on the type of project. We do not invent these methodologies, we use methodologies from groups like Verra Carbon Standard (https://verra.org/project/vcs-program/methodologies/methodol...). https://projectwren.com/methodologies has more information about how we specifically choose projects.

It can be pretty down in the weeds to calculate the emissions from these projects and since it varies by type I can't summarize it all here. However if you have more specific questions I'd be happy to answer.

Re: carbon footprints, it's a little simpler. We use data + research from Berkeley's cool climate lab (https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/publications) The main model is maintained by them, and is based on linear regression from a bunch of lifestyle variables that you input into the calculator. Our version is slightly different because we base it on country instead of zip code, so we scale most input variables by the country's per capita emissions to get a good estimate.

We love Pachama! They have been helpful in shaping our understanding of the space and some of the big challenges with forest carbon projects. They are not a competitor though, they mostly work with bigger companies where as we focus on individuals.

Your footprint should be available on that page—you should be able to see your annual total, your breakdowns by category, and how that compares to global averages. The "Email me my footprint" button just sends you a link so you can save it. I could see how you may want to change the email you entered once you get there though. We should add that!

Thanks for pointing that out

Great idea! We're actually piloting that right now. I think it would be promising especially since companies ask employees to travel and have otherwise larger footprints from work.

We use the email to save your progress, but if you'd like you can just use any fake email

Side note: I just launched a web app for offsetting the emissions you havent been able to reduce— I’d love to hear what you think of it projectwren.com

Email is in profile if you have feedback, the goal is to get more people involved with reversing climate change