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Comment by OmarIsmail | Hacker News Reader

I'm bias because I prefer YC companies, but I just signed up and started donating to offset me and my family's carbon impact. When I ran through the calculator and saw how much damage we were doing (the "if everyone lived like you the planet would have X months" was VERY effective) that really pushed me over the edge. Now that I've donated I feel great. I just have to pay a little bit more (relative to my income/standard of living) and I can live guilt free?? Sign me up!

And I note that this sounds pretty shilly, but seriously, if you don't donate to wren go donate to some other reputable climate change mitigating org. Just donate to something, even for the selfish feeling of smugness and guilt-removal it brings.

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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 :)

Maybe you should expand your offering so that I can live guilt free. That's what I really want. To maintain my standard of living without harming the planet.

That’s impossible unfortunately. Money alone won’t “buy” a guilt free, business-as-usual lifestyle in the face of this emergency. I suggest doing a bit more research to see for yourself what I mean.

This is clearly false. Subsidizing the conversion of the the entire world to clean energy does more good than burning an ounce of coal does harm.

Conversely, planting one tree is insufficient to buy an SUV guilt-free.

There’s inherently a crossover point somewhere.

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.

I've read this subthread 3 times and can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

I hope you are still reading replies, even though I'm a couple days late. But if the calculator has such a high impact, why hide it behind a requirement to give out our email? I'd love to give it a try, but have no desire to sign up until I've seen more. It sounds like you are hiding one of your most effective conversion tools from me.

Hi! We are still reading replies, though a couple days late as well. That's a great point and something we're planning on doing — We're going to spin out the calculator to be its own tool separate from the sign up flow soon. We can keep you posted when that's up!

If you want to try the calculator now but don't want to use your email, you're free to use a fake email. You can change it to your real email if you do decide to create an account after calculating your footprint :)

Selling the guilt and then the absolutism after? Isn't that a tad too much Catholic stick?

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