204 karma · joined January 13, 2017
Basically feed them seaweed and try to manage the land in a way that sequesters CO2 on balance
It's a skillset that opens you up to a lot of possibilities
That's kind of theoretical still, but perhaps we could crack it
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.
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.
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 :)
Thanks for mentioning them again
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.
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
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) 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Thanks for pointing that out
Email is in profile if you have feedback, the goal is to get more people involved with reversing climate change