We're Mimi, Ben, and Landon, founders of Wren (https://projectwren.com). Wren lets you offset your carbon footprint by funding projects that prevent or sequester greenhouse gas emissions. It works by calculating your carbon footprint and then funding a project of your choice through a monthly subscription. Some of the projects we have right now involve planting forests in East Africa, providing more efficient cookstoves to Ugandan refugees, and preventing deforestation in the Amazon.
We met in college, and worked together on numerous side projects and class projects. After a while we decided to try finding a meaningful project that we could work on after graduation. At the time, we didn't know much about the science or emerging technologies for mitigating climate change, but we saw carbon offsets and asked ourselves "why isn't everyone doing this?" Then we got to work on Wren.
Carbon offsets have been around for a while, and with some googling, research, and phone calls anyone can find reliable and transparent projects. Our goal is to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible to offset your footprint. We only work with projects that have good evidence suggesting they're long lasting and reliable. We also only work with projects that wouldn't happen without support from Wren users. In addition to climate benefits, we prefer projects with strong social impact. Projects listed on Wren reduce lung cancer risk for refugees, provide millions of dollars of economic benefit to subsistence farmers, and protect biodiversity.
We see climate change as the most important problem we can work on. Despite growing evidence of the damage it will cause, governments are not taking necessary action. Wren is a way for an individual to have impact today.
Most in this space are nonprofits but we are a business. We take a 20% fee on each subscription. This allows us to hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital. This way we can build tools that make our projects more transparent and reliable—daily satellite images of forest projects, data visualizations of tree trunk diameters, and other ways we can build more trust for these projects.
I've seen a lot of posts on HN recently about climate change and potential solutions so I'm looking forward to a good discussion :)
Another part of me wonders why would anyone chose Wren over COTAP[0] (for example) - a non-profit (501c3) where 90.9% of funds go toward their projects, you get a tax deduction and you can check in on their finances via their non-profit filings to ensure they are actually allocating funds how they say they are.
edit: grammar
On the subset of humanity that is already pro-active on this, advertising COTAP is the way to go but the strategies are complementary.
1) Will my money go where they say it'll go? How can I know that? 2) How do I know that I'm actually helping the environment? How do I know the money doesn't end up in some corrupt individual's pocket at the target country? I know first-hand how some people end up profiting handsomely from subsidies with various tricks. 3) Am I actually offsetting X tons of carbon? How does preservation even offset any carbon, since it's preventing more carbon from being released, instead of offsetting what I did release.
Thanks for the effort, it seems like a very worthwhile cause!
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.
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 :)
Why did you choose to charge with a percentage model instead of a flat fee? If I'm a "hero" and offset double my footprint why should I be charged double for doing that? Is the cost to you as a business relative to the dollar amount I donate?
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)
They could either receive those as Stripe payouts, or further reinvest their earnings into curing global warming
i.e. cure global warming MLM style
This could also open up some nice customer acquisition strategies benefit from asymmetric motivation: teenagers/kids bunch of teenagers (who would spend hours persuading their rich parents /grandparents to donate $50/mo, such that in return the teenager earns $5/mo). This may be able to help mitigate the problem that older people are less likely to believe in the severity of global warming than younger people - in the same way that your grandma bought your magazine in 5th grade (so that you could win a prize, not because she actually cared about the magazine) as part of those gamified magazine fundraisers in elementary school
Going the business route instead of non-profit sounds like something worth trying out. Ultimately this is about making the biggest impact on slowing down the climate change - not about who takes the smallest fees and has the lightest overhead.
Could you say a bit more about how this works in practice? I'm asking because of vague memories that much of the logging in the Amazon is done illegally anyway. So presumably just saying "we buy up land and then it's ours and nobody will log it because it's forbidden" would not be effective.
Am I misremembering things and this is not really a problem? Or do you have some effective way to ensure that land not meant to be logged is really left alone?
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.
I'm not sure if you guys are looking for other projects to support, but one interesting project is Project Vesta[0]. Seems like there is some potential for a successful partnership.
Thanks for mentioning them again
Non-profits can do all of those things, too... Why not do them as a non-profit?
We've already got nonprofits doing this stuff. Given the gravity of the situation, shouldn't we encourage a range of different approaches?
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.
Like as someone who mostly bikes but does use a car a during the summer months there's a clear scale. I'm also a meat eater but have very little red meat. This would half the food emissions of an average American. Some sort of scale would make me feel like I'm getting a more accurate answer to nuanced questions (ones that I think a lot of people concern themselves with).
I was also suspicious when I put in vegetarian, car, and 2 flights a year < 3hrs resulted in having 11% lower than most Americans and then switching to electric car gave me another 10%. IIRC that's making some big assumptions (not considering electricity costs, lifetime emissions, state electric emissions).
I also find the "if everyone" part misleading (though I get why it's there, to show privilege), but I think it is also effective to promote competition within a country. I can be the best American but have a hard time beating someone from the third world. Maybe have both?
Also, if you're going to allow fake emails why don't you let people calculate first? Or maybe email required for a more nuanced position, if you're trying to harvest them (since that probably gives you a better set of people that you're looking for).
> switching to electric car gave me another 10%. IIRC that's making some big assumptions (not considering electricity costs, lifetime emissions, state electric emissions).
Are you talking about not considering electricity costs for manufacturing an electric vehicle or more generally for your personal footprint?
Might be helpful to note that our previous calculator set up was much more state specific (to postal code level) but we had to switch up the setup so it could accommodate for international users. Our breakdown is still based on the Berkeley Cool Climate model (https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/publications) but scaled by a country's per capita emissions (data from World Bank). Unfortunately that means there's less granularity on region specific data for the U.S. for now, but it should still be a pretty good estimate. That said — there's still plenty of improvements that we can make to the calculator, so thank you for the feedback.
Oh, I like the idea of competition on a country basis. Maybe showing your percentile in your country could work. Let me know if you have any other ideas here!
For the fake emails, from a product perspective it was more confusing for people to enter in their emails after calculating their footprint than right upfront. It might have been the way we had it set up or something but we can come back to explore what can be improved there. For now if folks want to calculate and leave without a way to get back to their footprint calculations or offset their footprint, it's fine to leave a fake email. If users make it to the create account page, they're able to confirm their email or change their fake email there. :)
Ideally we're going to make the calculator completely open to use, but for now it's still in our onboarding flow until we get around to spinning it out into a separate tool.
I suggest you let people use the calculator freely, and when I enter e.g. "4 transatlantic flights per year" then you show me what that sin translates to specifically for one of your offset projects, e.g. "1000 briquettes" (with photos, of course). Personally speaking, that would make me pay up.
Oh, and the 20% fee is really problematic. I'd like to see a pay-what-I-want slider where I can adjust the percentage. The slider minimum would be set to min(0.2*x, $10) or some other reasonable amount, and you can calibrate that function to maximize donations.
"How about instead of directing people to pay a middle man to take 20% off the top to pay others to plant trees" which, correct me if I'm wrong, is exactly what you are doing, while some of may be going to non-tree planting activities - the most effective thing you can do with that money right now, unless you are sitting on a miraculous new technology, is to pay people to actively plant new trees and/or protect existing forest.
Per your website for those that haven't looked
>Wren takes 20% of each subscription and puts it toward growing the company.
Also like I told Paul, and Sam Altman,
"Planting trees isn't even a bandaid, it's like cutting your arm off and then gently blowing in the gaping wound. To offset our current CO2 production you need to add more than 31 million square miles, nearly 16% of the earth's land, of new forest assuming a healthy density of 40-60 trees per acre."
That figure above is actually really conservative. Add to that the fact we're losing forest at an estimated 28,125 square miles annually... do you realize how many customers you'll have to get to even combat 28,125 square miles annually? The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre, that means you're going to need to plant a billion plus trees a year to even hope to combat current forest loss, a BILLION trees... and I'm not talking twigs, I'm talking 10ft+ trees, in healthy soil, with healthy fungal networks (the fungi that work in symbiosis with trees aid considerably in the carbon sequestration and overall tree health).
Seriously, do the math yourselves and then try and justify your business model. Not to me, but to each other.
I think you need to cease operations immediately, I think you need to do a lot more math, and then I think you need to come back with a strategy to help people personally minimize their carbon impact. You're selling people a fantasy, you're selling them nothing more than an uniformed "I'm helping save the world" feeling because they joined a subscription service while you take 20% off the top to hire more employees.
I honestly have no idea whatsoever why YC selected your company and chose to fund it, other than the 20% off the top of every subscription and perhaps banking on the fact that people will feel guilty about climate change and happily fork over money on a subscription model.
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
What I hear from your parent comment is "Your solution is not yet perfect, therefore you should give up now". Nirvana fallacy, throwing out baby with bathwater fallacy etc.
Feasibility of your solution aside (which I think is very promising), I think we need 1000x more people like you in the world who take personal risks for the sake of humanity.
Skimming the parent commenters other comments on this post, all I saw were him listing solutions that he believes will not work, and I didn't see him list a single solution/idea that could fight global warming in his mind. I really feel like he was a horserider who was looking at you building a car and saying your car doesn't travel at the speed of light therefore you should give up immediately.
> "You're selling people a fantasy".
^^ no you're not. You are objectively selling them the truth and actual results - that if they invest X dollars they will offset their personal footprint
> "How about instead of directing people to pay a middle man to take 20% off the top to pay others to plant trees"
IMO the genius behind what Graham is doing by investing in Wren is he is acknowledging that you have to create a self-sustaining and replicating structure to cure global warming. Graham could donate all his money directly to subsidizing planting trees, and then he'd be out of money and only a relatively small number of trees would be planted. But if he can invest a small amount of money in a team of smart and altruistic individuals who can create an economically self-sufficient machine that plants trees in perpetuity (or uses some other (better) solution to fix global warming), he can have a much larger impact, while outlaying a much smaller investment, AND while making money out of it.
You keep mentioning Project Drawdown in this thread.
Why should people pay you 20% instead of just donating to Project Drawdown.
Will you continue to take 20% when you reach those 'several million people' subscribing? I mean, at 5$ a month each that's 'several million' dollars a month for what, web hosting and 3 salaries?
I see on LinkedIn you're listed as a software company and keep mentioning engineers. What engineers do you need? What exactly are you doing other than acting as a middle-man for funds by hosting a simple calculator and merchant portal?
As my downvotes would suggest, I'm apparently coming across as quite harsh but I've yet to see anything remotely actionable other than "see the ideas so and so has" "engineers" "millions".
I'm not a venture capitalist, I have no use for projections and buzzwords. I'm not even a CS type so I don't immediately think "we need engineers!" for every problem that comes along in some subconscious way of justifying my career/creating job security.
"we prefer projects with strong social impact" what does this even mean. Global warming isn't something that's going to be solved by 'social impact'. China is building HUNDREDS of coal power plants right now and adding millions of new drivers to the road annually (in fact, China has more licensed drivers now than the United States does citizens). The methane produced by 1.3-1.5 billion cattle worldwide are responsible for roughly 2 gigatons CO2-equivalent.
Drawdown, as you keep linking, most of their proposed ideas/areas of interest are laughable
- Electric bikes (going to largely be powered by, fossil fuels)
- Electric cars (going to largely be powered by, fossil fuels, and will remain cost prohibitive for 95% of the world's population, if not more)
- Mass transit takes years or decades to roll out, when funding can even be secured and all zoning challenges can be met
- Alternative cement, this will be great if someone can make a breakthrough but there has been next to zero progress made on anything that is remotely feasible or even scalable
- Bioplastic, while this takes petrochemicals out of the equation it is still pretty energy demanding and is still not good for the environment, biodegradable does not inherently mean safe.
- Recycled paper, or how about doing away with paper. Instead of making recycled paper (which requires obscene amounts of toxic chemicals) why not get legislation passed to outlaw mass mailing, do you know how much mail I throw away each week that is advertisements and solicitations that I never even look at?
- Industrial recycling, aside from aluminium and CLEANED glass recycling is mostly a farce. Don't believe me, do your homework, planet money even had an episode on this recently. Plastic is largely just taken to landfills, even if sent to recycling, because unless it is cleaned it is considered contaminated and China will no longer buy it to recycle it because of a loss of cheap labor and the pollution recycling it causes.
- Autonomous vehicles, mutli-national companies are having trouble with this and even if they do pass it you likely have years of legal hurdles to get them legal and a decade or more to get people to even begin to accept and adopt them in numbers sufficient enough to make them more efficient than human driving as you'll have to remove the bulk of human drivers from the road.
- Building with wood is already happening, but it adds considerable cost and still has considerable height limits which still require more land to be turned from green spaces to tarmac and building. Not to mention this wood isn't always sustainably farmed.
- Direct air capture, this is almost certainly never going to happen barring multiple miraculous inventions. The closest person to doing this is Dr. Klaus Lackner and even his research has it not being viable, even if you capture in a method like his (a polymer that you then 'wash' it you still have to sequester it somehow).
- Hyperloop, pure fantasy. Never going to happen for travelling large distances. Travelling large distances is one of the problems anyway. Commercial aviation fuel usage has gone up 33% in 9 years.
- Refrigerant management, this will help with new appliances but the billion plus refrigeration/freezer units out there already...
- Industrial hemp, will just require more land to be planted as farmland won't be sacrificed it and cotton will be farmed until at least the current generation of farmers dies, farmers don't like change.
- Living buildings, they look great in concept art but aren't practical and won't have any meaningful impact. They'll likely take decades just to offset the CO2 emissions from manufacturing the concrete that went into the building's foundations.
- Ocean farming and marine permaculture, coastal waters absolutely need kelp and seaweed 'forests' re-established. There are some women in/around the Bay Area working on this - Tessa Emmer, Catherine O'Hare, and Avery Resor and what they are doing needs to be done up and down every last square mile of water with proper depth in the entire world.
Smart grids, if you mean in the United States good luck. This isn't something you are going to be able to have any influence on whatsoever. You'll have to get every single power company in the United States and Canada to voluntarily replace perfectly functioning, very expensive, equipment over a decade or more and even if you did they'll pass the cost on tot eh customer.
- Solid-state wave energy, at any scale this is likely to have any number of unforeseen consequences for marine life (probably sound-induced stress for starters) and be quite costly due to the corrosive nature of oceans.
Makes complete sense. But there's probably no business there. Everybody wants to be connected and not miss out these days, especially young people. Most people won't even consider "putting down their digital devices", but they would happily pay money to offset their carbon footprint.
It can't ever be as effective as putting down the devices in the first place, and completely offsetting their carbon footprint may be impossible, but it's still something which is probably better than nothing. And also something that these people can actually make happen.
They don't need to save the world. But I feel the effort is something that needs to be applauded and supported here. These kinds of things may not succeed, but they can lead to better versions in time.
No need to support blindly of course, but the criticism could be more constructive in my opinion.
Because God forbid we try and preserve the vast majority of life on earth instead of pursuing generating millions of dollars of profit every month.
The vast majority of human beings haven't put 1 minute of thought into global warming, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if there were billions of human beings walking around today that have never even heard of global warming or climate change, aside from noticing each year getting hotter and hotter and weather getting a little more extreme.
We don't need startups taking a 20% vig via a subscription service for a feel-good "I did my part by giving money" company. We need to present the facts, as unbiased as possible, to the masses and get people to start questioning the topic. We need people to start going "oh, wow, we did that?" we need them to start thinking "well how can I minimize my impact myself".
More than a third of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day [1]. Do you think that 2.5 billion people can afford to scrape together even $2 a month to offset the CO2 from their cooking?
The median annual household income worldwide is $9,733,[2], do you think that families can afford to pay $10-20 a head worldwide? Do you think that 1/3 of the world's population can realistically afford that? Do you think by the time that Wren backs out 20%, then the non-profits/NGOs/companies they turn around and give the money to backs out their operating costs, that that amount of money (probably 50% or less of the original contribution) will make even a 10% reduction in last year's CO2 emissions and that it will not only be able to keep pace with the increase, but also continue to increase to the point of getting us not just carbon neutral, but removing 10-2 gigatons more than we produce each year to try and restore us to levels of even the 1980s in any reasonable amount of time?
I don't. I think this company is just going to be away for those individuals with a little disposable income, that believe in climate change and feel guilty about driving their car and flying everywhere for vacations, to buy themselves a little 'feel good' or a little peace of mind. Most will probably think they're really making a difference and that all will be fine.
Even if Wren manages to generate 5 billion dollars a month, and ends passing 4.95 billion down the chain, it's unlikely to even result in sequestering 10% of last year's levels annually. Seriously, run the numbers yourself, everyone that's going to downvote this comment like you are my others, RUN THE NUMBERS please. You'll see that this isn't going to be the solution, nor is it likely to lead to one. It is the wrong approach to the problem as is.
This is Silicon Valley being clueless and/or overly optimistic as usual with these sorts of markets/challenges, just like YC wanting to turn half of the Sahara into shallow algal pools (which would result in the rainforest losing massive amounts of fertilization and cause a potentially catastrophic change in global weather patterns, not to mention require more electricity than the plant currently produces).
[1] 2012 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17312819
[2] 2013 https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...
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.
I'm still noodling on a somewhat similar project with treespree.io but had some of the same concerns raised in your thread that I still need to think through.
I think one of the core value adds of these approaches is that they convert people who are inactive out of fear or uncertainty into people who are at least starting to do something and possibly discuss the issues with people they are close to.
Still not sure how to best ensure ongoing engagement for the long haul.
All the best to you guys though - really want to see your project succeed.
- Asking only for the size of my home but nothing else seems bogus. Surely apartments in a densely populated city have different footprints than single-family homes in suburbia or the countryside? Part of my housing's footprint will be modeled by transport considerations and heating costs, but apparently not all, otherwise you wouldn't ask.
- District heating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating) is a big thing where I live, and it's impossible to quantify for individuals what their footprint is when they have that instead of gas.
- My final result came back as 10% less than my country's average (yay) but I see no way to figure out why. Probably because I don't drive, but it would be cool to see a more detailed breakdown of all the data I entered, how they factor into the calculation, and how they relate to my country's (and the worldwide) average.
Nice job and certainly not trivial to set up!
Edit: Oh, and I'd like a less clumsy way to see in the footprint overview (the link mailed to me) how much it would cost to offset my footprint, and what projects are available. I had to re-enter all the data! It would be awesome if I had a link that I could mail to friends and family saying "look, here is my impact, and this is how unexpectedly cheap it is to fix it".
1. You can change info about your transportation habits + electricity usage in the footprint breakdown below the first six questions. Those top level questions have the largest impact on the delta between your country's avg and your footprint, but you can go more in depth below to account for diff between if you live in an urban, suburb, or rural area.
Does that answer your q? I'm not sure if you are asking for more specificity on your footprint overall or just the housing section.
2. Good point. We're improving the electricity section of our calculator to account for renewables and other specific energy setups. Will keep you posted when that's up.
3. (Yay indeed!) All of the initial values pre-populated in the accordion below the first six questions are actually averages from your country. It might not be clear right now since the values appear somewhat random and also disappear as soon as you enter in your own information, but we can have those values persist and show specific deltas between you and your country / world for each question if that's helpful.
4. We're setting up those links so it's easier to get back to your information in the calculator! Also, we have the cost to offset your footprint appear a page later once you choose your project. Wasn't sure if you hadn't made it to that step or just want that information in the footprint overview link as well.
Hope that's helpful, thanks for the feedback.
As for 3 and 4, yes, the more information I can get in the overview the better. And always with a link to the service you are actually providing for money :-)
Rough outline from Rod Fitzsimmons:
- capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using a variety of techniques, usually adsorbtion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage). This takes quite a bit of energy.
- Conversion of the dissolved CO2 into alcohols. Reaction is 2CO2 + 9H2O + 12e- → C2H5OH + 12OH- so it's energy-uphill and needs an energy input. Maybe solar cells or a wind turbine. Requires a catalyst, often a variety of copper matrix. Catalysts are the major subject of research. To figure out whether you could do this in your garage you'd probably need to go to the literature.
- Distillation of the alcohols - usually done with heat, requires 800-900 deg C. Possible but hard and energy intensive. This is where Prometheus sits, they have a nanoscale membrane that does room-temperature separation of the alcohols using electricity input (more energy in!)
- Conversion of the alcohols into gasoline, diesel, kerosene etc. This is a pretty well-known process that uses a catalyst called ZSM-5 plus heat (mo' mo' energy!). I haven't looked into the chemistry or the availability of the catalyst.
This seems like a better startup idea than a project funding aggregator.
It solar powered and even self-replicating!
Can you elaborate on how this is a better startup idea than funding projects that are fighting climate change at scale? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Here's a tweet from a user with a satellite image update from the Tech-enabled rainforest protection project we're working with: https://twitter.com/crabbyafrica/status/1144332819969105920
I recognize that the direct dollar-to-CO2 carbon impact might be lower, but green investments might enable higher retail & institutional spend (since it's an investment instead of a donation) and therefore might have more impact on reducing CO2.
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.
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.
As with more tangible-seeming waste, it's always better to avoid and reduce before paying another party to deal with it. Yet CO2 is demonized because global warming is a collective externality. Because it's invisible doesn't make it intangible. Because the reductions can be counteracted by an entity that's in another location doesn't make a difference, either!
EDIT: cool project btw :)
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.
Jet-Set Offset was founded with the belief that we can make better choices and do good when we fly. Jet-Set Offset is a platform that allows eco-conscious travelers to do something about the environmental impact of their air travel by automatically donating one-cent per mile to their choice of non-profit environmental organization - every time they fly. Rather than operate as another carbon market, we've developed a donation-based alternative. Our model allows members to give based on the exact air mileage of their flight (not an estimated subscription model), and give to nonprofits in a meaningful way without taking a 20% cut.
We share similar aims to Wren but our approach is different. Here’s how: - We provide a donation-based alternative to the traditional "purchase and sale" carbon offset market. Some of our nonprofit partners operate certified carbon offset projects, but Jet-Set Offset is not just another carbon marketplace. - Jet-Set Offset operates as a business, but every donation made through the platform is 100% tax-deductible, as it’s made directly to the organization of the flyer’s choice. The organizations pay Jet-Set Offset a 3% fee of every donation made for use of the platform, in addition to credit card processing fees -- which means that the non-profit organizations are receiving 94% of each donation made. - The work of many of our nonprofit partners moves beyond the direct mitigation of carbon emissions by also focusing on climate adaptation, resilience, energy transformation, and policy change. - We’ve made choice a huge part of our model. Flyers can choose to give where they live and support a local organization with an environmental mission that resonates with them.
As public consciousness of this issue grows, we think that air travelers will seek viable options and alternatives to the traditional 1:1 carbon offset markets -- which can be challenging to navigate and bring up separate issues of resilience, additionality, permanence, and leakage (see Andy Newman’s recent article in the NYT, “If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It…”). While certifying organizations go to great lengths to verify carbon offset projects, verification has limits.
To all the readers, check us out! We’re interested in feedback to our approach and connection to more nonprofit partners doing amazing work that we can support. Is that an organization you’d want to give to when you fly? (Currently, any US-based 501c3 organization can request to become a Jet-Set Offset partner, provided that part of their mission is working to combat climate change and that they can provide measurable results of how donations made via the platform will be used.)
