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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.