Launch HN: Wren (YC S19) – Offset Your Carbon Footprint

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.

> 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.

Not to rain on the parade here, just a cautionary tale that is intended to be helpful...

I would say take a look at Cool Effect which launched in early 2016. Charity at a glance, but it's also a bottomless-pocketed family from Marin. It cuts itself checks from the Overlook Intl Foundation, run by the same people. Both orgs have same CEO. All fine...

But look at the 990s... They have thrown the kitchen sink at this and have probably dumped $10+ million by now. $800K+ in PR and marketing before they even launched.

Yet they've only sold well under 1 million tonnes over 3 years. In other words, back of the envelope they've lost $9 per tonne, even when being a charitable donation.

Also, divide their 838,715 cumulative tonnes noted on their home page by their 533,115 cumulative members. 1.57 tonnes/member over 3 years, or a half tonne per member per year. Not anywhere close to the average US footprint.

Half the country doesn't believe in climate change, or it's not a priority, or is living paycheck to paycheck, or all of the above. Offsetting is not anywhere on the horizon of their hierarchy of needs. Offsetting is complex, misunderstood, and controversial (see our op-ed's n TheHill.com for a taste).

When you finally get beyond those nesting subsets, there's enough market size to go around in theory but it's extremely competitive.

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!

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.