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

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

#91

Post by chadl2 »

thisjustinm wrote: post #29

Part of me says this is great because we need every single action towards reducing carbon in the atmosphere - big and small - we can get if we want to even get close to where we need to avoid catastrophe. 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…

Very cool, hadn't seen this before. Signed up for a monthly COTAP offset donation. :)

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

#92

Post by johnsimer »

landon32 wrote: post #25
ryanmercer wrote: post #21

Here is part of what I told Paul Graham after he tweeted you last week: "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 techn…

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 foo…

@landon32, you handled your parent comment with absolute class.

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.

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

#93

Post by landon32 »

johnsimer wrote: post #84
landon32 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great question. To be completely transparent, we are considering a flat fee because of the reason you stated. 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 som…

what about letting your users get a % of all the money from collected from users they invite? 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 ri…

This is very clever, we might try that. Thanks for sharing!

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

#94

Post by StavrosK »

cotap wrote: post #86
StavrosK wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not very familiar with charities, can you clarify what your point is here? I'm not sure what Cool Effect is or what you're talking about.

They're a 501(c)3 private foundation, similar to a 501(c)3 public charity like COTAP. This makes offsetting contributions tax-deductible. The point is by making it tax-deductible, along with other things like helping folks offset monthly, they've already tried to make it as compelling and easy as possible to offset, but no dice relative to time/effort/$ put in. Similar to StandforTrees.org. I'm basically saying I don…

I see, thank you. What would you recommend I donate to, if I wanted to maximize my environmental impact per dollar?

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

#95

Post by johnsimer »

landon32 wrote: post #93
johnsimer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about letting your users get a % of all the money from collected from users they invite? 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 ri…

This is very clever, we might try that. Thanks for sharing!

would love to schedule a call with you to see if there is any pro-bono help I could do. I've thought about a couple creative solutions w.r.t to donation psychology, and have actually pitched ideas similar to Wren before at events. I do full stack web dev and have a couple of ideas for visualizations/UX that may help increase donation/referral behavior

http://calendly.com/johnsimerlink

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

#96

Post by gustaf »

cotap wrote: post #76
gustaf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good point. The goal of both Wren and COTAP is to have the most impact solving climate change. Having the most impact doesn't have to mean you charge the lowest fee - but it does mean removing the most amount of CO2. If charging a higher fee gives Wren a change to reach millions and get them to pay more where COTAP is still tiny and have one-time donations that is a strong argument for why a differen…

COTAP here... Thanks to thisjustinm for getting us into the conversation : ) 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…

I hope my answer didn't come off as ignorant to the COTAP story - I'm sorry if it did.

Thanks for sharing the backstory on Cool Effect. Their effort on marketing to me also reflect the type of marketing that don't work. After spending 5 years at the growth team of Airbnb I'm more convinced than ever that marketing have to have strong ROI that can be measured. If it does, it's an excellent way of growing something. And because of Google and Facebook's dominance, more and more this is becoming one of the very few ways to go really big. I know Wren isn't spending money on marketing yet but having a foundation where that is possible is a great chance to make a really big impact.

I totally agree that educating the rest of the country and policy etc are the top priorities but at the same time you have millions of individuals who want to take individual action but don't know exactly what to do. Both you and Wren seems like great options for them to be involved.

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

#97

Post by burke »

mancuso5 wrote: post #88
OmarIsmail wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#98

Post by landon32 »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #53
landon32 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nec…

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 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.

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

#100

Post by landon32 »

burke wrote: post #97
mancuso5 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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