This is awesome! Great stuff guys
Thank you! There's not a ton of activity yet but if you wanna hang out with us and chat all things climate-tech, here's the link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U
Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the way you're thinkin'! That's a very "Bend-onomics" mindset, if I can be so presumptive. That calculation is not dissimilar from what we do on a merchant-level, and I think it's a good, macro-comparison! For your three variables, we just substitute 1) transaction amount, 2) vendor revenue, and 3) vendor emissions, if that makes sense. There are many reasons why it's important to do this at the merchant level…
Ya totally! Another way to think about it — in climate lingo, there are 3 types of emissions: First there are Scope 1 emissions, which are the emissions from burning fossil fuels directly (gas in your car, natural gas for your stove, etc.). Then there are Scope 2 emissions, which are from energy (you buy electricity from utilities, and those utilities use some percentage of non-renewable generation, like coal or natu…
At least my suggestion is that the more effective way to reduce emissions (given we are not gonna go fully green for 80 years probably) is to just spend less. Park more of the money you make. Make Even more money and park it more.
Economically that might be the worst but environmentally that might be the best. The pandemic lockdowns kinda proved that as well.
Having said that your approach isn’t mutually exclusive. Even this dimensional balance method still suggests if more of our economy goes green then it’s better. So if your endeavor can shame more orgs to go green then great.
Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#23What’s the carbon footprint of $100 bend subscription? It would be neat if carbon footprint could be translated to some more humanized unit. Like trees or global warming degrees or idk. Also, it seems like some products at companies would be more carbon friendly. Would be nice if you could categorize the spending within a bank line item. Naive example… I bought a $10 reusable cup from my local coffee shop so that eve…
We are offsetting all our emissions via the Bend Offsets Plan, so the carbon footprint of your $100 Bend subscription is credibly net-zero :) And yes, line-item and other "level 3" data is very exciting to us techies—unfortunately it's also really difficult to access! One of the reasons we like the Bend model is that it simplifies/abstracts away from that by looking at your total contribution to a company's bottom-li…
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Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#24What’s the carbon footprint of $100 bend subscription? It would be neat if carbon footprint could be translated to some more humanized unit. Like trees or global warming degrees or idk. Also, it seems like some products at companies would be more carbon friendly. Would be nice if you could categorize the spending within a bank line item. Naive example… I bought a $10 reusable cup from my local coffee shop so that eve…
Anyone can translate carbon footprint into trees or whatever. The important part is having a metric so you can make sure it's going down, not up.
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Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#25I'm quite worried about the viability of CO2 offset markets in the absence of legislative action from the US. Since the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin seem to have doomed our chances for stricter CO2 emissions regulation, what's going to incentive companies to purchase more offsets? Is there hope from Europe? China?
Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#26I'm quite worried about the viability of CO2 offset markets in the absence of legislative action from the US. Since the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin seem to have doomed our chances for stricter CO2 emissions regulation, what's going to incentive companies to purchase more offsets? Is there hope from Europe? China?
From a regulatory perspective, yes, there's a lot of pressure being generated in European markets. In the US, another thing we're starting to see is pressure from procurement managers at large companies like Salesforce. Since Salesforce is committed to a net-zero footprint, anyone selling software to Salesforce needs to at least report their emissions (we can help with that!)—and as more companies adopt similar policies, hopefully we'll see more market incentive to report, reduce, and offset
Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya totally! Another way to think about it — in climate lingo, there are 3 types of emissions: First there are Scope 1 emissions, which are the emissions from burning fossil fuels directly (gas in your car, natural gas for your stove, etc.). Then there are Scope 2 emissions, which are from energy (you buy electricity from utilities, and those utilities use some percentage of non-renewable generation, like coal or natu…
At least my suggestion is that the more effective way to reduce emissions (given we are not gonna go fully green for 80 years probably) is to just spend less. Park more of the money you make. Make Even more money and park it more. Economically that might be the worst but environmentally that might be the best. The pandemic lockdowns kinda proved that as well. Having said that your approach isn’t mutually exclusive. E…
Unfortunately 'spend less' is not by itself a viable strategy for most growing companies. Companies need to invest in their growth. But companies can instead shift their spend from higher 'carbon intensity' goods and services to lower carbon intensity goods and services. E.g. if you need to buy a vehicle, buy an electric vehicle. Or if you need to rent office space, rent well-insulated efficient office space. Or if you need cloud hosting, select the greenest cloud and the greenest region. Or if you need to meet with a prospective customer, maybe do it over Zoom vs. getting on a plane. We try to help you prioritize that list of lower-carbon options.
Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#28Hey, this is an interesting and emerging market, what will maybe be called 'carbon analytics' or 'GHG analytics'. There are definitely lots of opportunities in this space.
Without letting perfect be the enemy of good here... I have some questions.
It seems nice to have a backstop for what GHGP calls "Corporate-level data" which is the lowest level and least specific for purchased goods and services in GHGP's Scope 3 calculation guidance.
Do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?
As a second angle on this, do you have any accuracy or uncertainty estimates for the CO2e values a user receives? Let's say my company goes to a supermarket one month and buys $1000 worth of beef, and the next month buys $1000 worth of lentils from the same store. The GHG impacts of these purchases are (in reality) entirely different, but your API would tell me the emissions are the same. I know this line-item accounting is a massive challenge, but it seems there is an equal risk of green-washing as brown-washing here. This might be acceptable at the aggregate level but potentially harmful and very inaccurate at the individual level. Is there sufficient information returned from the API for your users to communicate data quality in a way aligned with the GHGP reporting standard?
Second line of questioning - GHGP guidance says companies must re-account historic emissions when data becomes available that significantly change estimated emissions. Would your API be compatible with this requirement? The Docs are locked off and the example on the homepage doesn't show any time component (presumably Uber's data would be different for 2022 than 2020).
Some disclosure: I work at the World Resources Institute with many colleagues who co-authored the GHGP guidance, though I have very low association with that project. I am acting on my own here.
Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#29I’m not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some point want to try and model) that one’s carbon footprint is just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent, the fraction of all money that’s in active circulation in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy. If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employe…
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Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint
#30I’m not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some point want to try and model) that one’s carbon footprint is just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent, the fraction of all money that’s in active circulation in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy. If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employe…
> I’m not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some point want to try and model) that one’s carbon footprint is just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent, the fraction of all money that’s in active circulation in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy.
On average, it is true by definition (at least, if one holds that all activity in some way supports personal consumption) that carbon footprint from consumption is (global carbon output) × (personal consumption) / (global consumption).
It sounds like your proposed hypotheses essentially rephrases this.
> Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to pretty much just spend less money!
In the short-term, sure. What spending a premium on things that reduce carbon footprint in normal narrow analysis (but which force the reductions in the short term to be someone else's increases who aren't paying the premium) does isn't actually reducing the near term footprint of the whole economy, it increases the economic incentive for production models which reduce the footprint per unit output.