Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 99 posts

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#51

Post by tedpower »

loganbyers wrote: post #50
tedpower wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, good questions! You know your stuff. Re: 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? > I think the high order bit here is that 99%+ of companies don't measure their emissions at all. This is for a good reason — measuring your emissions historically has been quite labor-i…

Thanks for the responses - I think I typically agree with your approach that there are substantial benefits to getting people to crawl or walk rather than making them run. On your belief that actionable data _trumps_ perfectly attributed data, I'm not entirely convinced. I think actionable data _complements_ attributable data. But you need the attributable data to accurately measure the impact and learn what specific…

Thanks, ya, fair points — as orgs level-up and get more sophisticated, you might start to use Bend as the first pass, identifying hot-spots, and then doing deeper dives on the specific 'SKUs' that are being purchased.

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#52

Post by phtrivier »

rob_c wrote: post #32

Can we stop with the nonsense footprint, token, credit system. Having a single data scientist unfortunately does not a fix make it just stalls the whole thing and leads to bad over engineered, overly technical solutions. Companies would be better investing in encouraging people to behave better on compus if they were serious, and I mean by actually investing to make using eco friendly things pleasent, not using brown…

> Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients).

Yes, and the goal of carbon accounting is basically to give actual data about which of these things offer the better trade off between the goal of reducing emissions and keeping the lights on in your business.

The exercise is only as useful as the actions it enables. Short of absolutes ("just close shop ! The greenest form of transportation is, after all, the hearse") or "one size fits all" solutions, there is some level of accounting that's needed.

The biggest risk, of course, is that the customer hides all information about its emission and just wants you to package a shiny report to fuel the marketing department's greenwashing op.

I'll soon be working for one of bend competitors, it seems, so I'll get to see how it goes...

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#53

Post by throwaway69123 »

thomasmost wrote: post #41
tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #39

Will you make a contractual promise that you will NEVER sell the financial data that you scoop up?

Absolutely. Even though we have a fintech background and we're tackling carbon accounting from the angle of spend, we know how sensitive revenue and budget data are. Our business is firmly in mapping the carbon graph; we'll never sell financial insights.

What about financial data?

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#54

Post by Snoozus »

thomasmost wrote: post #43
Snoozus wrote: post #38

So what's the carbon impact of paying employees? Is there a Co2 kg/$ ratio?

Good question! We don't currently consider payroll a carbon emitting activity. Generally we think of salary as paying exclusively for human-hours. In contrast, if your company paid for your metro card or reimbursed for mileage or gas on your commute, we would estimate the carbon intensity for those expenses.

So replacing a 100k employee by a 10k cloud service would increase a companys co2 balance? Seems counterintuitive, no?

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#55

Post by Xixi »

ramraj07 wrote: post #5

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. If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employe…

Fossil fuels are responsible for about 60% of greenhouse gases emissions (in CO2 equivalent), the remaining 40% being split between: deforestation, farming and various chemical processes (to make concrete, to reduce iron ore, to make fertilizer from natural gas, etc.). Your equation seems to solely focus on these 60%, so it's quite incomplete, given that we also need to get rid of the remaining 40%.

For example methane and nitrous oxide, two extremely potent greenhouse gases, are mostly by-product of agriculture/cattle rearing: methane from cows and rice fields, nitrous oxide from the usage of fertilizers (from memory, I might be wrong).

Another example: the chemical process behind concrete production (CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2) emits more CO2 (about 4% of global emissions) than the world airplane fleet (about 2% of global emissions). That's without accounting for the energy necessary to trigger the chemical process, usually coming from fossil fuel...

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#56

Post by WalterBright »

Bluntly, this is a completely fruitless, hopelessly inaccurate, and unnecessarily expensive way to measure and deal with CO2 emissions.

What's the easy, accurate, and fruitful way? Toting up the amount of fuel that comes out of refineries and coal mines multiplied by its carbon content.

Then, tax it, which will provide a disincentive for all uses that burn that fuel.

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#58

Post by danuker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #30
ramraj07 wrote: post #5

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. 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…

As a non-economist also, I am quite sure moving $1 of your yearly expenses away from CO2 heavy suppliers will encourage the market to find other solutions.

What you spend your money on matters, even more than voting.

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#59

Post by danuker »

ramraj07 wrote: post #5

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. If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that money: it saves some, pays off its employe…

The fact that YOUR suppliers are reducing CO2 emissions matters.

If enough people did that, every supplier would eventually reduce CO2.

Energy can be produced with very little CO2 emissions, like solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.

Re: Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

#60

Post by WalterBright »

Here's a challenge. Determine the carbon footprint of a pencil. Milton Friedman writes:

"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum."

https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/

It's a hopeless task. You're never going to get an accurate accounting of carbon footprints by looking at the end result. Not a chance.

Post reply on HN