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

114 pointsby landon32almost 6 years ago
Hi HN,<p>We&#x27;re Mimi, Ben, and Landon, founders of Wren (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectwren.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectwren.com</a>). Wren lets you offset your carbon footprint by funding projects that prevent or sequester greenhouse gas emissions. It works by calculating your carbon footprint and then funding a project of your choice through a monthly subscription. Some of the projects we have right now involve planting forests in East Africa, providing more efficient cookstoves to Ugandan refugees, and preventing deforestation in the Amazon.<p>We met in college, and worked together on numerous side projects and class projects. After a while we decided to try finding a meaningful project that we could work on after graduation. At the time, we didn&#x27;t know much about the science or emerging technologies for mitigating climate change, but we saw carbon offsets and asked ourselves &quot;why isn&#x27;t everyone doing this?&quot; Then we got to work on Wren.<p>Carbon offsets have been around for a while, and with some googling, research, and phone calls anyone can find reliable and transparent projects. Our goal is to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible to offset your footprint. We only work with projects that have good evidence suggesting they&#x27;re long lasting and reliable. We also only work with projects that wouldn&#x27;t happen without support from Wren users. In addition to climate benefits, we prefer projects with strong social impact. Projects listed on Wren reduce lung cancer risk for refugees, provide millions of dollars of economic benefit to subsistence farmers, and protect biodiversity.<p>We see climate change as the most important problem we can work on. Despite growing evidence of the damage it will cause, governments are not taking necessary action. Wren is a way for an individual to have impact today.<p>Most in this space are nonprofits but we are a business. We take a 20% fee on each subscription. This allows us to hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital. This way we can build tools that make our projects more transparent and reliable—daily satellite images of forest projects, data visualizations of tree trunk diameters, and other ways we can build more trust for these projects.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a lot of posts on HN recently about climate change and potential solutions so I&#x27;m looking forward to a good discussion :)

29 comments

thisjustinmalmost 6 years ago
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.<p>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 via their non-profit filings to ensure they are actually allocating funds how they say they are.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cotap.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cotap.org</a><p>edit: grammar
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OmarIsmailalmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;m bias because I prefer YC companies, but I just signed up and started donating to offset me and my family&#x27;s carbon impact. When I ran through the calculator and saw how much damage we were doing (the &quot;if everyone lived like you the planet would have X months&quot; was VERY effective) that really pushed me over the edge. Now that I&#x27;ve donated I feel great. I just have to pay a little bit more (relative to my income&#x2F;standard of living) and I can live guilt free?? Sign me up!<p>And I note that this sounds pretty shilly, but seriously, if you don&#x27;t donate to wren go donate to some other reputable climate change mitigating org. Just donate to something, even for the selfish feeling of smugness and guilt-removal it brings.
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balletbalancealmost 6 years ago
&gt; We take a 20% fee on each subscription.<p>Why did you choose to charge with a percentage model instead of a flat fee? If I&#x27;m a &quot;hero&quot; and offset double my footprint why should I be charged double for doing that? Is the cost to you as a business relative to the dollar amount I donate?
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JaakkoPalmost 6 years ago
Awesome to see new players in this space! I&#x27;ve been subscribing to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;compensate.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;compensate.com&#x2F;</a> which seems somewhat similar to you guys.<p>Going the business route instead of non-profit sounds like something worth trying out. Ultimately this is about making the biggest impact on slowing down the climate change - not about who takes the smallest fees and has the lightest overhead.
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tom_mellioralmost 6 years ago
&gt; preventing deforestation in the Amazon<p>Could you say a bit more about how this works in practice? I&#x27;m asking because of vague memories that much of the logging in the Amazon is done illegally anyway. So presumably just saying &quot;we buy up land and then it&#x27;s ours and nobody will log it because it&#x27;s forbidden&quot; would not be effective.<p>Am I misremembering things and this is not really a problem? Or do you have some effective way to ensure that land not meant to be logged is really left alone?
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asaucealmost 6 years ago
Congrats on the launch guys! I am always excited to see green startups coming out of YC.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if you guys are looking for other projects to support, but one interesting project is Project Vesta[0]. Seems like there is some potential for a successful partnership.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20403570" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20403570</a>
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smaddoxalmost 6 years ago
&gt; Most in this space are nonprofits but we are a business. We take a 20% fee on each subscription. This allows us to hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital.<p>Non-profits can do all of those things, too... Why not do them as a non-profit?
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godelskialmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;d love to see a further breakdown in options.<p>Like as someone who mostly bikes but does use a car a during the summer months there&#x27;s a clear scale. I&#x27;m also a meat eater but have very little red meat. This would half the food emissions of an average American. Some sort of scale would make me feel like I&#x27;m getting a more accurate answer to nuanced questions (ones that I think a lot of people concern themselves with).<p>I was also suspicious when I put in vegetarian, car, and 2 flights a year &lt; 3hrs resulted in having 11% lower than most Americans and then switching to electric car gave me another 10%. IIRC that&#x27;s making some big assumptions (not considering electricity costs, lifetime emissions, state electric emissions).<p>I also find the &quot;if everyone&quot; part misleading (though I get why it&#x27;s there, to show privilege), but I think it is also effective to promote competition within a country. I can be the best American but have a hard time beating someone from the third world. Maybe have both?<p>Also, if you&#x27;re going to allow fake emails why don&#x27;t you let people calculate first? Or maybe email required for a more nuanced position, if you&#x27;re trying to harvest them (since that probably gives you a better set of people that you&#x27;re looking for).
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jatsignalmost 6 years ago
Why do I have to give you my email address before you&#x27;ll let me figure out my carbon footprint, and how much this will cost?
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gringoDanalmost 6 years ago
Do you have any plans to expand to B2B? I&#x27;d imagine it might be a larger impact, along with the positive psychological effect of it not being an individual&#x27;s money on the line.
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ryanmerceralmost 6 years ago
Here is part of what I told Paul Graham after he tweeted you last week:<p>&quot;How about instead of directing people to pay a middle man to take 20% off the top to pay others to plant trees&quot; which, correct me if I&#x27;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 technology, is to pay people to actively plant new trees and&#x2F;or protect existing forest.<p>Per your website for those that haven&#x27;t looked<p>&gt;Wren takes 20% of each subscription and puts it toward growing the company.<p>Also like I told Paul, and Sam Altman,<p>&quot;Planting trees isn&#x27;t even a bandaid, it&#x27;s like cutting your arm off and then gently blowing in the gaping wound. To offset our current CO2 production you need to add more than 31 million square miles, nearly 16% of the earth&#x27;s land, of new forest assuming a healthy density of 40-60 trees per acre.&quot;<p>That figure above is actually really conservative. Add to that the fact we&#x27;re losing forest at an estimated 28,125 square miles annually... do you realize how many customers you&#x27;ll have to get to even combat 28,125 square miles annually? The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre, that means you&#x27;re going to need to plant a billion plus trees a year to even hope to combat current forest loss, a BILLION trees... and I&#x27;m not talking twigs, I&#x27;m talking 10ft+ trees, in healthy soil, with healthy fungal networks (the fungi that work in symbiosis with trees aid considerably in the carbon sequestration and overall tree health).<p>Seriously, do the math yourselves and then try and justify your business model. Not to me, but to each other.<p>I think you need to cease operations immediately, I think you need to do a lot more math, and then I think you need to come back with a strategy to help people personally minimize their carbon impact. You&#x27;re selling people a fantasy, you&#x27;re selling them nothing more than an uniformed &quot;I&#x27;m helping save the world&quot; feeling because they joined a subscription service while you take 20% off the top to hire more employees.<p>I honestly have no idea whatsoever why YC selected your company and chose to fund it, other than the 20% off the top of every subscription and perhaps banking on the fact that people will feel guilty about climate change and happily fork over money on a subscription model.
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supercallalmost 6 years ago
Why did you decide to pursue this strategy to help fight the climate crisis? As opposed to other strategies such as carbon removal technologies or supporting &#x2F; electing public officials that understand the climate crisis?
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zackproseralmost 6 years ago
Great idea. I&#x27;ve signed up and I think your execution is pretty slick.<p>I&#x27;m still noodling on a somewhat similar project with treespree.io but had some of the same concerns raised in your thread that I still need to think through.<p>I think one of the core value adds of these approaches is that they convert people who are inactive out of fear or uncertainty into people who are at least starting to do something and possibly discuss the issues with people they are close to.<p>Still not sure how to best ensure ongoing engagement for the long haul.<p>All the best to you guys though - really want to see your project succeed.
tom_mellioralmost 6 years ago
Some notes on the calculator:<p>- Asking only for the size of my home but nothing else seems bogus. Surely apartments in a densely populated city have different footprints than single-family homes in suburbia or the countryside? Part of my housing&#x27;s footprint will be modeled by transport considerations and heating costs, but apparently not all, otherwise you wouldn&#x27;t ask.<p>- District heating (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;District_heating" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;District_heating</a>) is a big thing where I live, and it&#x27;s impossible to quantify for individuals what their footprint is when they have that instead of gas.<p>- My final result came back as 10% less than my country&#x27;s average (yay) but I see no way to figure out why. Probably because I don&#x27;t drive, but it would be cool to see a more detailed breakdown of all the data I entered, how they factor into the calculation, and how they relate to my country&#x27;s (and the worldwide) average.<p>Nice job and certainly not trivial to set up!<p>Edit: Oh, and I&#x27;d like a less clumsy way to see in the footprint overview (the link mailed to me) how much it would cost to offset my footprint, and what projects are available. I had to re-enter all the data! It would be <i>awesome</i> if I had a link that I could mail to friends and family saying &quot;look, here is my impact, and this is how unexpectedly cheap it is to fix it&quot;.
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MuffinFlavoredalmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;m more interested in setting up consumer&#x2F;hobbyist level carbon capture processes (if thermodynamically possible).<p>Rough outline from Rod Fitzsimmons:<p>- capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using a variety of techniques, usually adsorbtion (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carbon_capture_and_storage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carbon_capture_and_storage</a>). This takes quite a bit of energy.<p>- Conversion of the dissolved CO2 into alcohols. Reaction is 2CO2 + 9H2O + 12e- → C2H5OH + 12OH- so it&#x27;s energy-uphill and needs an energy input. Maybe solar cells or a wind turbine. Requires a catalyst, often a variety of copper matrix. Catalysts are the major subject of research. To figure out whether you could do this in your garage you&#x27;d probably need to go to the literature.<p>- Distillation of the alcohols - usually done with heat, requires 800-900 deg C. Possible but hard and energy intensive. This is where Prometheus sits, they have a nanoscale membrane that does room-temperature separation of the alcohols using electricity input (more energy in!)<p>- Conversion of the alcohols into gasoline, diesel, kerosene etc. This is a pretty well-known process that uses a catalyst called ZSM-5 plus heat (mo&#x27; mo&#x27; energy!). I haven&#x27;t looked into the chemistry or the availability of the catalyst.<p>This seems like a better startup idea than a project funding aggregator.
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danielecookalmost 6 years ago
Not sure how you will provide updates but I think satellite imagery over time would be really neat for reforested areas.
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greenbondsalmost 6 years ago
Congrats on the launch! Curious about your thoughts on the carbon impact of carbon offsets vs investing in green bonds that fund energy efficiency projects (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copower.me&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copower.me&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>) vs investing in public companies that fund sustainable development (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hannonarmstrong.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hannonarmstrong.com&#x2F;</a>) vs investing in green energy companies directly (e.g. vivint solar or first solar).<p>I recognize that the direct dollar-to-CO2 carbon impact might be lower, but green investments might enable higher retail &amp; institutional spend (since it&#x27;s an investment instead of a donation) and therefore might have more impact on reducing CO2.
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hairytrogalmost 6 years ago
This is pretty unfair. People who put money into these projects should be able to make money from them as well. Why should climate-conscious people have to donate money to offset the carbon footprint while investors get to earn?
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angerbotalmost 6 years ago
Super neat! One note that I found odd: km&#x2F;L is a weird way to talk about fuel efficiency for metric. Everywhere that I&#x27;ve seen typically uses L&#x2F;100km rather than just doing a MPG equivalent conversion.
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robin_realaalmost 6 years ago
How do you work to avoid monoculture ecosystems when planting forests as carbon capture? Also, how do you ensure that the wood isn’t subsequently harvested and burnt, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere again.
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mlguy456almost 6 years ago
I don&#x27;t believe in &quot;offsetting personal footprint&quot;. This idea appeals to personal guilt, while aims at filling the pockets of the founders. The solution should be going after companies who make products that break by design after certain time of use, thus forcing the customers to buy new items. If done right, this will be painful for both companies (many will have to close the shop) and for the people who are used to cheap shiny stuff, but the result will be a cleaner planet and healthier business model.
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plondon514almost 6 years ago
Did you consider the ability for one to offset their carbon footprint on their own? I know there is probably less money involved, but it would be cool if I could determine my footprint and then be given tasks to try to offset it on my own.<p>EDIT: cool project btw :)
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whoisjuanalmost 6 years ago
Does this compete with Pachama? I don&#x27;t understand this space well so I&#x27;m not entirely sure, but if I remember well Pachama is also trying to sell, carbon offsets by quantifying forest projects.
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hariisalmost 6 years ago
Have you consulted any experts in this area to see if offsetting carbon footprint is an effective way? Perhaps that will provide more credibility to potential customers.
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teabee89almost 6 years ago
Can you share the methodology on how you calculate a carbon footprint&#x2F;offset?
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maerF0x0almost 6 years ago
see also: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbonzero.ca&#x2F;offset&#x2F;?offset_tonnes=6.2342388173333" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbonzero.ca&#x2F;offset&#x2F;?offset_tonnes=6.23423881733...</a>
beohalmost 6 years ago
Please add more payment methods, credit cards are kinda rare where I live.
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winslettalmost 6 years ago
Shameless plug: check out Cloverly.com for an API for Carbon Offsets.
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erica_eliotalmost 6 years ago
Hi! Jet-Set Offset here (www.jetsetoffset.com). This is an interesting approach for offsetting. We’re a startup with a similar focus on air travel -- which is one of the largest contributors of carbon emissions in the US and around the world, with emissions rates that have been increasing 4% each year as more and more of us are flying. We’ve found that lack of awareness around this issue is almost as great as the difficulty of navigating the traditional carbon marketplace to “offset” your flight emissions. While flying less is the best thing each of us can do as individuals, it&#x27;s not always possible or realistic.<p>Jet-Set Offset was founded with the belief that we can make better choices and do good when we fly. Jet-Set Offset is a platform that allows eco-conscious travelers to do something about the environmental impact of their air travel by automatically donating one-cent per mile to their choice of non-profit environmental organization - every time they fly. Rather than operate as another carbon market, we&#x27;ve developed a donation-based alternative. Our model allows members to give based on the exact air mileage of their flight (not an estimated subscription model), and give to nonprofits in a meaningful way without taking a 20% cut.<p>We share similar aims to Wren but our approach is different. Here’s how: - We provide a donation-based alternative to the traditional &quot;purchase and sale&quot; carbon offset market. Some of our nonprofit partners operate certified carbon offset projects, but Jet-Set Offset is not just another carbon marketplace. - Jet-Set Offset operates as a business, but every donation made through the platform is 100% tax-deductible, as it’s made directly to the organization of the flyer’s choice. The organizations pay Jet-Set Offset a 3% fee of every donation made for use of the platform, in addition to credit card processing fees -- which means that the non-profit organizations are receiving 94% of each donation made. - The work of many of our nonprofit partners moves beyond the direct mitigation of carbon emissions by also focusing on climate adaptation, resilience, energy transformation, and policy change. - We’ve made choice a huge part of our model. Flyers can choose to give where they live and support a local organization with an environmental mission that resonates with them.<p>As public consciousness of this issue grows, we think that air travelers will seek viable options and alternatives to the traditional 1:1 carbon offset markets -- which can be challenging to navigate and bring up separate issues of resilience, additionality, permanence, and leakage (see Andy Newman’s recent article in the NYT, “If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It…”). While certifying organizations go to great lengths to verify carbon offset projects, verification has limits.<p>To all the readers, check us out! We’re interested in feedback to our approach and connection to more nonprofit partners doing amazing work that we can support. Is that an organization you’d want to give to when you fly? (Currently, any US-based 501c3 organization can request to become a Jet-Set Offset partner, provided that part of their mission is working to combat climate change and that they can provide measurable results of how donations made via the platform will be used.)