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

[landon32]

Hi HN,

We're Mimi, Ben, and Landon, founders of Wren (https://projectwren.com). 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.

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't know much about the science or emerging technologies for mitigating climate change, but we saw carbon offsets and asked ourselves "why isn't everyone doing this?" Then we got to work on Wren.

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're long lasting and reliable. We also only work with projects that wouldn'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.

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.

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.

I've seen a lot of posts on HN recently about climate change and potential solutions so I'm looking forward to a good discussion :)

[thisjustinm]

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 via their non-profit filings to ensure they are actually allocating funds how they say they are.

[0] https://cotap.org

edit: grammar

[robertk]

Humans are not rational agents. Scaling through a technology model that measures “customer acquisition” and uses its for profit structure to identify more effective messaging and adoption patterns for carbon offsetting commitments may be more impactful on aggregate, even if per your remarks it is objectively worse than the nfp alternative.

On the subset of humanity that is already pro-active on this, advertising COTAP is the way to go but the strategies are complementary.

[bstanfield15]

Hi Justin! Ben here, co-founder of Wren. COTAP is a great organization, and the non-profit filings are a good, fundamental way to verify that they exist and are doing what they say. In response to why Wren, our philosophy is that most individuals—perhaps most of you on HN excluded—don't spend the time to figure how to contribute to stopping climate change, let alone carbon reduction projects, and certainly don't spend additional time following up on the additionality and usage of their donations. On top of that, there is a great opportunity to stitch this community together and create a place where ideas can be shared around climate reduction, projects can be supported in tandem, and ideas can be brought forward for how to reduce your carbon footprint. We're only a few weeks old and a lot of this is ambition, but our goal is to expand upon an individual's initial excitement around doing something about climate change.

[baby_wipe]

I don't care about how companies allocate their funds. Results matter more.

[chadl2]

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

[OmarIsmail]

I'm bias because I prefer YC companies, but I just signed up and started donating to offset me and my family's carbon impact. When I ran through the calculator and saw how much damage we were doing (the "if everyone lived like you the planet would have X months" was VERY effective) that really pushed me over the edge. Now that I've donated I feel great. I just have to pay a little bit more (relative to my income/standard of living) and I can live guilt free?? Sign me up!

And I note that this sounds pretty shilly, but seriously, if you don'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.

[landon32]

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 necessary.

That said, we need to pursue all solutions aggressively right now and we obviously think carbon offsets are a key part of the portfolio that will save humanity from climate change :)

[tomjen3]

Selling the guilt and then the absolutism after? Isn't that a tad too much Catholic stick?

[balletbalance]

> We take a 20% fee on each subscription.

Why did you choose to charge with a percentage model instead of a flat fee? If I'm a "hero" 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?

[landon32]

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 someone's footprint) it makes more sense to scale it. A $4 transaction cost on a $2 impact to the project is crazy.

The tricky thing about our cost structure is that currently we do not have enough revenue to cover our overhead expenses, so even if we're ignoring the per transaction cost we need to find a way to cover our overhead (e.g. a place for us to live so we can hack on this all day)

[JaakkoP]

Awesome to see new players in this space! I've been subscribing to https://compensate.com/ which seems somewhat similar to you guys.

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.

[bstanfield15]

Good local focus on Finland w/ Compensate! Like the team behind that product a lot. Thanks for sharing

[tom_mellior]

> preventing deforestation in the Amazon

Could you say a bit more about how this works in practice? I'm asking because of vague memories that much of the logging in the Amazon is done illegally anyway. So presumably just saying "we buy up land and then it's ours and nobody will log it because it's forbidden" would not be effective.

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?

[landon32]

No you're spot on, historically this has been a huge problem. You can make it illegal to log an area, but people will log anyway.

What's different about the project we listed is that it uses satellite monitoring and drones to very quickly catch illegal logging. So instead of loggers taking out 100s of acres over a few weeks, they can be caught on day one and authorities can be sent to the area. This makes it very difficult to log at a large scale. They also send several patrols each month to walk through the area and inspect on the ground to make sure the forest is as expected.

[asauce]

Congrats on the launch guys! I am always excited to see green startups coming out of YC.

I'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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403570

[smaddox]

> 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.

Non-profits can do all of those things, too... Why not do them as a non-profit?

[jnbiche]

> Non-profits can do all of those things, too... Why not do them as a non-profit?

We've already got nonprofits doing this stuff. Given the gravity of the situation, shouldn't we encourage a range of different approaches?

[landon32]

Ah, sorry "hire talented engineers, invest in marketing, and raise capital." was actually more in reference to the 20% fee.

Although we think impact investors and potentially even VCs can help fund this which is why we haven't become a nonprofit. We are looking at Benefit Corporation as the best legal structure for this, but it will take some time for us to transfer over.

[godelski]

I'd love to see a further breakdown in options.

Like as someone who mostly bikes but does use a car a during the summer months there's a clear scale. I'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'm getting a more accurate answer to nuanced questions (ones that I think a lot of people concern themselves with).

I was also suspicious when I put in vegetarian, car, and 2 flights a year < 3hrs resulted in having 11% lower than most Americans and then switching to electric car gave me another 10%. IIRC that's making some big assumptions (not considering electricity costs, lifetime emissions, state electric emissions).

I also find the "if everyone" part misleading (though I get why it'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?

Also, if you're going to allow fake emails why don't you let people calculate first? Or maybe email required for a more nuanced position, if you're trying to harvest them (since that probably gives you a better set of people that you're looking for).

[jatsign]

Why do I have to give you my email address before you'll let me figure out my carbon footprint, and how much this will cost?

[landon32]

We use the email to save your progress, but if you'd like you can just use any fake email

[gringoDan]

Do you have any plans to expand to B2B? I'd imagine it might be a larger impact, along with the positive psychological effect of it not being an individual's money on the line.

[landon32]

Great idea! We're actually piloting that right now. I think it would be promising especially since companies ask employees to travel and have otherwise larger footprints from work.

[ryanmercer]

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 technology, is to pay people to actively plant new trees and/or protect existing forest.

Per your website for those that haven't looked

>Wren takes 20% of each subscription and puts it toward growing the company.

Also like I told Paul, and Sam Altman,

"Planting trees isn't even a bandaid, it'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's land, of new forest assuming a healthy density of 40-60 trees per acre."

That figure above is actually really conservative. Add to that the fact we're losing forest at an estimated 28,125 square miles annually... do you realize how many customers you'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'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'm not talking twigs, I'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).

Seriously, do the math yourselves and then try and justify your business model. Not to me, but to each other.

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're selling people a fantasy, you're selling them nothing more than an uniformed "I'm helping save the world" feeling because they joined a subscription service while you take 20% off the top to hire more employees.

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.

[landon32]

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 footprint is a reasonable goal for the short term. This is nontrivial—it will be as impactful as the U.S. agreeing to go on track for the paris climate accord again. This would not happen if we did not take a fee.

Planting trees is one of many solutions we're focused on. Project Drawdown has 99 more: https://www.drawdown.org/ and if we were able to enact all of them we'd be carbon neutral as a planet.

We will certainly be doing more math and developing a better strategy. However we think that by launching Wren we have already learned more than months spent strategizing could have taught us—this is at its core a consumer behavior problem so we have to spend our time understanding people.

Keep us posted on more ideas and feedback for maximizing our impact

[gwn7]

> "Start encouraging people to to put down their digital devices and live simpler. That will make a hell of a lot larger impact than telling people to pay 20$ a month to plant trees".

Makes complete sense. But there's probably no business there. Everybody wants to be connected and not miss out these days, especially young people. Most people won't even consider "putting down their digital devices", but they would happily pay money to offset their carbon footprint.

It can't ever be as effective as putting down the devices in the first place, and completely offsetting their carbon footprint may be impossible, but it's still something which is probably better than nothing. And also something that these people can actually make happen.

They don't need to save the world. But I feel the effort is something that needs to be applauded and supported here. These kinds of things may not succeed, but they can lead to better versions in time.

No need to support blindly of course, but the criticism could be more constructive in my opinion.

[supercall]

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 / electing public officials that understand the climate crisis?

[landon32]

2 big reasons: 1) There are a lot of solutions to climate change that we could enact today if they had funding. Project Drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org/) may be of interest—it lists all the solutions to climate change we can enact today. It's quite surprising—we don't need CRT, we just need action today. With electing officials, we think that would be the best solution but it's relatively high risk—if we fail to do it, climate change gets worse. (that said electing officials is still super important, more on why we didn't choose that route in (2))

2) We thought this is something we'd be good at relative to our other options.

It would be really cool to work on CRT or clean energy breakthroughs, but we have no science background and it would be years before we ramped up to start making an impact on those technologies.

For policy, we think we can be good active members of our communities and vote etc, but we could not see ourselves spending all of our time lobbying or campaigning or otherwise pulling levers in the political space.

But what we do love doing is building products. We are content doing this all day, and hope that will allow us to make more and more useful products to reverse climate change.

[zackproser]

Great idea. I've signed up and I think your execution is pretty slick.

I'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.

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.

Still not sure how to best ensure ongoing engagement for the long haul.

All the best to you guys though - really want to see your project succeed.

[tom_mellior]

Some notes on the calculator:

- 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's footprint will be modeled by transport considerations and heating costs, but apparently not all, otherwise you wouldn't ask.

- District heating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating) is a big thing where I live, and it's impossible to quantify for individuals what their footprint is when they have that instead of gas.

- My final result came back as 10% less than my country's average (yay) but I see no way to figure out why. Probably because I don'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's (and the worldwide) average.

Nice job and certainly not trivial to set up!

Edit: Oh, and I'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 awesome if I had a link that I could mail to friends and family saying "look, here is my impact, and this is how unexpectedly cheap it is to fix it".

[mtranzambetti]

Mimi from Wren here:

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.

[MuffinFlavored]

I'm more interested in setting up consumer/hobbyist level carbon capture processes (if thermodynamically possible).

Rough outline from Rod Fitzsimmons:

- capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using a variety of techniques, usually adsorbtion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage). This takes quite a bit of energy.

- Conversion of the dissolved CO2 into alcohols. Reaction is 2CO2 + 9H2O + 12e- → C2H5OH + 12OH- so it'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'd probably need to go to the literature.

- 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!)

- 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' mo' energy!). I haven't looked into the chemistry or the availability of the catalyst.

This seems like a better startup idea than a project funding aggregator.

[nostromo]

- plant a tree

It solar powered and even self-replicating!

[mtranzambetti]

Super cool ideas here. It'd definitely be fun to offer consumer level carbon capture tech, but the main reason we're starting with established project partners is that they have verifiably offset carbon.

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.

[danielecook]

Not sure how you will provide updates but I think satellite imagery over time would be really neat for reforested areas.

[greenbonds]

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. https://copower.me/en/) vs investing in public companies that fund sustainable development (e.g. https://www.hannonarmstrong.com/) vs investing in green energy companies directly (e.g. vivint solar or first solar).

I recognize that the direct dollar-to-CO2 carbon impact might be lower, but green investments might enable higher retail & institutional spend (since it's an investment instead of a donation) and therefore might have more impact on reducing CO2.

[landon32]

This sort of investment is very cool! I hope to see it becoming more common.

We're focusing on direct offsets because we think long term we'll need a great market for carbon offsets and reduction. We already have too much CO2 in the atmosphere, so everything we can do to literally pull it out is necessary. Clean energy is great but I think we'll need something like carbon offsets/reduction in addition to it.

[hairytrog]

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?

[angerbot]

Super neat! One note that I found odd: km/L is a weird way to talk about fuel efficiency for metric. Everywhere that I've seen typically uses L/100km rather than just doing a MPG equivalent conversion.

[mtranzambetti]

Oh great to know. We recently added in support for metric conversion and weren't familiar with the standard for mpg to metric. We'll change that!