[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

[johnsimer]

@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.

[ryanmercer]

> Project Drawdown has 99 more: https://www.drawdown.org/

You keep mentioning Project Drawdown in this thread.

Why should people pay you 20% instead of just donating to Project Drawdown.

Will you continue to take 20% when you reach those 'several million people' subscribing? I mean, at 5$ a month each that's 'several million' dollars a month for what, web hosting and 3 salaries?

I see on LinkedIn you're listed as a software company and keep mentioning engineers. What engineers do you need? What exactly are you doing other than acting as a middle-man for funds by hosting a simple calculator and merchant portal?

As my downvotes would suggest, I'm apparently coming across as quite harsh but I've yet to see anything remotely actionable other than "see the ideas so and so has" "engineers" "millions".

I'm not a venture capitalist, I have no use for projections and buzzwords. I'm not even a CS type so I don't immediately think "we need engineers!" for every problem that comes along in some subconscious way of justifying my career/creating job security.

"we prefer projects with strong social impact" what does this even mean. Global warming isn't something that's going to be solved by 'social impact'. China is building HUNDREDS of coal power plants right now and adding millions of new drivers to the road annually (in fact, China has more licensed drivers now than the United States does citizens). The methane produced by 1.3-1.5 billion cattle worldwide are responsible for roughly 2 gigatons CO2-equivalent.

Drawdown, as you keep linking, most of their proposed ideas/areas of interest are laughable

- Electric bikes (going to largely be powered by, fossil fuels)

- Electric cars (going to largely be powered by, fossil fuels, and will remain cost prohibitive for 95% of the world's population, if not more)

- Mass transit takes years or decades to roll out, when funding can even be secured and all zoning challenges can be met

- Alternative cement, this will be great if someone can make a breakthrough but there has been next to zero progress made on anything that is remotely feasible or even scalable

- Bioplastic, while this takes petrochemicals out of the equation it is still pretty energy demanding and is still not good for the environment, biodegradable does not inherently mean safe.

- Recycled paper, or how about doing away with paper. Instead of making recycled paper (which requires obscene amounts of toxic chemicals) why not get legislation passed to outlaw mass mailing, do you know how much mail I throw away each week that is advertisements and solicitations that I never even look at?

- Industrial recycling, aside from aluminium and CLEANED glass recycling is mostly a farce. Don't believe me, do your homework, planet money even had an episode on this recently. Plastic is largely just taken to landfills, even if sent to recycling, because unless it is cleaned it is considered contaminated and China will no longer buy it to recycle it because of a loss of cheap labor and the pollution recycling it causes.

- Autonomous vehicles, mutli-national companies are having trouble with this and even if they do pass it you likely have years of legal hurdles to get them legal and a decade or more to get people to even begin to accept and adopt them in numbers sufficient enough to make them more efficient than human driving as you'll have to remove the bulk of human drivers from the road.

- Building with wood is already happening, but it adds considerable cost and still has considerable height limits which still require more land to be turned from green spaces to tarmac and building. Not to mention this wood isn't always sustainably farmed.

- Direct air capture, this is almost certainly never going to happen barring multiple miraculous inventions. The closest person to doing this is Dr. Klaus Lackner and even his research has it not being viable, even if you capture in a method like his (a polymer that you then 'wash' it you still have to sequester it somehow).

- Hyperloop, pure fantasy. Never going to happen for travelling large distances. Travelling large distances is one of the problems anyway. Commercial aviation fuel usage has gone up 33% in 9 years.

- Refrigerant management, this will help with new appliances but the billion plus refrigeration/freezer units out there already...

- Industrial hemp, will just require more land to be planted as farmland won't be sacrificed it and cotton will be farmed until at least the current generation of farmers dies, farmers don't like change.

- Living buildings, they look great in concept art but aren't practical and won't have any meaningful impact. They'll likely take decades just to offset the CO2 emissions from manufacturing the concrete that went into the building's foundations.

- Ocean farming and marine permaculture, coastal waters absolutely need kelp and seaweed 'forests' re-established. There are some women in/around the Bay Area working on this - Tessa Emmer, Catherine O'Hare, and Avery Resor and what they are doing needs to be done up and down every last square mile of water with proper depth in the entire world.

Smart grids, if you mean in the United States good luck. This isn't something you are going to be able to have any influence on whatsoever. You'll have to get every single power company in the United States and Canada to voluntarily replace perfectly functioning, very expensive, equipment over a decade or more and even if you did they'll pass the cost on tot eh customer.

- Solid-state wave energy, at any scale this is likely to have any number of unforeseen consequences for marine life (probably sound-induced stress for starters) and be quite costly due to the corrosive nature of oceans.

[beachy]

There's a lot to be negative about wrt our climate crisis for sure.

However overwhelmingly negative messages I believe can contribute to inaction through people moving straight from the denial phase to the "what's the point, we're all doomed" phase.

Just to pick the first of your points to rebut:

> Electric bikes (going to largely be powered by, fossil fuels)

1) in my country the grid uses 70+ renewable energy (mainly hydro), so EVs are extremely promising.

2) progress made on EVs will pay off in the future, when/if the grid becomes greener. How crap would it be to make big success at one end of the equation, e.g widespread deployment of nuclear to green the grid, and then find that all the vehicles had no way to use that clean power?

Of course it makes sense to develop technologies like electric bike, EVs generally.

Yet your comment is written as if it makes no sense. It conveys a strong sense of doom and pointlessness.

If your intention is just to spread doom, then perhaps keep it to yourself.

If it's to shock people into action then there are better ways to communicate.

[ryanmercer]

>1) in my country the grid uses 70+ renewable energy (mainly hydro), so EVs are extremely promising.

Sadly that's not the case for most of the world. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal—combined accounted for about 77.6% of the U.S. primary energy production in 2017. Fossil fuel energy consumption in China was reported at 87.48% in 2014.

> progress made on EVs will pay off in the future, when/if the grid becomes greener.

Only if new battery technologies are created that can be manufactured quicker, in a greater capacity, than lithium batteries are now.

>There’s little risk of lithium supplies running low in any absolute sense; the next decade will probably see less than one percent of the world’s lithium reserves depleted. The real danger is that lithium won’t be recovered and made available quickly enough to meet the rising demand.

>There are two sources of lithium: brine and mineral deposits. Brine is recovered through a process known as brine mining in which dissolved lithium (and other useful elements) are extracted through a long, energy-intensive, and costly process. Recovering lithium from mines is more straightforward, but most of the world’s lithium is in brine pools in South America. About half of the 35,000 metric tons produced in 2016 came from brine operations in Chile and Argentina.

https://blog.energybrainpool.com/en/is-there-enough-lithium-...

From the same article we also have to factor in how rapidly lithium prices are increasing:

>Anxiety about lithium’s availability has caused its price to spike. In 2010, lithium sold for $5,180 per metric ton. By 2012, the cost was over $6,000 per metric ton, and by the end of 2017, a metric ton was going for about $14,000 – a 270 percent increase over 2010 levels.

So what happens when you start churning out EVs 10x faster than Tesla is, 100x faster?

And how much more fossil fuels will need to be burnt in power plants (it's worth noting that roughly 6% of power generated at a power plant is lost in transmission before it arrives, then more will be lost changing voltage at a charging location, then more as it feeds into the battery) instead of as gasoline as more and more cars come online? And all of the infrastructure that will have to be created to support them? 17% of Americans live in an apartment or a condo, they can't just pay to install a plug in their garage as in most cases they do not have a garage or even a dedicated parking spot and businesses, you're going to have to convince businesses to spend large sums of money to install charging infrastructure in their parking lots for tens or hundreds of parking spots, and likely to support that new lines will have to be run to the area, widespread adoption of electric vehicles in a country like the United States suddenly means tens of billions of dollars in just power lines and substations, wiring and charging stations.And adding a bunch of EVs will mean you'll need to add a bunch of grid storage or bring more fossil fuel plants online to meet the demand of all of the cars getting plugged in at 8-9am in each time zone as people arrive at work... renewable energy doesn't work well for spooling up to meet demand.

Plus with widespread EV adoption in a given country you have to basically retool every firehouse in that country to also be able to handle EV accidents, pierce a cell on an EV and you have a fire situation that can last DAYS as cells rupture one by one in a worst-case scenario (like when Richard Hammon crashed that Rimac Concept One supercar).

>Yet your comment is written as if it makes no sense. It conveys a strong sense of doom and pointlessness.

No my comment points out that the organization Wren keeps listing, has a bunch of whimsical fantasy ideas that are not remotely viable and I don't see why I should give Wren my hard-earned money to take 20% for themselves before they hand 80% over to organizations, or individuals, that are chasing fantasy technologies that won't be viable for decades, if ever.

[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.

[ryanmercer]

>But there's probably no business there.

Because God forbid we try and preserve the vast majority of life on earth instead of pursuing generating millions of dollars of profit every month.

The vast majority of human beings haven't put 1 minute of thought into global warming, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if there were billions of human beings walking around today that have never even heard of global warming or climate change, aside from noticing each year getting hotter and hotter and weather getting a little more extreme.

We don't need startups taking a 20% vig via a subscription service for a feel-good "I did my part by giving money" company. We need to present the facts, as unbiased as possible, to the masses and get people to start questioning the topic. We need people to start going "oh, wow, we did that?" we need them to start thinking "well how can I minimize my impact myself".

More than a third of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day [1]. Do you think that 2.5 billion people can afford to scrape together even $2 a month to offset the CO2 from their cooking?

The median annual household income worldwide is $9,733,[2], do you think that families can afford to pay $10-20 a head worldwide? Do you think that 1/3 of the world's population can realistically afford that? Do you think by the time that Wren backs out 20%, then the non-profits/NGOs/companies they turn around and give the money to backs out their operating costs, that that amount of money (probably 50% or less of the original contribution) will make even a 10% reduction in last year's CO2 emissions and that it will not only be able to keep pace with the increase, but also continue to increase to the point of getting us not just carbon neutral, but removing 10-2 gigatons more than we produce each year to try and restore us to levels of even the 1980s in any reasonable amount of time?

I don't. I think this company is just going to be away for those individuals with a little disposable income, that believe in climate change and feel guilty about driving their car and flying everywhere for vacations, to buy themselves a little 'feel good' or a little peace of mind. Most will probably think they're really making a difference and that all will be fine.

Even if Wren manages to generate 5 billion dollars a month, and ends passing 4.95 billion down the chain, it's unlikely to even result in sequestering 10% of last year's levels annually. Seriously, run the numbers yourself, everyone that's going to downvote this comment like you are my others, RUN THE NUMBERS please. You'll see that this isn't going to be the solution, nor is it likely to lead to one. It is the wrong approach to the problem as is.

This is Silicon Valley being clueless and/or overly optimistic as usual with these sorts of markets/challenges, just like YC wanting to turn half of the Sahara into shallow algal pools (which would result in the rainforest losing massive amounts of fertilization and cause a potentially catastrophic change in global weather patterns, not to mention require more electricity than the plant currently produces).

[1] 2012 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17312819

[2] 2013 https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...

[gwn7]

I... agree with you. Everything you say is making sense. Thank you for the insights.

It's just that I couldn't help but feel that these guys are among the "good guys", and telling them to "cease operations immediately" is a bit harsh, for just being not good enough. They are probably not doing any harm.

> I think this company is just going to be away for those individuals with a little disposable income, that believe in climate change and feel guilty about driving their car and flying everywhere for vacations, to buy themselves a little 'feel good' or a little peace of mind.

On the other hand, maybe this is harm. Those individuals who buy themselves a little "feel good" may believe that they are actually doing everything they can, and that they really are offsetting their carbon footprint so what they are doing will be sufficient. This can prevent them from realizing the real nature of the threat. This I don't like very much.

> This is Silicon Valley being clueless and/or overly optimistic as usual with these sorts of markets/challenges

Haha. Agreed.

> We need to present the facts, as unbiased as possible, to the masses and get people to start questioning the topic. We need people to start going "oh, wow, we did that?" we need them to start thinking "well how can I minimize my impact myself".

So how do you think we can do this? Masses won't listen to people like you who are talking too much about numbers and then doing this in a very pedantic way (as you did in your first comment). Even if you have the facts.

Or, maybe even arming masses with unbiased facts won't be enough. Maybe it's only people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk who can save us. What do you think?

[ryanmercer]

>So how do you think we can do this? Masses won't listen to people like you who are talking too much about numbers and then doing this in a very pedantic way (as you did in your first comment). Even if you have the facts.

The giving pledge has more than a trillion dollars pledged as of right now, certainly at least one of those individuals or couples has interest in climate change. With an incredibly small amount of that trillion dollars of pledges we could gather data and educate people.

- Ask a healthy sampling of random people if they know what global warming is, do they believe in it, have they seen signs of it, is it affecting their life (talk to farmers, ranchers, amusement park operators and owners of tourist destinations, wildfire firefighters, etc as well as random people).

Then find out what misconceptions there are, what fears there are, what falsehoods people believe.

- Talk to experts: climatologists, entomologists, financial market experts, marine and wildlife, biologists, agricultural sciences types. Find out what effects are being seen right now, ge the data from all the fields, get video interviews with them saying who they are - what they do - what they see happening - why it concerns them - if the changes continue what are the probable outcomes in the next 5/10/15 years. Start a campaign, edit this stuff and start putting it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram as short clips.

You do this to build awareness. You create plenty of resources that people can use to educate themselves and you drive interest by raising awareness. The only way we are EVER going to tackle climate change, other than just struggling to adapt to the changes, is by educating people and getting them personally interested.

Go ask 50 random people you know "So, what do you think about global warming", you're probably going to be surprised when several flat out think it's made up and others are along the lines of "I don't know, it might be true, but I can't do anything about it".

We're not going to make changes by paying to protect Amazon rainforest. We're going to make changes by convincing people they really don't need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine and they don't need the newest model just because it now has ultra hologrpahic flurm instead of super hologrpahic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing.

People can make small changes that add up to significant changes when you get widespread adoption.

People will illegally harvest lumber as long as there are trees, there are people literally stealing entire BEACHES [1][2], lumber (especially exotic hardwoods) sell for way more money than sand. But what if we can convince people to make some small changes:

- Do you like meat? Eat chicken instead of beef, it's an order of magnitude better per pound of meat as far as greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention land use

- 71F is a wonderful temperature for that AC but is 72F so bad?

- So, you want to fly a bunch of founders out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews for your tech accelerator batch? Seriously, can't you just use skype? Sure it's slightly annoying with the delay but it'll save a couple of tons of CO2 per person.

- You live alone, do you really need 4 lights on in the kitchen and your bedroom when you've been in the living room for the past 6 hours? And why is your tv and soundbar on, you've had headphones on listening to classical music while you stare at your laptop screen playing GorkaMorka 27 or trying to finish some code.

You have to educate the masses if you want to make change. Just because you, or me, or that guy over there recognize climate change at varying levels, does NOT mean that the majority of people do.

And you know what happens when you start to get the masses interested? You actually stand a chance out getting legislation passed that can begin to put pressure on companies. Lobbyists carry a lot of weight, but if you can sway enough voters to acknowledge climate change is an issue, then you stand a much better chance of putting pressure one existing politicians, or removing them during voting cycles and installing politicians that do care and start to create a legal framework to force change. Change in community planning, change in tax incentives, change in legal requirements, make it illegal for HOAs to tell homeowners they can't have PV panels 'because they hurt property values and ruin visual appeal'.

You know encouraging people to eat locally grown food, instead of eating exotic fruit like, bananas and coffee and oranges, year-round that get shipped from halfway around the world will have more impact than giving 20$ a month to 'protect the amazon'. Yes, we should protect rainforests because of the incredible biodiversity, but ehhhh a subscription service to wash the guilt from your conscience (not unlike the Medieval Indulgence system) just is not a realistic solution, at any meaningful level anyway.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/epis...

[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

[gwn7]

Thank you.

[shawndrost]

I understand your reservations about this being done by a for-profit.

I don't understand your opposition to the idea of individuals contributing to carbon offset projects. It seems like the reservations you've expressed (it's not a whole solution, it's not feasible for people earning less than $2 per day, it might have too much of a "feel good" effect, etc) are equally true of many ideas you'd probably like, including the ideas you put forward yourself.

I liked this part of your comment: "RUN THE NUMBERS please". I did. Illuminating! My back-of-napkin:

  Global CO2 emissions were 10b tons (10 Gigatonnes) in 2014 (https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions)

  $4.5B per month * 12mo = ~$50 billion per year

  Carbon offset costs vary wildly. That's the big Q. You will have to do your own research on this, but to me, $100 per ton seems conservative, and $10 seems very generous.

  If Wren collects $5B per month, and offsets cost $100 per ton, they would offset 5% of 2014-level annual emissions. (Probably less than our annual increase.) 

  If offsets cost $10 per ton, it's 50% -- more meaningful!

[ryanmercer]

> don't understand your opposition to the idea of individuals contributing to carbon offset projects.

My opposition is that for every 1$ you give Wren, they pocket 20 cents and then hand 80 cents off to another organization (of their choosing) with, as far as I can tell from their site, zero information on how your money is being applied, who exactly they are giving it to, if that organization is for or non-profit and how much they are spending on overhead before actually doing something with the money, etc. Right now there are vague mentions of stopping illegal logging, and that's it. Doesn't say what company, what organizations, what countries, how or who.

What they do document well, is their roadmap... how they want to spend your money internally, not directly to some sort of carbon sequestration efforts.

They want to:

- make it easy to unsubscribe from wren

- increase site performance internationally

- add sharing features

- add how to change your subscription to their FAQ

- handle declined card errors

Great, but what are you doing with the other 80% of the money someone gives you?