[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.