hey everyone!
i’ve been thinking a lot about the saga of carbon offsetting, and what comes next.
carbon offsets were pitched as promises to remove some amount of carbon from the atmosphere (or prevent some amount of emissions). you would buy them to offset your carbon footprint and the money would be used to fulfill the promised impact. sadly, many of these promises failed to deliver.
that wouldn’t be the end of the world, except that these offsets were used as cover by large corporations to avoid reducing their own emissions. by buying offsets, these companies reaped all the reputational rewards of “carbon neutrality,” without actually achieving carbon neutrality, since the offsets were faulty.
the climate community, realizing their unwitting role in this greenwashing, has since moved away from the idea of “offsets”. now you don’t buy “offsets”. you purchase “carbon removal”. (sometimes they call it “durable” carbon removal, so as to reassure you they are serious this time! -- but also, there is an increased emphasis on physically removing carbon from the air and burying it in the ground where it will stay for a long long time.)
under this new framework, instead of “offsetting”, businesses are told to pay an “internal carbon fee” (basically a tax on their emissions). this change in semantics represents a more explicit acknowledgement of risk -- your carbon fee is not guaranteed to offset your emissions -- and correspondingly comes with new guidance more focused on decarbonization than “neutrality” on the balance sheet.
whatever you make of these business shenanigans, these changes haven’t fully reached the consumer realm, where the largest consumer app still sells itself as a footprint neutralizer. (what else would it be? ain’t no one gonna be bragging about their internal carbon fees.)
indeed, wren has been an interesting experiment. carbon offsets have never been much of a consumer product -- the vast majority of purchases are from governments and businesses -- but wren bundled purchases into a nice UI and subscription and accrued 30,000ish subscribers. whether that would have been possible without spending millions of VC-dollars on ads… well, no comment.
as a consumer product, carbon offsetting (or removal) is a difficult sell. people don’t want to pay other people to do cool shit; they want to do the cool shit themselves.
another problem is that there’s not that many offset options for consumers. you can either buy offsets from the formerly-disgraced “accredited” offsetting marketplaces, or else you can purchase carbon removal from one of a few different VC-backed companies. needless to say, these are not the most romantic options…
all that said, we should be clear about where the problem lies. at a basic level, carbon offsetting is just a way to fund cool projects like tree planting and direct air capture machines. these projects themselves are not the problem -- that work still has to be done. the problem was the framing: “offsetting”.
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so, what’s next?
don’t let the political and cultural trends get you down. there are some new ideas on the horizon that give me hope. i think we’ll see three trends:
first, i think we’ll see more indie projects. ai has made phd-level knowledge on almost any subject matter readily available to anyone. this makes small indie projects way more viable. and though ai is still terrible at any kind of novel or creative thinking -- that’s what we have human beings for.
second, i think we’ll see a broader spectrum of “climate” projects with less emphasis on carbon removal. what survives this era won’t be a retread of past themes (re: carbon galore). instead, we’ll see renewed interest in areas like nature restoration, overlooked causes like animal welfare, and causes tied to our current historical moment -- like data centers, AI, and the rise of fascism.
third, i think we’ll see more democratic funding models. instead of passive subscriptions where you give your money to someone and hope for the best, we’ll see more active systems where people play an important role through voting or other kinds of participatory systems. mainly because they are just way more fun.
or at any rate, those are the ideas that i am excited about… what about you?
