[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) - Automatically measure you...
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Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) - Automatically measure your company's
carbon footprint
Hi HN! We're Ted and Thomas from Bend (https://bend.green/product).
We help companies measure their carbon emissions by connecting to
your corporate bank account (Brex, Mercury, or any other financial
institution on Plaid) and then estimating the impact of each
purchase. Thomas and I found our way to this project via our
background in fintech. Prior to Bend, I was a co-founder of Abacus
(YC W14), a spend management company. At Abacus, we noticed that
finance teams are increasingly paying attention to the climate
impact of their purchase decisions, from travel policies, to cloud
hosting, and beyond. We believe this 'spend based' approach is the
key to unlocking scalable carbon accounting. Today, most carbon
accounting is manual, conducted once a year, and takes weeks or
months to complete. It's like doing your taxes. Fortunately, in
the last couple years, we've started to reach a critical mass of
good merchant data. It used to be that only a handful of companies
tracked and disclosed their emissions. Today, 70%+ of Fortune 500
companies disclose their emissions in annual sustainability
reports, and 1/3 of the entire global economy is now covered by a
Science Based Target (and this coverage and quality is
accelerating). The spend-based approach is fully automated and
starts working the moment you connect your bank account. That's
the good news. The bad news is that this emissions data is trapped
in PDFs and blog posts, scattered across the internet. We aggregate
and normalize this data by hand today, and plan to automate the
process in the future. Here's how we measure the tCO2e (metric
tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) of your transactions: imagine
that you get a $1,000 bill from Atlassian and want to know the
carbon impact of that purchase. We know that for every $1,000 spent
with Atlassian, there's a 30.2 kg footprint -- we multiply your
bill total * (Atlassian's annual emissions / Atlassian's annual
revenue) and return the tCO2e of that transaction. Now imagine a
similar calculation for each of the thousands of purchases your
company makes every month / quarter / year. For merchants that
don't yet publish their emissions data, we fall back to category
averages (e.g. for a Starbucks, we use the specific Starbucks
carbon intensity factor, but for a mom-and-pop coffee shop that
doesn't disclose their greenhouse gas info, we use a generic
benchmark 'coffee shop' factor). To get a feel for the data we
track, click on some of the corporate logos on https://bend.green/
-- these aren't customers; they're examples of Bend's merchant
data. We have a climate scientist PhD on the team named Marion --
we'd be happy to answer questions about our methodology! Measuring
and reducing your company's emissions is of course good for the
planet, but it also prepares your company for upcoming regulations
and investor requirements. We help you create a 'climate profile'
that you can use to close sales as the sustainable alternative to
your competitors (you can share your info with prospects,
customers, employees, investors, etc. -- think of it like the
climate equivalent of becoming SOC 2 compliant). And we just rolled
out the ability to purchase carbon removal credits, powered by
Patch, to offset some or all of your remaining emissions
(optionally opt-in to automatic monthly purchasing). Our pricing
is $100 / month per company, and your company can try Bend for free
for 14 days: https://app.bend.green/sign-up Bonus points: if
you're building a fintech app, Bend data is also available via API
(email us for API keys and docs). And if you work at a large /
public company that already measures emissions, we encourage you to
claim your company profile on Bend (for free!), and ask your
vendors to track their emissions (after all, your vendors'
emissions become your emissions). We'd love to hear your feedback
and we're excited to answer any questions!
Author : tedpower
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-07-20 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| Will you make a contractual promise that you will NEVER sell the
| financial data that you scoop up?
| thomasmost wrote:
| Absolutely. Even though we have a fintech background and we're
| tackling carbon accounting from the angle of spend, we know how
| sensitive revenue and budget data are. Our business is firmly
| in mapping the carbon graph; we'll never sell financial
| insights.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I'm not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some
| point want to try and model) that one's carbon footprint is just
| a linear function of three variables: the amount of money spent,
| the fraction of all money that's in active circulation in the
| economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total economy.
|
| If you pay google 100 bucks, and See how google spends that
| money: it saves some, pays off its employees, it spends on infra
| and then finally on actual energy. Saved money is never accessed
| if parked. What it gives to other companies and people will spawn
| the same split we created when we paid google ad infinitum. Money
| spent on infra can have an outsized environmental impact
| (plastic, concrete) but I'm hoping we can ignore it, and the
| Final expenditure is pure energy.
|
| I feel like if you keep breaking down every Avenue parts of your
| 100 bucks goes into, it'll eventually go to creating energy more
| or less. Even if you choose google because they use green energy,
| the employees who are paid by google will use amazon powered
| Netflix so it might not matter any more than what's the fraction
| of green energy in the total economy.
|
| Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to
| pretty much just spend less money! But no one wants that do they?
| They just want to have their cake and also eat it so we are just
| doomed.
|
| Been outlining this for an article for a while, comments , prior
| research and criticism appreciated!
| https://www.ramrajv.com/blog/how-to-truly-reduce-your-carbon...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm not an economist by profession but I suspect (and at some
| point want to try and model) that one's carbon footprint is
| just a linear function of three variables: the amount of money
| spent, the fraction of all money that's in active circulation
| in the economy, and the fraction of clean energy in the total
| economy.
|
| On average, it is true _by definition_ (at least, if one holds
| that all activity in some way supports personal consumption)
| that carbon footprint from consumption is (global carbon
| output) x (personal consumption) / (global consumption).
|
| It sounds like your proposed hypotheses essentially rephrases
| this.
|
| > Thus the only solution to reduce your carbon footprint is to
| pretty much just spend less money!
|
| In the short-term, sure. What spending a premium on things that
| reduce carbon footprint in normal narrow analysis (but which
| force the reductions in the short term to be someone else's
| increases who _aren 't_ paying the premium) does isn't actually
| reducing the near term footprint of the whole economy, it
| increases the economic incentive for production models which
| reduce the footprint per unit output.
| [deleted]
| thomasmost wrote:
| I like the way you're thinkin'! That's a very "Bend-onomics"
| mindset, if I can be so presumptive.
|
| That calculation is not dissimilar from what we do on a
| merchant-level, and I think it's a good, macro-comparison! For
| your three variables, we just substitute 1) transaction amount,
| 2) vendor revenue, and 3) vendor emissions, if that makes
| sense.
|
| There are many reasons why it's important to do this at the
| merchant level, but one of the most exciting (from an economics
| perspective) is to amplify market pressure on high-emitters. In
| the future, you can imagine a green marketplace powered by
| Bend, where you can instantly comparison shop for providers
| with lower "carbon intensities" than those you're currently
| using.
| tedpower wrote:
| Ya totally! Another way to think about it -- in climate
| lingo, there are 3 types of emissions: First there are Scope
| 1 emissions, which are the emissions from burning fossil
| fuels directly (gas in your car, natural gas for your stove,
| etc.). Then there are Scope 2 emissions, which are from
| energy (you buy electricity from utilities, and those
| utilities use some percentage of non-renewable generation,
| like coal or natural gas). And finally Scope 3 is everything
| else -- all the goods and services you buy, upstream and
| downstream.
|
| But I think the point you guys are making, is that actually
| everything is Scope 1 emissions plus some number of hops. So
| if you buy gas, that's 0 hops. If you buy energy from your
| utility, and they use natural gas, that's 1 hop. If you buy
| an ice cream that was made in a factory powered by natural
| gas, that's 2 hops. And if you buy that ice cream with a
| cone, purchased by the ice cream shop, that was manufactured
| in a factory ... etc.
|
| The problem is, consumers are often the ones who apply the
| pressure to address climate (don't wait for the fossil fuel
| companies to take this on themselves). And so we need to
| trace back all those upstream emissions, all the way back to
| those Scope 1 emissions, to really size the impact, and align
| incentives to decarbonize.
|
| Historically, climate programs only focused on Scope 1 and
| Scope 2 emissions. But that only addresses maybe 20% of
| emissions for most companies. This is why it's critical to
| consider the impact of all the goods and services your
| company purchases.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| At least my suggestion is that the more effective way to
| reduce emissions (given we are not gonna go fully green for
| 80 years probably) is to just spend less. Park more of the
| money you make. Make Even more money and park it more.
|
| Economically that might be the worst but environmentally
| that might be the best. The pandemic lockdowns kinda proved
| that as well.
|
| Having said that your approach isn't mutually exclusive.
| Even this dimensional balance method still suggests if more
| of our economy goes green then it's better. So if your
| endeavor can shame more orgs to go green then great.
| tedpower wrote:
| Unfortunately 'spend less' is not by itself a viable
| strategy for most growing companies. Companies need to
| invest in their growth. But companies can instead shift
| their spend from higher 'carbon intensity' goods and
| services to lower carbon intensity goods and services.
| E.g. if you need to buy a vehicle, buy an electric
| vehicle. Or if you need to rent office space, rent well-
| insulated efficient office space. Or if you need cloud
| hosting, select the greenest cloud and the greenest
| region. Or if you need to meet with a prospective
| customer, maybe do it over Zoom vs. getting on a plane.
| We try to help you prioritize that list of lower-carbon
| options.
| bradhe wrote:
| Man, I grew up in a city called Bend and my family still lives
| there. Your company name is really tripping me out.
| thomasmost wrote:
| Bend, Oregon?
|
| I'm from Seattle, but I've actually wanted to visit Bend for a
| while. Seems like a nice river town
| bradhe wrote:
| Exactly. It's an amazing place. Definitely go visit it.
| [deleted]
| l1n wrote:
| If any of that spend is at a cloud provider, it's an opaque,
| highly variable blob. How do you plan to deal with that?
| tedpower wrote:
| Ya good point -- our approach is always spend-based, so the way
| we'd calculate cloud spend is your AWS / GCP bill * the AWS /
| Google carbon intensity (what we call a 'factor'). It is true
| that some data center regions use cleaner energy vs. others. We
| consider the spend-based approach, at a minimum, a good first
| pass. The greener the cloud you use, the lower the emissions.
| And then you can further optimize within your cloud provider.
|
| Another note -- most cloud emissions only factor in the energy
| footprint ('scope 2' in technical greenhouse gas inventory
| terms). We believe this significantly undercounts emissions,
| because it ignores the capital expenditure of building the
| facility, buying all the machines, etc. The great thing about
| the spend-based approach is all this overhead is factored in.
| (BTW, Google Cloud Platform just started to layer in some of
| this 'scope 3' operational overhead data, but I believe AWS
| still ignores it, significantly undercounting emissions).
| dyeje wrote:
| How'd you arrive at this pricing? This seems like too expensive
| (and frankly irrelevant) for small companies and absurdly cheap
| for a large enterprise.
| tedpower wrote:
| We picked a price that opens up the addressable market beyond
| late stage and public companies.
|
| As startups, you have an unfair advantage -- it's much easier
| to build good carbon habits early, vs. retooling your business
| after having already invested large amounts of capital in
| carbon-intensive practices and depreciating assets.
|
| We do offer enterprise pricing for API access for larger
| customers.
| thomasmost wrote:
| Yes, $100/month is our Startup pricing. Enterprise customers
| have very different needs and multiple bank connections to
| manage, so we approach those case-by-case.
| parkerjamie1993 wrote:
| This is awesome! Great stuff guys
| thomasmost wrote:
| Thank you! There's not a ton of activity yet but if you wanna
| hang out with us and chat all things climate-tech, here's the
| link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U
| enviclash wrote:
| Climate economist here: great and brave idea. Just to mention,
| emissions data from blogs can only be too sloppy. What data is
| the most difficult to find in particular? Happy to think and
| help.
| tedpower wrote:
| Hi! Ya we only use full GHGP inventory data. Honestly, the
| hardest data to gather is clean transaction data! The Brex API
| returns relatively clean data. Other banks and financial
| institutions, via Plaid, often have pretty messy merchant and
| category info. If I had a magic wand, it's actually the spend
| data I'd focus on -- super clean, itemized transaction data
| would be amazing.
| Snoozus wrote:
| So what's the carbon impact of paying employees? Is there a Co2
| kg/$ ratio?
| tedpower wrote:
| We treat payroll as zero emissions. The responsibility boundary
| of a company doesn't include the personal consumption decisions
| of employees. The spend-based approach makes this pretty
| straightforward -- if the company is buying, those are company
| emissions. If an individual is buying, those are individual
| emissions.
| loganbyers wrote:
| Not trying to put you in a 'gotcha' situation, but GHGP Scope
| 3 Category 7 (Employee Commuting) is entirely related to
| employee actions outside the bounds of the company. Commutes
| and also home-office energy choices (heating, cooling, use of
| renewable energy credits, ...) are typically chosen (and paid
| for) by individuals outside of work but are components of an
| organization's value chain.
| [deleted]
| tedpower wrote:
| ya, that's right, good point. For complete GHGP inventory
| reporting, customers need to estimate employee commuting
| separately (and we're happy to help with that; it's usually
| a pretty straightforward calculation, though gathering the
| employee info takes some doing).
|
| Setting the GHGP aside, my own personal opinion about how
| we interpret GHGP data is that it's important to make a
| clear distinction between upstream emissions and downstream
| emissions. For example, 'use of sold products' (Category
| 11) is also not something you can determine from spend
| data. But I'd argue that 'use of sold products' is a very
| different thing than upstream emissions (even though
| they're all lumped under Scope 3).
|
| Commuting is a less clear-cut case, but I think of
| commuting (that is paid for by employees) as more of a
| downstream emissions category.
|
| We wrote up some notes on this here:
| https://bend.green/faq/downstream-emissions
| thomasmost wrote:
| Good question! We don't currently consider payroll a carbon
| emitting activity. Generally we think of salary as paying
| exclusively for human-hours.
|
| In contrast, if your company paid for your metro card or
| reimbursed for mileage or gas on your commute, we _would_
| estimate the carbon intensity for those expenses.
| loganbyers wrote:
| Hey, this is an interesting and emerging market, what will maybe
| be called 'carbon analytics' or 'GHG analytics'. There are
| definitely lots of opportunities in this space.
|
| Without letting perfect be the enemy of good here... I have some
| questions.
|
| It seems nice to have a backstop for what GHGP calls "Corporate-
| level data" which is the lowest level and least specific for
| purchased goods and services in GHGP's Scope 3 calculation
| guidance.
|
| Do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work
| to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when
| you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?
|
| As a second angle on this, do you have any accuracy or
| uncertainty estimates for the CO2e values a user receives? Let's
| say my company goes to a supermarket one month and buys $1000
| worth of beef, and the next month buys $1000 worth of lentils
| from the same store. The GHG impacts of these purchases are (in
| reality) entirely different, but your API would tell me the
| emissions are the same. I know this line-item accounting is a
| massive challenge, but it seems there is an equal risk of green-
| washing as brown-washing here. This might be acceptable at the
| aggregate level but potentially harmful and very inaccurate at
| the individual level. Is there sufficient information returned
| from the API for your users to communicate data quality in a way
| aligned with the GHGP reporting standard?
|
| Second line of questioning - GHGP guidance says companies must
| re-account historic emissions when data becomes available that
| significantly change estimated emissions. Would your API be
| compatible with this requirement? The Docs are locked off and the
| example on the homepage doesn't show any time component
| (presumably Uber's data would be different for 2022 than 2020).
|
| Some disclosure: I work at the World Resources Institute with
| many colleagues who co-authored the GHGP guidance, though I have
| very low association with that project. I am acting on my own
| here.
| tedpower wrote:
| Hey, good questions! You know your stuff.
|
| Re: do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the
| work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3
| emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality
| estimates?
|
| > I think the high order bit here is that 99%+ of companies
| don't measure their emissions at all. This is for a good reason
| -- measuring your emissions historically has been quite labor-
| intensive. Even for large companies, there is always a 'long
| tail' of 'Scope 3 goods and services' transactions that are
| hard to measure. Our goal is to create a scalable solution so
| that a much larger share of companies are able to participate.
|
| Re: your grocery store example --
|
| > This is a fair point. Our main belief is that realtime,
| actionable data trumps perfectly attributed data, if perfectly
| attributed data requires a bottoms-up manual model. The
| advantage of the spend-based approach is that (1) it's
| realtime, and (2) it aligns incentives at the company level.
| The holy grail, however, would be itemized spend data (level 3
| data), where you could factor in the emissions of your specific
| line-items. Unfortunately, that data is nearly impossible to
| get (yet). Maybe that's Bend 2.0 :)
|
| Re: re-accounting historical emissions --
|
| > Yes! We use the emissions 'factor' that most closely matches
| the transaction date. So for example, if you bought a Starbucks
| coffee in 2020, we would use the 2020 Starbucks factor, and if
| you bought a Starbucks in 2021, we would use the 2021 Starbucks
| factor. If Starbucks is late to publish their 2022 report, we
| would recalculate the emissions when the info is updated. For
| our category fallbacks, we also take currency / region into
| consideration.
|
| Happy to chat more, either with you or the WRI folks! Thanks
| for the questions.
| loganbyers wrote:
| Thanks for the responses - I think I typically agree with
| your approach that there are substantial benefits to getting
| people to crawl or walk rather than making them run.
|
| On your belief that actionable data _trumps_ perfectly
| attributed data, I'm not entirely convinced. I think
| actionable data _complements_ attributable data. But you need
| the attributable data to accurately measure the impact and
| learn what specific actions caused that impact.
|
| I think all companies want to make actions that are well-
| informed, 'the right choice', and have the potential to
| demonstrate it was 'the right choice'. My concern is that
| when someone takes a 'good action' such as replacing high
| intensity animal protein with low intensity plant protein
| there is no evidence from your side that it made any
| difference. You are divorcing the actual choice that was made
| from what is perceived as the outcome.
|
| The dollars-to-emissions relationship is just not as simple
| as is being represented, and for those who are not
| specialists there might be a false sense of progress.
|
| "We cut our daily emissions from transport by having
| employees purchase Uber rides in off-peak times."
|
| "We cut our emissions for business travel by setting up a
| policy that flights must be purchased at least 2 months in
| advance."
|
| "We cut our emissions from our regular food purchases by
| looking at the local newspaper for coupons and signing up for
| a customer loyalty account."
|
| "Maybe we all should fly to Las Vegas (tickets are cheap)
| rather than have Linda fly to NYC (an expensive ticket)."
|
| Each of these might be smart business choices, but they have
| absolutely no real world effect on emissions that should be
| attributable to a company, but that isn't what the company is
| being told.
|
| As a first pass to estimate sense of scale and where to look
| into unsustainable practices and prioritize better data
| collection, Bend seems to be valuable.
| tedpower wrote:
| Thanks, ya, fair points -- as orgs level-up and get more
| sophisticated, you might start to use Bend as the first
| pass, identifying hot-spots, and then doing deeper dives on
| the specific 'SKUs' that are being purchased.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| What's the carbon footprint of $100 bend subscription?
|
| It would be neat if carbon footprint could be translated to some
| more humanized unit. Like trees or global warming degrees or idk.
|
| Also, it seems like some products at companies would be more
| carbon friendly. Would be nice if you could categorize the
| spending within a bank line item. Naive example... I bought a $10
| reusable cup from my local coffee shop so that every time I shop
| there I am not using a styrofoam cup so let me tweak how that
| impacts my carbon footprint. That way I can still get coffee and
| feel good about doing so in a conscientious way. I'm sure there
| are similar big company examples, too -\\_(tsu)_/-
| thomasmost wrote:
| We are offsetting all our emissions via the Bend Offsets Plan,
| so the carbon footprint of your $100 Bend subscription is
| credibly net-zero :)
|
| And yes, line-item and other "level 3" data is very exciting to
| us techies--unfortunately it's also really difficult to access!
| One of the reasons we like the Bend model is that it
| simplifies/abstracts away from that by looking at your total
| contribution to a company's bottom-line as the source of truth
| for emissions, which prevents a kind of "line item
| greenwashing."
|
| But yes, in the future it would be nifty to sync in level 3
| data from receipts or something to factor that into our
| calculations!
| [deleted]
| elil17 wrote:
| Anyone can translate carbon footprint into trees or whatever.
| The important part is having a metric so you can make sure it's
| going down, not up.
| tedpower wrote:
| +1!
| [deleted]
| totetsu wrote:
| Are there any emerging standards or agreement on exactly how to
| measure carbon footprint?
| tedpower wrote:
| Ya, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol -- https://ghgprotocol.org/ --
| is the universally accepted way for companies to measure their
| emissions. It's been around for about a decade.
|
| That being said, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol reporting has been
| pretty inconsistent in the past. Companies cherry-pick and
| leave out important info, or define their 'reporting boundary'
| in inconsistent ways. One of our goals is to help 'debug' these
| inconsistencies.
|
| Lucas Joppa from Microsoft laid this out quite well here:
| https://www.ted.com/talks/lucas_joppa_how_to_fix_the_bugs_in...
| totetsu wrote:
| Thanks I'm joining a start up in this space soon too. Good
| luck.
| thomasmost wrote:
| Exciting! Would love to hear more about it and chat all
| things climate-tech in our Discord server if you're
| interested: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U
|
| Good luck to you too!
| rob_c wrote:
| Can we stop with the nonsense footprint, token, credit system.
| Having a single data scientist unfortunately does not a fix make
| it just stalls the whole thing and leads to bad over engineered,
| overly technical solutions.
|
| Companies would be better investing in encouraging people to
| behave better on compus if they were serious, and I mean by
| actually investing to make using eco friendly things pleasent,
| not using brown paper to give printouts to clients or having some
| guy who shouts about the wrong paper going in the wrong bin all
| the time.
|
| Companies should buy things that people want that produce less
| waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down),
| consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.)
| and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled
| paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to
| clients). And when companies start doing this rather than
| individuals it has a knock on effect on the market and
| affordability.
|
| And finally, I'm sorry, I fail to understand why anyone needs to
| pay to be told this.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Companies should buy things that people want that produce
| less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down),
| consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space
| etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good
| recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given
| to clients).
|
| Yes, and the goal of carbon accounting is basically to give
| actual data about which of these things offer the better trade
| off between the goal of reducing emissions and keeping the
| lights on in your business.
|
| The exercise is only as useful as the actions it enables. Short
| of absolutes ("just close shop ! The greenest form of
| transportation is, after all, the hearse") or "one size fits
| all" solutions, there is some level of accounting that's
| needed.
|
| The biggest risk, of course, is that the customer hides all
| information about its emission and just wants you to package a
| shiny report to fuel the marketing department's greenwashing
| op.
|
| I'll soon be working for one of bend competitors, it seems, so
| I'll get to see how it goes...
| thomasmost wrote:
| To be fair, I think a solution like Bend would help companies
| make the kinds of decisions your advocating for. "You can't
| improve what you don't measure," so Bend offers a measurement
| tool that enables procurement managers to make smart buying
| decisions. Companies pay lots of money for other internal
| reporting tools; why should sustainability be any different?
| jdpigeon wrote:
| I'm quite worried about the viability of CO2 offset markets in
| the absence of legislative action from the US. Since the Supreme
| Court and Joe Manchin seem to have doomed our chances for
| stricter CO2 emissions regulation, what's going to incentive
| companies to purchase more offsets? Is there hope from Europe?
| China?
| thomasmost wrote:
| From a regulatory perspective, yes, there's a lot of pressure
| being generated in European markets. In the US, another thing
| we're starting to see is pressure from procurement managers at
| large companies like Salesforce. Since Salesforce is committed
| to a net-zero footprint, anyone selling software to Salesforce
| needs to at least report their emissions (we can help with
| that!)--and as more companies adopt similar policies, hopefully
| we'll see more market incentive to report, reduce, and offset
| benbristow wrote:
| For all this talk about climate change & global warming, green-
| washing companies sure do seem to be making a lot of dollar.
| tedpower wrote:
| Ya I hear you, our goal is to combat greenwashing in a few
| ways. We cover total emissions (vs. cherry-picking categories
| of emissions). We incentivize companies to take action today
| (vs. vague 2040 or 2050 goals). And to the degree that carbon
| credits are part of your strategy, we push for very high cost-
| per-tCO2e removal credits ($100 / tCO2e) vs. low quality $5-$10
| cost-per-tCO2e avoidance credits.
| thomasmost wrote:
| Yes, green-washing is definitely a problem. There is an
| incredibly wide variance of quality among carbon offsets, from
| dubious avoidance offsets priced at $2 per ton of
| CO2-equivalent emissions (tCo2e) to actually sucking carbon out
| of the atmosphere and sequestering it below the earth for
| $600-1000 per tCo2e.
|
| At Bend, we are trying to really apply pressure on the market
| to be real about going "net-zero." Our offsets package is
| priced at $100 per ton, which is still surprisingly affordable
| for a lot of small companies. We blend that package across
| reforestation projects (low-cost) and true carbon removal
| project (high-cost) to offset a company's emissions, in order
| to funnel investment towards those more expensive operations.
| This is important so that companies like Charm Industrial and
| Climeworks can increase their efficiency and bring the price-
| point of carbon removal down.
|
| And while $100/tCo2e might sound expensive, our thesis is that
| it's still remarkably affordable, especially for small
| companies who factor it in early on. This program is also opt-
| in, so you can start out with Bend just to measure your
| emissions and then decide about offsetting later... but for us,
| for example, our "Carbon Bill" hovers between just $25 to a
| $100 per month. Barely doubles the cost of the base
| subscription!
| [deleted]
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