Panicking about climate change? Consider subscribing to a carbon removal or offset service.
What with the heatwaves, the fires, and the billionaires on their private jets, I've been seeing more climate doomism on here than usual. I get it. Everything feels terrible. And it can be so frustrating to see stuff about personal carbon impact when you're already washing your laundry on cold cycles, biking to work, eating less meat, etc., and meanwhile the US Senate is killing energy initiatives.
But if you have climate anxiety, I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to a carbon-negative project. My carbon subscriptions help me sleep at night. They have been my antidote to feeling helpless.
Some quick math. In the US, there are 74.5 million Netflix subscribers. And in 2020, the US had CO2 emission averages of 14.2 tonnes annually per capita.
So, if every US American with a Netflix subscription took out a subscription that offset their emissions, that'd be 1.06 billion tonnes annually: over 3% of total global emissions (34b tonnes). And that's just if a subsection of the US population did this.
Obviously this is an oversimplification. Carbon offsets are admittedly more expensive than Netflix. Also, offsetting usually works by funding projects elsewhere to reduce global emissions, so it's overall less efficient than, I don't know, the US getting its shit together and funding public transit, which would cut emissions at the source.
But the point remains: collectivism does exist, and we CAN do something about the emissions that we're unavoidably responsible for.
Enter these services, all of which do carbon offsets that are effective, additional, verifiable, and permanent.
WREN. I subscribe to Wren. You pick a dollar amount per month, and they funnel it toward carbon offset projects worldwide. They offer a carbon calculator, personal suggestions for how to reduce your footprint, and are generally awesome. An example of their projects: in the last six months, they enabled 12 Indigenous communities in the Amazon to reduce local deforestation by a staggering 84%, preserving 180,000 acres.
CLIMEWORKS. Climeworks is more expensive per kg removed, but I subscribe to this one too and LOVE this project. It's direct capture, meaning their factories suck CO2 out of the air and sequester it in rock. I want this to scale SO, SO badly. Climeworks doesn't just prevent or reduce emissions—it's carbon NEGATIVE, which is massive. And it's fully permanent: once the Climeworks facilities sequester the carbon in rock, it's there forever (unlike, say, tree-planting, which relies on the lifespan and health of the tree). Climeworks, like Wren, is a no-minimum subscription. You could do a dollar a month.
ECOLOGI. Pretty similar to Wren, but with high emphasis on tree-planting! Ecologi is big on reforestation, and other recent projects include access to clean cookstoves and providing renewable fuel to farmers. They do tree-planting gifts that would be an awesome option around holiday time.
NORI. A carbon-removal marketplace that connects its users to farmers, who submit plans for carbon removal and storage! This one has more of a businessy bent to it, but you can outright buy a tonne of CO2 storage in a transactional way.
To finish off with some good news: the US has joined China and Europe in hitting the 5% tipping point for electric car adoption, the costs of renewable energy have cratered, and China is set to hit its emissions peak earlier than anticipated (huge for the world's largest emitter).
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