Reddit has been in the news for other reasons recently. Here’s what its ex-CEO is up to:
“Trees can play a key role in capturing carbon at scale—by one estimate, nearly a billion hectares of land could feasibly be reforested with a trillion trees, and those trees could potentially store more than 200 gigatons of carbon. But efforts at reforestation are moving too slowly. “Essentially, we need to scale the solution in about 10 years, so that there is time for the forest to mature and become a carbon sink of reasonable size to meet various nations’ commitments to be net zero around 2040 or 2050,” says Yishan Wong, CEO of the Hawaii-based startup, called Terraformation.”
“Wong, who previously served as CEO of Reddit, has a tech-world mindset to solving problems and scalability. Even goals that sound ambitious now—say, planting 10 billion trees by 2030—don’t go far enough, he says. “Ten billion trees is actually 1% of the problem, and 1% in 10 years is not going to get us there,” Wong says. “Most plans are like, we’re going to plant a billion trees by the end of the century. That isn’t even close. By examining the full scale of the problem, we can create this map and say, okay, if we wanted to plant, roughly speaking, forests worth a trillion trees . . . then [we’d] have to pass through several scaling milestones at an exponential rate over the next 10 years.”
First-wave Covid exponential kind of thing. Off the charts.
Here are some of the new tricks they’re using to push this forward:
“In Hawaii, the startup built the world’s largest fully off-grid, solar-powered desalination system. With a half-acre of solar panels, there’s enough power to desalinate around 34,000 gallons of water per day, taken from a well on the site. A drip irrigation system sends the water to the roughly 1,900 native trees and shrubs that have been planted in the area so far. As the forest grows, proving that the system works, the company is working to replicate the same idea around the world. It’s creating seed banks that fit inside shipping containers and can store the millions of native seeds that are necessary for large planting projects. It’s also building open-source software that groups can use to collect data and track progress after trees are planted.”
Using solar power to desalinate water in order to grow a forest is kinda cool. We should no doubt be asking what happens to the brine removed from the water before running around the room high-fiving, but it’s a start.
I like their way of going about this though:
“There’s actually no reason why any company that’s working on any sort of natural carbon capture solution should be doing anything proprietary,” Wong says. “I think people still have that reflex, but the addressable market is literally like 1,000 times bigger than any single organization can possibly address. . . . We actually want a million copycats. We want to give out our technology and our techniques as widely as possible. We’re showing that it works. And then we’ll tell everyone, this is what we do, and you can copy us. That’s really the only way we’re going to actually achieve an order of magnitude increase in the acreage that is reforested per year.”
Trees are good.
[Cover photo: Yishan Wong, from Terraformation]