Hacker News Reader

Comment by parhamn | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool! Kudos to the team there for doing this!!

Semi-shameless plug (it's for the environment!!): We're launching something similar next week here [1]. Instead pulling off revenue we're helping teams plant trees when they close an issue or merge a PR. I think the additional visibility to the team members as they work has a great feel-good vibe! We currently connect with Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab & JIRA. We also give badges to show on your repos.

Here is a video to see what it looks like [2]. If you'd like to join the beta please email at parham@cloudsynth.com!

[1] https://cloudsynth.com/social-impact/trees

[2] https://www.loom.com/share/2ad9a30d13aa4cd78ed98308b0d37283

View on HN

Hey parhamn, Cloudsynth looks awesome. If you'd like to connect with a community of climate action oriented people, feel free to post about your work over at https://collective.energy (I'm the founder).

For anyone else who cares about making a positive impact on the planet, come join us as well!

This is pretty awesome! How does pricing work for this?

We're providing this service for free. Your team sets your monthly donation limit and we just handle everything else. 100% goes to #TeamTrees.

This smptomatic of the green-washing trend. Planting trees by itself is not an action that is inherently good: it is if placed where useful for instance to fight desertification, it can be dommageable in other cases such as planting non native species, or planting moni-cture forest.

As usual with this kind of initiative, there is no info on the type of trees planted, where they are and why it does matter to the local environnement. There is no way to verify impact.

My comment might be harsh, but most of the releved criticized can be easily addressed with more information.

You're absolutely right, it can be easily addressed with more information. So perhaps it would have been worth it to get that information first and level a more applicable criticism before posting valueless FUD.

https://teamtrees.org/

Sure, it's a fair question :)

The idea came to me when I saw the popular youtube campaign TeamTrees [1], and wondered how we can achieve a similar throughput on a regular basis.

We're still looking for t he best partners forward the money to. We'd love to allocate to any provider we think is going to do the most for the climate. I'm happy to forward they money to Stripe as well if they have better strategies for this.

It seems fine to forward it to the team that Mark Robber and Mr. Beast put together (assuming they have done proper due diligence given Elon & Tobi have donated 1m respectively), until we find better strategies.

[1] https://teamtrees.org/

What do you think about this option from Project Wren? It looks like the money is going to an established organization (TIST) run with an eye towards everything you said.

https://projectwren.com/projects/community-tree-planting

I just found out about Project Wren recently, turns out they are a YC company.

I want to pull the trigger on signing up for it but I want to be really sure what I'm donating towards is actually effective.

If anyone wants some evidence supporting this comment's overall idea, here's an applicable podcast episode to provide some examples of when indiscriminately planting trees might have unintended consequences:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/for-the-love-of-peat/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com