spyhi

In my case, I was sitting on the beach here in Hawaiʻi, and it was HOT. I mean, it's Hawaiʻi, it's supposed to be hot. But it was really really HOT. I talked to the locals who'd been around a while, and they said, "No, this isn't normal. It's never been this hot before

One time a while back a coworker that was new to Hawaii asked me what my opinion was about how real climate change was, and what I told him is that he didn't need to trust me, he could just look around and see it:

The architecture in Hawaii was designed to take advantage of the naturally cool breezes and it was always enough. Now you have reports of students being so hot they're unable to concentrate on schoolwork, and you see buildings everywhere getting retrofitted with air conditioning. Every summer Home Depot has tons of air conditioners piled high, and they sell out every time because people are having to adjust their living styles and homes to the new temperatures. He didn't have any more doubts after that convo.

Thanks for not succumbing to the temptation of an awesome creation myth. A lot of awesome stuff has started for small reasons, and I'm always happy when more people learn that :)

How does Terraformation take into account the economic motives behind deforestation? For example, you have illegal decimation of native forests in Indonesia for palm oil, massive wood black markets for paper, and slash-and-burn techniques destroying native forests in South America. Is Terraformation just planting trees or taking a broader view around making those new forests durable (or perhaps connecting harvesting to carbon-sequestering markets and applications)?

Also, it was asked elsewhere, but you recently did the biggest raise in Hawaii history (which was interestingly very muted in the news here), so I assume Terraformation is going to be making money. I know a startup is in search of a repeatable and scalable business model so maybe you haven't answered this yet, but what are your theories on what the business side will look like?

But then we'd have a business that was generating cashflow, and not solving climate change at scale.

and from elsewhere in the threads:

All of our investors really just care about solving climate change. I didn't present them with a path to profitability, but I presented them with one possible hypothetical path to solving climate change (and that's what's being presented here in this crowdfunding investment too) and that's what they want us to do.

This is pretty interesting. From the perspective of an outsider looking in, the raise looked like "we think there is a big business here" but sounds like instead you're just using the tools you already knew to drive impact. I was curious because with stuff like Green New Deal, cap-and-trade, and all those things on the horizon, I thought the regulatory environment had created some sort of big opportunity or economic incentive for forests.

In the United States there are some farmers that are paid to not farm in order to preserve certain kinds of grasses and soils in reserve, which is kind of what I thought Terraformation might be doing--creating a marketplace for carbon credits that would help incentivize planting trees to the point that it would be more profitable than the current destructive economic forces driving the "use" of "underutilized" land.

Either way, good luck. I hope Terraformation succeeds!

I also like it here very much and don't plan on moving, so I expect I would encounter some

You realize there are tons of remote work opportunities for coders these days, right? You could stay in your community and probably not have to encounter your classmates ever again in a professional setting if you didn't want to. Just saying.