Does ecosia plant trees5/2/2023 ![]() ![]() Ecosia faces a lot of too-good-to-be-true skepticism, but it is a certified B Corporation, meaning that it has been forced to meet certain standards around transparency and social impact. Trees help, but, to summarize a jungle of a climate debate, it’s more complicated than that.īut hey, 70 million trees and counting ain’t bad for a search engine with a small fraction of the overall market. (Though even this requires a caveat: a recent IPCC report noted that mass tree-planting initiatives could significantly raise food prices.) That said, truly solving climate change will inevitably involve real changes in how we live and transport ourselves. Add in the benefits to the surrounding economy and ecosystem, and it’s hard to argue with tree planting as a worthy use of available funds. How big a piece of the carbon pie can be handled through tree planting alone is a live debate among climate scientists, but all will acknowledge it can be a meaningful part of the solution. To Kroll, it’s nearly good enough to stop climate change. In order to sell, the foundation would have to be convinced that the sale will result in more trees being planted.īeneath all of this is the assumption that planting trees is a good idea. Ecosia is not permitted to issue shareholder dividends, and only employees can be shareholders. ![]() So, they legislated away their power to do so.Įcosia describes itself as a “purpose company,” meaning, according to Kroll, that a foundation holds 1 percent of its shares, 99 percent of its capital, and veto rights over any sale of the company. Kroll and the other executives could sell, become millionaires, and move onto whatever sort of project they’re in the mood for. After all, with 50 percent margins, there is plenty of room to provide shareholder dividends while still putting an impressive number of trees in the ground. ![]() As it grows, the possibility of cashing out becomes weightier. In making their own operation sustainable, Ecosia’s founders foresaw a growing threat: their company’s value. The heavy lifting of operating a search engine is outsourced to a tech colossus. Ecosia pays for its own servers, maintains a browser plug-in and mobile app, and the rest of the team works on marketing and operations. Microsoft does not disclose how many engineers work specifically on Bing, but it’s clear from financial reporting around Bing that the company’s budget is several orders of magnitude greater than Ecosia’s. Ecosia employs around 25 software engineers. The answer is that Ecosia can collect the profits per click of a major search engine (minus Microsoft’s cut) while spending next to nothing on the technology to create and maintain such a service. How is it that Ecosia has been merrily pumping out month after month in which it brings in at least double its total cost of operating-unheard of for nearly any business-while its technological backbone only recently became profitable? Trees generate their own emissions too.īing, meanwhile, was $1.3 billion in the red in 2013 and only became profitable in 2016.How many trees can we actually plant on available land? A whole lot.Just planting new trees isn't going to get us out of the mess we're in.Does planting trees really slow climate change? Ask a physicist.Though it is based on Bing, Ecosia anonymizes all user data after holding it for four days (according to Ecosia, this four-day period is for security purposes) and has a written agreement with Microsoft requiring the company to follow the same practice. You search to see if that was, as you suspected, Bill Hader doing the voice of that animated squirrel, and somewhere far away, a tree is put into the ground. One company is trying to do exactly that for our most perpetually present source of ongoing damage to the planet: the internet.Įcosia is a search engine that donates the bulk of its expendable funds to tree-planting organizations around the globe. ![]() If only, preposterously, all those minuscule actions were not tiny inflictions on the environment, but tiny improvements to it. But it’s everything, and that is paralyzing. If it were one element of our society or personal lives we’d have to change, that would perhaps be manageable. Your morning coffee, the clothes you wear, every inch you travel by motorized means-it all adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Climate change is the problem we have few answers for, because every little thing we do makes it worse. ![]()
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