I love that High Impact Engineers is back and I generally like a forum-style place over Slack, but I want to push back specifically on "many engineers have a GitHub account" -- especially since your goal is to be welcoming to non-software-engineers, I wouldn't make this assumption! I was a materials engineering undergrad and none of my classes/internships/research projects used GitHub. Maybe it's really taken over in the last 10 years or something, but if not, you might want to consider being a bit more 101-level with the GitHub stuff, e.g. not using jargon like 'pull' or 'repo' without explanation -- when I see that kind of thing, at least personally my immediate reaction is "oh, this is a space for software engineers".

in addition to everything already said, I think this can be bad from an organizational sustainability perspective—if you decide to leave / get hit by a truck / etc, the organization now doesn't have the budget to hire someone new to do the work, meaning that some commitments will need to be dropped. Some funders will see this type of thing as a bad signal about the management of the organization.

Another way of leveraging your relative class privilege could be taking a part-time job and doing impactful volunteer work!

interestingly i've talked to a couple of other asian women in EA who have sort of an opposite experience—we (including myself here) feel like EA ideas and communities fundamentally don't capture things that are important to us as asian women, and so that actually forces us to be more balanced and draw our values from multiple places, rather than holding ourselves to a standard of being a more-optimized EA. one very literal example someone mentioned to me is that western cultures and traditions of thought emphasize breaking down systems into discrete parts and optimizing on single goals, and eastern cultures/traditions value more holistic thinking and balance.

i can also 100% see where you're coming from, as someone who grew up in a very competitive asian/immigrant community myself—i'm sharing another experience not to discount yours, but more to highlight alternate ways of thinking about your own relating to EA that might help you find that balance!

as a former optimizer: #1 thing that helped was therapy

the most commonly soundbited research on this is Chenoweth's 3.5% rule if you want a place to start

Hmm. I think once we get into the territory of "plan to use", though, you end up with the same types of criticisms that apply to carbon credits and RECs, no? I really think that a nonzero price is not a good enough signal here! Polluters don't have perfect information about future climate regulations, future technologies, future market demand for their products, or even necessarily the future of the cap per Ville's point below. I read Making Climate Policy Work recently, which is a really thorough critique of the compliance markets; could be useful to see which of their criticisms apply to retiring allowances.

Giving Green hat on: if you want relatively certain and near-term emissions reductions at this price point, we usually recommend Tradewater. However, generally we would argue that unconstrained donors (i.e. not meeting some kind of net-zero reporting requirement) should donate to nonprofits working on policy or other systems change; GG's cost-effectiveness analyses land about an order of magnitude lower in $/ton than most allowances or credits, and I think also Founders Pledge's climate fund's analyses do as well. 

I think people should keep re-releasing this idea because this community dynamic very much still exists! I've also seen extremely smart and motivated friends engage with and then "bounce off" EA because of this.

Gotcha. Since you're already in the UChicago network I think it's definitely worth getting in touch with someone about Climate Vault, as in the early days they were aiming at permanent retirement - I don't know the specifics of why they pivoted away from that model but I imagine you'll learn something useful. 

Giving Green briefly looked into some brokers with similar models here as well; ultimately we're pretty skeptical. Even if your marginal additionality is 1 for small purchases, it's inherently not a scalable model. If the core of what you're doing is funding public goods and not selling carbon allowances, you should pitch that more! There are more cost-effective ways to just reduce emissions :) 

Inside baseball comment here but what's the relationship between Ultra Civic and Climate Vault? Assuming that as a recent UChicago econ grad you're familiar with them. (I used to work for Levitt, my team briefly explored working with Greenstone on Climate Vault when the model was purely about retiring allowances, before they pivoted to combining this with removal tons)

suggestion along the same lines: Fight for the Future has been sounding the alarm about consolidated corporate control of communication spaces and the risks that poses, especially to pro-democracy movements and to queer & trans folks. Haven't done a deep dive but have followed them for a while and they seem to be consistently ahead of the curve (alongside EFF) on the wonky things like Section 230, ID checks, net neutrality