Green.org sat down with Lucid Home Co-Founders Lisbeth Kaufman and Julian Villella, Co-Founders of Lucid Home, to learn how they are helping homeowners understanding the climate risks and advantages of property in the U.S. They developed the Lucid Home Report Card, which provides a simple climate risk assessment for any region or property. Using the Lucid Home Report Card, potential homeowners can now type in the address and how long they plan to live at the property, and Lucid Home will provide a report card detailing risks specific to that timeline.
Lisbeth and Julian, thank you for being here. Tell us a little bit about you and your background:
Lisbeth and Julian started Lucid Home because they were concerned about the 40 million people in America buying homes each year with no insights into climate risk. They build Lucid Home to provide free, easy to understand, instant climate risk reports for any address in the continental U.S. They hope it helps people make informed decisions about where to live and how to prepare for climate disasters.
Lisbeth Kaufman, Co-Founder of LucidHome.co, has a background in climate policy and entrepreneurship. She focused on climate change as an energy/agriculture policy advisor in the United States Senate. There she built a first-of-its-kind energy efficiency financing program and wrote a clean energy bill for farmers that got passed into law. She currently serves as the Head of Climate Tech Startups and VC Business Development at AWS, as well as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and a mentor at Techstars. She was previously Cofounder and CEO of KitSplit, the venture-backed startup called “the Airbnb of Cameras” by Forbes.
Julian Villella, Co-Founder of LucidHome.co, is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Entrepreneur First and has a technical background in software engineering and applied machine learning. Most recently he’s led teams at Huawei in autonomous driving simulation and Kindred’s robotic grasping solution. Before that he worked in large scale cloud computing applications. He’s motivated by what a technologist can do about climate change.
What would you do with $1 Billion dollars?
To help the world adapt to climate change I would invest in climate resiliency to ensure all regions can withstand climate disasters and recover quickly. This would minimize death and suffering caused by climate disasters. To help stop the climate crisis I would help climate-focused Senators and Congressmen get elected to the US Congress (and other countries) to pass cap and trade legislation.
Why do you think sustainability is such an important topic today?
Climate change is the defining issue of our time. If we don’t solve it nothing else matters. It’s already having an impact on people’s lives with natural disasters, extreme heat, flooding, sea level rise and wildfire. We need to 1) prevent climate change from getting worse, 2) adapt to the climate impacts we’re already experiencing and 3) invest in resiliency to prepare and lesson the impacts to come.
What do you envision your industry looking like 10 years from now?
We hope that thanks to Lucid Home, 10 years from now regional climate risk will be common knowledge among people and businesses. People and businesses will be prepared for climate disasters and will be able to (literally) weather the storm. They will be making informed decisions about where to live and where to build and invest. We also hope that the world is rapidly getting close to net-zero carbon emissions to avoid the worst tipping points of climate change.
What can the average person do to make a difference?
To deal with the impacts of climate change: 1) If you’re moving homes or businesses, move away from a place that has high climate risk. 2) Encourage your local government to invest in resiliency. To stop the climate crisis: 1) change jobs so that you can spend your working hours on stopping the climate crisis. 2) Vote and advocate for climate-first candidates. 3) Reduce your own carbon footprint. 4) Don’t support companies that emit carbon – i.e. don’t buy their products or their stock.