Hilary, holding a sign she made, at Day 2 of the London BTS Arirang Concerts.
Image curtesy of Hilary Karls
I’ve been chatting with Hilary Karls, a member of our studio community, about the project she began building this summer, during our weekly GYROTONIC® appointment. It’s not an area I felt confident explaining to others, so I asked her for an interview to get a fuller picture of her Climatebase fellowship capstone project, now that it’s live and operational. It started when she became a fan of BTS and and has since travelled globally to see them perform live sixteen times.
Hilary spent more than twenty years in tech, including Uber Eats, Cash App, and TaskRabbit, and she gathers joy wherever she can find it: ballet, theater, Burning Man, and, since 2024, the Korean band BTS. At a show in London, one of the members asked the crowd whether they’d keep showing up for another thirty-two years. The entire stadium screamed “Yeeeeessss! Woohoo!” Of course, Hilary screamed yes at the top of her lungs too.
“[G]etting home from that trip a week or so later, I [asked myself], ‘What does 32 more years of this much travel really mean for the world, and can we actually viably do that?’ In 32 years, if we continue what we’re doing without being smarter about what we’re doing, will we still be able to gather in large numbers and dance together and have fun? And I still want room [for] that joy to happen. I still want room for all [of] us to get together, and for me at least, that means doing my part to take responsibility for the carbon emissions that I am emitting while traveling. And so I built a platform in order to do that.”
That platform is Thrivedom, a simple tool. You tell it where you went and how you got there, it estimates the carbon emissions from the trip, and you can fund carbon credits to match. It began with exclusively concert travel, and it now works for any trip: a wedding across the country, a conference, a week away, or a holiday visit home.
The puzzle-lover in me enjoys the push and pull in this project. Hilary built Thrivedom in under three months with the help of AI tools, and what she built it for is more people dancing and singing at the tops of their lungs together. She introduced me to the term for what happens in those rooms: collective effervescence, the lift people feel when a crowd moves through something together. She pointed me to a short clip of psychologist Kelly McGonigal on the Liz Moody Podcast, on the experience of joy and how it grows when we share it with others. Researchers who study it describe collective effervescence as a blend of feeling connected to others and a sense of something sacred. In a 2019 paper pooling nine studies and more than 2,500 people, they found it isn’t reserved for rare, intense events: in their samples, about three quarters of people experienced it at least once a week, and experiencing it often was linked to greater wellbeing, beyond the benefit of other kinds of social connection.
“The energy of [the concerts] is amazing, and it’s hard to find that collective field of energy of excitement, of into-it-ness, … of being present, of being excited, of being all of that, and that level of engagement in other spaces. Because particularly with live performance, … every performance is different because of the interaction between the performers onstage, [between the] performers and the audience, how [the audience] show[s] up. It can be the same ballet but different casts, and the way that they interpret it hits very differently.”
The research on why that might matter is encouraging, though modest. In a recent set of four studies with 789 people, those who felt that collective effervescence at a live music event reported greater happiness a week later. Going with friends, feeling close to the artist, and absorbing the lyrics made it more likely. A similar pattern turned up in an earlier Australian survey of a thousand adults, in which people who danced or went to live music reported greater life satisfaction than those who didn’t, and the benefit seemed tied to doing it with other people. Both rely on what people report about themselves, so they show an association, not proof that concerts make us happier. And there is a small, curious Dutch lab study in which a few dozen women smelled sweat collected from a dozen men who had watched film clips. The women who smelled the “happy” samples showed more of the facial muscle activity of a genuine smile. It was tiny and exploratory, but I like the idea that joy messages can travel in unexpected ways.
Keeping that room possible has a cost, and most of it is in how we get there. In MIT’s 2025 assessment of live-music emissions, the whole category turns out to be a small slice: about 0.2 percent of U.S. emissions. But within that slice, the largest piece by far is how fans get to the show, about 62 percent in the U.S. and 77 percent in the U.K. The stage lights and sound systems are a minor part of the story. The drive and the flight are the major part.
For scale, Hilary mentioned it helps to know that the world emitted more than 38.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024, and that much of what we add stays in the atmosphere for a very long time. Any one trip is a drop in that giant bucket. Hilary’s point, as I understood it, is that we’re still responsible for our own drops, and that every drop helps fill that proverbial bucket. Her mindset reminds me of the parable of The Hummingbird that I’ve previously mentioned in one of these emails. The hummingbird is small, helping to put out a raging forest fire one drop at a time because that is all they can do.
I’ve been interested in ways to reduce my family’s environmental impact, but I’d get hung up on the calculation side of carbon credits. As many of you know from working with me, counting is not my strong suit. As Hilary explained it, a carbon credit is a certificate a project earns for each tonne of carbon dioxide, or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases, it keeps out of the air or removes from it. An independent verifier checks the work, and once a credit is bought, it’s retired on a public registry so no one else can claim it.
Thrivedom’s credits come from two places. About 96 percent of the credits right now, by weight, come from collecting and destroying old refrigerant gases that would otherwise eventually leak, which warm the planet far more than carbon dioxide does. The rest come from a project in Kansas that turns organic waste into a slurry and stores its carbon deep underground, where it’s expected to stay for a thousand years or more. The project disclosures lay out each one in detail.
Hilary was also candid about what credits don’t do. They aren’t a straight undo of your trip. They’re a way to take responsibility for what’s already happened, after you’ve reduced what you can. “[I]t’s like when you pay the cleanup fee for a festival: it doesn’t un-step-on the grass. … but it generally makes sure that as much as possible the site is restored to a place where it can be enjoyed in the future.” Credits work a little differently: they don't pull a trip's emissions back out of the air. They pay for verified projects elsewhere that stop or remove other emissions.
The numbers are relatively modest. A round trip from San Francisco to Newark comes to about 900 kg (roughly 2,000 pounds) of carbon dioxide equivalent (meaning all greenhouse gases counted as CO2), and funding credits to match costs around $45. A round trip by train between Boston and New York is about $2. Thrivedom is structured as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company legally obliged to weigh its public-benefit purpose alongside profit — so this is a paid service rather than a donation. The price includes a 20 percent service fee. Every purchase appears on a public ledger, and once the credits are retired, the registry serial numbers show exactly what your money is working on. Thrivedom is independent of the artists and organizers of these shows.
“If I’m taking money from ARMY [BTS’s fanbase] to go do this, I wanted to be able to show the receipts. I needed that level of transparency and that level of traceability in order to feel comfortable taking money from a community that I care about so much; to work on their behalf toward the future we want to exist.”
Which brings me to the question underneath all of it: does one small choice matter? Hilary’s order of operations is simple. Reduce what you can, then fund credits for what’s left. And she was honest that she’s wondered about the math herself.
“The one other very small thing that I’ve struggled with at times, and this may be something your readers struggle with at some point or not… [is if] someone’s buying 10 kilograms of carbon offsets in order to match their public transit trip, is it worth it? And, yes. Still, everything we can do, every small action we can take is worth it because it adds up over time. We know [that] one individual person listening to one song is not going to drive an artist to the top of the Billboard charts. It’s the chart taking everyone’s actions all together, with an entire fanbase streaming songs, [then] suddenly you have a number one hit. And we can do that with carbon credits.”
This isn’t a plea to stay home. Hilary’s hope is that we consider what it costs to get where we’re going and make small, steady choices that add up, the way a fanbase’s streams become a chart-topper, and the way movement choices layer over months. It’s the same mindset many of you bring to the studio and to the Gyrotonic Method. The joy of moving together is worth protecting, and a little attention helps keep the room possible.
WHAT I’M READING
Golden State Valkyries top Atlanta Dream in Game 7 to secure first WNBA title (ESPN)
Gabby Williams scored 28 of her 30 points in the second half, including fifteen straight, in front of 18,000 people in violet. Afterward she said the team kept its circle tight and shut out the noise. A good practice for the rest of us, and a fitting companion to this week’s essay.
Historic win: Nurses fought to secure the nation’s first countywide 12-week paid parental leave policy (Good Good Good, via The 19th)
Pittsburgh NICU nurses watched parents go back to work while their babies were still in intensive care, so they asked their community what would help and launched a campaign on Mother’s Day. Five months later, Allegheny County passed twelve weeks of paid parental leave, the first county-level policy of its kind. Whatever your view on how it’s funded, the order of events is worth noticing: listen first, then build.
Battlefield Acupuncture (East-West Integrative Medicine Clinic)
Veterans Day is this Wednesday, and this short piece from our neighbors at East-West describes a five-point ear acupuncture protocol developed in 2001 by Dr. Richard Niemtzow while on active duty in the Air Force, now taught to more than 4,600 VA and Department of Defense providers. It’s a clinic’s own blog, so I read the efficacy claims as an introduction rather than a verdict. It’s also a good moment to thank the veterans in our community and their families.
Wherever your next trip takes you (a stadium, a theater, a holiday table), it takes about a minute at thrivedom.co to see the estimated carbon from your journey, and how you can take responsibility for it, one drop at a time.
We’re looking forward to seeing you in the studio this week. We’re getting ready to move into our new studio space in the next week or two, and we’re grateful for your patience as we work through our Change of Use permit, a few incremental ADA improvements, and a final inspection expected late this week or early next. We will update all appointment and class reminder emails with the updated location upon successful completion of our final inspection. Other questions about the move? Please reach out to Shellie at shellie@movementforeveryone.com or (415) 599-3223.
Warmly,
Harriet
