Dec 28 2023
Six takeaways from a climate-tech boom

The surge of climate-tech startups seeking to reinvent clean energy and transform huge industrial markets is fueling optimism about our prospects for addressing climate change. Tens of billions are pouring into these venture-backed companies in just about every field you can imagine, from green steel to nuclear fusion.

As I explain in “Climate tech is back—and this time, it can’t afford to fail,” investments led by venture capitalists could play a critical role in developing novel sources of clean energy and greener industrial processes. Speaking to numerous VCs, people at startups, and those academics who study innovation in so-called deep tech, I became convinced we’re in the early stages of a carbon-free economy. 

But the optimism comes with a warning. As a journalist who wrote extensively about cleantech 1.0, which began around 2006 and collapsed by 2013 as countless solar, battery, and biofuel firms failed, I have a sense of wariness. All of it feels a bit too familiar: the exuberance of the VCs, the hundred of millions going to risky demonstration plants testing unproven technologies, and the potential political backlash over government support of aggressive climate policies. Writing about the current climate-tech boom means keeping in mind that most previous venture-backed startups in cleantech have failed miserably.

Today’s investors and entrepreneurs hope this time is different. As I discovered in speaking with them, there are plenty of reasons they might be right; there is far more money available, and far more demand for cleaner products from consumers and industrial customers. Yet many of the challenges seen in the first boom still exist and provide ample reason to worry about the success of today’s climate-tech startups.

Here are some of the key lessons from cleantech 1.0. To learn more, you can read my full report here. 

six die with the facing sides arranged in a line from one to six.

Lesson #1: Demand matters. This is basic to any market but is oft ignored in climate tech: someone needs to want to buy your product. Despite the public and scientific concerns over climate change, it’s a tough sell to get people and companies to pay extra for, say, green concrete or clean electricity.

A recent study by David Popp at Syracuse University and his colleague Matthias van den Heuvel suggests that weak demand, more than the costs and risks associated with scaling up startups, was what doomed the first cleantech wave. 

Many of the products in cleantech are commodities; price often matters above all else, and green products, especially when they are first introduced, are typically too expensive to compete. The argument helps to explain the great exception to the cleantech 1.0 bust: Tesla Motors. “Tesla’s been able to differentiate their product: the brand itself has value,” says Popp. But, he adds, “it’s hard to imagine that there’s going to be a trendy [green] hydrogen brand.”  

The findings suggest that government policies are probably most effective when they help to create demand for, say, green hydrogen or cement rather than directly funding startups as they struggle toward commercialization. 

Lesson #2: Hubris hurts. One of the most obvious problems in cleantech 1.0 was the extreme hubris of many of its advocates. Leading cheerleaders and money men (yes, nearly all were men) had made their fortunes on computers, software, and the web and sought to apply the same strategies to cleantech.

“Rule number one: do not have people invest in a category who do not know about the category,” says Matthew Nordan, general partner at Azolla Ventures. “Cleantech 1.0 investors were largely folks from tech and biotech, desperately trying to come up to speed on industrial categories they knew little about.”

These days many venture capitalists profess to be chastened by the experience of cleantech 1.0 and deeply ingrained in the industries they hope to disrupt. But there are still some high-profile investors parachuting in from making fortunes in Big Tech who are convinced they have the solution to the world’s biggest problem.  

I asked Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies how venture capital works, why such investors haven’t learned from the past. The pessimistic view, he says, “is that these guys are just megalomaniac characters who want to save the world and view themselves as heroes, and they’re just fools plunging again even though they had their head handed to them before.” A more optimistic view, he says, is that they might be able “to take some of the knowledge and innovations that happened in the software arena and put them to work here.”

Lesson #3: Molecules are different from bits. Yes, of course, we know writing code is easier and cheaper than building a steel plant. But just how much riskier and unpredictable it is to scale up molecule-based businesses was an unpleasant surprise to many during cleantech 1.0. Poor yields or the synthesis of unwanted by-products—problems that might have seemed like small hiccups in the lab—can be show stoppers as the process is scaled up and must compete against existing technologies.

Finding out whether a process is commercially competitive typically means building a demonstration plant, often costing $100 million or more. Many startups during cleantech 1.0 got tripped up when processes that worked fine in the lab didn’t work nearly as well in larger facilities. You just don’t know if an industrial process will work until you build it.

The hope these days is that far more computation power and the use of artificial intelligence will allow startups to simulate how processes will work before actually building anything. Running a new way to make green hydrogen in silico to see what goes wrong is certainly far cheaper and safer than building a $100 million demonstration plant.

Lesson #4: The real takeaway from Solyndra. The failure of the company, which received a $535 million loan guarantee from the US government to manufacture a novel type of solar panel, is the one that everyone remembers from cleantech 1.0. And it’s often offered as strong evidence of what goes wrong when governments try to pick winners. But the lingering lesson from the failure of Solyndra is quite different.

First—whether you’re in government or a venture capitalist—don’t invest in technology that makes little manufacturing sense and has dubious market demand. Solyndra’s product was a highly complex cylinder-shaped solar panel that required custom and unproven equipment to build. 

See lessons #1, #2, and #3. I wrote this in 2011: “What Solyndra lacked, though, was market savvy and manufacturing flexibility. Although the company had quickly traversed what Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs like to call ‘the valley of death’—the risky financial period between receiving initial venture funding and beginning to earn revenues—it badly faltered in turning its operations into a viable, long-term business. If there is a prevailing lesson from the Solyndra debacle, it has to do with the danger of trying to do too much too quickly—and doing it alone.”

Solyndra would likely have failed anyway, but had the company gone slower, a lot of people, including both US taxpayers and the VCs who ponied up hundreds of millions, would have lost a lot less money.

Lesson #5: Politics can change everything. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which helped fuel the recent wave of cleantech investments, passed Congress without a single Republican vote. Simply put, electing a Republican president in 2024 could mean an end to the aggressive federal climate policies.

And there is an ongoing backlash in many other industrial countries. Recently in the UK, the prime minister proposed weakening the country’s climate policies. Even Germany is showing signs of backing away from political support and funding for cleantech. 

In his recent paper, Syracuse’s Popp and his coauthor traced the woes of cleantech 1.0 back to a largely forgotten Senate election in early 2010. After the death of the liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts voters elected the Republican Scott Brown, dooming a comprehensive climate bill being debated in Congress. Without the possibility of carbon pricing, many venture investors lost interest in clean-energy startups. 

By the end of the year, a newly elected Republican majority in the US House of Representatives had doomed additional large federal investments in clean energy.

Politics do matter. And they can change overnight.

Lesson #6: Survival is all about the economics. The early days of cleantech 1.0 were filled with enthusiasm and good intentions. People saw climate change as an existential crisis, and technology, led by visionary entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, was going to solve it. The vibes these days are in many ways similar; in fact, people are even more intense and committed. The brilliance of many new climate technologies is evident, and we desperately need them.

But none of that will ensure success. Venture-backed startups will need to survive on the basis of economics and financial advantages, not good intentions. 

The simple fact is that we have too few examples of prosperous climate-tech startups with radical new technology. It’s all still a grand experiment. Cleantech 1.0 taught us what can go wrong. We’re still learning how to get it right.

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Dec 23 2023
Is this the most energy-efficient way to build homes?

When the Canadian engineer Harold Orr and his colleagues began designing an ultra-efficient home in Saskatchewan in the late ’70s, responding to a provincial conservation mandate during the oil embargo, they knew that the trick wasn’t generating energy in a greener way, but using less of it. They needed to make a better thermos, not a cheaper coffee maker.

illustration of a house with numbered features

ARTHUR MOUNT

1

High-performance windows with orientation and shading

Heat loss and gain through standard windows accounts for 25% to 30% of residential energy use.

2

Airtight building
envelope

Keeping air, and thus heat, from leaking out or in further reduces the need for heating and cooling.

3

Climate-appropriate
insulation levels

Some homes are even built entirely from insulating materials to minimize the need for energy supply.

4

Thermal-bridge-free design

Weak points in a building envelope that allow heat to drain out of a house are eliminated.

5

Continuous ventilation
with heat recovery

Fresh, filtered air enters the home through a heat recovery ventilation (HRV) system.

The result was the 1978 Saskatchewan Conservation House, a cedar-clad trapezoid that cut energy usage by 85%—and helped inspire today’s globally recognized passive-house standard for building design. Adopted by thousands of buildings comprising tens of thousands of housing units, this concept marries vernacular building techniques, like orienting toward the sun, with cutting-edge insulation and air circulation systems. The formula for these efficient homes, standardized and shared by the German physicist Wolfgang Feist and the Swedish structural engineer Bo Adamson beginning in 1988, also bestows health benefits. With airtight exteriors and better air circulation, these homes offer improved interior air quality and significant noise reduction.

Passive houses now account for less than 1% of multifamily construction. 

It’s a marriage of efficiency and rigorously applied physics, says Bronwyn Barry, a passive-house pioneer and principal of a Bay Area architecture firm. If homes are machines for living, passive-house design principles offer a blueprint for a better machine, highlighting just how poorly constructed postwar suburban sprawl can be.

Passive design focuses on the exterior, or envelope, which needs to be tightly insulated to avoid allowing heat out or unwanted heat in. This means using thick thermal insulation and high-quality, often triple-pane windows, which let in the sun’s light and warmth but keep heat from escaping. Heat loss (and, in warm weather, gain) through standard windows necessitates 25% to 30% of residential energy use. Construction also eliminates thermal bridges, or breaks in the envelope or insulation that allow heat to drain out. Think “boxy but beautiful,” as Barry once wrote: houses boast continuous layers of insulation while minimizing the cantilevers, corners, dormers, and other features that characterize the messy rooflines of McMansions. These design requirements result in airtight buildings, as measured by a blower door test: after a specially calibrated door-mounted fan sucks air out of the house to lower the air pressure inside, technicians look for gaps and cracks where higher-­pressure air from the outside flows in. 

While this single-minded focus on efficiency, or building the best thermos, leads to exceptional performance—up to a 90% reduction in heating and cooling demand—passive houses can’t circulate air like traditional builds. But heat recovery ventilators or energy recovery ventilators can address that problem, exchanging air without sacrificing interior heat.

Often considered a cold-climate approach, passive houses actually have universal benefits. Warmer climates simply require different windows and exteriors, and additional shading to combat excessive heat gain. 

The passive-house movement has expanded well beyond single-family homes and the German and Nordic regions where it’s most popular. There are now 275-plus finished multifamily projects in the US alone, including dorms at Cornell University, scores of affordable housing projects across New York City, and the newly opened Winthrop Center, a 53-story skyscraper in downtown Boston. But even though the Passive House Network, an educational organization for the building industry, has found that costs are competitive for these large-scale projects, and incentives introduced by the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act could decrease costs even more, passive houses still account for less than 1% of all multifamily construction in the US in the past decade. 

Patrick Sisson, a Chicago expat living in Los Angeles, covers technology and urbanism.

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Dec 22 2023
There was some good climate news in 2023. Really.

Bad climate news was everywhere in 2023. 

It’s been the hottest year on record, with January through November clocking in at 1.46 °C (2.62 °F) warmer on average than preindustrial temperatures. Meanwhile, emissions from fossil fuels hit a new high—36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, 1.1% more than in 2022. 

Scientists are loudly warning that the world is running out of time to avoid dangerous warming levels. The picture is grim. But if you know where to look, there are a few bright spots shining through the darkness.

New technologies that can help address climate change, from heat pumps to solar panels to EVs, are coming to the market and getting cheaper. Climate policy is also developing, from incentives to support new technology to rule-making around pollution. And efforts to help the most vulnerable nations adapt to climate change are growing. 

Here are a few of those bright spots that our climate reporters saw in 2023. 

The brakes are off for electric vehicles

There’s been a spate of good news for EVs. We put the “inevitable EV” on our list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies in January, noting that strong policy support and expanding supply chains were combining to vault the technology to new relevance. 

Those trends have largely continued through 2023, and that means good news for climate change, since the transportation sector accounts for nearly 20% of global emissions. 

EVs are on track to make up 15.5% of automotive sales this year, according to BNEF. Between battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, this new growth means there are almost 41 million passenger EVs on the road. China has the largest share of EVs in the world, making up nearly a quarter of the global fleet. 

Batteries to power all those vehicles are becoming more widely available and cheaper. Global manufacturing for lithium-ion batteries increased by over 30% this year. And while prices ticked up slightly last year, they are down again in 2023, representing the largest annual decline since 2018. 

A wide range of policies could help continue the growth of electric vehicles. Some governments are mandating the switch away from fossil-fuel-powered cars—the European Union and United Kingdom both passed policies in 2023 mandating that all new passenger vehicles sold be zero-emissions starting in 2035. Several states in the US have adopted the same policy, with California leading the way last year and more signing on in 2023. 

Incentives are also driving consumers toward EVs. The Inflation Reduction Act in the US serves up a huge menu of tax credits for battery manufacturing, EV manufacturing, and mineral processing. 

While many signs are positive, it’s not all rosy for electric vehicles. Growth in sales slowed between 2022 and 2023, and changing demand has some automakers slowing production for models like the Ford F-150 Lightning. Charging infrastructure isn’t available or reliable enough in most markets, a problem that has become one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption. 

Cars are being sold at a record pace and road emissions are still going up, so EV sales need to accelerate to make a dent in transportation’s climate impact. But EVs’ progress so far seems to be an encouraging story of a new climate-friendly technology becoming a mainstream option. Let’s hope it keeps going in 2024—all gas, no brakes. 

—Casey Crownhart

Countries and companies are cracking down on methane 

Another encouraging development on the otherwise daunting topic of climate change is the growing recognition that cutting methane pollution is one of the most powerful levers we can pull to limit global warming over the coming years. 

Carbon dioxide has long overshadowed methane, since we emit so much more of it. But methane traps about 80 times as much heat over a 20-year period and accounts for at least a quarter of overall warming above our preindustrial past. 

On the other hand, it also breaks down far faster in the atmosphere. Together, those qualities mean that rapid cuts in methane emissions today could deliver an outsize impact on climate change, potentially shaving a quarter-degree off total warming by midcentury. That could easily make the difference between a planet that does or doesn’t tip past 2 °C.

So it was encouraging to finally hear the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency announce, at the recent UN climate conference, that it will soon require oil and gas companies to monitor methane emissions across their pipelines, wells, and facilities and sharply reduce venting, flaring, and leaks. 

As federal regulations go, preventing emissions of a combustible, planet-warming superpolllutant that isn’t even producing anything of economic value is truly about the least we can ask of an industry. But it’s a step forward that promises to eliminate the warming equivalent of about 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2038.

There was other good news on methane at the UN conference as well. A group of major oil and gas companies including BP, Exxon, and Saudi Aramco pledged to cut their methane pollution by at least 80% by 2030. In addition, a handful of additional nations joined an international coalition committed to easing global emissions by 30% this decade, while others stepped up their pledges and funding.

All of this comes on top of growing global efforts to more effectively monitor and report major sources of methane pollution around the globe, and reduce emissions from agriculture and landfills. 

As with every issue when it comes to climate change, none of this is enough, too much of it is voluntary, and complications abound. But these announcements, along with other signs of progress, are slowly adding up to a less grim future, while reminding us all that we’re capable of achieving even more.

—James Temple

A crucial fund to pay for climate damages launched

While the world scrambles to slow our emissions, it’s becoming ever more clear that the damage from climate change is happening in the present tense, with wildfires, floods, and heat waves making headlines. 

So it was welcome news that this year’s UN climate conference started with a historic milestone for vulnerable countries struggling to deal with these problems. On day one of the talks, the long-anticipated loss and damage fund was officially launched.

Historically, a handful of industrialized nations like the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom have been responsible for much of the emissions that are exacerbating extreme weather events and related disasters. Now, they are (nominally) paying for that legacy.

The purpose of this fund is to help poor and developing countries address the increasing harm from climate disasters. Many of these countries—which have contributed the least amount of emissions—are the most vulnerable to climate impacts and often lack adequate resources to manage them. The funds can help them rebuild in the aftermath of events like drought or floods, and improve a nation’s ability to withstand future catastrophes.

Advocates have been quick to point out that the total amount pledged so far is minuscule compared to the actual need on the ground. They estimate that the current pledge equates to less than 0.2% of the potential economic losses facing developing nations from climate disasters every year.

By the end of COP28 on December 12, countries had collectively committed nearly $800 million. The United Arab Emirates and Germany each pledged $100 million, the United Kingdom offered $75 million, and the United States contributed $17.5 million. 

Those numbers sound big, but a few people have made a sports analogy that puts this all in perspective. On December 9, a baseball player, Shohei Ohtani, signed a $700 million contract with the LA Dodgers. The fact that a worldwide effort to address climate change is even remotely comparable to the amount spent by a sports team on a single athlete should be a global embarrassment.

 “The rich world needs to take a good look at itself and its actions so far,” says Ritu Bharadwaj, a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development.

That being said, the fund is still a step toward equitable climate resilience. Now the focus is on continuing to scale up the commitments and making the funds more accessible to those who need them.

—June Kim

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Dec 22 2023
2023 is breaking all sorts of climate records 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

This has been quite the year for climate news, with weather disasters, technological breakthroughs, and policy changes making headlines around the world. There’s an abundance of bad news, but there are also some glimmers of hope, if you know where to look.

It’s a lot to make sense of, so for this last newsletter of 2023, let’s take a look back at the year, and let’s do it in data. A “climate wrapped,” if you will. 

A new record on emissions (again)

Technically, we can’t draw definitive conclusions about 2023 just yet. But it’s pretty evident that we’re on track for yet another record year when it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to hit 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, according to the Global Carbon Budget report, which was released earlier this month. That’s just over 1% higher than last year’s levels.

Hitting another record high for emissions isn’t the best news. Ideally, this line would be going in the other direction, and quickly. 

The story isn’t the same everywhere, though. The US and Europe, for instance, are actually seeing slight decreases in carbon pollution (though these places are among the highest historical emitters). China and India are seeing emissions growth of around 4% and 8%, respectively. 

But that growth could be slowing down soon, and some analysts say that within the next few years we could be nearing peak emissions (the moment when they turn around and start going down). I’ll believe it when I see it. 

It’s getting hot in here

Not only are we seeing record-high emissions, but 2023 is almost certainly going to be the hottest year on record, too. The year through November averaged just under 1.5 °C (or about 2.6 °F) hotter than preindustrial levels.

The warming is noticeable even compared with the last few decades. November was 0.85 °C warmer than the average November was in the 1990s. 

Wherever you look, from the air to the ocean, the planet is heating up, and these rising temperatures and other changing weather patterns have cascading effects, as we saw firsthand in 2023. 

Sea ice hit new low levels. Historic wildfires in Canada brought oppressive smoke sweeping down the east coast of the US. Thousands died in flooding in Libya, and a years-long drought in the Horn of Africa has left millions facing water and food shortages. Name any type of climate disaster you can think of, and one of those probably broke records, somewhere in the world, in 2023. 

Looking back, I think this year I saw a trend that’s been building for the past couple of years: a growing number of people are being directly and dramatically affected by climate change. It’s pushing awareness that climate change isn’t some theoretical future possibility, but something happening in the present tense.

Money money money

It’s not possible to take a look back at this year without talking about bad news. But there are some positives too, I promise! 

For one thing, this year also saw record investment in clean energy, with global total spending of $1.7 trillion. (Yes trillion, with a “t.”) 

Investment in clean energy has been outpacing investment in fossil fuels for a while now, but the gap is starting to widen, with growing amounts of spending on technologies like solar and wind power and energy storage. In fact, solar power alone attracted more investment than fossil fuels for the first time.

The current state of the climate is pretty grim, and it’s important to take note of that and be realistic about where we are and what still needs to happen. But these bright spots of climate news are around, if you know where to look. 

That’s why the MIT Technology Review climate team put together some of the good news we saw in the climate world this year. You can find out more about what’s giving us hope in our new story here. 

Related reading

While we’re looking back, let’s reminisce about some of our top climate and energy stories of 2023. 

Keeping up with climate  

Fewer EVs will qualify for tax credits soon in the US, as new restrictions kick in on January 1. Tesla’s Model 3 and Ford’s Mustang Mach-E will be among those ruled out, according to the automakers. (New York Times)

New details about a tax credit in last year’s climate bill reveal a surprising winner: thermal energy storage. Qualifying for the credits could help these alternative energy storage methods break into the market. (Canary Media)

→ Here’s why bricks are a hot new energy storage technology. (MIT Technology Review)

Lab-grown-meat companies like Upside Foods have raked in billions of dollars in funding promising healthy, climate-friendly meat without the animals. But so far, there’s not much to show for it, and lots of challenges with scaling ahead. (Bloomberg) 

There’s a huge backlog of clean energy projects waiting to connect to the grid in the US. This delay could put 2030 clean-energy targets out of reach for many states. (Canary Media)

After an emissions scandal, automaker Volkswagen agreed to spend $2 billion funding public EV charging stations. Now, those chargers are unreliable—yes, even more so than other public charging networks. (Washington Post)

By the end of the decade, many batteries will need to have a passport—a digital record of their source materials and history. (Quartz)

Carbon removal has gone from a wild idea to a hot topic. Some scientists think that’s a problem, as companies and governments are using this unproven technology to continue with business as usual rather than making hard cuts to emissions. (E&E News)

→ Here’s why some experts say the world is thinking about carbon removal all wrong. (MIT Technology Review)

Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is real, some people still fall for conspiracy theories. There’s a whole host of reasons why. (Grist)

→ If you’re looking to broach the subject, here are my tips for talking about climate technology over the holidays. (MIT Technology Review)

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Dec 19 2023
Developing climate solutions with green software

After years of committing to sustainable practices in his personal life from recycling to using cloth-based diapers, Asim Hussain, currently the director of green software and ecosystems at Intel, began to ask questions about the practices in his work: software development.

Developers often asked if their software was secure enough, fast enough, or cost-effective enough but, Hussain says, they rarely considered the environmental consequences of their applications. Hussain would go on to work at Intel and become the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation, a non-profit aiming to create an ecosystem of people, tooling, and best practices around sustainable software development.

“What we need to do as software developers and software engineers is we need to make sure that it is emitting the least amount of carbon for the same amount of value and user functionality that we’re getting out of it,” says Hussain.

The three pillars of green software are energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness. Making more efficient use of hardware and energy consumption when developing applications can go a long way toward reducing emissions, Hussain says. And carbon-aware computing involves divestment from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources to improve efficiency without compromising performance.

Often, when something is dubbed “green,” there is an assumption that the product, application, or practice functions worse than its less environmentally friendly version. With software, however, the opposite is true.

“Being green in the software space means being more efficient, which translates almost always to being faster,” says Hussain. “When you factor in the hardware efficiency component, oftentimes it translates to building software that is more resilient, more fault-tolerant. Oftentimes it also translates then into being cheaper.”

Instituting green software necessitates not just a shift in practices and tooling but also a culture change within an enterprise. While regulations and ESG targets help to create an imperative, says Hussain, a shift in mindset can enable some of the greatest strides forward.

“If there’s anything we really need to do is to drive that behavior change, we need to drive behavior change so people actually invest their time on making software more energy efficient, more hardware efficient, or more carbon aware.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Intel.

Full Transcript

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Laurel Ruma and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Our topic is green software, from apps to devices to the cloud. Computing runs the world around us. However, there is a better way to do it with a focus on sustainability.

Two words for you: sustainable code.

My guest is Asim Hussain, who is the director of the Office of Green Software and Ecosystems at Intel, as well as the chairperson of the Green Software Foundation.

This podcast is produced in partnership with Intel.

Welcome, Asim.

Asim Hussain: Hi Laurel. Thank you very much for having me.

Laurel: Well, glad you’re here. So for a bit of background, you’ve been working in software development and sustainability advocacy from startups to global enterprises for the last two decades. What drew you into sustainability as a focus and what are you working on now?

Asim: I’ve personally been involved and interested in the sustainability space for quite a while on a very personal level. Then around the birth of my first son, about five years ago now, I started asking myself this one question, which was how come I was willing to do all these things I was doing for sustainability to recycle, we were using cloth-based nappies, all sorts of these different things. Yet I could not remember in my entire career, my entire career, I could not remember one single moment where in any technical discussion, in any architectural meeting, in any discussion about how we’re going to build this piece of software. I mean, people oftentimes raise points around is this secure enough? Is this fast enough? Does this cost too much? But at no point I’d ever heard anybody ask the question, is this emitting too much carbon? Is this piece of software, is this solution that we’re talking about right now, how does that solution, what kind of environmental impacts does that have? I’ve never, ever, ever heard anybody raise that question.

So I really started to ask that question myself. I found other people who are like me. Five years ago, there weren’t many of us, but were all asking the same questions. I joined and then I started to become a co-organizer of a community called ClimateAction.Tech. Then the community just grew. A lot of people were starting to ask themselves these questions and some answers were coming along. At the time, I used to work at Microsoft and I pitched and formed something called the green cloud advocacy team, where we talked about how to actually build applications in a greener way on the cloud.

We formed something called the Green Software Foundation, which is a consortium of now 60 member organizations, which I am a chairperson of. Over a year ago I joined Intel because Intel has been heavily investing in sustainable software space. If you think about what Intel does, pretty much everything that Intel produces, developers use it and developers write software and write code on Intel’s products. So it makes sense for Intel to have a strong green software strategy. That’s kind of why I was brought in and I’ve since then been working on Intel’s green software strategy internally.

Laurel: So a little bit more about that. How can organizations make their software greener? Then maybe we should take a step back and define what green software actually is.

Asim: Well, I think we have to define what green software actually is first. The way the conversation’s landed in recent years and the Green Software Foundation has been a large part of this is we’ve coalesced around this idea of carbon efficiency, which is if you are building a piece of software … Everything we do emits carbon, everything we do emits carbon, this tool we’re using right now to record this session is emitting carbon right now. What we need to do as software developers and software engineers is we need to make sure that it is emitting the least amount of carbon for the same amount of value and user functionality that we’re getting out of it. That’s what we call carbon efficiency.

What we say is there’s three pillars underneath, there’s only really three ways to make your software green. The first is to make it more energy efficient, to use less energy. Most electricity is still created through the burning of fossil fuels. So just using less electricity is going to emit fewer carbon emissions into the atmosphere. So the first is energy efficiency. The second is hardware efficiency because all software runs on hardware and depends on the, if you’re talking about a mobile phone, typically people are forced to move on from mobile phones because the software just doesn’t run on their older models. In the cloud it tends to be more around a conversation around utilization by making more use of the servers that you already have in the cloud, making just more efficient use of the hardware. The third one is a very interesting space. It’s a very new space. It’s called carbon awareness or carbon-aware computing. That is you are going to be using electricity anyway. Can you make your software? Can you architect your software in such a way?

So it does more when the electricity is clean and does less when the electricity is dirty. So can you architect an application? So for instance, it does more when there’s more renewable energy on the grid right now, and it does less when more coal or gas is getting burnt. There’s some very interesting projects in this space that have been happening, very high-profile projects and carbon-aware computing is an area where there’s a lot of interest because it’s a stepping stone. It might not get you your 50, 60, 70% carbon reductions, but it will get you your 1, 2, 3, and 4% carbon reductions and it’ll get you that with very minimal investments. There’s a lot of interest in carbon-aware computing. But those are basically the three areas, what we call the three pillars of green software, energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness.

Laurel: So another reason we’re talking about all of this is that technology can contribute to the environmental issues that it is trying to actually help. So for example, a lot of energy is needed to train AI models. Also, blockchain was key in the development of energy-efficient microgrids, but it’s also behind the development of cryptocurrency platforms, some of which consume more energy than that of a small country. So how can advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and blockchain contribute positively to the development of green software?

Asim: That’s an interesting question because sometimes the focus oftentimes is how do we actually make that technology greener? But I don’t believe that is necessarily the whole story. The story is the broader story. How can we use that technology to make software greener? I think there’s many ways you can probably tackle that question. One thing that’s been interesting for me since my journey as a software developer joining Intel is me realizing how little I knew about hardware. There is so much, I describe it as the gap between software and silicon. The gap is quite large right now. If you’re building software these days, you have very little understanding of the silicon that’s running that software. Through a greater understanding of exactly how your software is exactly getting executed by the silicon to implement the functionality, that’s where we are seeing that there’s a lot of great opportunities to reduce emissions and to make that software more energy efficient, more hardware efficient.

I think that’s where places like AI can really help out. Developer productivity has been the buzzword in this space for a very long time. Developers are extremely expensive. Getting to market fast and beating your competition is the name of the game these days. So it’s always been about how do we implement the functionality we need as fast as possible, make sure it’s secure, get it out the door. But oftentimes the only way you can do that is to increase the gap between the software and silicon and just make it a little bit more inefficient. I think AI can really help there. You can build AI solutions that can, there’s copilot solutions which can help as you’re developing code could actually suggest to you. If you were to write your code in a slightly different way, it could be more efficient. So that’s one way AI can help out.

Another way that I’m seeing AI utilized in this space as well is when you deploy … Silicon and the products that we produce can actually, they come out of the box configured in a certain way, but they can actually be tuned to actually execute that particular piece of software much more efficiently. So if you have a data center running just one type of software, you can actually tune the hardware so that software is run more efficiently on that hardware. We’re seeing AI solutions come on the market these days, which can then automatically just figure out what type of application are you, how do you run, how do you work? We have a solution called Granulate, which does part of this as well. It can then figure out how do you tune the underlying hardware in such a way so it executes that software more efficiently. So I think that’s kind of a couple of ways that this technology could actually be used to make software itself greener.

Laurel: To bridge that gap between software and silicon, you must be able to measure the progress and meet targets. So what parameters do you use to measure the energy efficiency of software? Could you talk us through the tenets of actually measuring?

Asim: So measuring is an extremely challenging problem. When we first launched the Green Software Foundation three years ago, I remember asking all the members, what is your biggest pain point? They all came back, almost all came back with measuring. Measuring is very, very challenging. It’s so nuanced, there’s so many different levels to it. For instance, at Intel, we have technology in our chips to actually measure the energy of the whole chip. Those counters on the chip which measure it. Unfortunately, that only gives you the energy of the entire chip itself. So it does give you a measurement, but then if you are a developer, there’s maybe 10 processes running on that chip and only one of them is yours. You need to know how much energy is your process consuming because that’s what you can optimize for. That’s what you can see. Currently, the best way to measure at that level is using models, models which are either generated again through AI or through other processes where you can effectively just run lots large amounts of data and generate statistical models.

Oftentimes a model that’s used is one that uses CPU [central processing unit] utilization, so how busy a CPU is and translate that into energy. So you can see my process is consuming 10% of the CPU. There are models out there that can convert that into energy, but again, all models are wrong, some models are useful. So there’s always so much nuance to this whole space as well, because how have you tweaked your computer? What else is running on your computer? It can also affect how those numbers are measured. So, unfortunately, this is a very, very challenging area.

But this is really the really big area that a lot of people are trying to resolve right now. We are not at the perfect solution, but we are way, way better than we were three, four or five years ago. It’s actually a very exciting time for measurement in this space.

Laurel: Well, and I guess part of it is that green software seems to be developed with greater scrutiny and higher quality controls to ensure that the product actually meets these standards to reduce emissions. Measurement is part of that, right? So what are some of the rewards beyond emissions reduction or meeting green goals of developing software? You kind of touched on that earlier with the carbon efficiency as well as hardware efficiency.

Asim: Yeah, so this is something I used to think about a lot because the term green has a lot associated with it. I mean, oftentimes when people historically have used the word green, you can have the main product or the green version of the product. There’s an idea in your mind that the green version is somehow less than, it’s somehow not as good. But actually in the software space it’s so interesting because the exact opposite. Being green in the software space means being more efficient, which translates almost always to being faster. When you factor in the hardware efficiency component, oftentimes it translates to building software that is more resilient, more fault-tolerant. Oftentimes it also translates then into being cheaper. So actually green has a lot of positive associations with it already.

Laurel: So in that vein, how can external standards help provide guidance for building software and solutions? I mean, obviously, there’s a need to create something like the Green Software Foundation, and with the focus that most enterprises have now on environmental, social, and governance goals or ESG, companies are now looking more and more to build those ideas into their everyday workflow. So how do regulations help and not necessarily hinder this kind of progress?

Asim: So standards are very, very important in this space. Standards, I mean, one of the things, again, when we look to the ecosystem about three, four years ago, the biggest problem the enterprises had, I mean a lot of them were very interested in green software, but the biggest problem they had was what do they trust? What can I trust? Whose advice should I take? That’s where standards come in. That’s where standards are most important. Standards are, at least the way we develop standards inside the Green Software Foundation, they’re done via consensus. There are like 60 member organizations. So when you see a standard that’s been created by that many people and that many people have been involved with it, it really builds up that trust. So now you know what to do. Those standards give you that compass direction to tell you which direction to go in and that you can trust.

There’s several standards that we’ve been focusing on in the Green Software Foundation, one’s called the SEI, which is a software carbon intensity specification. Again, to prove it as an ISO standard, you have to reach consensus through 196 countries. So then you get even more trust into a standard so you can use it. So standards really help to build up that trust, which organizations can use to help guide them in the directions to take. There’s a couple of other standards that are really coming up in the foundation that I think are quite interesting. One is called Real-Time Cloud. One of the challenges right now is, and again always comes back to measurement, it always always comes back to measurement. Right now measurement is very discreet, it happens oftentimes just a few times a year. Oftentimes when you get measurement data, it is very delayed. So one of the specs that’s been worked on right now is called Real-Time Cloud.

It’s trying to ask the question, is it possible? Is it possible to get data that is real-time? Oftentimes when you want to react and change behaviors, you need real-time data. If you want data so that when somebody does something, they know instantly the impact of that action so they can make adjustments instantly. If they’re having to wait three months, that behavior change might not happen. Real-time [data] is oftentimes at log aheads with regulations because oftentimes you have to get your data audited and auditing data that’s real-time is very, very challenging. So one of the questions we’re trying to ask is, is it possible to have data which is real-time, which then over the course of a year, you can imagine it just aggregates up over the course of a year. Can that aggregation then provide enough trust so that an auditor can then say, actually, we now trust this information and we will allow that to be used in regulatory reporting.

That’s something that we’re very excited about because you really need real-time data to drive behavior change. If there’s anything we really need to do is to drive that behavior change, we need to drive behavior change so people actually invest their time on making software more energy efficient, more hardware efficient, or more carbon aware. So that’s some of the ways where standards are really helping in this space.

Laurel: I think it’s really helpful to talk about standards and how they are so ingrained with software development in general because there are so many misconceptions about sustainability. So what are some of the other misconceptions that people kind of get stuck on, maybe that even calling it green, right? Are there philosophies or strategies that you can caution against or you try to advocate for?

Asim: So as a couple of things I talk about, so one of the things I talk about is it does take everybody, I mean, I remember very early on when I was talking in this space, oftentimes a conversation went, oh, don’t bother talking to that person or don’t talk to this sector of developers, don’t talk to that type of developers. Only talk to these people, these people who have the most influence to make the kind of changes to make software greener. But it really takes a cultural change. This is what’s very important, really takes a cultural change inside an organization. It takes everybody. You can’t really talk to one slice of the developer ecosystem. You need to talk to everybody. Every single developer or engineer inside an organization really needs to take this on board. So that’s one of the things I say is that you have to speak to every single person. You cannot just speak to one set of people and exclude another set of people.

Another challenge that I often see is that people, when they talk about this space, one of the misconceptions they talk about is they rank where effort should be spent in terms of the carbon slice of the pie that it is responsible for and I’ll talk about this in general. But really how you should be focusing is you should be focusing not on the slice of the pie, but on the ability to decarbonize that slice of the pie. That’s why green software is so interesting and that’s why it’s such a great place to spend effort and time. It might not be, I mean it is, depending on which academic paper you look at, it can be between 2 to 4% of global emissions. So some people might say, well, that’s not really worth spending the time in.

But my argument is actually the ability for us to decarbonize that 2 to 4% is far easier than our ability to decarbonize other sectors like airlines or concrete or these other sectors. We know what we need to do oftentimes in the software space, we know the choices. There doesn’t need to be new technology made, there just needs to be decisions made to prioritize this work. That’s something I think is very, very important. We should rank everything in terms of our ability to decarbonize the ease of decarbonization and then work on the topmost item first down, rather than just looking at things in just terms of tons of carbon, which I think leads to wrong decision making.

Laurel: Well, I think you’re laying out a really good argument because green initiatives, they can be daunting, especially for large enterprises looking to meet those decarbonization thresholds within the next decade. For those companies that are making the investment into this, how should they begin? Where are the fundamental things just to be aware of when you’re starting this journey?

Asim: So the first step is, I would say training. What we’re describing here in terms of, especially in terms of the green software space, it’s a very new movement. It’s a very new field of computing. So a lot of the terms that I talk about are just not well understood and a lot of the reasons for those terms are not well understood as well. So the number one thing I always say is you need to focus on training. There’s loads of training out there. The Green Software Foundation’s got some training, learn.GreenSoftware.Foundation, it’s just two hours, it’s free. We send that over to anybody who’s starting in this space just to understand the language, the terminology, just to get everybody on the same page. That is usually a very good start. Now in terms of how do you motivate inside, I think about this a lot.

If you’re the lead of an organization and you want to make a change, how do you actually make that change? I’m a big, big believer in trusting your team, trusting your people. If you give engineers a problem, they will find a solution to that problem. But what they oftentimes need is permission, a thumbs up from leadership that this is a priority. So that’s why it’s very important for organizations to be very public about their commitments, make public commitments. Same way Intel has made public commitments. Be very vocal as a leader inside your organization and be very clear that this is a priority for you, that you will listen to people and to teams who bring you solutions in this space.

You will find that people within your organization are already thinking about this space, already have ideas, already probably have decks ready to present to you. Just create an environment where they feel capable of presenting it to you. I guarantee you, your solutions are already within your organization and already within the minds of your employees.

Laurel: Well, that is all very inspiring and interesting and so exciting. So when you think about the next three to five years in green software development and adoption, what are you looking forward to the most? What excites you?

Asim: I think I’m very excited right now, to be honest with you. I look back, I look back five years ago the very, very early days, first looked at this, and I still remember if there was one article, one mentioning green software, we would all lose our heads. We’d get so excited about it, we’d share it, we’d pour over it. Now I’m inundated with information. This movement has grown significantly. There are so many organizations that are deeply interested in this space. There’s so much research, so much academic research.

I have so many articles coming my way every single week. I do not have time to read them. So that gives me just a lot of hope for the future. That really excites me. I might just be because I’m at this kind of cutting edge of this space, so I see a lot of this stuff before anybody else, but I see a huge amount of interest and I see also a huge amount of activity as well. I see a lot of people working on solutions, not just talking about problems, but working on solutions to those problems. That honestly just excites me. I don’t know where we’re going to end up in five years time, but if this is our growth so far, I think we’re going to end up in a very good place.

Laurel: Oh, that’s excellent. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Business Lab.

Asim: Thank you very much for having me.

Laurel: That was Asim Hussain, the director of the Office of Green Software and Ecosystems at Intel, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review.

That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Laurel Ruma. I’m the director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can also find us in print on the web and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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Dec 15 2023
The two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in the early morning hours, and the meetings ended a day past their scheduled conclusion (as these things tend to). 

If you’ve tuned out news from the summit, I don’t really blame you. The quibbles over wording—“urges” vs. “notes” vs. “emphasizes”—can all start to sound like noise. But these talks are the biggest climate event of the year, and there are some details that are worth paying attention to. 

We’ve seen agreements on methane and renewables, and big progress on an international finance deal. And, of course, there was the high-profile fight about fossil fuels. As negotiators wrap up and start their treks home, let’s take a beat to sort through what happened at COP28 and why all these political fights matter for climate action.

What’s the point of these meetings anyway? 

The UN Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings are an annual chance for negotiators from nearly 200 nations to set goals and make plans to address climate change. 

You might be familiar with the outcome of one of these meetings: eight years ago COP21 gave us the Paris Agreement, the international treaty that set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) over preindustrial levels.

This year’s meeting comes at a crucial time for the Paris Agreement. Part of that treaty requires the world to put together a progress report on climate change, called the global stocktake. It’s supposed to happen every five years, and the first one was scheduled to finish up at this year’s COP. 

What were the big agreements from the meetings? 

1. On the first day of the talks, there was a big announcement about a loss and damage fund. This is money that richer nations put into a pool to help pay for damages caused by climate change in more vulnerable nations. 

You may remember that the creation of this fund was a major topic at last year’s COP27 in Egypt. The urgency was spurred by a collection of climate disasters, including particularly devastating floods in Pakistan in August 2022. 

Now there’s some money going into the account: at least $700 million pledged by wealthy nations.

There are some caveats, of course. The agreement is still short on details, missing anything like financial targets or rules about how nations will put money in. In fact, there’s currently no requirement for wealthy nations to contribute at all, and the pledged money is a fraction of what many scientists say is really needed to pay for the damage caused by climate change. (Some estimates put that number at $100 billion annually.)

2. Over 100 countries pledged to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030. In addition, the US and 20 other countries signed a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. 

3. Finally, 50 oil and gas companies pledged to virtually eliminate methane leaks from their operations by 2030. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and plugging up accidental leaks from oil and gas production is seen as an easy way to cut climate pollution. 

The companies that signed this pledge, which included ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, represent 40% of global production. 

Some analysts have pointed out that the pledge will have a pretty limited effect. Most human-caused methane emissions come from agriculture, after all. And accidental methane emissions aren’t the biggest problem fossil-fuel companies cause, by a long shot. The majority of emissions from fossil-fuel companies isn’t from their operations but from their products.

What was holding things up? 

In two words: fossil fuels. 

I wrote in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago about how fossil fuels were going to loom large over these talks, not least because they’re being hosted in the UAE, a nation whose wealth relies heavily on them. The leader of the talks (and head of the UAE’s national oil company) has lived up to that prediction, questioning the scientific reasoning behind the calls to eliminate fossil fuels. 

As delegates worked to put the final agreement together, a sticking point in the debate was how fossil fuels would be represented. Earlier versions of the draft text called for phasing them out. But many nations, including the UAE, objected to this sort of language. And these meetings run by consensus: everybody has to sign off on the final agreement. 

So in the final version, the language was watered down. The pivotal paragraph now calls on parties to take a series of actions, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”  

In a way, this bit is a win, since it’s the first COP agreement that even mentions fossil fuels by name. (The bar is truly on the floor.) 

Ultimately, the exact wording of a COP agreement probably won’t be the thing to spur anybody into real action. Rather, the state of the world’s attitude toward climate change is reflected in this agreement: there’s a growing acknowledgement that something needs to change in our relationship with fossil fuels. But there’s not a wide enough consensus yet on the speed of that change, or what that relationship should look like as we pursue ambitious climate goals. 

Maybe next year. 

Another thing

The carbon removal industry is starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s headed in the wrong direction. 

There’s a growing signal that the world may have to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to limit global warming. But in a new essay, two former US Department of Energy staffers argue that the emergence of a for-profit sector could actually spell danger for the technology’s ability to help meaningfully address climate change. 

Get all the details in the latest story from my colleague James Temple.

Keeping up with climate  

Silicon powder could be the key to longer EV range and faster charging. Battery giant Panasonic will use silicon material from US-based startup Sila to build new EV batteries. (Wired)

→ Sila’s material debuted in a much smaller product in 2021. (MIT Technology Review)

Not the potatoes! Heavy rains have been bad news for European potato harvesting, sending prices soaring. Thanks, climate change. (Bloomberg)

Repairing EV batteries can be dangerous and difficult. But some mechanics want to do it anyway to save customers money and keep older EVs on the roads. (Grist)

This startup wants to sprinkle rock dust over farmland for carbon removal. (Wired)

Public (non-Tesla) EV chargers in the US can be unreliable, to put it lightly. Here’s how $7.5 billion in federal funding aims to change that. (Canary Media) 

Two- and three-wheelers are going electric in nations across Asia and Africa. And these small vehicles are having a big impact, making up the majority of reduction in oil demand as transportation goes electric. (New York Times)

→ Gogoro is building a massive network of battery-swappable electric scooters. (MIT Technology Review)

Animal agriculture is a big contributor to climate change, but convincing meat eaters to cut back isn’t easy. If you want to get more people to eat plant-based foods, don’t call them “plant-based.” Much less “vegan.” (Washington Post)

There was one permitted offshore wind farm in progress in the US Great Lakes. Now, the project is on hold. (Inside Climate News)

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Dec 13 2023
Two former Department of Energy staffers warn we’re doing carbon removal all wrong

The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s already headed in the wrong direction. Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry’s focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull the planet back from dangerous levels of warming.

Numerous studies have found that the world may have to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year by around mid-century to keep global warming in check. These findings have spawned significant investments into startups developing carbon-sucking direct air-capture factories, and companies striving to harness the greenhouse gas-trapping potential of plants, minerals, and the oceans. 

But a fundamental challenge is that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) isn’t a product that any person or company “needs,” in the traditional market sense. Rather, carrying it out provides a collective societal good, in the way that waste management does, only with larger global stakes. To date, it’s largely been funded by companies that are voluntarily paying for it as a form of corporate climate action, in the face of rising investor, customer, employee or regulatory pressures. That includes purchases of future removal through the $1 billion Frontier effort, started by Stripe and other companies.

There’s also some growing government support, including in the US, which is funding carbon removal projects, offering a comparatively small amount of money to companies that provide the service and subsidizing those that store away carbon dioxide. 

But in a lengthy and pointed essay published in the new Carbon Management journal on Tuesday, researchers Emily Grubert and Shuchi Talati argue there are rising dangers for the field. Both previously worked for the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which drove several of the recent US efforts to develop the industry.

They write that the emergence of a for-profit, growth-focused carbon removal sector selling a carbon removal product, instead of a publicly funded and coordinated effort more akin to waste management, “presents grave risks for the ability of CDR to enable net zero and net negative targets in general,” including keeping or pulling the planet back to 1.5 C of warming. 

“If we missallocate our limited CDR resources and end up not having access to the capacity that can help meet the needs we really have, climatically, that’s a problem,” says Grubert, now an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame. “It means we’re never going to get there.”

One of their main concerns is that corporations have come to see carbon removal as a relatively simple and reliable way of canceling out ongoing climate pollution that they have other ways of cleaning up directly, which the authors refer to as “luxury” removals. The emergence of this market effectively grants a larger share of the world’s carbon removal capacity to profitable companies in rich nations, rather than reserving it for higher priority public goods, including: allowing developing nations more time to reduce emissions; balancing out emissions from sectors we still don’t have ways of cleaning up, like agriculture; and drawing down historic emissions enough to bring global temperatures to safer levels.

“You really need to save it for the stuff you can’t eliminate, not just the stuff that’s expensive to eliminate,” Grubert says. 

That means using carbon removal to address things like the emissions from the fertilizer used to feed populations in poor parts of the world, not for avoiding the hassle and expense of retrofitting a cement plant, she adds.

“CDR cannot succeed at restorative and reparative goals if it is controlled by the same forces that created the problems it is trying to solve,” write Grubert and Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering.

There is evidence that some companies have come to perceive carbon removal in the way that the authors describe. 

Earlier this year, Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of the oil and gas company Occidental, which recently acquired a direct-air capture company, told the audience at an energy conference: “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

Part of the problem, the authors note, is that carbon removal is seen as  “unconstrained,” easily scaled to meet industry goals and climate needs. But in fact, it’s hard and expensive to do it reliably. Direct air-capture machines, for instance, require a lot of land and resources to build and a lot of energy to run, Talati says. That limits how big the sector can become and complicates the question of how much good the facilities do.

Last week, the Global Carbon Project reported that the world’s technology-based carbon removal only sucked down about 10,000 tons this year, “significantly less than one-millionth of our fossil-fuel emissions,” as MIT Technology Review reported.

Other means of carbon removal may be cheaper and more scalable, particularly methods that harness nature to do the job. But some of these approaches, including adding minerals to or sinking biomass in the oceans, also raise concerns about environmental side-effects or create added difficulties in certifying the climate benefits.

Grubert and Talatai fear that growing market pressures, including the demand for high volumes of low cost carbon removal, could undermine the quality of the measuring, reporting and verification of such efforts over time. They add that the carbon removal market may simply replicate many of the problems in the traditional carbon offsets space, where researchers have found that efforts to plant trees or prevent deforestation often substantially exaggerate the amount of additional carbon trapped.

Ultimately, the authors argue that the global task of drawing down billions of tons of carbon dioxide should largely be a publicly funded, owned and managed enterprise, if we hope to achieve the global, common good of stabilizing and repairing the climate.

“There’s a role for the private sector, but our argument is that a purely profit-driven industry that’s currently operating with very little governance is going to go badly,” Talati says. “If we want to see this succeed, we can’t count on the self-governance of corporations, which we’ve seen fail over and over again, across every industry. The role of the public sector needs to be broadened and deepened.”

Stripe didn’t respond to an inquiry before press time. But executives there have argued that Frontier is marshaling corporate funds and expertise to help build up an essential industry that will be needed to combat the dangers of climate change, enabling startups to move ahead with early demonstration projects and to test a variety of approaches to carbon removal. Major investors in the space have also said that rising demand among corporations is helping to drive forward innovation and growth in the field. 

A spokesman for Heirloom, which is part of a team that recently secured Department of Energy funds to move ahead with a major direct-air capture project in Louisiana, said it recognizes some of the risks that the authors raise and has taken steps to address them by committing to follow a clear set of corporate principles: “We believe decarbonization should be the #1 goal of climate mitigation, and CDR should be used for residual and legacy emissions. We feel strongly that CDR is not used as a fig leaf for emitting industries.”

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Dec 10 2023
How carbon removal technology is like a time machine

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

If you could go back in time, what would you change about your life, or the world?

The idea of giving myself some much-needed advice is appealing (don’t cut your own bangs in high school, seriously). But we can think bigger. What about winding the clock back on the emissions that cause climate change? 

By burning fossil fuels, we’ve released greenhouse gases by the gigaton. There’s a lot we can (and need to) do to slow and eventually stop these planet-warming emissions. But carbon removal technology has a different promise: turning the clock back. 

Well, sort of. Carbon removal can’t literally take us back in time. But this time-machine analogy for thinking about carbon removal—specifically when it comes to the scale that will be needed to make a significant dent in our emissions—is a favorite of climate scientist David Ho, who I spoke to for my latest story. So for the newsletter this week, let’s consider what it might take for carbon removal to take us back far enough in time to reverse our mistakes (emissions-related ones, anyway). 

The world is on track to hit a new record for carbon dioxide emissions due to fossil fuels, with the global total expected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons this year, according to the newest edition of the Global Carbon Budget Report.

For the first time this year, the report included another total: how much carbon dioxide was sucked out of the atmosphere by carbon removal technologies. In 2023, carbon removal is expected to total around 10,000 metric tons. 

That’s obviously a lot less, but exactly how much less can be hard to grasp, as Ho points out. “I think humans (myself included) have a hard time with orders of magnitude, like the difference between thousands, millions, and billions,” he told me in an email. 

One solution Ho has come up with is putting things in terms of time. It’s something we intuitively have a handle on, which can make big numbers easier to understand. A thousand seconds is around 17 minutes. A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. 

Since time is a bit easier to grasp, when Ho talks about carbon removal, he often invokes the idea of a time machine. “My goal is to help people appreciate the scale of the problem, and put ‘solutions’ into context,” he says. 

Imagine all carbon removal technology as one big time machine, winding the clock back on emissions. If the world is emitting just under 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year, how far back in time could this year’s total carbon removal take us? Right now, the answer is somewhere around 10 seconds. 

We eventually need to reach net-zero emissions if we’re going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. And it’s pretty clear that 10 seconds is a pretty far cry from being enough to zero out a year’s worth of emissions. There are two things we’d need to do for this time machine to be more effective: scale up carbon removal technology, and drastically scale back emissions. 

It’ll take time, and likely a lot of it, to get carbon removal technology to a point where it’s a more effective time machine. There are technical, logistical, and economic challenges to figure out. And early projects, like the Climeworks direct-air-capture plant in Iceland, are still getting their footing.

“It’s going to take many years to make significant progress, so we should start now,” Ho says. And while we figure all that out, it’s a good time to focus on decarbonization, he adds. Slashing our emissions is possible with tools we already have on the table. Doing so will make it a bit more feasible for carbon removal technologies to eventually play a significant role in cleaning up our emissions. 

If you’re curious to learn more, including how big a dent larger projects might make, check out David Ho’s article from earlier this year in Nature. You can also take a look back at some of our recent coverage of carbon removal below. 

Related reading

Carbon removal tech is vacuuming up significantly less than one-millionth of our fossil-fuel emissions. Get all the details in my latest story.

Startup Climeworks has been one of the major actors in putting direct air capture on the map. We put the company on our list of 15 businesses to watch in climate tech this year.

The US Department of Energy is committing big money to carbon removal. Earlier this year, the agency announced over $1 billion in funding for the technology, as my colleague James Temple covered.

Another thing

Around a decade ago, a huge wave of startups working on energy and climate-related technologies failed. This surge and crash in what’s often called cleantech 1.0 holds many lessons for innovators today. 

Now, as interest and funding in climate and energy technology companies again is surging, what should we take away from the previous generation of startups? My colleague David Rotman took a careful look for his latest story. Give it a read!

Keeping up with climate  

The University of California system is basically done with carbon offsets. While paying to balance out your own emissions sounds like a good deal, there are a host of problems with the practice. (MIT Technology Review)

Generating an image using AI can require as much energy as fully charging a smartphone. Smaller models doing other tasks (like generating text) can be significantly less energy intensive. (MIT Technology Review)

COP28 is in full swing. Here’s a quick roundup of a few of the headlines that have caught my eye so far. (If you need a catch-up on what’s happening at the UN climate talks and why fossil fuels are center stage, check out my story from last week here.) 

  • The head of the conference has been criticized for his comments about fossil fuels. (Vox)
  • Over 20 countries pledged to triple the world’s nuclear energy by 2050. (Canary Media)
  • Nations committed over $400 million in funding to help vulnerable nations pay for climate damages. These are the first pledges to the loss and damage fund, created at last year’s talks. (NPR)

A rule change in California slashed the value of rooftop solar panels six months ago. New sales are (predictably) down since the change. (Canary Media)

The Salton Sea is a salt lake in California. It contains a fascinating ecosystem, and apparently a whole lot of lithium. There might be 18 million metric tons of the metal under the main lake, the equivalent of nearly 400 million EV batteries. (LA Times) 

Congress set aside $7.5 billion for EV chargers. But there hasn’t been a single one installed with the money yet. (Politico) 

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Dec 5 2023
Fossil-fuel emissions are over a million times greater than carbon removal efforts

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are on track to reach a record high by the end of 2023. And a new report shows just how insignificant technologies that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere are by comparison. 

Worldwide, those emissions are projected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, a 1.1% increase from 2022 levels, according to this year’s Global Carbon Budget Report, released today. As delegates gather in Dubai for this year’s UN climate summit, a record-setting year for emissions underscores the need to make dramatic changes, and quickly. 

“There has been great progress in reducing emissions in some countries—however, it just isn’t good enough. We’re drastically off course,” Mike O’Sullivan, a lecturer at the University of Exeter and one of the authors of the report, said via email. 

Europe’s emissions dropped around 7% from last year, while the US saw a 3% reduction. But overall, coal, oil, and natural-gas emissions are all still on the rise, and nations including India and China are still seeing emissions growth. Together, those two nations currently account for nearly 40% of global fossil-fuel emissions, though Western nations including the US are still the greatest historical emitters.

“What we want to see is fossil-fuel emissions decreasing, fast,” said David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a science advisor at Carbon Direct, a carbon management company, via email. 

However, one technology sometimes touted as a cure-all for the emissions problems has severe limitations, according to the new report: carbon dioxide removal. Carbon removal technologies suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere to prevent them from further warming the planet. The UN panel on climate change has called carbon removal an essential component of plans to reach international climate targets of keeping warming at less than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels. 

The problem is, there’s very little carbon dioxide removal taking place today. Direct air capture and other technological approaches collected and stored only around 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023. 

That means that, in total, emissions from fossil fuels were millions of times higher than carbon removal levels this year. That ratio shows that it’s “infeasible” for carbon removal technologies to balance out emissions, O’Sullivan says: “We cannot offset our way out of this problem.”

The report also had bad news about nature-based approaches. Efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere with methods like reforestation and afforestation (in other words, planting trees) accounted for more emissions removed from the atmosphere than their technological counterparts. However, even those efforts are still being canceled out by current rates of deforestation and other land-use changes.

“The only way to solve this crisis is with major changes to the fossil-fuel industry,” O’Sullivan says. Technologies like carbon removal “only become important if emissions are drastically cut as well.”

There are many tools available to start making more progress on emissions in the near term, as a UN climate report released earlier this year laid out: deploying renewables like wind and solar, preventing deforestation and cutting methane leaks, and increasing energy efficiency are all among the low-cost solutions that could cut emissions in half by 2030.  

Ultimately, carbon removal could also be part of the answer, but there’s a lot of work left to do, Ho says. Now is a good time to study and develop carbon removal technologies, figure out the risks and benefits of different approaches, and determine which ones can be scaled up while avoiding ecological and environmental-justice issues, he adds. 

None of that is likely to happen fast enough to achieve the progress needed on emissions cuts this decade. In the Global Carbon Budget report, researchers estimate how close we are to sailing past climate limits. The researchers estimate that there’s about 275 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide left to emit before we exceed 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) of warming. At this rate, the world is on track to blow that budget within about seven years, around the end of the decade. 

“We have agency, and nothing is inevitable,” O’Sullivan says. “The world will change and is changing—we just need to speed up.”

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Dec 2 2023
The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets—and thinks you should, too

In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses. 

The researchers found next to nothing.

“We took a look across the whole market and did deeper dives into project types we thought were more promising,” says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, housed within UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, who led the effort. “And we came up almost empty.”

The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. In July, UC announced it would nearly eliminate the use of third-party offsets, charge each of its universities a carbon fee for ongoing pollution, and focus on directly cutting emissions across its campuses and health facilities. 

Now the researchers are sharing the lessons they learned over the course of the project, in the hopes of helping other universities and organizations consider what role, if any, offsets should play in sustainability strategies, MIT Technology Review can report. On November 30, they will launch a website highlighting the array of problems they found, the strict standards they helped set for UC’s offset purchases, and the methods they developed for scrutinizing projects in voluntary carbon markets. 

The University of California is a huge and influential public research system encompassing three national labs and 10 campuses, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UCLA. Its commitment to replacing natural gas plants and other polluting infrastructure across the state highlights a model that other universities, organizations, and even cities could and should follow, says Holly Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo. And the fact that it has taken such a strong stance on offsets marks another blow to battered carbon markets.

The basic promise of offsets is that individuals or organizations can balance out their own greenhouse gas pollution by paying others to grow trees, halt logging, or take other steps that may reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But a mounting body of studies and investigative reports has found that these projects can dramatically exaggerate the climate benefits in a variety of ways, often amounting to little more than greenwashing. 

The growing criticism is taking a toll. Recent data shows that demand for offsets is falling, as are prices for future contracts, a commitment to buy offsets at a set price at a later date, as some companies rethink their reliance on them. But many corporations and nations alike continue to bank heavily on the promise of offsets. Indeed, the subject will be a hot point of debate at the COP28 climate conference that kicks off November 30 in Dubai, where national negotiators will haggle over the standards for a UN-run global carbon trading market.

Haya, who has highlighted issues with offsets for two decades, says she sees three main takeaways from the research project, which she lists in order of priority: Don’t buy carbon offsets; focus on cutting emissions instead. If you must use offsets, create your own. If you can’t create your own, scrutinize the options in the marketplace very carefully and commit to only buy trustworthy ones.

But that third option “is a hard path to take,” she says, “just because of the poor quality on the market today.”

Direct cuts

In 2013, the University of California pledged to achieve carbon neutrality across its campuses and health centers within 12 years by shifting to emissions-free vehicles, building renewables projects, and undertaking similar efforts. But reaching that goal would have also required significant purchases of offsets through carbon markets. 

Students, faculty, and campus budget officers raised concerns about the institution’s plan to rely on and invest so heavily in such an unreliable climate tool. In response, the UC’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative set up the UC Carbon Abatement Committee, which worked with staff, students, and faculty from each campus to establish the institution’s purchasing standards and to identify the types of projects that could meet them. The initiative also provided funding for a dedicated research effort, led by Haya, exploring these questions.

But finding projects that met even the basic standards of reliability proved so difficult that the researchers ultimately drew a larger lesson from the work, says Camille Kirk, who was previously the director of sustainability at UC Davis and co-directed the research effort along with staff at the UC Office of the President.

“You can’t buy your way out of this,” says Kirk, now head of sustainability at the 

J. Paul Getty Trust, one of the world’s richest arts institutions. “Ultimately, it’s just better if you invest in yourself, invest in your infrastructure, and do the direct work on decarbonization.” 

That philosophy is, more or less, what’s now playing out across the UC system.

Based on the Carbon Abatement Committee’s findings, increasingly pointed criticisms of offsets, and tightening California climate targets for state agencies, UC ultimately opted to rewrite its sustainability plan. 

This summer, the university system dropped its 2025 target, after concluding it would have needed to use offsets to address more than 50% of its emissions reductions. Those purchases would have cost the system $20 million to $30 million annually.

“We were not able to get to a point where we had enough confidence that we could procure the volume of offsets we would require to meet our goal, with offsets that would meet our minimum quality requirements,” says Matt St.Clair, the UC Office of the President’s chief sustainability officer.

UC’s goal now is to clean up its carbon footprint by 2045, almost entirely by directly cutting emissions. The system’s updated policy on sustainable practices notes that every campus will now need to charge itself a $25 carbon fee for every ton of ongoing carbon pollution.

That money must be used to cut greenhouse gas pollution, or to support climate justice or community benefits programs. The carbon price will tick up by 5% each year starting in 2026.

The University of California says it has already cut carbon pollution 30% below 2009 levels, through energy efficiency improvements, the construction of more than 100 on-campus solar projects, and similar steps. It has also set up its own utility to purchase clean electricity from solar, wind, and hydroelectric projects.

Funds from the carbon fee will be used to accelerate these efforts, with a particular focus on replacing on-campus natural gas turbines, which produce 80% of the system’s emissions.

Under UC’s revised plan, offsets can only account for up to 10% of the total reductions by 2045. In addition, any projects must adhere to the strict criteria the committee developed, and they must remove carbon from the atmosphere rather than simply prevent emissions.

One way the university system has opted to control quality is to develop its own offset projects, enabling it to direct university funds to faculty and students while ensuring greater confidence that the projects would meet the institution’s standards and values. Indeed, another goal of the Carbon Abatement Committee was to help kick-start UC-initiated projects, in part to explore and test new approaches. 

In March 2019, UC issued a request for ideas to students and researchers across its campuses. It received 80 proposals and has since provided pilot funding for 12 projects, including: a UC Santa Barbara effort to provide households in rural Rwanda with cookstoves that are cleaner and more efficient than their standard means of cooking, potentially cutting greenhouse gas and indoor air pollution; a UC Davis project designed to reduce methane emissions from rice farming in California’s Central Valley by draining the fields at certain points; and a UCLA effort to convert carbon dioxide captured from power plants or industrial facilities in concrete.

As an outside observer, the University at Buffalo’s Buck says she’s eager to see the results from these pilot projects, noting that rigorous, peer-reviewed studies of such efforts could help improve the field’s understanding of what works.

“It’s pretty well demonstrated that the open market approach isn’t generating that knowledge,” she adds.

Carefully vet

But not every organization has the reach and resources to build its own projects, and even UC may not be able to clean up all its lingering emissions through such efforts.

In its effort to identify more reliable project types, the UC research group formalized an approach that it calls “over/under crediting analyses.”

Here’s how it works: Methods for estimating climate benefits of projects will sometimes exaggerate and sometimes discount them. In practice, though, it’s far more often the former—and there are a common set of ways in which the problems frequently arise.

Take forestry offsets. Researchers have shown that the methods for awarding carbon credits often overestimate the levels of logging that would have occurred without the programs, as when conservation groups earn and sell carbon credits for preventing logging in forests they’ve already pledged to preserve.

Programs can also discount the degree to which a timber company may increase harvesting to make up for the supply-demand gaps when another landowner commits to halting logging for carbon credits. Or added carbon gains may simply not last long enough to matter much from a climate perspective, as when wildfires blaze through project areas.

The UC Berkeley group analyzes offset project types with those known problems and others in mind, then strives to calculate whether the offset program’s methods will undercount actual carbon benefits enough to more than make up for any likely overcounting. If the projects pass that test, the results must then be reviewed by at least two independent researchers or go through a formal peer review process at a scientific journal.

In September the largest certifier of carbon offsets, Verra, provided a point-by-point response to a related study by Haya and colleagues that found four of its most widely used methods for forestry offsets dramatically overestimated the carbon benefits.

Verra stressed that it has spent the last two years updating its methods in ways that address most of the concerns and recommendations. The organization added it is committed to transparency and welcomes academic scrutiny. 

Passing the test

If offsets are so often so bad, why bother with them at all? Why would UC even use them to address up to 10% of its climate pollution in the end?

One argument is that some sources of emissions will continue to be difficult to eliminate directly for a long time to come, like those from air travel and cattle digestion. Offsets may create a mechanism for funding projects that do counteract such pollution, and even provide other important societal or ecological benefits, when they are done right.

Take the example of cookstoves. Using the under/over analysis, UC Berkeley researchers found the existing methods for evaluating the impact of giving households cleaner cooking devices exaggerate the climate benefits between six and nine times, on average. But they also noted that if the programs are carried out carefully, with conservative assumptions and stoves that run on very low polluting fuels, they could both cut greenhouse gas emissions and help save some of the millions of people who die annually from household air pollution.

Haya hopes their work will encourage organizations that manage offsets programs and the regulators who oversee them to embrace the sorts of assessment methods they have developed. After all, amid the widening criticisms it’s imperative that these groups transform their approach if they hope to restore faith in the market, she says.

But given the long track record of problems, she argues, it’s better at this point for universities and other potential buyers to spend their money on cutting emissions instead—and to think of purchasing offsets as an act of charity that might do some added good in the world.

“See it as a donation, as a contribution, but not as a quantified, certified ton of emissions reductions,” she says. “We need to move away from the whole idea of offsetting. You can’t fly and drive and burn fossil fuels, and then pay someone else to do something and say you didn’t have an impact.”

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