Decarbonization as a Service

We must build data infrastructures that embody multiple ways of knowing and understanding our world, and that help us advance both ecological and social ends, before corporations conquer this space for themselves.

Climate activists can help us avoid the trap of “platform determinism”—that is, the risk of fetishizing the platforms as mythically powerful actors, instead of centering the choices made by the humans who design the platforms. Such activists also bring expertise in movement building: they know how to put pressure on investors and companies, and how... See more

More broadly, public planetary data infrastructures would enable the inhabitants of Earth to know their world. Knowledge about one’s environment should be a basic human right. Imagine a world where you could know what’s in your air, what’s in your drinking water, what species are in the forest near you and how much carbon it’s storing, or what the ... See more

We need platforms that monitor our world for the sake of collective management of a shared commons—not platforms that measure our world for the sake of profiting from the data created from it, extracting value from the digital layer the same way that value is extracted from the mines, forests, and soils of our physical world.

Software is essential for facing the challenge of climate change. We need to build a computational infrastructure for tracking carbon. The impact of humans on ecosystems has been so deep and so complex that digital monitoring and modeling are essential for ecological repair. But right now, we are headed towards a world of proprietary platforms... See more

Getting to net zero matters, but how we get there is just as important. Put another way, different attempts to quantify carbon produce different kinds of social relations. Ceding unilateral control over these choices to corporate platforms—letting them decide which kinds of net-zero social relations to make—would be a significant mistake.

We wouldn’t just be entrusting the platforms with data, however. We would also be entrusting them to play a major role in the governance of ecosystems, with significant social consequences.

A final problem with a market-based system is that it turns the platforms themselves into black boxes. As profit-seeking enterprises, they must protect their algorithms and data, as otherwise their competitors might gain an advantage. But this opacity obstructs the learning and experimentation process that’s required to combat climate change.

If you were designing a net-zero platform with the goal of working towards full decarbonization, it would be a time-limited project. But that would be incompatible with market imperatives: nobody wants to start a business with an expiration date. This is why the companies running these platforms will have an incentive to encourage a version of net ... See more