Decarbonization as a Service

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.

Veritree is in its early days, but it hopes to become “an operating system for the restoration economy,” in Emsley’s words. An “Initial Tree Offering” was used to raise money for a “First Edition Forest,” which features trees in Madagascar, Indonesia, Nepal, Kenya, Senegal, and Haiti. The appeal for corporations hoping to make good on their net-zer... See more

The knowability of net zero can’t be taken for granted, then. All those policymakers and executives are making net-zero pledges without a clue for how to see them through. How can these pledges possibly be fulfilled? How can the knowledge problem of net zero be solved?

At the center of net zero is a knowledge problem: How do we know when we’ve gotten to net zero? Answering this question is surprisingly hard.

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.

Net zero is still a worthwhile transitional goal, because we don’t yet have all the technologies we need at scale for true climate repair. Climate change is a problem of stocks, not flows: we need not only to stop emitting carbon by switching to renewables, but to reduce the existing levels of carbon in our atmosphere. Net zero alone won’t get us t... 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

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.

The rise of a decarbonization-as-a-service sector may make it easier to commodify and exchange carbon. But what if it doesn’t actually help address climate change? There is always the risk that the platforms could be algorithmically flawed—that their software isn’t accurately quantifying emissions, whether positive or negative. But there are also d... See more