Climate

The IPCC to humanity: We can’t wait for carbon dioxide removal to save us

The latest climate report, dubbed an “atlas of human suffering,” also warns that we need to cut carbon with the tools we have rather than waiting for a silver bullet.

Sign that says "There is no Planet B"

The IPCC's report shows we need to act right now.

Photo: Markus Spiske/Unsplash

Do you like having a habitable climate? If so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a few tips on how to keep it that way.

The world’s leading body of climate scientists dropped its latest report on Monday. There’s no shortage of bad news in it, including the fact that current climate policies could still result in up to nearly 30% of all species being wiped off the face of the Earth, and up to $12.7 trillion (yes, that’s a T) in coastal assets is at risk of inundation by the end of this century under a middle-of-the-road scenario. As your friendly climate correspondent, I would normally keep going down that road. But not today, Satan.

Instead, I want to talk about the good parts of the IPCC. Well, “good.” The report shows that we still have a choice to address climate change. Importantly, it lays out that we also have the technology needed right now — and that if we wait for some silver bullet that venture capital is increasingly investing in, we could face serious harm.

This iteration of the IPCC focuses on how to adapt our entire world for a new climate. That includes the energy system. It finds that we can not just reduce the impacts of climate change by investing in renewable and decentralized energy systems by cutting carbon pollution, but we can also reduce society’s vulnerability to climate change.

There are already myriad examples to point to, from Puerto Ricans with rooftop solar who had power after Hurricane Maria to some Tesla owners using their cars to stay warm during last year’s Texas blackouts. (Both those disasters also show the vulnerabilities of a fossil fuel-powered grid.) These types of distributed power systems are just the tip of the iceberg. The IPCC also references microgrids, basically self-contained grids that can power neighborhoods, as another tool that can keep the lights on and reduce air pollution, particularly in disadvantaged communities.

These are not exactly splashy solutions, though no shade to solar panels. Instead, we’ve seen an increasing interest, particularly among venture capitalists, in carbon dioxide removal. The full 3,675-page report notes that all the scenarios the IPCC runs where we limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a target that’s crucial to the continued existence of small island states and millions of other people around the world — require some form of carbon dioxide removal to stabilize the climate. However, the report warns of “trade-offs” and the risk of maladaptation if we put too many eggs in the carbon removal basket.

There are lots of ways to suck carbon dioxide from the sky. Planting trees and growing kelp are some of the more natural ways to do it. Other options focus on new, unproven technologies that pull the climate pollutant from the air. While we need to figure out how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale, the report shows there are a few pitfalls.

Marc Benioff has pushed the idea of planting 1 trillion trees. I love forests as much as the next person — I was a freaking park ranger — but figuring out where to put those trees is a whole other story. Tree planting at the scale needed to reduce carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere could mean turning farmland into forests, which would have an impact on food security. If the past is any prologue, it’s not like the world has a great track record of ensuring burdens are shouldered equitably, meaning that a tree-planting program could fall on the Global South.

There are also questions on what exactly all those trees would look like; would it be a monocrop focused solely on sucking up carbon dioxide that kills local biodiversity? Would local communities get a say in what gets planted? These are big questions, ones the world needs to collectively answer before pursuing what’s essentially a planetary terraforming experiment.

Any kind of solution like that is years — if not decades — away. The report also shows we need to act right now, and that doing so with the technology we have will pay dividends by reducing the effects of climate change and improving resilience to the more violent weather already in the pipeline.

The real world offers a similar lesson. Oil and gas have become a central discussion as the world grapples with the Russian war against Ukraine. Europe is hooked on Russian gas, and sanctions against the petrostate have so far skirted the industry. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels isn’t just good for the climate; it can also help improve resiliency and curtail the power of Russia and other authoritarian states that have oil-dependent economies. As if we needed another reason to kick fossil fuels to the curb.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
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AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

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Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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