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.

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.

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.

Established “Big Four” accounting firms like KPMG and Deloitte, as well as tech giants like Salesforce, are creating tools for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) accounting that help measure the carbon footprint of firms, among other things. Some companies combine carbon measurement with a portal for purchasing offsets, such as the Atlanta... 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

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?

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.

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

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

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