Decarbonization as a Service

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.

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

Net zero has gone viral. Everyone is announcing their net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets, from Saudi Arabia to Australia. By the final day of COP26—the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow in 2021—more than 130 countries had made net-zero pledges of one kind or another, representing about 70 percent of the world’s ... See more

Companies large and small have begun to build “platforms” that promise to help organizations meet their net-zero promises. These platforms claim to be able to deliver “decarbonization-as-a-service” through the use of digital technologies that effectively track carbon. They are racing ahead of law and policy and performing de facto governance, creat... 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?

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

Under such an arrangement, countries are free to continue burning fossil fuels, so long as they offset their emissions. For this reason, many climate advocates have been critical of net zero as a goal. One common critique is that net-zero pledges won’t stop the continued extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Further, they’re aimed at a future ... 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.

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.