- 18 Jul, 2024

- 17 Jul, 2024

- 16 Jul, 2024

- 15 Jul, 2024

18 Jul, 2024

- Building supply chain resilience with AI

- The Download: Falcon 9’s future, and Big Tech’s climate goals

- Companies need to stop taking the easy way out on climate goals

- What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9

Artificial intelligence

Building supply chain resilience with AI

10:00AM, 18 Jul, 2024

If the last five years have taught businesses with complex supply chains anything, it is that resilience is crucial. In the first three months of the covid-19 pandemic, for example, supply-chain leader Amazon grew its business 44%. Its investments in supply chain resilience allowed it to deliver when its competitors could not, says Sanjeev Maddila, worldwide head of supply chain solutions at Amazon Web Services (AWS), increasing its market share and driving profits up 220%. A resilient supply chain ensures that a company can meet its customers’ needs despite inevitable disruption.

Today, businesses of all sizes must deliver to their customers against a backdrop of supply chain disruptions, with technological changes, shifting labor pools, geopolitics, and climate change adding new complexity and risk at a global scale. To succeed, they need to build resilient supply chains: fully digital operations that prioritize customers and their needs while establishing a fast, reliable, and sustainable delivery network.

The Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien, for example, operates two dozen manufacturing and processing facilities spread across the globe and nearly 2,000 retail stores in the Americas and Australia. To collect underutilized data from its industrial operations, and gain greater visibility into its supply chain, the company relies on a combination of cloud technology and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities.

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“A digital supply chain connects us from grower to manufacturer, providing visibility throughout the value chain,” says Adam Lorenz, senior director for strategic fleet and indirect procurement at Nutrien. This visibility is critical when it comes to navigating the company’s supply chain challenges, which include seasonal demands, weather dependencies, manufacturing capabilities, and product availability. The company requires real-time visibility into its fleets, for example, to identify the location of assets, see where products are moving, and determine inventory requirements.

Currently, Nutrien can locate a fertilizer or nutrient tank in a grower’s field and determine what Nutrien products are in it. By achieving that “real-time visibility” into a tank’s location and a customer’s immediate needs, Lorenz says the company “can forecast where assets are from a fill-level perspective and plan accordingly.” In turn, Nutrien can respond immediately to emerging customer needs, increasing company revenue while enhancing customer satisfaction, improving inventory management, and optimizing supply chain operations.

“For us, it’s about starting with data creation and then adding a layer of AI on top to really drive recommendations,” says Lorenz. In addition to improving product visibility and asset utilization, Lorenz says that Nutrien plans to add AI capabilities to its collaboration platforms that will make it easier for less-tech-savvy customers to take advantage of self-service capabilities and automation that accelerates processes and improves compliance with complex policies.

To meet and exceed customer expectations with differentiated service, speed, and reliability, all companies need to similarly modernize their supply chain operations. The key to doing so—and to increasing organizational resilience and sustainability—will be applying AI/ML to their extensive operational data in the cloud.

Resilience as a business differentiator

Like Nutrien, a wide variety of organizations from across industries are discovering the competitive advantages of modernizing their supply chains. A pharmaceutical company that aggregates its supply chain data for greater end-to-end visibility, for example, can provide better product tracking for critically ill customers. A retail startup undergoing meteoric growth can host its workloads in the cloud to support sudden upticks in demand while minimizing operating costs. And a transportation company can achieve inbound supply chain savings by evaluating the total distance its fleet travels to reduce mileage costs and CO2 emissions.

Download the full report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

The Download

The Download: Falcon 9’s future, and Big Tech’s climate goals

Rhiannon Williams   8:10AM, 18 Jul, 2024

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is one of the world’s safest, most productive rockets. But a rare engine malfunction on July 11 prompted the US Federal Aviation Administration to initiate an investigation and ground all Falcon 9 flights until further notice. The incident has exposed the risks of the US aerospace industry’s heavy reliance on the rocket.

The Falcon 9 has an unusually clean safety record. It’s been launched more than 300 times since its maiden voyage in 2010 and has rarely failed. But while its malfunction might seem surprising, anomalies are to be expected when it comes to rocket engines.

What exactly went wrong last week remains a mystery. Still, experts agree the event can’t be brushed off. Read the full story.

—Sarah Ward

Companies need to stop taking the easy way out on climate goals

Corporate climate claims can be confusing—and sometimes entirely unintuitive.

Tech giants Amazon and Google both recently released news about their efforts to clean up their climate impact. Both were a mixed bag, but one bit of news in particular stood out: Google’s emissions have gone up, and the company stopped claiming to be “net zero.”

Sounds bad, right? But in fact, one might argue that Google’s apparent backslide might actually represent progress for climate action. Read our story to learn why.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter covering all the latest developments in climate and energy tech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Meta won’t release multimodal AI models in Europe

It’s blaming the “unpredictable nature” of the European regulatory environment. (Axios)

+ The AI Act is done. Here’s what will (and won’t) change. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Spain is dependent on an algorithm to combat gender violence

Hundreds of women who were assessed by the software have since been killed by their current or former partners. (NYT $)

3 Russia and China are stirring online dissent in the wake of Trump’s shooting

State media sites seized the opportunity to blame the Democrats for the violence. (WP $)

+ X’s AI bot Grok is failing to report the attempted assassination accurately. (WSJ $)

4 This drug extended the lifespan of lab mice by close to 25%

The animals were stronger, healthier, and developed fewer cancers, too. (BBC)

+ These scientists are working to extend the life span of pet dogs—and their owners. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Synthetic speech firm ElevenLabs wants to detect deepfakes

A new partnership with detection company Reality Defender could help it do just that. (Bloomberg $)

+ Australia’s police union is pushing for a portal to report deepfakes. (The Guardian)

6 NASA is abandoning its mission to search for water on the moon

The much-delayed Viper program is too expensive, it’s concluded. (Bloomberg $)

+ Future space food could be made from astronaut breath. (MIT Technology Review)

7 A mobile forensics firm can’t unlock many modern iPhones

In fact, its success hinges on iPhones running software that’s almost five years old. (404 Media)

8 Space-based solar power is looking increasingly viable

It could be a 24/7 source of clean power in the future. (Wired $)

+ The race to get next-generation solar technology on the market. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Antarctica is the perfect place to look for alien life

Which is even more reason to protect it from melting. (The Atlantic $)

+ Climate change is making our days longer, too. (Vox)

10 Are you auramaxxing?

Predictably, this intense form of manifesting is big on TikTok. (NY Mag $)

Quote of the day

“The Blue Wall of tech is crumbling before our very eyes.”

—Ryan Selkis, CEO of crypto research firm Messari, remarks on how the traditionally left-leaning tech industry is changing its alliances to the Republicans ahead of November’s Presidential election, Vox reports.

The big story

After 25 years of hype, embryonic stem cells are still waiting for their moment

August 2023

In 1998, researchers isolated powerful stem cells from human embryos. It was a breakthrough, since these cells are the starting point for human bodies and have the capacity to turn into any other type of cell—heart cells, neurons, you name it.

National Geographic would later summarize the incredible promise: “the dream is to launch a medical revolution in which ailing organs and tissues might be repaired” with living replacements. It was the dawn of a new era. A holy grail. Pick your favorite cliché—they all got airtime.

Yet today, more than two decades later, there are no treatments on the market based on these cells. Not one. Our biotech editor Antonio Regalado set out to investigate why, and when that might change. Here’s what he discovered.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ A video game about potatoes? Perfection. 🥔

+ These sunflower slides are pretty amazing.

+ The Therizinosaurus was a mysterious mix of giraffe, sloth, and wolverine, and it roamed the earth for millions of years.

+ A minimal effort, no-bake lemon cheesecake is the ideal end to a summer’s meal.

Climate change and energy

Companies need to stop taking the easy way out on climate goals

Casey Crownhart   6:00AM, 18 Jul, 2024

Data centers like Amazon’s are major sources of emissions.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Corporate climate claims can be confusing—and sometimes entirely unintuitive.

Tech giants Amazon and Google both recently released news about their efforts to clean up their climate impact. Both were a mixed bag, but one bit of news in particular made me prick up my ears. Google’s emissions have gone up, and the company stopped claiming to be “net zero” (we’ll dig into this term more in a moment). Sounds bad, right? But in fact, one might argue that Google’s apparent backslide might actually represent progress for climate action.

My colleague James Temple dug into this news, along with the recent Amazon announcement, for a story this week. Let’s take a sneak peek at what he found and untangle why corporate climate efforts can be so tricky to wrap your head around.

To make sense of these recent announcements, the most important phrase to understand is “net-zero emissions.”

Companies produce greenhouse-gas emissions by making products, transporting them around, or just using electricity. Some corporate leaders may want to reduce those emissions so they can be a smaller part of the climate-change problem (or brag about their progress). Net-zero emissions refers to the point at which the emissions a company produces are canceled out by those it eliminates. But very different paths can all lead to that point.

One way to get rid of emissions is to take actions to reduce them in your operations. Imagine, for example, Amazon replacing its delivery trucks with EVs or building solar panels on warehouses.

This sort of direct action tends to be hard and expensive, and it’s probably impossible for any company to totally wipe out all its emissions right now, given that so much of our economy still relies on fossil fuels. So to reach net zero, many companies choose to disappear their emissions with math instead.

A company might buy carbon credits or renewable-energy credits, essentially paying someone to make up for its own climate impact. That might mean giving a nonprofit money to plant some trees, which suck up and store carbon, or funneling funds to developers and claiming that more renewables projects will get built as a result.

Not all credits are all bad—but often, carbon offsets and renewable-energy credits reflect big claims with little to back them up. And if companies are going after a net-zero label for their business, they may be incentivized to buy cheap credits, even if they don’t actually deliver on claims.

As James puts it in his story, “Corporate sustainability officers often end up pursuing the quickest, cheapest ways of cleaning up a company’s pollution on paper, rather than the most reliable ways of reducing its emissions in the real world.”

This sort of issue is why I tend to be suspicious of companies that claim to have already achieved net-zero emissions or 100% renewable energy. Cleaning up emissions is hard, and if you’ve already claimed victory, I’d say the odds are good that you’re taking an easy way out.

Which brings us to Google’s news. Google has claimed that its operations have operated with net-zero emissions since 2007. Now it’s not claiming that anymore—not really because it suddenly decided to take huge steps back in how it operates, but because it’s stopped buying carbon offsets on a massive scale. Instead, it’s focusing on investing in other ways to tackle emissions.

So what’s the next step for big companies looking to have a material impact on climate action? James has us covered again: In a 2022 story, he laid out six potential ways to rethink corporate climate goals.

Instead of buying up credits, companies can instead put that money toward investing in permanent carbon removal. Developing more reliable methods of pulling climate pollution out of the atmosphere and locking it away might be more expensive, but investing in those efforts will help the market mature and support companies that need commitments.

Companies can also contribute money to research and development for areas that are difficult to decarbonize—think aviation, shipping, steel, and cement. Those sectors touch basically every industry, so helping them make progress could be a worthy use of dollars.

If there’s one takeaway in this tangle of news, I’d say that we could all ask more questions and dig a little deeper into claims from big corporations. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read more about Big Tech climate action, including why Amazon’s renewable-energy claims might be more complicated than they appear at first glance, in James’s latest story.

And here’s his piece on six ways that we can rethink net-zero climate plans.

For more on how the climate “solution” of carbon offsets might be adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, read this 2021 deep dive.

KPOP4PLANET

Another thing

A small group of K-pop fans is working to clean up music streaming. Streaming can consume a lot of computing power, and all that energy used in data centers supporting it can mean big-time emissions.

A group called Kpop4planet put pressure on a streaming service to commit to using 100% renewables for its data centers by 2030. And the fans’ organizing paid off, because the service agreed.

Read more about the power of K-pop fans in this latest story from my colleague Zeyi Yang.

Keeping up with climate

It’s been mixed news this year so far for the EV market in the US. Overall sales are up, but some automakers are seeing deliveries stall. Also notable: Tesla has historically dominated, but it just dropped below 50% of the market for the first time. (Inside Climate News)

New materials that help tackle humidity could make air-conditioning a lot more efficient. Several companies are trying to bring machines based on these desiccant materials to the market. (Wired)

→ I wrote last year about how these moisture-sucking materials could help us beat the heat. (MIT Technology Review)

Electric vehicles are associated with lower emissions over their lifetimes than gas-powered cars, but they don’t start out that way, largely because of the climate cost of building their batteries. This calculator estimates how far you need to drive for EVs to break even with gas vehicles. (PNAS)

Nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems is selling its high-tech magnets now. The company is still working toward flipping on its fusion reactor. (TechCrunch)

The near-term future of EVs might include gas tanks, since some automakers are building electric vehicles that include gas-powered generators. The difference between these and plug-in hybrids is subtle, but basically these would have simpler guts inside. They could help bring more drivers onto team electric. (Heatmap News)

San Francisco launched a new ferry that runs entirely on hydrogen fuel cells. It’s the first such commercial passenger ferry in the world. One challenge could be securing a reliable source of low-emissions hydrogen. (Canary Media)

File this under weird effects of climate change: Melting ice sheets are making days longer. Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica makes the Earth wider, slowing the planet’s rotation. It’s only on the scale of about a millisecond per century, but it could be enough to throw off precise timekeeping. (The Guardian)

Rules around tax credits for hydrogen fuel were proposed to ensure that the money went to projects that help the climate. Now those rules seem to be in trouble. (Heatmap News)

Space

What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9

Rachel Courtland   5:00AM, 18 Jul, 2024

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is lifting off from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, carrying the Turkish Satellite Turksat 6A to Geo-Synchronous orbit. (Photo by Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via AP)

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is one of the world’s safest, most productive rockets. But now it’s been grounded: A rare engine malfunction on July 11 prompted the US Federal Aviation Administration to initiate an investigation and halt all Falcon 9 flights until further notice. The incident has exposed the risks of the US aerospace industry’s heavy reliance on the rocket.

“The aerospace industry is very dependent on the Falcon 9,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who issues regular reports on space launches. He says the Falcon 9 and the closely related Falcon Heavy represented 83% of US launches in 2023. “There’s a lot of traffic that’s going to be backed up waiting for it to return to flight,” he adds.

During a SpaceX livestream, ice could be seen accumulating on the Falcon 9’s engine following its launch from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base en route to releasing 20 Starlink satellites. According to SpaceX, this buildup of ice caused a liquid oxygen leak. Then part of the engine failed, and the rocket dropped several satellites into a lower orbit than intended, one in which they could readily fall back into Earth’s atmosphere.

By July 12, an FAA press statement was circulating on X. The federal agency said it was aware of the malfunction and would require an investigation. “A return to flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety,” said the statement.

SpaceX says it will cooperate with the investigation. “SpaceX will perform a full investigation in coordination with the FAA, determine root cause, and make corrective actions to ensure the success of future missions,” says a statement on the company’s website. Details about what the investigation will entail and how long it might take are unknown. In the meantime, SpaceX has requested to keep flying the Falcon 9 while the investigation takes place. “The FAA is reviewing the request and will be guided by safety at every step of the process,” said the agency in a statement.

Nominal failure

The Falcon 9 has an unusually clean safety record. It’s been launched more than 300 times since its maiden voyage in 2010 and has rarely failed. In 2020, the rocket was the first to launch under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which was designed to build the US’s commercial capacity for taking people, including astronauts, into orbit.

According to MIT aerospace engineer Paulo Lozano, part of the Falcon 9’s success is due to advances in rocket engines. Exactly how SpaceX incorporates these new technologies is unclear, and Lozano notes that SpaceX is quite secretive about the manufacturing process. But it is known that SpaceX uses additive manufacturing to build some engine components. This makes it possible to create parts with complex geometries (for example, hollow—and thus lighter-weight—turbine blades) that enhance performance. And, according to Lozano, artificial intelligence has made diagnosing engine health faster and more accurate. Parts of the rocket are also reusable, which keeps costs low.

With such a successful track record, the Falcon 9 malfunction might seem surprising. But, Lozano says, anomalies are to be expected when it comes to rocket engines. That’s because they operate in harsh environments where they’re subjected to extreme temperatures and pressures. This makes it difficult for engineers to manufacture a rocket as reliable as a commercial airplane.

“These engines produce more power than small cities, and they work in stressful conditions,” says Lozano. “It’s very hard to contain them.”

What exactly went wrong last week remains a mystery. Still, experts agree the event can’t be brushed off. “‘Oh, it was a fluke’ is not, in the modern space industry, an acceptable answer,” says McDowell. What he finds most surprising is that the malfunction didn’t occur in one of the reusable parts of the rocket (like the booster), but instead in a part known as the second stage, which SpaceX switches out each time the rocket launches.

Stalled schedules

It remains unclear when the Falcon 9 will fly again. Several upcoming missions will likely be postponed, including the billionaire tech entrepreneur Jacob Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn, which would have been the first all-private mission to include a space walk. It’s possible NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station (ISS), planned for mid-August 2024, will also be delayed.

Uncrewed missions will be affected too. One that stands out is the Europa Clipper mission, which is intended to explore Jupiter’s icy moon and assess its habitability. According to McDowell, the mission, which is planned for October 2024, will likely be delayed by the Falcon 9 grounding. That’s because there is a narrow time frame within which the satellite can be launched. (The mission is facing a technological hangup unrelated to the Falcon 9 that could also push back its launch.)

The incident reveals a need for the US to explore alternatives to the Falcon 9. McDowell says the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, accompanied by Boeing’s Starliner capsule, used to be the next best option for US-based crewed ISS missions. But the Atlas V is being phased out. It will be replaced by the ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, a partially reusable rocket that has made only one test flight so far. Plus, the Starliner capsule has serious issues that have left two NASA astronauts stuck at the ISS, potentially until August.

Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket could be a competitor, but it hasn’t flown yet. The aerospace company says it hopes to launch the rocket before 2025. Blue Origin’s other reusable rocket, New Shepard, is not capable of flying into orbit.

The Falcon 9 malfunction makes these projects all the more essential. “Even the Falcon 9 can have problems,” says McDowell. “It’s important to have multiple routes of access to space.”

17 Jul, 2024

- Transforming the energy industry through disruptive innovation

- The Download: Big Tech’s climate claims, and reducing your music streaming carbon footprint

- Five ways to make music streaming better for the climate

- Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims

Humans and technology

Transforming the energy industry through disruptive innovation

Jenn Webb   9:00AM, 17 Jul, 2024

In the rhythm of our fast-paced lives, most of us don’t stop to think about where electricity comes from or or how it powers homes, industries, and the technologies that connect people around the world. As populations and economies grow, energy demands are set to increase by 50% by 2050–challenging century-old energy systems to adapt with innovative and agile solutions. This comes at a time when climate change is making its presence felt more than ever; 2023 marked the warmest year since records began in 1850, crossing the 1.5 degrees global warming threshold.

Nadège Petit of Schneider Electric confronts this challenge head-on, saying, “We have no choice but to change the way we produce, distribute, and consume energy, and do it sustainably to tackle both the energy and climate crises.” She explains further that digital technologies are key to navigating this path, and Schneider Electric’s AI-enabled IoT solutions can empower customers to take control of their energy use, enhancing efficiency and resiliency.

Petit acknowledges the complexity of crafting and implementing robust sustainability strategies. She highlights the importance of taking an incremental stepwise approach, and adopting open standards, to drive near-term impact while laying the foundation for long-term decarbonization goals.

Because the energy landscape is evolving rapidly, it’s critical to not just keep pace but to anticipate and shape the future. Much like actively managing health through food and fitness regimes, energy habits need to be monitored as well. This can transform passive consumers to become energy prosumers–those that produce, consume, and manage energy. Petit’s vision is one where “buildings and homes generate their own energy from renewable sources, use what’s needed, and feed the excess back to the grid.”

To catalyze this transformation, Petit underscores the power of collaboration and innovation. For example, Schneider Electric’s SE Ventures invests in startups to provide new perspectives and capabilities to accelerate sustainable energy solutions.

“It’s all about striking a balance to ensure that our relationship with startups are mutually beneficial, knowing when to provide guidance and resources when they need it, but also when to step back and allow them to thrive independently,” says Petit.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Schneider Electric.

Full transcript

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Laurel Ruma, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Our topic today is disruptive innovation in the energy industry and beyond. We use energy every day. It powers our homes, buildings, economies, and lifestyles, but where it came from or how our use affects the global energy ecosystem is changing, and our energy ecosystem needs to change with it.

My guest is Nadège Petit, the chief innovation officer at Schneider Electric.

This podcast is produced in partnership with Schneider Electric.

Welcome, Nadège.

Nadège Petit: Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me today.

Laurel: Well, we’re glad you’re here.

Let’s start off with a simple question to build that context around our conversation. What is Schneider Electric’s mission? And as the chief innovation officer leading its Innovation at the Edge team, what are some examples of what the team is working on right now?

Nadège: Let me set up this scene a little bit here. In recent years, our world has been shaped by a series of significant disruptions. The pandemic has driven a sharp increase in the demand of digital tools and technologies, with a projected 6x growth in the number of IoT devices between 2020 and 2030, and a 140x growth in IP traffic between 2020 and 2040.

Simultaneously, there has been a parallel acceleration in energy demands. Electrical consumption has been increasing by 5,000 terawatt hours every 10 years over the past two decades. This is set to double in the next 10 years and then quadruple by 2040 This is amplified by the most severe energy crisis that we are facing now since the 1970s. Over 80% of carbon emissions are coming from energy, so electrifying the world and decarbonizing [the] energy sector is a must. We cannot overlook the climate crisis while meeting these energy demands. In 2023, the global average temperature was the warmest on record since 1850, surpassing the 1.5 degrees global warming limit. So, we have no choice but to change the way we produce, distribute, and consume energy, and do it sustainably to tackle both the energy and climate crises. This gives us a rare opportunity to reimagine and create a clean energy future we want.

Schneider Electric as an energy management and digital automation company, aims to be the digital partner for sustainability and efficiency for our customers. With end-to-end experience in the energy sector, we are uniquely positioned to help customers digitize, electrify, and deploy sustainable technologies to help them progress toward net-zero.

As for my role, we know that innovation is pivotal to drive the energy transition. The Innovation at the Edge team leads the way in discovering, developing, and delivering disruptive technologies that will define a more digital, electric, and sustainable energy landscape. We function today as an innovation engine, bridging internal and external innovation, to introduce new solutions, services and businesses to the market. Ultimately, we are crafting the future businesses for Schneider Electric in this sector. And to do this, we nourish a culture that recognizes and celebrates innovation. We welcome new ideas, consider new perspectives inside and outside the organization, and seek out unusual combinations that can kindle revolutionary ideas. We like to think of ourselves as explorers and forces of change, looking for and solving new customer problems. So curiosity and daring to disrupt are in our DNA. And this is the true spirit of Innovation at the Edge at Schneider Electric.

Laurel: And it’s clear that urgency certainly comes out, especially for enterprises. Because they’re trying to build strong sustainability strategies to not just reach those environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, goals and targets; but also to improve resiliency and efficiency. What’s the role of digital technologies when we think about this all together in enabling a more sustainable future?

Nadège: We see a sustainable future, and our goal is to enable the shift to an all-electric and all-digital world. That kind of transition isn’t possible without digital technology. We see digital as a key enabler of sustainability and decarbonization. The technology is already available now, it’s a matter of acceleration and adoption of it. And all of us, we have a role to play here.

At Schneider Electric, we have built a suite of solutions that enable customers to accelerate their sustainability journey. Our flagship suite of IoT-enabled solution infrastructure empowers customers to monitor energy, carbon, and resource usage; and enabling them to implement strategies for efficiency, optimization, and resiliency. We have seen remarkable success stories of clients leveraging our digital EcoStruxure solution in buildings, utilities, data centers, hospitality, healthcare, and more, all over the place. If I were to take one example, I can take the example of PG&E customer, a leading California utility that everybody knows; they are using our EcoStruxure distributed energy resources management system, we call it DERMS, to manage grid reliability more effectively, which is crucial in the face of extreme weather events impacting the grid and consumers.

Schneider has also built an extensive ecosystem of partners because we do need to do it at scale together to accelerate digital transformation for customers. We also invest in cutting-edge technologies that make need-based collaboration and co-innovation possible. It’s all about working together towards one common goal. Ultimately the companies that embrace digital transformation will be the ones that will thrive on disruption.

Laurel: It’s clear that building a strong sustainability strategy and then following through on the implementation does take time, but addressing climate change requires immediate action. How does your team at Schneider Electric as a whole work to balance those long-term commitments and act with urgency in the short term? It sounds like that internal and external innovation opportunity really could play a role here.

Nadège: Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. We already have many of the technologies that will take us to net-zero. For example, 70% of CO2 emissions can be removed with existing technologies. By deploying electrification and digital solutions, we can get to our net-zero goals much faster. We know it’s a gradual process and as you already discussed previously, we do need to accelerate the adoption of it. By taking an incremental stepwise approach, we can drive near-term impact while laying the foundation for long-term decarbonization goals.

Building on the same example of PG&E, which I referenced earlier; through our collaboration, piece by piece progressively, we are building the backbone of a sustainable, digitized, and reliable energy future in California with the deployment of EcoStruxure DERMS. As grid reliability and flexibility become more important, DERMS enable us to keep pace with 21st-century grid demands as they evolve.

Another critical component of moving fast is embracing open systems and platforms, creating an interoperable ecosystem. By adopting open standards, you empower a wide range of experts to collaborate together, including startups, large organizations, senior decision-makers, and those on the ground. This future-proof investment ensures flexible and scalable solutions, that avoids expensive upgrades in the future and obsolescence. That is why at Innovation at the Edge we’re creating a win-win partnership to push market adoption of the innovative technology available today, but laying the foundation of an even more innovative tomorrow. Innovation at the Edge today provides the space to nurture those ideas, collaborate together, iterate, learn, and grow at pace.

Laurel: What’s your strategy for investing in, and then adopting those disruptive technologies and business models, especially when you’re trying to build that kind of innovation for tomorrow?

Nadège: I strongly believe innovation is a key driver of the energy transition. It’s very hard to create the right conditions for consistent innovation, as we discuss short-term and long-term. I want to quote again the famous book from Clayton Christenson, The Innovator’s Dilemma, about how big organizations can get so good at what they are already doing that they struggle to adapt as the market changes. And we are in this dilemma. So we do need to stay ahead. Leaders need to grasp disruptive technology, put customers first, foster innovation, and tackle emerging challenges head on. The phrase “that’s no longer how we do it,” really resonates with me as I look at the role of innovation in the energy space.

At Schneider, innovation is more than just a buzzword. It’s our strategy for navigating the energy transition. We are investing in truly new and disruptive ideas, tech, and business models, taking the risk and the challenge. We complement our current offering constantly, and we include the new prosumer business that we’re building, and this is pivotal to accelerate the energy transition. We foster open innovation through investment and incubation of cutting-edge technology in energy management, electrical mobility, industrial automation, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, sustainability, and other topics that will help to go through this innovation. I also can quote some joint ventures that we are creating with partners like GreenStruxure or AlphaStruxure. Those are offering energy-as-a-service solutions, so a new business model enabling organizations to leverage existing technology to achieve decarbonization at scale. As an example, GreenStruxure is helping Bimbo Bakeries move closer to net-zero with micro-grid system at six of their locations. This will provide 20% of Bimbo Bakeries’ USA energy usage and save an estimate of 1,700 tons of CO2 emission per year.

Laurel: Yeah, that’s certainly remarkable. Following up on that, how does Schneider Electric define prosumer and how does that audience actually fit into Schneider Electric’s strategy when you’re trying to develop these new models?

Nadège: Prosumer is my favorite word. Let’s redefine it again. Everybody’s speaking of prosumer, but what is prosumer? Prosumer refers to consumers that are actively involved in energy management; producing and consuming their own energy using technologies like solar panels, EV chargers, EV batteries, and EV storage. This is all digitally enabled. So everybody now, the customers, industrial customers, want to understand their energy. So becoming a prosumer comes with perks like lower energy bills. Fantastic, right? Increase independence, clean energy use, and potential compensation from utility providers. It’s beneficial to all of us; it’s beneficial to our planet, it’s beneficial to the decarbonization of the world. Imagine a future where buildings and homes generate their own energy from renewable sources, use what’s needed, and feed the excess back to the grid. This is a fantastic opportunity, and the interest in this is massive.

To give you some figures; in 2019 we saw 100 gigawatts of new solar PV capacities deployed globally, and by last year this number had nearly quadrupled. So transformation is happening now. Electric vehicles, as an example, their sales have been soaring too, with a projected 14 million sales by 2023, six times the 2019 number. These technologies are already making a dent in emissions and the energy crisis.

However, the journey to become a prosumer is complex. It’s all about scale and adoption, and it involves challenges with asset integration, grid modernization, regulatory compliance. So we are all part of this ecosystem, and it takes a lot of leadership to make it happen. So at Innovation at the Edge, we’re creating an ecosystem of solutions to streamline the prosumer journey from education and management to purchasing, installation, management, and maintenance of these new distributed resources. What we are doing, we are bringing together internal innovations that we already have in-house at Schneider Electric, like micro-grid, EV charging solutions, battery storage, and more with external innovation from portfolio companies. I can quote companies like Qmerit, EnergySage, EV Connect, Uplight, and AutoGrid, and we deliver end-to-end solutions from grid to prosumer.

I want to insist one more time, it’s very important to accelerate and to be part of this accelerated adoption. These efforts are not just about strengthening our business, they’re about simplifying the energy ecosystem and moving the industry toward greater sustainability. It’s a collaborative journey that’s shaping the future of energy, and I’m very excited about this.

Laurel: Focusing on that kind of urgency, innovation in large companies can be hampered by bureaucracy and go slow. What are some best practices for innovation without all of those delays?

Nadège: Schneider Electric, we are not strangers to innovation, specifically in the energy management and industrial automation space. But to really push the envelope, we look beyond our walls for fresh ideas and expertise. And this is where SE Ventures comes in. It’s our one-billion-euro venture capital fund, from which we make bold bets and bring disruptive ideas to life by supporting and investing in startups that complement our current offering and explore future business. So based in Silicon Valley, but with a global reach, SE Ventures leverages our market knowledge and customer proximity to drive near-term value and commercial relationships with our businesses, customers, and partners.

We also focus on partnership and incubation. So through partnerships with startups, we accelerate time to market. We accelerate the R&D roadmap and explore new products, new markets with startups. When it comes to incubation, we seek out game-changing ideas and entrepreneurs. We are providing mentorship, resources, and market insight at every stage of their journey. As an example, we also invested in funds like E14, the fund that started out at MIT Media Lab, to gain early insight into disruptive trends and technology. It’s very important to be early-stage here.

So SE Ventures has successfully today developed multiple unicorns in our portfolio. We’re working with several other high-growth companies, targeted to become future unicorns in key strategic areas. That is totally consistent with Schneider’s mission.

It’s all about striking a balance to ensure that our relationship with startups are mutually beneficial, knowing when to provide guidance and resources when they need it, but also when to step back and allow them to thrive independently.

Laurel: With that future lens on, what kind of trends or developments in the energy industry are you seeing, and how are you preparing for them? Are you getting a lot of that kind of excitement from those startups and venture fund ideas?

Nadège: Yeah, absolutely. There are multiple strengths. You need to listen to startups, to innovators, to people coming up with bold ideas. I want to highlight a couple of those. The energy industry is set to see major shifts. We know it, and we want to be part of it. We discussed prosumers. Prosumer is something very important. A lot of people now understand their body, doing exercises, monitoring it; tomorrow, people will all monitor their energy. Those are prosumers. We believe that prosumers, that’s individuals and businesses, they’re central to the energy transition. And this is a key focal point for us.

Another trend that we also discuss is digital and also AI. AI has the potential to be transformative as we build the new energy landscape. One example is AI-powered virtual power plants, or what we call VPP, that can optimize a large portfolio of distributed energy resources to ensure greater grid resiliency. Increasingly, AI can be at the heart of the modern electrical grid. So at Schneider Electric, we are watching those trends very carefully. We are listening to the external world, to our customers, and we are showing that we are positioning our solution and global hubs to best serve the needs of our customers.

Laurel: Lastly, as a woman in a leadership position, could you tell us how you’ve navigated your career so far, and how others in the industry can create a more diverse and inclusive environment within their companies and teams?

Nadège: An inclusive environment starts with us as leaders. Establishing a culture where we value differences, different opinions, believe in equal opportunity for everyone, and foster a sense of belonging, is something very important in this environment. It’s also important for organizations to create commitments around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and communicate them publicly so it drives accountability, and report on the progress and how we make it happen.

I was truly fortunate to have started and grown my career at a company like Schneider Electric where I was surrounded by people who empowered me to be my best self. This is something that should drive all women to be the best of herself. It wasn’t always easy. I have learned how important it is to have a voice and to be bold, to speak up for what you are passionate about, and to use that passion to drive impact. These are values I also work to instill in my own teenage daughters, and I’m thrilled to see them finding their own passion within STEM. So the next generation is the driving force in shaping a more sustainable world, and it’s crucial that we focus on leaving the planet a better and more equal place where they can thrive.

Laurel: Words to the wise. Thank you so much Nadege for joining us today on the Business Lab.

Nadège: Thank you.

Laurel: That was Nadège Petit, the chief innovation officer at Schneider Electric, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review.

That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Laurel Ruma. I’m the global director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

The Download

The Download: Big Tech’s climate claims, and reducing your music streaming carbon footprint

Rhiannon Williams   8:10AM, 17 Jul, 2024

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims

Last week, Amazon trumpeted that it had purchased enough clean electricity to cover the energy demands of all its global operations, seven years ahead of its sustainability target.

That news closely followed Google’s acknowledgment that the soaring energy demands of its AI operations helped ratchet up its corporate emissions by 13% last year—and that it had backed away from claims that it was already carbon neutral.

If you were to take the announcements at face value, you’d be forgiven for believing that Google is stumbling while Amazon is speeding ahead in the race to clean up climate pollution.

But while both companies are coming up short in their own ways, Google’s approach to driving down greenhouse-gas emissions is now arguably more defensible. To learn why, read our story.

—James Temple

This piece is part of MIT Technology Review Explains, our series untangling the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Five ways to make music streaming better for the climate

As K-pop sweeps the world and accumulates a massive, devout fan base, these fans have been turning their power into action. Zeyi Yang, our China reporter, recently published a story about Kpop4planet, a group of activists who are using K-pop’s influence to hold large corporations accountable for their carbon footprints.

During his reporting, he talked to several experts about how to correctly understand the climate impact of music streaming, and one thing became clear: It all comes down to how we stream—the content, the device, the length, etc. Read on for their tips to help any music streaming user leave a smaller carbon footprint.

This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter examining the relationship between tech and power in the country. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Donald Trump’s allies are already working on a sweeping AI order

Which many AI investors in Silicon Valley would favor over President Biden’s approach. (WP $)

+ Elon Musk is among the first big names in tech to pledge support for Trump. (WSJ $)

+ Trump’s former FDA commissioner wants to peer inside AI’s black boxes. (Politico)

2 TikTok’s attempt to swerve the EU’s Digital Markets Act has been dismissed

The EU’s General Court ruled TikTok was powerful enough to have to comply. (Bloomberg $)

+ It’s good news for European antitrust regulators. (Reuters)

+ Here’s what you need to know about the Digital Markets Act. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Bitcoin miners are signing deals with AI firms

Putting all those vast data centers to good use. (FT $)

+ How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Amazon’s Prime Day sale causes a spike in injuries among warehouse workers

A new report accuses the company of prioritizing speed over safety. (WSJ $)

+ Not everything that looks like a deal is, in fact, a deal. (The Atlantic $)

5 We’re learning more about how deadly pancreatic cancer spreads

The disease shuts down molecules in key genes. (The Guardian)

+ An AI-based risk prediction system could help catch pancreatic cancer cases earlier. (MIT Technology Review)’

6 The Milky Way is full of free-floating planets

These scientists are on a mission to track these rogue worlds down. (IEEE Spectrum)

7 Beware the rise of fake AI-powered therapists

It’s just one example among a rising wave of AI scams. (Vice)

+ Five ways criminals are using AI. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Black women are listing their race as white on dating apps

And report receiving higher-quality matches as a result. (NY Mag $)

9 The JWST just celebrated its second year in space

And the photographs it captures are still awe-inspiring. (The Atlantic $)

10 Lab-grown meat for pets has been green-lit in the UK 🐈‍⬛ 🐕

For the discerning pet palate. (Wired $)

+ Here’s what a lab-grown burger tastes like. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“This country is on fire, Mr. Altman.”

—Jennifer Loving, who runs a nonprofit that administers basic-income pilot programs in Silicon Valley, tells OpenAI CEO Sam Altman it’s time to act on all the research into guaranteed income, the New York Times reports.

The big story

This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.

September 2022

Greg Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist who uses classical styles to create dreamy landscapes. His distinctive style has been used in some of the world’s most popular fantasy games, including Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

Now he’s become a hit in the new world of text-to-image AI generation. His name is one of the most commonly used prompts in the open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion.

But this and other open-source programs are built by scraping images from the internet, often without permission and proper attribution to artists. And artists like Rutkowski have had enough. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Here’s a great reminder of just how beautiful the night sky is. 🌌

+ If you didn’t already know, it’s officially a brat summer.

+ The Ancient Olympic Games was a serious sporting affair.

+ If you tend to forget most of the TV shows you watch or books you read: fear not. You’re not alone. ($)

Climate change and energy

Five ways to make music streaming better for the climate

Zeyi Yang   6:00AM, 17 Jul, 2024

Kpop4planet launched the “Save the Butter Beach” campaign in 2021 to protest against a new coal power plant.

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

This week, we are taking a short break from China and turning to its neighbor South Korea instead. As K-pop sweeps the world and accumulates a massive, devout fan base, these fans have been turning their power into action. Today, I published a story about Kpop4planet, a group of volunteers who are using K-pop’s influence to hold large corporations accountable for their carbon footprints.

One of the most interesting (and also successful) campaigns Kpop4planet has organized shines a light on the carbon footprint of music streaming. Aware that K-pop fans stream significantly more than average (sometimes over five hours a day!) to support their favorite artists, the group successfully campaigned to get Korea’s largest domestic streaming platform to pledge to use 100% renewable energy by 2030.

I have to admit, before working on this story, it didn’t really cross my mind that streaming music could be so polluting. Streaming an album more than 27 times uses more energy than it takes to produce a CD, according to researchers, but it’s surprisingly hard to draw a conclusive answer on whether streaming is more polluting than CDs or records overall. What we do know is that since the carbon emissions associated with streaming are produced in faraway data centers and through invisible data transmissions, the problem is harder to pin down.

During my reporting, I talked to several experts about how to correctly understand the climate impact of music streaming, and one thing became clear: It all comes down to how we stream—the content, the device, the length, etc. They also recommended a bunch of things that any music streaming user can do to leave a smaller carbon footprint.

So here are the things you can do if you are a heavy music streamer:

1. Use small devices instead of big TVs.

A major part of streaming’s carbon footprint comes from the device that’s used to play the music or video. And some are much more power hungry than others. A 50-inch LED TV consumes 100 times more electricity than a smartphone when used for streaming, according to the International Energy Agency. It also consumes more electricity if the screen stays on, displaying videos or lyrics, rather than just playing the audio. So using a smartphone to stream cuts energy consumption to a minimum.

2. Wait longer to buy a new phone.

Yes, smartphones are designed to be pretty energy-efficient to use, but manufacturing them is another story. “In the life-cycle analysis of a phone, 85% to 90% of its lifetime energy occurs in its production,” says Laura Marks, a professor in media art and philosophy at Simon Fraser University. The manufacturing process usually involves fossil fuels, plastics, and minerals that could pollute the environment.

“So if I were to make a couple of recommendations, one of them would be to keep your devices for as long as possible, because that’s a huge, huge component of streaming that’s often overlooked,” she says.

3. Return to digital downloads, and only use streaming in selected situations.

While few people still download music files today, experts have agreed that one of the most climate-friendly ways to listen to music is to keep a digital file of your favorite song and return to it repeatedly.

We also need to change our mindset about treating streaming as the only way to listen to music, says Joe Steinhardt, an assistant professor in the music industry program at Drexel University. “The first and the easiest [suggestion] is to think about streaming music like Styrofoam plates or plastic forks. It doesn’t mean I never use those; it’s just that I don’t eat every meal off of them,” he says. If you are listening to a large variety of music, maybe streaming is the best choice; if you are listening to a few songs repeatedly, go for a digital download or even an old-fashioned CD.

4. Push for streaming platforms to do their part.

Climate action is not just about individual responsibility—it also means pushing corporations to do better. Just as Kpop4planet chased after Melon, Korea’s largest domestic music streaming service, you can also hold your favorite music streaming service accountable.

A big part of that is figuring out where the platforms’ data centers are, as these can account for a third to a half of streaming’s carbon footprint, according to Marks. These gigantic facilities draw significant amounts of electricity. If they can switch to using renewable energy, that will be much more meaningful than any action one individual can take. It’s also important not to fall for empty promises, and to seek specific plans on where and how they plan to source renewable energy.

5. Cherish music and resist overconsumption.

Many experts mention the Jevons paradox, which states that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used can lead to more total consumption. In the case of streaming, this means that even if the technology can become more energy-efficient on a per-song basis, the business model and the sheer convenience often encourage users to listen to more and more songs without considering the climate consequences.

To resist that mindset, Marks suggests, we should cherish listening to music more. “Instead of streaming all day, it could mean really enjoying the performance of a song—just listening to it a couple of times and then talking with your friends about it,” she says.

My conclusion? It’s never too late to become aware of the climate impact of music streaming and think about what we can do to make it even just a little greener.

What’s your relationship with music streaming? Tell me more about it at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is flush with cash. But China’s strict control of capital means it has to seek external investment to build up its supply chain outside the country. (Financial Times $)

2. China is asking the World Trade Organization to settle its dispute with the US about EV tariffs. (Reuters $)

3. US-China trade conflicts are spreading to the mattress market, where US retailers say the domestic market is being flooded by Chinese products. (Wall Street Journal $)

4. A new movie in China used AI face-swapping technology to make Jackie Chan look decades younger. Critics hated it. (South China Morning Post $)

5. The failed assassination attempt at a Trump rally not only boosted support for the former president but also caused the price of a Chinese stock to soar—all because the name of the company sounds like “Trump Wins Big” in Chinese. (Bloomberg $)

6. China denies it’s building a naval base in Cambodia. Satellite images show that it is. (New York Times $)

7. Claw-machine arcades are cropping up in Hong Kong—but it’s a result of the failing retail market and low demand for commercial property. (Nikkei Asia $)

Lost in translation

Morowali, a remote, agricultural community in Indonesia, has been transformed into a hub for heavy industry by the entrance of a Chinese company, according to the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek. Tsingshan Holding Group, a Chinese steel and nickel company, was instrumental in investing in and setting up the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), where a rich local reserve of nickel ore is converted into high-purity nickel sulfate that’s essential for electric vehicle batteries.

IMIP has created at least 100,000 jobs and contributed significantly to Indonesia’s economy, but it has also led to environmental and health challenges for local communities. Concerns about air and water pollution, garbage disposal, and worker safety have intensified following an explosion in 2023 that killed eight Chinese workers and 13 Indonesian workers. Now, local workers are organizing to sit down with management and push for changes in worker welfare.

One more thing

If you want a guaranteed sighting of a UFO, come to Shenzhen. Last week, a Chinese company tested an electric helicopter that looks just like a UFO. Flying at a low height and able to land on water, the vehicle is designed for transporting tourists and displaying ads in the future.

Manned UFO looking eVTOL by Shenzhen Smart Drone Co making maiden flight

Flying saucer is low altitude UAV operating @ 10-30 m & can land safely on water surface

Designed for sightseeing & advertising performances

Use 6-axis & 12-propeller duct design that's entirely contained… pic.twitter.com/kUiaRKPnAY

— tphuang (@tphuang) July 13, 2024

Climate change and energy

Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims

James Temple   5:00AM, 17 Jul, 2024

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Last week, Amazon trumpeted that it had purchased enough clean electricity to cover the energy demands of all the offices, data centers, grocery stores, and warehouses across its global operations, seven years ahead of its sustainability target.

That news closely followed Google’s acknowledgment that the soaring energy demands of its AI operations helped ratchet up its corporate emissions by 13% last year—and that it had backed away from claims that it was already carbon neutral.

If you were to take the announcements at face value, you’d be forgiven for believing that Google is stumbling while Amazon is speeding ahead in the race to clean up climate pollution.

But while both companies are coming up short in their own ways, Google’s approach to driving down greenhouse-gas emissions is now arguably more defensible.

In fact, there’s a growing consensus that how a company gets to net zero is more important than how fast it does so. And a new school of thought is emerging that moves beyond the net-zero model of corporate climate action, arguing that companies should focus on achieving broader climate impacts rather than trying to balance out every ton of carbon dioxide they emit.

But to understand why, let’s first examine how the two tech giants’ approaches stack up, and where company climate strategies often go wrong.

Perverse incentives

The core problem is that the costs and complexity of net-zero emissions plans, which require companies to cut or cancel out every ton of climate pollution across their supply chains, can create perverse incentives. Corporate sustainability officers often end up pursuing the quickest, cheapest ways of cleaning up a company’s pollution on paper, rather than the most reliable ways of reducing its emissions in the real world.

That may mean buying inexpensive carbon credits to offset ongoing pollution from their direct operations or that of their suppliers, rather than undertaking the tougher task of slashing those emissions at the source. Those programs can involve paying other parties to plant trees, restore coastal ecosystems, or alter agriculture practices in ways that purport to reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the air. The snag is, numerous studies and investigative stories have shown that such efforts often overstate the climate benefits, sometimes wildly.

Net-zero goals can also compel companies to buy what are known as renewable energy credits (RECs), which ostensibly support additional generation of renewable electricity but raise similar concerns that the climate gains are overstated.

The argument for RECs is that companies often can’t purchase a pure stream of clean electricity to power their operations, since grid operators rely on a mix of natural gas, coal, solar, wind, and other sources. But if those businesses provide money or an indication of demand that spurs developers to build new renewables projects and generate more clean electricity than they would have otherwise, the companies can then claim this cancels out ongoing pollution from the electricity they use.

Experts, however, are less and less convinced of the value of RECs at this stage.

The claim that clean-energy projects wouldn’t have been built without that added support is increasingly unconvincing in a world where those facilities can easily compete in the marketplace on their own, Emily Grubert, an associate professor at Notre Dame, previously told me. And if a company’s purchase of such credits doesn’t bring about changes that reduce the emissions in the atmosphere, it can’t balance out the company’s ongoing pollution.

‘Creative accounting’

For its part, Amazon is relying on both carbon credits and RECs.

In its sustainability report, the company says that it reached its clean-electricity targets and drove down emissions by improving energy efficiency, buying more carbon-free power, building renewables projects at its facilities, and supporting such projects around the world. It did this in part by “purchasing additional environmental attributes (such as renewable energy credits) to signal our support for renewable energy in the grids where we operate, in line with the expected generation of the projects we have contracted.”

But there’s yet another issue that can arise when a company pays for clean power that it’s not directly consuming, whether through RECs or through power purchase agreements made before a project is built: Merely paying for renewable electricity generation that occurred at some point, somewhere in the world, isn’t the same as procuring the amount of electricity that the company consumed in the specific places and times that it did so. As you may have heard, the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, even as Amazon workers and operations keep grinding around the world and around the clock.

Paying a solar-farm operator some additional money for producing electricity it was already going to generate in the middle of the day doesn’t in any meaningful way reverse the emissions that an Amazon fulfillment center or server farm produces by, say, drawing electricity from a natural-gas power plant two states away in the middle of the night.

“The reality on the ground is that its data centers are driving up demand for fossil fuels,” argued a report last week from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers that has been pushing the company to take more aggressive action on climate change.

The organization said that a significant share of Amazon’s RECs aren’t driving development of new projects. It also stressed that those payments and projects often aren’t generating electricity in the same areas and at the same times that Amazon is consuming power.

The employee group estimates that 78% of Amazon’s US energy comes from nonrenewable sources and accuses the company of using “creative accounting” to claim it’s reached its clean-electricity goals.

To its credit, Amazon is investing billions of dollars in renewables, electrifying its fleet of delivery vehicles, and otherwise making real strides in reducing its waste and emissions. In addition, it’s lobbying US legislators to make it easier to permit electric transmission projects, funding more reliable forms of carbon removal, and working to diversify its mix of electricity sources. The company also insists it’s being careful and selective about the types of carbon offsets it supports, investing only in “additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially beneficial” projects.

“Amazon is focused on making the grid cleaner and more reliable for everyone,” the company said in response to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review. “An emissions-first approach is the fastest, most cost-effective and scalable way to leverage corporate clean-energy procurement to help decarbonize global power grids. This includes procuring renewable energy in locations and countries that still rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their grids, and where energy projects can have the biggest impact on carbon reduction.”

The company has adopted what’s known as a “carbon matching” approach (which it lays out further here), stressing that it wants to be sure the emissions reduced through its investments in renewables equal or exceed the emissions it continues to produce.

But a recent study led by Princeton researchers found that carbon matching had a “minimal impact” on long-term power system emissions, because it rarely helps get projects built or clean energy generated where those things wouldn’t have happened anyway.

“It’s an offsetting scheme at its core,” Wilson Ricks, an author of the study and an energy systems researcher at Princeton, said of the method, without commenting on Amazon specifically.

(Meta, Salesforce, and General Motors have also embraced this model, the study notes.)

The problem in asserting that a company is effectively running entirely on clean electricity, when it’s not doing so directly and may not be doing so completely, is that it takes off any pressure to finish the job for real.

Backing off claims of carbon neutrality

Google has made its own questionable climate claims over the years as well, and it faces growing challenges as the energy it uses for artificial intelligence soars.

But it is striving to address its power consumption in arguably more defensible ways and now appears to be taking some notable course-correcting steps, according to its recent sustainability report.

Google says that it’s no longer buying carbon credits that purport to prevent emissions. With this change, it has also backed away from the claim that it had already achieved carbon neutrality across its operations years ago.

“We’re no longer procuring carbon avoidance credits year-over-year to compensate for our annual operational emissions,” the company told MIT Technology Review in a statement. “We’re instead focusing on accelerating an array of carbon solutions and partnerships that will help us work toward our net-zero goal, while simultaneously helping develop broader solutions to mitigate climate change.”

Notably, that includes funding the development of more expensive but possibly more reliable ways of pulling greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere through direct air capture machines or other methods. The company pledged $200 million to Frontier, an effort to pay in advance for one billion tons of carbon dioxide that startups will eventually draw down and store.

Those commitments may not allow the company to make any assertions about its own emissions today, and some of the early-stage approaches it funds might not work at all. But the hope is that these sorts of investments could help stand up a carbon removal industry, which studies find may be essential for keeping warming in check over the coming decades.

Clean power around the clock

In addition, for several years now Google has worked to purchase or otherwise support generation of clean power in the areas where it operates and across every hour that it consumes electricity—an increasingly popular approach known as 24/7 carbon-free energy.

The idea is that this will stimulate greater development of what grid operators increasingly need: forms of carbon-free energy that can run at all hours of the day (commonly called “firm generation”), matching up with the actual hour-by-hour energy demands of corporations. That can include geothermal plants, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric plants, and more.

More than 150 organizations and governments have now signed the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact, a pledge to ensure that clean-electricity purchases match up hourly with their consumption. Those include Google, Microsoft, SAP, and Rivian.

The Princeton study notes that hourly matching is more expensive than other approaches but finds that it drives “significant reductions in system-level CO_2 emissions” while “incentivizing advanced clean firm generation and long-duration storage technologies that would not otherwise see market uptake.”

In Google’s case, pursuing 24/7 matching has steered the company to support more renewables projects in the areas where it operates and to invest in more energy storage projects. It has also entered into purchase agreements with power plants that can deliver carbon-free electricity around the clock. These include several deals with Fervo Energy, an enhanced-geothermal startup.

The company says its goal is to achieve net-zero emissions across its supply chains by 2030, with all its electricity use synced up, hour by hour, with clean sources across every grid it operates on.

Energy-hungry AI

Which brings us back to the growing problem of AI energy consumption.

Jonathan Koomey, an independent researcher studying the energy demands of computing, argues that the hue and cry over rising electricity use for AI is overblown. He notes that AI accounts for only a sliver of overall energy consumption from information technology, which produces about 1.4% of global emissions.

But major data center companies like Google, Amazon, and others will need to make significant changes to ensure that they stay ahead of rising AI-driven energy use while keeping on track with their climate goals.

They will have to improve overall energy efficiency, procure more clean energy, and use their clout as major employers to push utilities to increase carbon-free generation in the areas where they operate, he says. But the clear focus must be on directly cutting corporate climate pollution, not mucking around with RECs and offsets.

“Reduce your emissions; that’s it,” Koomey says. “We need actual, real, meaningful emissions reductions, not trading around credits that have, at best, an ambiguous effect.”

Google says it’s already making progress on its AI footprint, while stressing that it’s leveraging artificial intelligence to find ways to drive down climate pollution across sectors. Those include efforts like Tapestry, a project within the company’s X “moonshot factory” to create more efficient and reliable electricity grids, as well as a Google Research collaboration to determine airline flight paths that produce fewer heat-trapping cirrus clouds.

“AI holds immense promise to drive climate action,” the company said in its report.

The contribution model

The contrasting approaches of Google and Amazon call to mind an instructive hypothetical that a team of carbon market researchers sketched out in a paper this January. They noted that one company could do the hard, expensive work of directly eliminating nearly every ton of its emissions, while another could simply buy cheap offsets to purportedly address all of its own. In that case the first company would have done more actual good for the climate, but only the latter would be able to say it had reached its net-zero target.

Given these challenges and the perverse incentives driving companies toward cheap offsets, the authors have begun arguing for a different approach, known as the “contribution model.”

Like Koomey and others, they stress that companies should dedicate most of their money and energy to directly cutting their emissions as much as possible. But they assert that companies should adopt a new way of dealing with what’s left over (either because that remaining pollution is occurring outside their direct operations or because there are not yet affordable, emissions-free alternatives).

Instead of trying to cancel out every ongoing ton of emissions, a company might pick a percentage of its revenue or set a defensible carbon price on those tons, and then dedicate all that money toward achieving the maximum climate benefit the money can buy, says Libby Blanchard, a research scholar at the University of Cambridge. (She coauthored the paper on the contribution model with Barbara Haya of the University of California, Berkeley, and Bill Anderegg at the University of Utah.)

That could mean funding well-managed forestry projects that help trap carbon dioxide, protect biodiversity, and improve air and water quality. It could mean supporting research and development on the technologies still needed to slow global warming and efforts to scale them up, as Google seems to be doing. Or it could even mean lobbying for stricter climate laws, since few things can drive change as quickly as public policy.

But the key difference is that the company won’t be able to claim that those actions canceled out every ton of remaining emissions—only that it took real, responsible steps to “contribute” to addressing the problem of climate change.

The hope is that this approach frees companies to focus on the quality of the projects it funds, not the quantity of cheap offsets it buys, Blanchard says.

It could “replace this race to the bottom with a race to the top,” she says.

As with any approach put before profit-motivated companies that employ ranks of savvy accountants and attorneys, there will surely be ways to abuse this method in the absence of appropriate safeguards and oversight.

And plenty of companies may refuse to adopt it, since they won’t be able to claim they’ve achieved net-zero emissions, which has become the de facto standard for corporate climate action.

But Blanchard says there’s one obvious incentive for them to move away from that goal.

“There’s way less risk that they’ll be sued or accused of greenwashing,” she says.

16 Jul, 2024

- The Download: K-pop stans’ climate plans, and what AI isn’t

- A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)

- Music streaming can be a drag on the environment. These K-pop fans want to clean it up.

The Download

The Download: K-pop stans’ climate plans, and what AI isn’t

Rhiannon Williams   8:10AM, 16 Jul, 2024

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Music streaming can be a drag on the environment. These K-pop fans want to clean it up.

K-pop fans have for years been known for their incredible organizing power. As their numbers have grown around the world, they have become influential political forces, shaping elections and advocating for social change.

It was these actions that inspired Kpop4planet. It’s a small group of volunteers that is achieving surprising success in mobilizing K-pop fans to act against the energy-intensive practices of the music streaming industry.

And, buoyed by its success, Kpop4planet has started targeting companies outside the music industry; it’s asked them to make similar pledges on renewable energy or other climate goals. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)

It’s the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it’s sold as a solution to the world’s problems, nobody seems to know what it really is.

For months, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven has been on a quest to go deeper to understand why everybody seems to disagree on exactly what AI is, and why you’re right to care about it.

He’s been talking to some of the top thinkers in the field, asking them, simply: What is AI? The end result is a great piece that looks at the past and present of AI to see where it is going next. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Silicon Valley is backing Donald Trump to become US President

Major VCs and tech leaders are lining up to pledge their financial support. (FT $)

+ JD Vance, Trump’s VP candidate, used to be a VC himself. (TechCrunch)

+ Wealthy far right activists are preparing for Trump to win. (New Yorker $)

+ The FBI has gained access to the phone of the suspected Trump shooter. (404 Media)

2 This site sells selfie ID verification photos and videos

Allowing customers to sign up for accounts using other people’s likenesses. (404 Media)

3 Bird flu cases could be undetected among US dairy workers

Health officials are struggling to keep track of who has been exposed. (New Scientist $)

+ What’s next for bird flu vaccines. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Scientists have discovered a cave on the moon

It could serve as a base for astronauts to shelter from radiation. (BBC)

+ It could be part of a hidden network of lunar caves. (New Scientist $)

5 China’s state support for AI is a double-edged sword

Its robust regulatory regime forces startups to jump through hoops. (WSJ $)

+ Critics aren’t happy about the EU’s new rules for AI. (FT $)

+ Why the Chinese government is sparing AI from harsh regulations—for now. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Google tried to ruin a pact between EU cloud firms and Microsoft

It offered the firms a $512 million package to uphold a complaint against Microsoft—but failed in its endeavor. (Bloomberg $)

7 Cloaking healthy cells could protect them from intensive cancer treatments

Drugs and therapies usually target all cells indiscriminately. (Ars Technica)

+ Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Artists in Latin America can’t opt out of Meta’s AI training project

The company failed to notify users in the region about its plans. (Rest of World)

+ Here’s how to opt out of Meta’s AI training if you’re in the US, UK, or Europe. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How to safeguard yourself against online conspiracy theories

It can be easy to share misinformation in the heat of the moment. (WP $)

10 Poker is essentially a math game 🃏

Which explains why computers are getting so good at it. (Vox)

+ Facebook’s poker-playing AI could wreck the online poker industry—so it’s not being released. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“I have questions. My biggest one: why??”

—Hebba Youssef, chief people officer at Workweek, reacts to HR company Lattice’s new tool designed to help organizations make employee records for AI bots, the Verge reports.

The big story

This scientist is trying to create an accessible, unhackable voting machine

November 2022

For the past 19 years, computer science professor Juan Gilbert has immersed himself in perhaps the most contentious debate over election administration in the United States—what role, if any, touch-screen ballot-marking devices should play in the voting process.

While advocates claim that electronic voting systems can be relatively secure, improve accessibility, and simplify voting and vote tallying, critics have argued that they are insecure and should be used as infrequently as possible.

As for Gilbert? He claims he’s finally invented “the most secure voting technology ever created.” And he’s invited several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology to prove his point. Read the full story.

—Spenser Mestel

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This tiny red squirrel is beyond adorable.

+ Apparently, looking a bit disheveled is the hot new trend for the summer—sign me up.

+ Animals change their social habits as they age, just like us.

+ You’re using your freezer all wrong: here’s how to make the most of it.

Artificial intelligence

A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)

Melissa Heikkila   6:23AM, 16 Jul, 2024

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

It’s the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it’s a technology being sold as a solution to the world’s problems, nobody seems to know what it really is. It’s a label that’s been slapped on technologies ranging from self-driving cars to facial recognition, chatbots to fancy Excel. But in general, when we talk about AI, we talk about technologies that make computers do things we think need intelligence when done by people.

For months, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven has been on a quest to go deeper to understand why everybody seems to disagree on exactly what AI is, why nobody even knows, and why you’re right to care about it. He’s been talking to some of the biggest thinkers in the field, asking them, simply: What is AI? It’s a great piece that looks at the past and present of AI to see where it is going next. You can read it here.

Here’s a taste of what to expect:

Artificial intelligence almost wasn’t called “artificial intelligence” at all. The computer scientist John McCarthy is credited with coming up with the term in 1955 when writing a funding application for a summer research program at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. But more than one of McCarthy’s colleagues hated it. “The word ‘artificial’ makes you think there’s something kind of phony about this,” said one. Others preferred the terms “automata studies,” “complex information processing,” “engineering psychology,” “applied epistemology,” “neural cybernetics,”  “non-numerical computing,” “neuraldynamics,” “advanced automatic programming,” and “hypothetical automata.” Not quite as cool and sexy as AI.

AI has several zealous fandoms. AI has acolytes, with a faith-like belief in the technology’s current power and inevitable future improvement. The buzzy popular narrative is shaped by a pantheon of big-name players, from Big Tech marketers in chief like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to edgelords of industry like Elon Musk and Sam Altman to celebrity computer scientists like Geoffrey Hinton. As AI hype has ballooned, a vocal anti-hype lobby has risen in opposition, ready to smack down its ambitious, often wild claims. As a result, it can feel as if different camps are talking past one another, not always in good faith.

This sometimes seemingly ridiculous debate has huge consequences that affect us all. AI has a lot of big egos and vast sums of money at stake. But more than that, these disputes matter when industry leaders and opinionated scientists are summoned by heads of state and lawmakers to explain what this technology is and what it can do (and how scared we should be). They matter when this technology is being built into software we use every day, from search engines to word-processing apps to assistants on your phone. AI is not going away. But if we don’t know what we’re being sold, who’s the dupe?

For example, meet the TESCREALists. A clunky acronym (pronounced “tes-cree-all”) replaces an even clunkier list of labels: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. It was coined by Timnit Gebru, who founded the Distributed AI Research Institute and was Google’s former ethical AI co-lead, and Émile Torres, a philosopher and historian at Case Western Reserve University. Some anticipate human immortality; others predict humanity’s colonization of the stars. The common tenet is that an all-powerful technology is not only within reach but inevitable. TESCREALists believe that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, could not only fix the world’s problems but level up humanity. Gebru and Torres link several of these worldviews—with their common focus on “improving” humanity—to the racist eugenics movements of the 20th century.

Is AI math or magic? Either way, people have strong, almost religious beliefs in one or the other. “It’s offensive to some people to suggest that human intelligence could be re-created through these kinds of mechanisms,” Ellie Pavlick, who studies neural networks at Brown University, told Will. “People have strong-held beliefs about this issue—it almost feels religious. On the other hand, there’s people who have a little bit of a God complex. So it’s also offensive to them to suggest that they just can’t do it.”

Will’s piece really is the definitive look at this whole debate. No spoilers—there are no simple answers, but lots of fascinating characters and viewpoints. I’d recommend you read the whole thing here—and see if you can make your mind up about what AI really is.

Now read the rest of The Algorithm

Deeper Learning

AI can make you more creative—but it has limits

Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human creativity?

A new study looked at how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories. The model was helpful—but only to an extent. The researchers found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans. Read more from Rhiannon Williams.

Bits and Bytes

Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle

Found everywhere from airplanes to grocery stores, prepared meals are usually packed by hand. AI-powered robotics is changing that. (MIT Technology Review)

AI is poised to automate today’s most mundane manual warehouse task

Pallets are everywhere, but training robots to stack them with goods takes forever. Fixing that could be a tangible win for commercial AI-powered robots. (MIT Technology Review)

The Chinese government is going all-in on autonomous vehicles

The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving feature to China. New government permits let companies test driverless cars on the road and allow cities to build smart road infrastructure that will tell these cars where to go. (MIT Technology Review)

The US and its allies took down a Russian AI bot farm on X

The US seized control of a sophisticated Russian operation that used AI to push propaganda through nearly a thousand covert accounts on the social network X. Western intelligence agencies traced the propaganda mill to an officer of the Russian FSB intelligence force and to a former senior editor at state-controlled publication RT, formerly called Russia Today. (The Washington Post)

AI investors are starting to wonder: Is this just a bubble?

After a massive investment in the language-model boom, the biggest beneficiary is Nvidia, which designs and sells the best chips for training and running modern AI models. Investors are now starting to ask what LLMs are actually going to be used for, and when they will start making them money. (New York magazine)

Goldman Sachs thinks AI is overhyped, wildly expensive, and unreliable

Meanwhile, the major investment bank published a research paper about the economic viability of generative AI. It notes that there is “little to show for” the huge amount of spending on generative AI infrastructure and questions “whether this large spend will ever pay off in terms of AI benefits and returns.” (404 Media)

The UK politician accused of being AI is actually a real person

A hilarious story about how Mark Matlock, a candidate for the far-right Reform UK party, was accused of being a fake candidate created with AI after he didn’t show up to campaign events. Matlock has assured the press he is a real person, and he wasn’t around because he had pneumonia. (The Verge)

Culture

Music streaming can be a drag on the environment. These K-pop fans want to clean it up.

Zeyi Yang   5:00AM, 16 Jul, 2024

On Valentine’s Day 2023, five K-pop fans came to a bustling street in the center of Seoul, one of them in a bee costume. Then they started dancing to “Candy” by the boy band NCT Dream and unfurled a banner with a message for Korea’s largest domestic music streaming platform: “Melon, let’s use 100% renewable energy and happily be together with Kpop for the next 100 years.”

KPOP4PLANET

A few weeks later, Melon, which has over 4 million active users in Korea, promised to do just that—pledging to adopt 100% renewable energy for its data centers by 2030.

It was the culmination of a campaign organized by Kpop4planet, a small group of volunteers that is achieving surprising success in mobilizing K-pop fans to act against the energy-intensive practices of the music industry. In recent years it has led a series of actions for climate causes, secured pledges to reduce the carbon footprint of music streaming, and pressured international brands to turn their supply chains away from fossil fuels.

K-pop fans have for years been known for their incredible organizing power. As their numbers have grown around the world, they have become influential political forces, shaping elections and advocating for social change. It was these actions that inspired two young fans, Dayeon Lee from South Korea and Nurul Sarifah from Indonesia, to found Kpop4planet in 2021. Particularly concerned about environmental issues, they began to think about how some aspects of K-pop culture can exacerbate environmental degradation. For example, excessive music streaming can generate carbon emissions at every step, from the data centers that process requests to the devices that play the music.

“I [initially] thought the physical-album-waste issue was much more important,” says Lee, who is a 21-year-old university undergraduate, currently living in Japan. “But I was really surprised when I did some background research … [and] realized that the streaming issue is much more serious because it is a long-term issue.”

While producing and selling physical recordings does, of course, have a carbon footprint, most of the environmental issues end after the initial purchase. That’s not the case with digital distribution. Streaming an album more than 27 times, according to 2019 research at Keele University in the UK, will likely end up using more energy than it takes to produce a CD. This kind of listening happens frequently in K-pop culture, which often encourages fans to host “streaming parties” where they play the same song on repeat.

Buoyed by the success of its streaming campaign, Kpop4planet has recently targeted companies outside the music industry that have benefited from working with K-pop idols; it’s asked them to make similar pledges on renewable energy or other climate goals in order to secure continuous support from the fans. The group has put pressure on Tokopedia, Indonesia’s largest e-commerce company, to set up a decarbonization plan. And it’s gone after Hyundai—which uses the K-pop band BTS as brand ambassadors—over a business deal to source aluminum from a company relying on a new coal power plant. This led to another big victory: In March 2024, Hyundai agreed to seek alternative suppliers for its aluminum.

These wins may be surprising for a group with just 10 full-time members. Hyundai and Melon did not immediately respond to requests for comment, so it’s hard to know exactly why they changed course. But for her part, Lee believes the group’s success comes from how it is able to represent the genuine feelings of a massive fan base and draw companies’ attention to those demands. In total, Kpop4planet’s online petitions have collected signatures from nearly 60,000 fans in 223 countries. And the group doesn’t stop until it gets what it wants.

“We have to be the messenger between corporations and K-pop fans,” Lee says. “We also want to expand our campaigns to more global corporations, because we believe that K-pop fans have enough power and influence to make our society more sustainable.”

The carbon footprint of “streaming parties”

Even as streaming has become the dominant way to listen to music, its energy consumption—in faraway data centers or via invisible telecommunication transmissions—remains hard for the end user to recognize.

“I think streaming is especially nefarious because those negative impacts are happening so far away and in such an invisible way,” says Joe Steinhardt, an assistant professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies the music industry and is the author of the book Why to Resist Streaming Music & How. He calls streaming music “a disposable listen” because of the way an app keeps pulling data from the cloud and not storing it locally.

Still, it’s hard to draw a definitive conclusion on whether streaming damages the environment more than buying physical copies; its actual carbon footprint depends on many factors. For example, streaming a music or lyrics video on a TV consumes significantly more electricity than using an energy-efficient device like a smartphone. But then smartphones present their own problems; they are very energy intensive to manufacture, and people often abandon them after a short time.

While the overall climate impact of streaming is still being studied, many of the problems it presents are undoubtedly exacerbated by the K-pop industry. The number of times a song is streamed is factored into music ranking charts, televised competitions, and awards. Artists with the highest streaming numbers are seen as more successful and consequently get more resources and exposure from the recording companies, incentivizing fans to keep streaming.

An offline event held for Kpop4planet’s campaign against plastic waste in physical albums.

KPOP4PLANET

As a result, many K-pop fans stream significantly more than listeners of other genres. In the streaming parties, fans play newly released songs for long periods of time in order to show their support, boost traffic numbers, and hopefully attract more fans to the songs. In 2022, Kpop4planet surveyed 1,097 fans (more than 75% of whom were in Korea) and found that the majority of them spent more than five hours per day in streaming parties. That is almost double the amount of time an average music consumer would spend listening to streamed songs, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). In extreme cases, streaming parties may push people to play the same song on multiple devices at once—sometimes muting them, so the music is not even being heard.

“Fandom at this level, whether it’s K-pop or any fandom, is an inherently wasteful concept. It’s based on how much can I waste to show that I love you,” says Steinhardt. In any musical genre, fans are used to expressing their love through excessive purchases because it’s a financial transfer to the artists. Streaming introduced new and less expensive ways to achieve the same goal, but they are nevertheless wasteful.

The practical solution, he says, is probably not to ask fans to stop being so devoted. “I recognize there’s a real value in that,” says Steinhardt. “So the question is, is there a way to do that that doesn’t involve overconsumption?”

Accountability for the streaming platforms

Instead of trying to change the individual actions of fans, Lee believes, it’s more important to hold big companies responsible for their behavior. “We believe that the environmental problems that the K-pop fans are suffering from are caused by the corporations,” she says. “They have the main keys to solving the climate crisis, as they are emitting lots of carbon emissions in the supply chain.”

So when Kpop4planet started its music-streaming campaign in 2022, it set its eyes on one particular solution: demanding that streaming companies switch to renewable energy.

A large portion of streaming-related emissions depends on the specific resources that power the data center a streaming company uses. “The actual streaming process is using electrical energy, so like electric cars, it comes down to how we are producing that electric power,” says Simon George, a lecturer in sustainability and green technology at Keele University. A server based in a region dependent on fossil fuels, for instance, will generate more carbon emissions than one powered by renewable energy.

And South Korea has very little renewable energy. In 2022, fossil fuels generated 63.6% of the electricity there, compared with 52.5% for the average OECD country. Renewables account for less than 10%. Because of that, Korean domestic streaming platforms are consuming more fossil fuels to power their data centers than their counterparts in other countries. “The more we can push to decarbonize the grid, then the better we can feel about streaming music,” George says.

Not many K-pop fans appear aware of this. Lee, too, was in the dark until she formed Kpop4planet and started doing her own research. In August 2022, she made a comic explaining why streaming can be an environmental concern and posted it on Twitter, where it was retweeted more than 18,000 times. “Everyone was so shocked. So that was the point that our streaming campaign went viral,” Lee says.

#알티추첨 #알티이벵

케이팝포플래닛ver.그것이 알고싶다

실물음반💿vs 음악스트리밍🎧

탄소배출 맞짱뜨면 누가 이길까요??🤭#멜론은탄소맛 캠페인에 함께해 주세요!🥺https://t.co/5UwusTDowB에서 온라인 청원+본 트윗을 알티해주신 분들 중 추첨을 통해 기프티콘을 드려요😍 pic.twitter.com/fuKfdqRYvw

— KPOP 4 PLANET (@kpop4planet) August 12, 2022

After initially calling upon all streaming platforms to act, Kpop4planet homed in on Melon. In a fan survey that year, nearly half the respondents said they used Melon to host streaming parties and that they also expected Melon to take the lead on climate actions. Plus, 71.2% of the fans said they would move to a different streaming platform if it adopted more climate-friendly practices.

“We want to make Korean streaming platforms more sustainable so that the K-pop fans do not feel guilty by listening to our favorite idol songs,” Lee says.

Lee and her crew set a clear if ambitious goal: Get Melon to commit to using 100% renewable energy for its data centers by 2030 instead of 2040, which was the original pledge by its parent company, the Korean tech giant Kakao. Over the next year, Kpop4planet collected the names and contact information of thousands of fans, and got their backing for a public letter it sent to Melon outlining its demands. Kpop4planet also worked to establish connections with Melon employees and repeatedly invited company representatives to attend the group’s offline events aimed at raising awareness about the impact of streaming.

Finally, Kpop4planet invited Melon to attend the Valentine’s Day dance; the company declined because of scheduling conflicts but agreed to meet for a private discussion. That’s when it made the promise to “move all the data to the cloud that does not emit any carbon emissions by 2030,” Lee says. Melon didn’t respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment.

K-pop idols are not tools for greenwashing

Kpop4planet’s actions are part of a broader evolution in K-pop fandom, which has “slowly moved from sending gifts to idols to donating or volunteering in the names of their idols,” says CedarBough Saeji, an assistant professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at South Korea’s Pusan National University.

In recent years, these volunteering activities have become much more political and direct—like organizing, she says, “to fund the escape from Gaza for individual Palestinian K-pop fans and their families and boycotting certain K-pop products or groups because of concerns around Israel-Palestine issues.” Kpop4planet, she notes, has also spoken directly to South Korea’s National Assembly about “how to make the K-pop businesses more environmentally friendly.”

This advocacy is no longer focused just on streaming companies. Kpop4planet has organized nine campaigns in total, including several involving Korean and international brands that have been tapping into the large K-pop fanbase to promote their products.

Its targeting of Hyundai was a particularly high-profile example. The Korean automaker has been working with BTS as brand ambassadors since 2018, and the group has more recently represented Hyundai’s electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. So when Kpop4planet learned in 2023 about a deal between Hyundai and an Indonesian aluminum supplier, the advocates decided to call out what they saw as hypocrisy. The metal supplier has plans to build a new coal power plant for aluminum smelting and wasn’t planning on using renewable power until late 2029 at best. If carried through, this deal would have increased the carbon emissions associated with Hyundai and delayed the automaker’s goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2045. (Hyundai did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.)

So Kpop4planet worked closely with BTS fandoms in Indonesia to highlight the local impact of a coal power plant like this one. Initially, fans worried that campaigning against Hyundai would give BTS a bad rep, but Lee and her group explained that the campaign was about protecting BTS from being associated with potential greenwashing activities. Kpop4planet collected  signatures from 11,000 K-pop fans in 68 countries and delivered an open letter to Hyundai’s office in Jakarta. It also invited indigenous fans in the country to show up for offline campaigns—dancing to BTS songs, sharing how they would be personally affected, and expressing their demands directly.

The message broke through. Hyundai agreed to meet with Kpop4planet in Seoul twice over the last year. “I was a little bit nervous before meeting them, because these are very big corporations,” Lee says. “But they are just like us, and they used to love K-pop culture when they were young as well.” In their conversations, Lee says, Hyundai told Kpop4planet that “they care about the K-pop fans because the influence of the K-pop industry is getting bigger and bigger around the world.”

In March, Hyundai announced it would terminate the deal and seek alternative sources of aluminum.

Also this year, the group has collaborated with five international Blackpink fan groups to campaign against four major luxury brands that the band’s members represent. Lee says they’re now talking to Kering (the owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent) and Chanel about reducing emissions and using 100% renewable energy across their supply chains. Lee says that in a Zoom meeting with Kering, the company echoed Hyundai in saying it cared about K-pop fans as its customers, and called Kpop4planet’s strategy of leveraging the influence of K-pop idols both modern and creative. (Kering and Chanel did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.)

Indeed, not many climate activist groups probably approach their demands the way Kpop4planet does—with lots of joyous dancing. “I watched some videos on TikTok and YouTube of lots of Thai K-pop fans doing some K-pop dance covers to protest for democracy,” Lee says. “It was really impressive, because it is one of the most creative and also peaceful ways to deliver their opinions. So we want to show and highlight that kind of fun element of K-pop fandoms.”

At the heart of all the campaigns, after all, is the love for K-pop music: “We [take] climate actions because we want to love and support our K-pop idols for a longer time.”

15 Jul, 2024

- The Download: how AI affects creativity, and CRISPR babies

The Download

The Download: how AI affects creativity, and CRISPR babies

Rhiannon Williams   8:10AM, 15 Jul, 2024

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

AI can make you more creative—but it has limits

Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human creativity?

That’s what two researchers set out to explore by studying how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories.

The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

CRISPR Babies: Six years later

Gene-editing can correct or improve the DNA of human embryos, essentially opening the door to ‘technological evolution’ of our species. But in 2018, a premature attempt to use gene-editing led to a prison term for the researcher involved.

Join our editor in chief Mat Honan and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado in a conversation to revisit China’s CRISPR babies and the future of editing in IVF clinics, in our subscriber-only Roundtables event. You can register here to join us on Thursday July 25 at 12.30pm ET.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Conspiracies about Donald Trump’s shooting are circulating online

Some observers are even claiming the shooting was faked. (WP $)

+ Far-right extremists are using it to call for violence. (Wired $)

+ Meta has lifted its restrictions on the former presidents’ accounts. (CNN)

2 Google is edging closer to closing its biggest acquisition yet

It’s reportedly willing to shell out $23 billion for security startup Wiz. (WSJ $)

+ Antitrust regulators are certain to be watching closely. (FT $)

3 AT&T appears to have paid hackers to delete stolen phone records

It’s just one company caught up in a major hacking spree that started in April. (Wired $)

+ An intermediary has provided extensive details from the reported deal. (The Verge)

4 A Brazilian influencer has been jailed for trafficking and slavery|

Kat Torres enchanted vulnerable women with her extravagant lifestyle. (BBC)

5 Samsung workers are defecting to a smaller chip rival

SK Hynix is hoovering up staff left dissatisfied by Samsung’s pay. (FT $)

+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Good luck renting an electric car

Rental companies are trying to shift their EV fleets—and fast. (NYT $)

+ Car sales are down across the board, in fact. (Reuters)

+ Why some companies want you to rent the battery in your EV. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Immunotherapy is being touted as a treatment for cancer

Starting with one of the toughest kinds to combat: brain cancer. (NY Mag $)

+ Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Better period products are on the horizon

Algae polymers turn menstrual blood into a spill-limiting gel. (Economist $)

+ Tiny faux organs could crack the mystery of menstruation. (MIT Technology Review)

9 The UK is addicted to weather apps 🌩️

Dragging the national fixation on the forecast into the digital age. (The Guardian)

10 This Japanese AI dating startup wants to make ‘Her’ a reality

Presumably with a slightly different ending. (Bloomberg $)

+ Everything you need to know about Google and OpenAI’s supercharged assistants. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“One of the things I love about Sam is every day he’s calling me and saying, ‘I need more, I need more, I need more.’”

—Satya Nadella reflects on his working relationship with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the New York Times reports.

The big story

Is the digital dollar dead?

July 2023

In 2020, digital currencies were one of the hottest topics in town. China was well on its way to launching its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, and many other countries launched CBDC research projects, including the US.

How things change. Three years later, the digital dollar—even though it doesn’t exist—has become political red meat, as some politicians label it a dystopian tool for surveillance. And late last year, the Boston Fed quietly stopped working on its CBDC project. So is the dream of the digital dollar dead? Read the full story.

—Mike Orcutt

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Ever wondered why we can only see one side of the moon? Wonder no more.

+ Not to wish the remainder of the summer away, but it’s time to order your seeds for the fall.

+ Alien isn’t just a great sci-fi film: it’s a great mystery, too.

+ I could watch this heated wire slice into foam all day long.

Table of Contents

MIT Technology Review: 18 Jul, 2024

18 Jul, 2024

Building supply chain resilience with AI

The Download: Falcon 9’s future, and Big Tech’s climate goals

Companies need to stop taking the easy way out on climate goals

What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9

17 Jul, 2024

Transforming the energy industry through disruptive innovation

The Download: Big Tech’s climate claims, and reducing your music streaming carbon footprint

Five ways to make music streaming better for the climate

Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims

16 Jul, 2024

The Download: K-pop stans’ climate plans, and what AI isn’t

A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)

Music streaming can be a drag on the environment. These K-pop fans want to clean it up.

15 Jul, 2024

The Download: how AI affects creativity, and CRISPR babies