Welcome to this week’s edition of AppropriateFuture, a weekly review of the convergence of technology, sustainability, innovation, and public policy.
Sustainability
🌱 The nonsensical, unrealistic desire for infinite exponential economic growth. Multiple opinion pieces on the topic this week:
⛓️ Our problem is the desire for limitless growth and the environmental consumption/destruction it requires: it is essentially impossible to decouple material use from economic growth. “The key point is that efficiency is limited by physics, but there is no sufficiency limit on the socioeconomic construct of demand.” [▶️ Chirag Dhara and Vandana Singh in Scientific American]
🔅 Is the Controlled Shrinking of Economies a Better Bet to Slow Climate Change Than Unproven Technologies? Degrowth is the concept of downscaling production and consumption, while improving ecological conditions and maintaining people’s quality of life. [▶️ Bob Berwyn in Inside Climate News]
🌫️ “It is no longer heretical to observe that economic growth will not, and cannot, solve our climate crisis…More growth means more emissions.” [▶️ Jeremy Caradonna in The Guardian]
💚 On Greenwashing:
That’s why a raft of politicians, regulators, lawyers, activists and investors are grappling with the question—how do you stop companies making unverifiable environmental claims? Greenwashing works because of nebulous definitions. A number of interested parties told me they likened “sustainable” to the phrase “world peace”—unopposable, unachievable, meaningless.
👟 Sustainable Sneakerheads: Adidas CEO said “If we succeed in sustainability – or when – we also succeed as a business.” 70% of consumers say that they consider sustainability a significant buying argument. [▶️ Harun Asad in Environmental and Energy Leader]
💵 The more carbon that an oil and gas company emits, the more it pays for capital. [▶️ Bill Holland and Starr Spencer from S&P Global Market Intelligence]
Technology
🇪🇺 Big Tech’s Big Hot Anti-Trust Summer — European Union regulators launch new antitrust investigation into Google’s potential abuse of its dominance to stifle competition in the online advertising market, a space said to be worth $24B in Europe alone. [▶️ Adam Satariano in The New York Times]
🏭 While tech will undoubtedly play a big role in innovation needed to achieve the world’s net zero carbon goals — it’s really, really dirty to manufacture the semiconductors at the center of it all. Intel's campus in Leixlip, Ireland, generated 14 metric tonnes of volatile organic compounds, 1.21 tonnes of hazardous air pollutants, 13 tonnes of oxides of nitrogen, and 22 tonnes of carbon monoxide in the last quarter. Over the last year the facility was responsible for 453,769 metric tons of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) global warming gas (GWG) emissions — and, here’s the thing, this is simultaneously true: Intel is also a leader in best practices in environmental sustainability. To their credit, Intel has purchased 100 per cent renewable electricity for the site since 2017. [▶️ Gareth Halfacree in The Register]
👔 Why does a VC see a “digital-sustainable business” as an advantage? “A truly sustainable company will encompass all ESG-aspects from equal-pay-policies to flexible working hours, from continuous education to inclusion and from transparent corporate governance to employee engagement.” [▶️ Wilken Engelbracht in EU-Startups]
Public Policy
🇺🇳 The United Nations News says Yikes to insane energy burn of Bitcoin (“One of the most fundamentally pointless ways of using energy,” says Tim Berners-Lee), but Yay to the benefits of the Blockchain. [▶️ UN News]
😐 EU Privacy regulators call for “a general ban on any use of A.I. for automated recognition of human features in publicly accessible spaces, such as recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioral signals, in any context." [▶️ David Meyer in Fortune]
Innovation
📈 Growth in patent applications that mention technologies for direct air capture to remove CO2 from the atmosphere has seen a three-fold increase over the last ten years — a sign that innovations and markets are targeting this difficult task. [▶️ Elliott Carrington and Emma Foster in The Chemical Engineer]
🤖 The startups tackling climate change - lots of interesting action in startups, including in buildings (BrainBoxAI), precision agriculture (Gamaya), the power grid (Raptor Maps) and more [▶️ Rob Toews in Fortune]
And Finally, The Good Links: (not a Milli Vanilli reference) Blame It On The Rain