Will big tech save us from climate change?
A generation ago, two simple insights changed the world: data could be monetised and would soon be everywhere. For the handful of entrepreneurs responsible, an Aladdin’s cave of riches lay ahead. Gates, Jobs, Page and Bezos had stumbled upon the most profitable business model in history.
Today, the collective market cap of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet (Google) (US$3.75 trillion) far exceeds the GDP of India (US$2.73 trillion). And data, too, is pervasive. By 2020, there will be 40 times more bytes of it than there are stars in the observable universe.
In late 2019, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon are playing an increasingly visible role in shaping a second business revolution, leveraging their huge cash reserves and data sets to transform global operations and supply chains. The goal? To speed the transition to a sustainable future by fighting climate change, reducing pollution and eliminating waste.
The extent of these efforts may surprise you, because the relationship between big tech and society is so broad and complex. Journalists have a range of key issues to probe, including governance, tax avoidance, privacy, fake news and trade wars. And on most of these issues, big tech deserves the censure received.
But it’s hard to malign the contribution the giants are making to address the climate emergency confronting our planet – even if their underlying motivation for action palpably blends idealism with self-interest.
The recent public relations efforts of Jeff Bezos are a case in point. Not one to misread business trends or invest time unprofitably, he announced in September that Amazon was founding The Climate Pledge – a commitment to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement ten years early.
“We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue,” Bezos said. “We’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference. If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon – which delivers more than 10 billion items a year – can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early [by 2040], then any company can.”
Bezos’ newfound passion for the planet is the clearest signal yet that big tech is willing to lead in response to a clamorous public demand for action. And why not? If climate change proves as consequential as the scientific evidence suggests, his coming to the light might be our last best hope.
After all, the traditional drivers of social change, nation states, have shown little capacity to cooperate for the common good. And as globalisation frays along the fault lines exposed by the withdrawal of American leadership, no issue is more susceptible than climate change to what Bank of England Governor Mark Carney calls the tragedy of the horizon.
The ‘tragedy’ here is two-fold. First, in the absence of regulation that correctly prices externalities like carbon emissions, the business models of the worst polluters remain as viable as ever. Saudi Arabia’s Aramco – responsible for 4.38 percent of all carbon dioxide and methane emissions since 1965 – was the world’s most profitable company last year, booking $111 billion on the bottom line. The most lucrative public company, Apple, pocketed only $31.5 billion in comparison
Second, the biggest impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the time horizons of key decision-makers today. These include national governments, management teams, most investors, and central banks, who remain incentivised by re-election, profit or legislative mandate to pursue short-term gains.
With options narrowing and time running out (the global population is expected to reach 11 billion in 2100), the assumption that politicians and bureaucrats have the capacity to engineer a solution to climate change looks increasingly na?ve.
Hobbes understood 400 years ago that human beings reflexively quest for power after power, “which ceaseth only in death”. So if national self-interest, alongside generational narcissism, condemns our global civilisation to failure, to whom might we turn?
The responsibility for preserving a habitable planet will soon fall to the decision-making capacities of non-human intelligence – algorithms capable of complex feats of cooperation, computation and regenerative engineering. Only three sectors, in turn, have the capacity to develop them: energy, finance and big tech.
Big tech is the best positioned of the three, with no legacy assets tied up in fossil fuels and the necessary combination of aligned incentives, balance sheet strength, visionary leadership and a STEM-literate employee base.
The superior ability of big tech to generate insights from data is an obvious starting point. AI for Earth, for instance, puts Microsoft cloud and AI tools in the hands of entrepreneurs looking to solve the biggest environmental challenges. A $50 million seed investment over five years will test new applications, and eventually help commercialise the best projects.
More importantly, on 23 October, Google announced what may one day prove one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of technology, claiming it had reached “quantum supremacy” by performing a calculation on its quantum computer, Sycamore, that no traditional computer is capable of matching.
While rival IBM disputes the claim, there is reason for cautious optimism – the superior processing powers of quantum computing could soon allow us to understand the complexity of climate systems.
Unlike classical computers which use 1s and 0s to process instructions, quantum computers communicate in basic units of information called qubits. The unique properties of quantum mechanics means that these qubits can represent 1s and 0s at the same time, allowing a quantum computer to uncover solutions to previously unfathomable problems.
By taking trillions of variables into account, Google and others may one day be able to create data-driven models that pinpoint how to reverse environmental damage, predict weather patterns, and prepare for bushfires and other natural disasters.
Switching to quantum computing will have the added benefit of reducing energy consumption; quantum computers are ten times more energy efficient than classical supercomputers.
Data centres today are the dirty secret of big tech, consuming two percent of the world’s energy. Despite pledges to shift to 100 percent clean energy, only 12 percent of Amazon’s massive Virginia-based data centres (and only 4 percent of Google’s) are powered by renewable energy. Microsoft is again leading the way, committing to a target of 70 percent renewable energy in data centres by 2023 and 100 percent “in the next decade”.
The necessity for climate action has reached an inflection point. In the near future, 2019 will be seen as a watershed year in the development and acceptance of sustainable capitalism, and big tech is helping lead the way.
Indeed, software billionaire Mark Cuban has predicted the world’s first trillionaire will master the power of AI and its derivatives (like quantum computing) to solve the seemingly unsolvable. Climate change – alongside human longevity – will be top of the list.
If quantum computing is the most exciting of the AI-backed ‘green’ opportunities ahead, trillions more stand to be made in closed-loop manufacturing, renewables, hydrogen fuel, sustainable agriculture, ecotourism, driverless cars and 3D printing.
And for all its sins, big tech will be responsible for driving many of the breakthroughs required.
Luke Heilbuth, Head of Strategy at BWD