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Happy Tuesday from Protocol Climate. Today, we’re examining the greatest tech worker to focus on climate. We’re also doubling down on the news of the AOC and Ilhan Omar’s covert campaign targeting voters and the heated carbon capture and storage debate. In the words of the immortal Beyoncé, “I need to unburden myself.
Climate technology is the new Facebook.
Move over, Silicon Valley. Engineers passionate about purpose and impact are quitting their jobs to fight the climate crisis.
- Some industry pioneers have been making headlines by shifting their energies from technology to climate change. Chris Sacca and Bill Gates both started climate VCs focused on carbonization. Mike Schroepfer recently stepped down from his CTO role at Meta to work on climate solutions.
- “These people don’t just do it for charity,” Climate Draft CEO and co-founder Jonathan Strauss told me. In his opinion, they’re in it because Climate is the most innovative place in technology right now.
- They are not alone. “There’s a huge exodus happening,” says CTO and co-founder of Climatebase, a talent directory for climate jobs, with more inbound demand from software engineers. In the year Since its launch in 2020, more than 500,000 people have used the site to find and apply for climate technology jobs.
“I think every generation has a zeitgeist.” Strauss said. For Gen X, that mission statement was the Internet, but for today’s generation, he believes the climate is rising.
- for what First, there’s the obvious. The tech workers I spoke to cited everything from seeing the sky turn orange during the California wildfires as reasons to join the Climate Charge of the planet they’re leaving for their children.
- Beyond the immediate urgency of the climate crisis, many see the nascent climate tech space as a breeding ground for innovation, where compared to older tech companies, “all the problems have already been solved,” Cassandra Xia, a former Googler and engineer at a climate tech startup, told me.
- For many, the quest is simply more inspiring. At Legacy Technologies, “you’re fed the idea that you can change the world, and then you work in advertising,” Hardin said.
- At Evergrow’s climate fintech startup, the company’s mission to help eliminate 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide by 2030 is printed at the bottom of each slide deck, “to make us aware and accountable,” Xia said. The company’s head of engineering.
These climate startup missions aren’t just inspiring. They also usually match the company’s financial incentives.
- The same cannot be said of Big Tech, no matter how well-intentioned climate commitments and net zero goals are. Malak AbuShark joined Apple as supply chain manager to lead supply chain and operations at Charm Industrial, a carbon removal startup.
- In her view, since the company’s business model is focused on selling consumer electronics, Apple will always have residual carbon emissions. Charm’s business model? Selling carbon removal services.
- “I think Apple is doing the right thing with a lot of environmental initiatives, but at the end of the day their scorecard is, ‘How many products did you sell?’ Our scorecard is ‘how much carbon dioxide have we removed?”’ she said.
– Michelle Ma
Black money tries to kill the IRA.
Historic climate legislation made it through the Senate this weekend. Now, all that stands between it and being signed into law is a House vote. A dark money group calls it a new approach to hoarding it.
Over the past few weeks, United for Clean Power has targeted progressive voters on social media, telling their Democratic representatives to oppose the inflation-reduction legislation. The group appears to be aligned with the GOP, and its strategy is trying to play up all that has been lost between cutting inflation and building improved jobs to create a divide.
The eclipse began at the end of July. Soon after, Senator Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that they had reached an agreement on a reconciliation bill. The newsletter, FWIW, first identified the campaign, which uses social media advertising and direct text messaging techniques to target voters in districts represented by progressive council members.
United for Clean Power is buying ads on Google and Facebook. Also newspapers and websites. As of July 30, the group has spent nearly $400,000 on the campaign, if not more.
- FWIW, the team spent $32,700 on Facebook ads and $44,300 on Google Ads in partnership with Popular Data.
- “Social media has allowed people to target super-specific audiences with messages about energy,” Curt Davis, founder and director of the Center for Climate Action, told The Protocol.
- The group has spent at least $20,000 sponsoring the POLITICO New York newspaper and its nightly newspaper last week. And the group’s ads dominated Politico’s homepage for several days last week, with ad placements averaging more than $150,000 a day. (POLITICO, which owns Axel Springer along with Protocol, did not respond to questions from Protocol about its ad-buying policy.)
The group is incorporated as a “social welfare” organization, known in IRS-speak as a 501(c)(4). But 501(c)(4) organizations are often used as vehicles for dark money operations, says Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigative manager of OpenSecrets.
- Although they are not required to have politics as their primary focus, she said, “Many people ignore that rule because it is not clearly defined.”
- The general rule of thumb is that if more than half of a group’s activities are political, it “must legally register and disclose donors,” she added.
- This is what United for Clean Energy looks like. The group’s 2018 and 2019 tax forms, available only online, show United for Clinton Power spent $201,772 in 2018, more than $135,000 of which went to the GOP-focused organization’s advertising service to document most of its strategies.
- The group was originally founded in 2015 by Erin Cummings, who currently works at the Department of Homeland Security, to promote bipartisan energy policies; In the year In 2017, she handed over control of the group to current director Greg Finnerty, an Ohio-based lawyer, who told The Protocol she was confused by the campaign. “I support the bill,” she said.
With the bill making it through the Senate and Democrats holding a large majority in the House, the campaign appears likely to fail.
- We are not talking about complex surgery here either.
- The label “no reconciliation without comprehensive climate change” seems to forget that climate change is not desirable, bill or otherwise. But the campaign is misrepresenting its origin and purpose and there is real money behind it.
- Davis said this and similar campaigns are designed to take advantage of ongoing divisions in the party, despite political reality.
- “It’s hitting a raw nerve, and someone has recognized that and is trying to divide the Democratic camp with real divisiveness,” he said. “You know there are divisions to the left of the Green New Deal … it’s hard for some people to bite their tongues at this point.”
– Lisa Martin Jenkins
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A big number: 200 million
The law of depreciation uses many carrots – and not many sticks – when it comes to reducing carbon pollution. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising incentives are for carbon capture and storage, which has a fairly proven track record of actually working.
An analysis by the Princeton Revision Project found that by 2030, CCS incentives could lead to 200 million tons of carbon lost per year, in part due to changes in the 45Q tax credit, which is a per ton of carbon sequestered and made easier for projects. To qualify. That growth is literally an order of magnitude greater than the current one. The Princeton team’s previous work charting a net zero path for the US also shows very slow progress. What does it give?
Jesse Jenkins is the leader of the group He tweeted. Modeling this young industry comes with “a lot of uncertainty in the forecast for growth.” Indeed, it is unclear what will happen to the industry, assuming the IRA passes the House with the new incentives.
Danny Cullenward, policy director of Carbon Plan, a climate research charity, said: “We don’t know how people will use these tax credits, we don’t yet know which projects will take which routes. I. We learn a lot about the technology.
Concerns that credits in the bill for sequestered carbon could help the fossil fuel industry use carbon to extract more oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery, are real, he said. Also, the credits are promising to be used to increase corn ethanol production. Cullenward said the corn ethanol plant is probably “the cheapest place you can do CCS.” In addition, California offers “storable” tax credits through its low-carbon fuel standard. Those credits could pay as much as $200 per ton for low-carbon-intensity fuels. Add to that a 45kW 85-tonne boost and you’ve got a “gold rush” for CCS and biofuels, according to Cullenward.
The bill is more than CCS. But with CCS garnering so much attention, we’ll have to wrestle with exactly what shape it will take in the coming years. Given the tech industry’s strong interest in decarbonizing, Cullenward said, “Technology leaders need to think really carefully, and engage in a vision of how to do this right in the long term and make money in the short term, not just a promise.”
– Brian Kahn
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Thanks for reading! As always, you can send any and all feedback. weather@protocol.com. See you Thursday!
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