Will technology save our planet?
Éadin O’Mahony spends each morning scanning the sea. She stands on the deck of the small wooden research center, flanked by pine forest, binoculars in hand. She’s searching for whales, humpbacks specifically.
Here, in the Great Bear Rainforest, it's not rare to see humpbacks.
Under the right weather conditions, she’ll be prepared with a drone so when she spots a whale, she can launch it straight away. She’ll fly it just above the graceful animal, positioned perfectly for when it surfaces and exhales forcefully. The snot from the blow coats a glass fitted to the drone, which she’ll freeze and analyze for DNA.
These samples tell her about breeding populations and will support a team project by BC Whales to see how whales might be affected by a natural gas tanker route scheduled to cross through this bay in 2023. It’s a lot of work to keep DNA fresh out here, using a solar-powered freezer, but it’s valuable information that could impact conservation efforts on one of Canada’s wildest coastlines.
Éadin’s drones make it possible for her to capture precise data about these whales without disturbing them, meaning she can analyze their natural behavior much more effectively. It also dramatically lowers the potential negative effects of this kind of study.
Is it possible that cutting-edge technology (including tech that has not yet been invented) could dramatically change our ability to save our planet from ourselves? It’s a tempting thought. However, we have a long way to go.
3 Reasons Why Tech Won’t Save Us
1. Big Tech is having a morality crisis.
Big Tech has gained a bad name for acting much like their corporate forbears. While these massive companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) are unlikely to pioneer a conservation revolution, they could eventually be the answer to scaling it.
After all, Google acquires approximately one company per month, adding up to over 241 companies since 1998. It nearly swamps all acquisitions by the other three put together. These massive companies have gained a reputation for buying up competition or cutting-edge startups in an “acquihire” model to bring their tech and teams in-house.
Given their size and financial clout, these tech startups are likely our best hope for accelerating the development of planet-saving technology. But the ideas and innovation are not going to come from within. And unfortunately, given the unavoidable moral/ethical component of working in conservation, it is increasingly difficult to see overlap between these massive tech companies and conservation-focused entrepreneurs — despite recent attempts at greenwashing by Amazon and Apple.
Furthermore, the association between large tech companies and abusive (& non-ecofriendly) business practices only makes it harder for younger tech startups to gain legitimacy in this field with diehard conservationists, scientists, and the general public.
2. Our hardware is still really dirty.
While digital technology can reduce our reliance on certain natural resources — for example, energy consumption has become increasingly efficient — we still need natural materials to make that hardware.
The chips and batteries in our phones, computers, Kindles, iPads, refrigerators (everything seems to have a screen now!) have a tremendous human and environmental cost. 60% of the cobalt needed to make lithium-ion batteries (like the one in your phone) comes from unregulated mines in the Congo, often from child labor. These mines supply factories in China that create the batteries currently powering most of the technologies we now take for granted — including the laptop I’m using to write this piece.
These mines are often open pits within the rainforest of the Congo Basin with few regulations and no oversight. Miners are predominantly independent, scraping together what they can to try to sell to the Chinese factories. Cobalt, and other minerals used in hardware, has created a “resource curse” in the Congo, where the country is impoverished and harmed by their natural resources, rather than empowered.
The lack of regulation over these mines — along with the high cost of cobalt — also means there is a significant incentive for individuals to look for new mining areas, requiring them to chop down forests within fragile ecosystems in the world’s second-largest rainforest.
Until we can solve our hardware problem, this negative externality will largely outweigh any tangible conservation benefits seen elsewhere.
3. Our current incentive structure does not reward ‘selfless’ entrepreneurs.
Know any billionaire conservationists? Or even greentech/conservation entrepreneurs? While financial gain is obviously not the only reason people look to entrepreneurship and technology, it is often a sufficient cause.
Having worked in conservation for three years, I’ve frequently heard the argument that “no one gets into conservation for the money.” I’ve even said it myself. But what if these brilliant and passionate scientists did not have to choose between financial stability (or dare I say success) and a rewarding career? I have come across far more biologists scraping by as waitresses and doing odd jobs so they can volunteer in their field than I would like to say.
There are two points to pick apart here. I’ll add that I’ve made this argument to many a biologist during expeditions in the Amazon Rainforest and many of them disagree with me.
A. As the current incentive structure stands, many people who are trained in and extremely passionate about conservation biology cannot afford to work in this field.
Not only does this issue unfairly weed out talented but less financially-privileged individuals, but it also discourages other smart, passionate people from entering this field because they cannot imagine surviving on this career. While it could be argued that this natural “weeding out” process keeps only the most passionate people in conservation, it is also narrowing the talent pool that is thinking about these critical issues.
I argue that we can only be saved by technology if the smartest people in the world are focused on innovating to fight conservation challenges. Some of those people will not mind — or will be able to weather — the financial instability, but a critical proportion will not. Thus, conservation brain drain.
B. Protecting our planet is actually economically good for us. So wouldn’t it make sense for someone to be able to make a LOT of money doing it?
A recent Freakonomics podcast episode tried to lay out the economics of saving the Amazon Rainforest. In terms of just the carbon stored in the forest (excluding biodiversity & tourism potential), a hectare of Amazon Rainforest is worth 28x more standing than cut down for a cattle farm. Yet we have already lost 20% of this forest, mostly to agricultural activities like livestock farming.
There are obviously multiple broken incentive structures at play here and I encourage you to listen to the podcast if you want to understand how conservation needs to reframe the dilemma of the Brazilian farmer. I’m not going to get into it. But if you do listen, I highly recommend you cast a critical eye on their proposed model and read more about what happened when Rafael Correa tried to implement a very similar model in Ecuador in the early-2000s. I’m dubious the international community would pay to protect forests in South America, or that this money could be trusted to reach its endpoint (without something like blockchain technology, at least!).
My point here is that some of the world’s smartest, most driven people are naturally drawn to the tech industry because they can make money, fan their egos, and potentially become famous for changing the world. And many of them succeed, creating technology that affects millions of people and produces billions of dollars.
The conservation industry tends to eschew these people, hiding behind moral arguments. But what if ambitious people (even those drawn by capital) could see a lucrative career for themselves in developing the next technology that eliminates our need for crude oil? Would that be so bad?
If we could double the number of people interested in working in conservation and make it possible for them to all make at least a living wage, if not millions of dollars, we could rapidly accelerate our discovery of the technology that could save us. To date, there are a few examples of people becoming tremendously rich off ‘green’ technology (not going to go into the weeds of harm done by hydroelectric power or biodiesel made with palm oil as this list is only based on avoiding greenhouse gas emissions). But these examples are few and far between, and mostly not using new tech like AI.
While our systems that allow people to make millions (and billions) of dollars need to be dismantled as well to actually solve the climate crisis, I argue that if they could be used responsibly and for good (such as saving our planet), we could drive change more quickly.
While these last sections might make it sound like I don’t think technology will save the planet, I’m actually optimistic. Here’s why:
3 Reasons Why Tech Will Save Us
1. Necessity is the Mother of Innovation.
It has become painfully clear that our planet is changing for the worse. This fact is no longer possible to ignore; even climate change deniers are beginning to see the rising tides lapping on their doorsteps. Unfortunately, the world’s most marginalized communities feel these effects first, meaning little has been done to resolve them.
Yet there are two converging factors that could cause an epiphany in innovation that fights our climate crisis: 1) Millennials are aging and 2) climate change has begun to very clearly affect wealthy communities, including areas of California at the heart of global innovation.
The wildfires in Australia, which now feel like they were a decade ago, consumed brushland and mansions alike. Same for the 2018 Camp Fire in California. While climate events like these happen daily in rural, marginalized communities, the global community cannot seem to turn away when they affect ‘developed’ nations like the US and Australia.
However, this situation is sparking real change through the anger and hunger of affected communities who are in a position of power to act. And increasingly, these actors are Millennials, now aged between their mid-twenties to early forties.
Why does this generational divide matter? Millennials have grown up aware and attuned to the issue of climate change, and still feel we (because yes, I am a Millennial) have a stake in fixing this problem as it will deeply affect us and our children. Furthermore, the average age of the founder of a high-growth startup is 45 years old.
So we are in a sweet spot where talented, experienced, and often well-funded people are feeling a strong pinch from climate change, see the need to fix it, and are in the right place and time to lead a team that does so effectively.
2. Successful entrepreneurs are going green.
The first cleantech bubble burst with the 2008 financial crisis and the notorious implosion of Solyndra. Investors and entrepreneurs in the early 2000s were already feeling the effects of climate change and felt pressed to act. Yet this bubble severely slowed down the development of the industry.
We are now over 12 years later. Current economic crisis aside, these twelve years have brought tremendous growth and opportunities for entrepreneurs to build successful companies, sell them, and go on to build more. And increasingly, these second or third companies have a strong social and/or environmental bent.
This particular pattern is important because repeat entrepreneurs are more successful. They make more money and their companies last longer. If these experienced, well-funded, trusted entrepreneurs turn their attention toward our society’s most urgent problem, we have the beginnings of a revolution. And this is already happening.
PayPal’s Elon Musk has gone on to build Tesla, one of the US’ most popular electric car brands. While his business model does not center around sustainability, these vehicles produce significantly fewer emissions and less noise pollution than cars using fossil fuels. Furthermore, the prominence of his brand (for better or for worse) encourages other ambitious entrepreneurs to fight for the ‘moonshot’ that could tip the scales on saving the planet.
Bluesmart’s Diego Saez Gil is creating Pachama, a scaleable voluntary carbon offset market using reforestation efforts driven by drone technology, Lidar, and Artificial Intelligence.
Lisa Dyson was a scientist before building Kiverdi, an agtech startup that reimagines the carbon cycle to produce food without infinitely extracting resources from the Earth. Their NASA-inspired technology has already garnered Kiverdi over 50 patents and could completely change the way we farm.
Before building Satellogic, Emiliano Kargiemann built a successful security startup. Today, he is launching low-cost satellites into orbit to provide accessible, high-resolution data that can help in decision-making, especially about protecting our threatened climate.
Examples of this pattern are nearly endless and I am always excited to hear about the next greentech innovations, so feel free to reach out to me if there are more case studies I should review!
Furthermore, while I was critical of some large tech companies above, a few are making legitimate strides toward improving our understanding — and therefore protection — of the Earth. Microsoft has recently taken on climate action with several enormous, cross-cutting initiatives that empower smaller organizations with the tech suite of this software giant.
They gained significant attention for vowing to go carbon negative by 2030, but this pledge actually seems small compared to the investment Microsoft has made in cutting-edge technology that can be used to make critical decisions about protecting our planet: AI for Earth.
AI for Earth is an initiative focused on building a “Planetary Computer” that aggregates and organizes millions of data points into an interactive map to help organizations of all sizes leverage data in decision-making about our planet. AI for Earth has also partnered with National Geographic to provide grants to innovators finding solutions that use artificial intelligence to improve climate resilience and protect biodiversity. This technology could potentially have thousands of applications and dramatically accelerate grassroots organizations’ ability to tackle climate change at the local and global level.
While AI for Earth is still incipient, it is a ray of hope. It also demonstrates how large tech companies can use their platforms to uplift other, smaller organizations, without necessarily facing the ethical/moral dilemmas of trying to get involved in conservation tech directly, as I mentioned above.
3. We are nearly incapable of imagining what the future could bring, and so the possibilities are endless.
Ask most people in the early-2000s if they thought they would carry a small computer in their pocket (or remain glued to it all day) in a few years, and they would say no. Yet smartphones have completely revolutionized the way we see and interact with the world. These devices may be the answer to financial exclusion crises in Latin America and Africa, as well as changing the way we experience media, education, and even healthcare.
Trying to fathom the breadth of opportunities to harness existing technology or develop entirely new systems to solve global problems is a bit like trying to understand how many stars are in the universe. There are things we simply cannot imagine. And therefore, it is entirely reasonable to believe that a relatively simple technological solution to our problems could be sitting under our nose.
This realization should make entrepreneurs, scientists, and techies hungry to figure out how to make the product or service that just ‘clicks’ for climate change in the way that smartphones have gradually become ubiquitous worldwide. People have already come up with lab-grown shrimp, vertical farms with a closed carbon cycle, and machines that eat garbage out of the ocean. Now we just need to make sustainability as addictive as tapping the home button on your smartphone.
This point is an optimist’s argument. I do believe we will get ourselves out of this mess, and I believe we will stumble upon the solution through a tech innovation at the eleventh hour. This ‘salvation’ will not come before we have suffered significantly and certainly not before we permanently lose a sizeable portion of our global biodiversity. We have likely already passed the tipping point on these issues.
However, we as a society have proven our capacity to innovate rapidly time and again throughout history; when our back is up against the wall (and believe me, it is), our smartest, scrappiest inventors pop out of the woodwork.
This article is a work-in-progress. I have pledged myself to write a new version every year as my thoughts and knowledge evolve on this topic. Please reach out to me at sophia@friendsofwallacea.org if you have ideas, comments, or questions.
