On Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week: On the Week That was

 

We present a curation of thoughts on our World on the Tech Scene and on "Going Green"  with thoughts from the Financial Times & The Information & Bloomberg Green...

By Natasha White and Eric Roston The Paris Agreement in 2015 established a 1.5° Celsius goal as a rallying point for every nation in the world, and the Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres was one of its chief architects. With the release of Monday’s latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she’s faced with the increasingly probable outcome that the temperature threshold she helped establish as former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will be passed in the years ahead. “I don’t have words to explain. ‘Concerning’ is not enough. This is frankly a terrifying report,” Figueres told Bloomberg Green a few days ahead of the report’s official release, speaking with apparent familiarity with its findings. “It’s not really about megatons,” she said, speaking of rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions. “It is fundamentally about the long-term wellbeing of the entire web of life on this planet.” Figueres is a founder of the Global Optimism Group and co-author of The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis. Her remarks reflecting on the IPCC climate assessment have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.  What does this report mean? Where are we now?  It’s quite foreseeable that the report would underline, yet again, that we are not doing enough, neither in terms of scale or speed. This decade continues to be the decisive decade to have half a chance to close the warming gap to where we need to be. We are far from being below 2° C, let alone 1.5° C, which we now know is where we need to be to adapt nature, humans and the economy. Beyond that, adaptation would be in serious question. It could trigger the point beyond which ecosystems will simply transform irreversibly. What’s the significance of the war in Ukraine for the energy transition? There seems to be big climate backslide and a scramble for coal, but at the same time a real chance to accelerate the push for renewables.  The way I think about the war is with the following analogy. Let us say that we have a patient who has been diagnosed with lung cancer that is quickly becoming terminal, but is not yet. That’s the situation that we have around the planet. Now we discover that one of the main sellers of the tobacco that has led to this cancer is using the income that the patients pay to commit atrocities against other people. So now we have a choice. What does the patient do? Option one: The patient says, “I’m going to start planting tobacco in my own yard and putting together my own little rolling station at home.” Well, that has the advantage that there’s less income [going to the seller]. So if we now dig for more oil and more gas, and ramp up the completely obsolete coal plants, that has the advantage that we begin to starve the bully of their income. So that’s definitely a good thing. However, it does absolutely nothing about the health of the patient—or the health of the planet.  It is very clear that we can’t continue to depend for our energy, which is the basis of the global economy, on regimes that are completely irresponsible and completely unpredictable. But if, on top of that, we [add] climate change, now we have a double-whammy situation.  The Paris Agreement goal is now under strain. How are we going to be talking about in two years?  It’s not the Paris narrative that is under strain. It’s our inability to live up to the Paris expectations. The Paris Agreement stands. In fact, it’s only getting more and more robust because we did not have the certainty around 1.5 in 2015.  I’m lacking words for this. It’s beyond immoral. It’s suicidal. What is suicidal is our inability to take the decisions and enact the behavioral changes that we perfectly well can in order to align our planet with the Paris Agreement. That’s the problem. There is nothing new that any report can tell us about what we should be doing. The gap that we identified years ago is not closing; in fact, it’s enlarging. That’s the news. It’s tragic.  Here’s my optimistic piece. This report will remind us once again that the cancer can very well become terminal, but is not terminal yet. It’s the “yet” that I would like to emphasize. We are standing in front of the abyss, we still have the opportunity to steer away from the abyss.  Five Takeaways from the New UN Climate Report The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its latest 3,000-page look at how humanity can avoid compounding catastrophe if nations take sufficient action to do so. So far humanity hasn’t, the report concludes. Left unchanged, the world’s current emissions trend could result in warming of more than twice the target limit set forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement of no more than 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.  The new report updates previous work by the IPCC — its last work on this topic came out in 2014 — as well as assessing the potential of technology and offering evidence that climate action, done right, can improve the health and wellbeing of people around the world. Here are five top takeaways. 1.  1.5°C is almost out of reach  Nations, cities, businesses and investors raced to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 after the publication of a previous IPCC report in 2018. Yet according to the new report, emissions have continued to drain the “carbon budget,” an accounting tool scientists use to estimate how much time is left before temperature limits are likely to be breached. The short time that’s passed makes keeping the goal much more difficult. While “net-zero by 2050” is a slogan with breathing room, a new factoid puts the challenge into sharper focus: Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025.  2.  We know what to do and have the tools to do it  More than a dozen countries have enjoyed a shrinking emissions rate for more than a decade, the panel said, with some seeing 4% annual declines consistent with a 2°C warmer world. There are cost-effective methods of cutting carbon that together could meet half the 2030 emissions target. Solar and wind costs fell 85% and 55% between 2010 and 2019, making them now cheaper than fossil-fuel-powered electricity generation in many places. Carbon-free and low carbon technologies, including nuclear and hydroelectric power, made up 37% of the electricity generated globally in 2019. The report heralds “digitalization” — robotics, AI, the internet of things — as a powerful way to increase energy efficiency and manage renewable power. ​​​​​​ 3.  Carbon removal is “unavoidable” to reach net zero  Keeping to the 1.5°C or even 2°C warming limit will be increasingly difficult without going into what scientists call “overshoot,” or surpassing the limit and then clawing back down. That means carbon removal is “unavoidable” for a path to net-zero emissions, the IPCC said. There are many ways to draw down CO₂. Some of them are tested by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, like halting deforestation and regrowing dense forests. Others are new and increasingly attracting investment, such as direct-air capture that scrapes carbon right out of the air. To fall back below the 1.5°C target by 2100, the IPCC wrote, practices and policies — many of them still embryonic — would have to draw down almost a decade of CO₂ emissions, according to scenarios that “are subject to increased feasibility concerns.”  4.   Behavior matters  Climate scientists use the term mitigation to encompass all the ways that the causes of climate change can be tamped down. For the first time in an IPCC study focusing on these prevention methods, scientists looked at carbon-cutting from the demand side. Scaled behavioral and cultural changes, they found, can wring out 40 to 70% of emissions compared with recent trends. Beef consumption, air travel and building energy use are all areas where the combined decisions of many people can have a substantial impact. Social science has rarely been a part of the IPCC process, but that changed as authors reviewed 100,000 relevant papers generated in recent years from those disciplines. The new report chapter dovetails with recent analyses quantifying just how much more wealthy people emit than everyone else: The top 1% of emitters are responsible for 70 times more pollution than people in the bottom 50%.  5.  Politics shapes the process  Media coverage of IPCC releases tends to focus on what’s called the “summary for policymakers,” a condensed version of the doorstop assessment. Every line of this document must be agreed on by delegates from 195 countries and the scientists who wrote the report. The approval session for the latest report lasted two weeks and was held virtually with hundreds of participants. Wrangling toward the end led to a 40-hour weekend sprint to push the report through the approval process. The IPCC’s work is scientific, but this layer of geopolitics leads to competition over every word, as negotiators to try to embed in final language protections of their own national interests. Although the summary must always reflect the science in the longer report, they don’t always match perfectly. Sometimes, scientists lay bare a core problem in a way that diplomats never would. Such as when they write: “The interaction between politics, economics and power relationships is central to explaining why broad commitments do not always translate to urgent action.”

Here's what else you need to know in Green

Planet’s Breakneck Warming Likely to Pass 1.5°C, UN Scientists Warn Current climate policies won’t be enough to keep alive the initial goal of the Paris Agreement, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Russia’s Gazprom Released Five Methane Plumes During Pipe Repairs The emissions, which were detected by satellite, underscore the climate dangers of relying on Russian gas  India Set to Miss Modi’s Ambitious 2022 Renewables Goal Pandemic, supply chains and indebted utilities are all to blame.

World FT ranking: The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies 2022 A medtech business leads the field of 500 companies, knocking a fintech lender off the top spot You could call it Elon Musk’s Twitter Mystery. The world’s most talkative CEO has suddenly turned coy. Yes, he revealed today that he had bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter. But he said not a word on Twitter about it. And he made the disclosure in a way that allowed him to hide how he paid for the stake. As it likely cost him at least $2.4 billion, that information is kind of important. Did he borrow against his Tesla stake to fund the purchase—a money-raising move he has used in the past? Or did he use some of the money raised from his recent sale of Tesla shares to buy Twitter stock?  Either way, the answer matters, including to Tesla shareholders. What adds to the mystery is that to keep that information secret, Musk had to pledge that he was a passive investor only, with no plans to try and take control or influence the management of the company. For Musk, that would seem to defeat the entire point of the purchase! He can’t call up Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, and tell him to make Twitter more of a free-speech paradise. Nor can he tweet such a proposal, which is something he has done recently. It’s no wonder Musk’s Twitter feed was silent on the purchase today.  Of course, he could start pushing Twitter to change, as long as he is willing to change his filing status to be more of an activist investor. According to Scott Budlong, a partner with Barnes & Thornburg, such a reversal wouldn’t be particularly unusual. But it would require a more detailed disclosure on several topics, including how he paid for the stock, whether he borrowed money to do so and possibly whether he pledged assets as collateral in any loan. We would also learn exactly when he bought the shares and the price he paid. Right now, the filing implies he passed the 5% disclosure threshold in mid-March. That means Musk was buying when Twitter hit its lows during the worst of the recent market downturn. Why he didn’t disclose the purchase earlier is unclear. Perhaps he wanted to finish buying before telling anyone what he was doing? Musk knew the stock would rocket once word got out, and of course it did, rising 27%. That suggests Musk may not be planning to buy more. In other words, the purchase may be simply what he presents it as: a good investment. And given today’s price rise, he has already made nearly half his money back.  The de-AT&Tification of WarnerMedia is underway. All but two members of the entertainment company’s executive team are departing as it gets swallowed up by Discovery, Warner said today. The two survivors are holdovers from Warner’s pre-AT&T era. Nearly all the others either came from the telecom giant or were installed by it. The shakeup is a reminder of the cultural shift underway in this merger. Discovery’s DNA is in television, making it a much closer fit with WarnerMedia’s entertainment business than AT&T ever was.  In other words, Discovery is about to liberate a company that for the past four years has been under barbarian control. At least, that’s how you can imagine some Warner lifers might see things. But as alien as AT&T was when its team took over the firm, then called Time Warner, its reign wasn’t without value. While it took the telecom folks a little while to get things straight, their installation of Jason Kilar and his cadre of ex-Hulu executives likely helped advance the competitiveness of Warner’s HBO Max streaming service more than it would have without Kilar’s input. Yes, Kilar’s central emphasis on streaming was probably alienating to entertainment lifers at Warner and beyond. But it’s what Warner needed as it plunged into direct rivalry with Netflix.  It’s a little disappointing, then, that Discovery didn’t retain Kilar’s two former Hulu colleagues, HBO Max general manager Andy Forssell and WarnerMedia CTO Richard Tom, at least. Entertainment companies historically have struggled to compete with tech for talent, so anyone with long experience in streaming would have been valuable. Discovery, of course, has its own team, including a CTO who worked at both Amazon and Microsoft. But Discovery’s streaming efforts haven’t exactly set the world on fire so far. Discovery CEO David Zaslav may come to regret not finding a way to hold onto the tech talent he could have inherited in the Warner deal. Elon Musk’s Arithmetic Error Can Elon Musk count? Musk tweeted today that the differences in what he disclosed about the size of his Twitter shareholding between his Monday disclosure and an updated one on Tuesday was due to an “incorrect” initial count of the shares he owned. Instead of owning 73.486 million shares, or 9.2%, as he initially disclosed, he owns only 73.115 million shares, or 9.1%. The difference, of 371,900 shares, is worth $18.5 million at Twitter’s current prices.  Musk’s Twitter disclosures already prompted plenty of debate, most notably about the timing and his initial description of himself as a passive investor (something he updated on Tuesday). With the arithmetic error, you really have to wonder: Maybe Musk needs a new lawyer to help him file these disclosures. At the very least, he needs to buy a new calculator. Or learn to use Excel. Fast’s Dollar Bonfire One-click checkout software startup Fast is about to enter the Museum of Failed Startups as a primary exhibit in the Cash Burning Hall. To get a sense of the craziness at the firm, check out our deep dive today. Its opening anecdote, about a colorful event held by Fast to announce Tampa, Fla., as its East Coast hub, gives you a flavor of how the company operated. The event ended with a performance by a Jet Ski rider doing backflips in the water below. The press conference was part of a multi-day corporate retreat for which the San Francisco–based startup flew in dozens of employees. During a recruiting event the day after Holland’s grand entrance, Tampa locals spoke with employees about career opportunities at the startup, which was supposedly growing in leaps and bounds. But it was all for show. Within weeks, talk died down internally about the planned hiring in Tampa. While Fast hired more than 30 people in the month following the retreat, none of them were based in Tampa, a person familiar with the matter said. For more on Fast’s demise, see our earlier stories: Fast, the Troubled Fintech Startup, is Shutting Down Stripe-Backed Fast Seeks Buyer After Struggling to Raise Capital Stripe-Backed Fast Puts Job Cuts on the Table as It Tries to Raise Money Why Stripe’s Fast Horse is Losing the One-Click Checkout Race In Other News… Boeing hired the three biggest public cloud services, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, to upgrade its computing services, Bloomberg reported. See our earlier report about how the three cloud giants were pursuing the deal. Uber will add train, bus and plane tickets, along with car rentals and eventually hotels, to its U.K. app, by partnering with companies that sell those forms of travel, CNBC reported today. As the CNBC report put it, Uber seems to want to turn its app into a “superapp” offering lots of other services, as is common in Asia with apps like Tencent’s WeChat. Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is exploring the development of a new virtual currency designed to pay for goods and services across the metaverse, the Financial Times reported. Internally referred to as “Zuck Bucks,” Meta’s new currency could be similar to the premium in-app currencies used in platforms like Roblox and Rec Room. The Financial Times said that Meta’s new metaverse currency is unlikely to be a blockchain-based cryptocurrency.  The Information Events Thursday, April 21—*SPEAKERS ANNOUNCED* Fintech: Women in Tech Leadership Forum We’re hosting our next Women in Tech Leadership Forum on the topic of fintech, convening executive women leaders virtually, with speakers from Affirm, Goldman Sachs, PayPal, Uniswap Labs and more. The event is free and by invitation only, for senior women in established tech companies. Limited space is available. Apply for an invitation or submit your interest in speaking here. New From Our Reporters Live Fast, Die Young: Behind the Fall of a One-Click Wonder Opinion: Pretty LinkedIn Profiles Are Overrated The Information’s Return to the Office Tracker: Spring 2022 What We’re Reading Banks Weigh Using Zelle to Challenge Visa, Mastercard Amazon Warehouse Workers Just Redefined What’s Possible for U.S. Labor What’s Next in Elon Musk’s Wild Week The New York Times’ Old White Democrats’ Problem The Global Glut of Clothing is an Environmental Crisis Question: When will Elon Musk get himself appointed CEO of Twitter? It has been only a few days since he joined the board, after buying 9% of the company, but already Twitter has arranged for him to talk to employees in a question-and-answer session, as The Washington Post reported. That’s an extraordinary move for Twitter to make. It’s hard to imagine the same thing happening with ordinary activist investors, such as Starboard Value or Elliott Management. But then again, Musk isn’t an ordinary activist investor. Most of them just want to make some money.  Musk has sent all sorts of signals implying he wants to be in charge of Twitter, from polling Twitter users about their views of company policies and product features to musing to people on phone calls that maybe he should buy the company. Now he’s going to talk to staff. You can see how this will play out over the next few weeks. Musk clearly has the clout to get his way on things at Twitter. CEO Parag Agrawal, after all, is essentially a hired hand, whereas Musk is the biggest shareholder. So unless the company makes Musk CEO, we’re in for months of media leaks detailing all the ways he’s pulling the strings at the company, which won’t be fun for Agrawal, his management team or the rest of the board. (Reporters and Musk, though, may enjoy it). And it has to be said that, for all the employee angst we’re hearing about Musk’s involvement—according to the Post, most of it is related to his free speech and content moderation issues—there would be nothing inherently wrong with putting him in the CEO seat. After all, he has put a couple of billion dollars into Twitter stock, so he has more at stake than anyone else on the Twitter board. (And yes, that’s even counting Silver Lake’s Egon Durban, whose firm put in a mere $1 billion two years ago). There’s precedent for investors buying minority stakes in companies and taking control—in the 1980s, Larry Tisch bought 24% of CBS and a few months later became CEO. Then there’s the fact that Musk is an enormously successful entrepreneur. That has to count for something. What are the arguments against Musk as CEO? He doesn’t have experience running an ad-driven business and he has other responsibilities, most obviously running Tesla. The ad concern is a valid one, but Musk can presumably find people to help. As for the other demands on his time, that’s also a fair point. Then again, Twitter was fine with Jack Dorsey running things even as he applied his own sleepy brand of management to another public company, payments firm Block, at the same time. Musk at least appears to have a lot more energy. He is also, as we have noted, a loose cannon. But as CEO, he would have to bear the brunt of his own mistakes. The bottom line is that this is probably going to happen, so why not get it over with?