How to fix the "bugs" in the net-zero code | Lucas Joppa

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2022

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Lucas Joppa, Microsoft's first chief environmental officer, thinks about climate change through the lens of coding, and he says the world's current net-zero approach simply won't compute. So how do we create a system that actually accounts for all the world's carbon emissions -- and helps us get to zero (as in zero additional carbon added to the atmosphere by 2050)? Joppa shares three "bugs" in our current net-zero code, a four-point plan for fixing them – and how logic can help us change the current course of climate change.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily.
0:07.1	How could software help companies get to net zero emissions?
0:11.0	That's what today's speaker, Lucas Joppa, is working on.
0:13.8	From the 2021 countdown summit stage, the Microsoft chief environmental officer breaks down the bugs in our global effort to bring
0:21.5	down emissions and has ideas on how to fix them.
0:27.3	When I was a kid, I lived in a pretty analog world. But then that all started to quickly
0:32.7	change. My music, my communications, my social networks, everything started to become digital.
0:39.1	And the force behind it all was this thing that seemed, at least to me at the time, almost magical.
0:44.9	This thing called software. But then over time, I realized that software isn't magic. It's just logic.
0:51.0	It's code that tells a computer what to do and how to do it. And that early
0:57.4	realization really still sits at the core of how I view my job as Microsoft's chief environmental
1:02.7	officer, where I help the company play its part in developing the code behind one of the most
1:08.8	complex programs the world has ever dared to develop.
1:13.9	A program that takes as input all of the carbon associated with all of the economic activity on the planet
1:21.5	and returns as output the value zero.
1:25.4	Zero additional carbon accumulating in the atmosphere by the year 2050.
1:32.2	Now, Microsoft's contribution to this is both simple and ambitious. By 2030, we've committed
1:37.1	to reduce our emissions by half or more and then physically remove the rest from the atmosphere.
1:43.9	And then from 2030 to 2050,
1:46.0	to continue not just zeroing out our annual emissions,
1:49.4	but to go back in time and remove all of the emissions we're associated with
1:53.5	since we were founded in 1975.
	...

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