How to not score a 0.0 on Earth’s OKRs

A guide to climate definite optimism

Nov 25, 2022

If you’ve deleted Twitter this month, I wouldn’t blame you. 99% of my feed has stuck to predictable format: a viral attack on Elon, unfailingly followed by an unrelated but typically irreverent Tweet by his truly, then commentary on aptly-named Bankman-Fried. Rinse and repeat. But this Tweet actually got my gears turning:

Charley Ma @CharleyMa

Still convinced OKRs are the ultimate google psyops to slow down startups…

After reading this, my mind jumped to climate change. (Btw, OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results” and are a popular organizational goal-setting framework.)

We’re on the heels of COP27, the United Nation’s annual conference to review the closest thing earth has to climate change OKRs—the Paris Agreement goals. And like how Charley suggests that OKR planning stalls meaningful action, some COP27 participants felt that the conference had also missed the point:

“I have never seen anything like this. We’ve reduced the whole thing into a grand spectacle”…
Researchers and activists attending the talks for the first time described disbelief as government negotiators spent days going back and forth over single words in the document.

Nature.com

As a former Product Manager at Atlassian, I get it. Planning cycles are fraught with slowdowns. What I’d add is that OKRs only shine if everyone deeply understands the priorities and factors those into more local decisions (like, does shopping Black Friday climate-conscious move the needle?).

I’ll take a stab at that latter challenge. I’ll summarize earth’s OKRs, our general plan of attack, and status and offer an easy way to get on board.

Earth’s OKRs

Objective: prevent a climate disaster

Key Result: limit warming to 2, ideally 1.5, degrees Celsius by 2050

Great! A goal that has top-level buy-in (on paper, at least). This was signed into history by 194 parties in the 2015 Paris Agreement. You might remember this making the news when former US President Trump infamously withdrew us and when now-POTUS Biden signed us back on. It isn’t the first of its kind—the 1987 Montreal Protocol successfully reduced ozone-depleting chemicals by 98% relative to 1990 baseline levels—though arguably the most ambitious.

To achieve this 1.5 degree goal, we need to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and halve our emissions by 2030.

By net zero, we mean that {earth’s GHG emissions} - {GHG removals} = 0. We’re starting from ~50 billion tons.

The Broad Plan

The two parts of that equation are our two levers:

#1 Reduce: emit fewer GHGs into the atmosphere.

This is the bucket we’re familiar with, covering technologies like solar, electric vehicles, and alternative meat. But now there’s so much more. Go ahead, spark your imagination:

Alternative aviation fuels like Air Company’s and Twelve’s, harnessing processed CO2
Methane-reducing cattle feed additives like Alga Biosciences and Symbrosia
Point capture solutions like Remora’s carbon scrubber for semi-trucks
Consumer products that make everyday lower-emissions choices easy, like Revel’s all-electric ride share fleet, Thousand Fell’s 100% recyclable sneakers, Eclipse’s dairy-free ice cream, GridRewards’ load-shifting app, and WildGrid’s solar onboarding

Note: I’m building a product to help you shop climate-conscious. I’d love to have you join the pilot 👉 sign up at regulars.earth.

#2 Remove: take GHGs out of the atmosphere.

Carbon removal technologies blew my mind. That said, while they might sound like a magical “undo” button for global warming, it’s important to note that many of them aren’t yet economical or even carbon neutral.

Plant-based direct air capture like Running Tide’s carbon-absorbing kelp buoys, and Living Carbon’s faster-growing trees
Mineral-based direct air capture like Heirloom’s carbon mineralization rocks
Chemical direct air capture like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering’s carbon-capture plants

By the way, removal credits are different from offset credits. The latter basically ask someone else to emit fewer to compensate for little to no change from the buyer.

Measure

How do we know the impact of our work? We need to build carbon accounting and markets. This is the infrastructure to measure, reduce, and report emissions as well as verify and trade carbon credits (1 credit = 1 ton of CO_2 equivalent).

Corporate carbon accounting platforms like Watershed and Persefoni
API for transaction-level emissions data + offsets like Patch, EcoCart, and GreenStory
Nature-based solutions management platforms like Pachama and Cecil

Adapt

We also need to adapt to the warming we are already experiencing. This is the set of initiatives that help people / cities / nations adjust effects of climate change.

Flood disaster response tools like Cloud to Street
Wildfire management solutions like Pano
(I’d love to see solutions that support lower- and middle-income countries)

How we’re doing

We’ve made great progress, but to be blunt, we’re off-track for 1.5 degrees by 2050. Both levers are failing. Let me share one data point that really stuck with me. This is from Dr. Leah Stokes, a renowned climate and energy policy expert:

The fossil fuel infrastructure we already have—pipelines, power plants, and oil wells, fracking operations, even things like our furnace in our basement and our cars in our driveway… if it keeps going along… until it’s depreciated… it will belch out too much carbon to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

My Climate Journey podcast — Leah Stokes, A Matter of Degrees (28:45)

Why this is so hard

Carbon is everywhere

Check out Bill Gates’ breakdown of the sources of global carbon emissions in his pragmatic book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster:

To explain how emissions get categorized, let’s walk through an example, like the gasoline that’s used for a passenger vehicle. That gasoline produces emissions two ways: during the extraction and refinement as well as during the actual combustion for driving. The former is counted with “making things” and the latter in “getting around.”

This way of breaking down emissions from one “source” is important because it demonstrates the way ownership of emissions transfers and therefore the complexity of carbon accounting. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol seeks to standardize the accounting methods, defining three scopes for emissions:

Scope 1: those that you produce from sources you own. example: for Tesla, fuel combustion in company-owned factories or transportation of Teslas

Scope 2: those that are created indirectly from the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling. example: electricity purchased for Tesla offices and showrooms

Scope 3: those that are produced upstream or downstream in the value chain. example: emissions produced by consumers charging Teslas with coal-powered electricity

Basically, your Scope 1 + 2 emissions are always someone else’s Scope 3 emissions.

My point here is that it’s helping no one to blame 20 fossil fuel firms for carbon emissions. The reality is that in the last hundred years, we’ve built our known universe largely on top of oil & gas. Because, for a while, it was really great (and the fossil fuel industry has seen success in misguiding the public a là schemes like “natural” gas or the popularization of your carbon footprint). But now, we need to rewrite much of it.

Regulatory incentives to get going are lacking

At every level, climate action gets more of a voluntary “carrot” rather than a stick approach.

Global: the Paris Agreement is a treaty, which means signatory countries don’t face any penalties for missing targets. The aforementioned COP27 largely disappointed for lack of progress in reductions and fossil fuels.
Federal: the Biden administration is slow to launch their climate strategy. We can celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act which is chock-full of tax credits and investment dollars, but regulations-wise, the landscape is largely barren. Requiring federal contractors to report and reduce emissions is still in the proposal stage.
State: the US has only two carbon cap-and-trade programs, one in California and another covering 12 states, RGGI, in the northeast.
Corporate: some large corporations commit to science-based reduction targets and some smaller enterprises work with small agencies / certifications, but again, these are voluntary.
Consumer: we make purchases largely based on value, and climate risk is unaccounted for in price. 65% of global fashion consumers say they care about the environment, but only ~15% make decisions that lower their impact.

What you can do

Work in climate tech

The future is waiting to be built, and I hope the above startups prove that this not Another Refactoring Project. Here are my favorite resources to learn and monitor the job market:

Climate Tech VC: breaking news + deep dive newsletters
My Climate Journey: community + podcast
Lowercarbon Capital: job board + newsletter

For aspiring founders: my friend is revving up to launch a newsletter just for you: Subscribe on Substack / Twitter to be the first to see it.

Take political action

Public will heavily influences political will. This is an area I’m personally learning more about. Here are the actions I’m focused on:

learning about and supporting climate policies in my home state, like the New York Fashion Act
engaging as many people as I can (like you!) in discussions about climate change

If you have additional resources or tips, please do share.

Consume climate-conscious

Consumer demand has always shaped the market. One common hesitation towards individual action is rooted in the idea that our efforts pale in comparison to regulations and companies. It is true that a single regulation or incumbent company could drive widespread change. However, our collective purchase decisions give lower-emissions products, whether in the form of a startup or an incumbent’s new offering, the capital to scale and replace the old.

To be clear, I’m not telling you to eat the bugs, like this recently resurfaced meme suggests:

Fortunately, in the year 2022, the climate-conscious option is often the better one.

Electric cars over gas — save money and reduce noise pollution
Heat pumps over furnaces — save money
Induction stoves over gas — improve air quality in your home
Natural fibers over petroleum-based polyester — invest in a longer-lasting wardrobe and save money

These win-win products are out there, just hidden.

Thanks for reading. If living climate-conscious is interesting to you, then join me at regulars.earth. The first 150 users to make a purchase on the platform get an Earth Verified badge ; ~ ) . My Twitter DMs are also open.

Common Climate

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