TED Radio Hour - Our Tech has a Climate Problem: Here's we solve it

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

AI, EVs, and satellites are tackling the climate crisis. But they have environmental downsides. This hour, TED speakers explain how to use these tools without making global warming worse. Guests include AI researchers Sasha Luccioni and Sims Witherspoon, climate researcher Elsa Dominish and astrodynamicist Moriba Jah. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Minoosh Zamoroti, and I'd like you to think of all the things you own. So many of them need electricity these days, which used to be pretty easy to quantify. That light in the hallway, it's a 60-watt incandescent bulb, so it uses 60 watts an hour. Maybe you now have an LED bulb in there. That uses around 10. Your washing machine, that needs around 1,500 watts per hour. And now what about your phone?

Well, a dead iPhone battery needs about three hours to fully charge, usually at around 5 watts an hour. Once that phone is charged, though, its energy use starts to multiply. Take an email, for example. There's the router that's connecting it to the internet. The energy needed to write, send, and store the message on your device and the cloud, both for you and the person on the receiving end. And now what if you added AI into the mix? Let's say you use chat GPT to help you craft that email.

It's really hard to quantify exactly how much energy a single query on chat GPT uses. Never mind how much was used to. to train that AI model to begin with. Yeah, the thing is, is that the current way we train these models is all, I call it brute force. This is Sasha Luciani. She's an AI researcher. Like terabytes of data, essentially, from the internet, from books, from Wikipedia, what have you. And so this process, especially for large, like, specifically large, large, large language models. So billions of parameters can take months.

Sasha has become obsessed with trying to figure out just how much energy. AI uses. It is a complicated endeavor, but we know it's significant. Take, for example, one early estimate by researchers. So it all started, I think, in 2019 or so, a first paper came out that estimated that training, a large language model like chat GPT emits as much carbon as five cars in their lifetime. So that's like the manufacturing of the cars and like the usage of the cars. And that's a lot. By one more recent estimate, training one of these models like ChatGPT3 took as much energy as 130 American homes in one year. And yet, climate scientists believe technology is crucial to helping find solutions to our climate crisis. But what can we do when technology itself is a problem for our planet? Today on the show, Tech's climate conundrum. ideas about how AI, electric cars, and satellite monitoring will help us reduce emissions

and how we can confront their environmental downsides too. So back to Sasha Lucioni. As AI gets embedded into everything we do, she says tech companies are more and more reluctant to be upfront about how much energy their products use, something I discovered for myself. I asked ChatGPT how much energy is. cost to query it. And do you mind if I read you the answer it gave me? It says, as an AI language model developed by OpenAI, I don't have direct access to information regarding my power consumption. Open AI strives to optimize its infrastructure for efficiency and sustainability, but precise

energy consumption figures would depend on various factors like server load optimization techniques and data center efficiency, among others. So no, I don't have a specific answer to your question. I mean, all of that is true. But that's really frustrating. But that doesn't answer your question. No, it doesn't. And it's saying, I find it strange that the AI is telling me that its maker won't share any of the information. Is that what it's saying, basically?

Yeah. It's kind of like what I've noticed a lot lately in the conversation about, you know, sustainability, environmental impact. It's like, once you start gathering the information, you have less plausible deniability. And so it's like, well, we don't have anything. They don't want to know. It's really complicated. So, you know, we haven't gone through the actions necessary to gather that information, right? And I've heard this answer are coming up a lot.

Well, AI is so complicated. We don't really have that information. Like, because AI is so distributed and complex. And so it's really even hard to, like, pin down. Do you include, I don't know, Internet of Things? Do you include smartphones? Do you include, like, right? Like, there's all these different.

So it's like, well, I mean, no, we don't have the answer. So to try and better estimate how much some AI use, she and other researchers built their own large language model. They called it Bloom. Last year, I was part of the Big Science Initiative, which brought together a thousand researchers from all over the world to create Bloom. Sasha Luciani continues from the TED stage. The first open, large language model like Jachibati,

but with an emphasis on ethics, transparency, and consent. And the study I led that looked at Bloom's environmental impacts found that just training it used as much energy as 30 homes in a whole year and emitted 25 tons of carbon dioxide, just so somebody can use this model to tell a knock-knock joke. And this might not seem like a lot, but other similar large-language models like GPT3 emit 20 times more carbon. But the thing is, tech companies aren't measuring this stuff.

They're not just closing it, and so this is probably only the tip of the iceberg, even if it is a melting one. And in recent years, we've seen AI models balloon in size because the current trend in AI is bigger is better. But please don't get me started and why that's the case. In any case, we've seen large language models in particular grow 2,000 times in size over the last five years,

and of course their environmental costs are rising as well. The most recent work I led found that switching out a smaller, more efficient model for a larger language model emits 14 times more carbon for the same task. And as we're putting in these models into cell phones and search engines and smart fridges and speakers, the environmental costs are really piling up quickly. Recently I was giving a talk and someone came up to me and they're like, yeah, we noticed that now that we're switching to local AI solutions, like our energy usage is going up.

And I was like, yeah, funny how that happens. And they're like, well. And the thing is, like, when we talk about AI or when we hear AI being discussed, it's often this like ephemeral thing that people are just, you know, they're like, oh, AI can read, AI can write, AI can make images. And so people don't tend to have a very physical concept linked to AI, but it actually does run on a computer. It's very physical.

To help companies who train or just use AI models, Sasha built a tool that estimates how much carbon they're admitting. It's called Code Carbon. I helped create Code Carbon, a tool that runs in parallel to AI training code that estimates the amount of energy it consumes and the amount of carbon it emits. And using a tool like this can help us make informed choices

like choosing one model over the other because it's more sustainable or deploying AI models on renewable energy, which can drastically reduce their emissions. So, for example, if I'm training a large language model on 1,000 GPUs that are all in Texas versus 1,000 GPUs that are all in Montreal, which has hydroelectricity, it's going to be the same amount of energy, but a hugely different amount of emissions just because the energy is generated differently.

And so we want to help give people that extra information. And so carbon is used by lots of developers. It's become kind of one of the de facto standards for reporting energy. We recently got a Mozilla Foundation grant for it. We're trying to essentially build it out and give it more functionalities and make it a little bit more user-friendly. So if I'm the CEO of a company, I can use your tool to figure out which AI to use more efficiently, to be more sustainable. But what if I'm just like a regular person? Let's say I am using AI too, but I want to choose the least carbon-admitting AI. Is there a tool for me?

I'm really a bit of a dreamer, but I think that if people are presented with information, I mean, they'll make choices that are kind of coherent with what they care about, what they're values are. And so I'm working on an energy star rating for AI models. So essentially, similarly to appliances or all sorts of, you know, even vehicles, they have these ratings that say, well, essentially, like, this is how it compares to other models. And so I want to do that for AI models for different tasks without going into too many details, but having like a like an A plus to an F or to a D rating, essentially so that people when they're picking a model and they're like, okay, I want to do, for example, image generation.

They kind of know at least at a high level how the different models measure up. Can we talk about what drew you to AI to begin with the good parts of AI, the problem solving it can do? Do you have a favorite example of AI being used efficiently to help the environment? Yeah, I mean, essentially AI actually is not a single technology as well. It's got a lot of underlying approaches. And so maybe people know most generative AI like chat GPT, but there's actually all sorts of what's called unsupervised learning. So there's a really cool startup on the West Coast called Rainforest Connection,

which is using a similar technique for detecting illegal logging and deforestation in the Amazon. And essentially they have these very, very lightweight AI models that are running on old cell phones, actually, with solar panels. So they're like very green. and they listen to the jungle and essentially they know what constitutes rain and parrots and monkeys and whatnot. And then if they hear a chainsaw or a truck

or even human voices, they can flag that as an anomaly. And then they partnered up with like rangers in different countries to send people to check if there's deforestation happening. And I find that it's really cool because on one hand it's very low tech. And on the other hand,

it is in partnership with, you know, Rangers who are already doing this work, they're already trying to stop illegal deforestation in the Amazon, and it's helping them, you know, target specific areas better. That sounds amazing. But let's say I'm at home thinking about these new tools and I, as a person, just wanted you right by the planet. Is the bottom line that I should think twice before I use AI unnecessarily? I'm totally, I'm totally agree with that. The only usage I found for Chad GPT, and once again, I'm trying not to be radical here is once I write a scientific article or, you know, a paper or something, I take the abstract, like the resume and I put it into Chad GPT to get it to come up with like funny titles because I'm typically really bad at that. And it can come up with really some really good ones and then like some puns or some like wordplays or whatever.

And then I'll tend to like put a bunch of them together and make something that I like. And so that's like my only go-to usage of generative. AI. Like, tech is, is, is, is so pervasive in our lives. Like, we, we shouldn't necessarily try to beat ourselves up about it. But, you know, trying to kind of stay critical. Like, you know, this thing that's being sold to me, do I really need it? It's like before, you know, I'm going to use whatever, chat GPT as a calculator. Think about the options that maybe isn't AI, but that does the task that I'm trying to do. It's funny. In France, there's this concept of a digital frugality that I really like or digital sobriety. And I find that it's really interesting because

They're really thinking about, like, do we need this tech? Does this thing have to be connected? Does this have to be a smart device? And I think that might help if we did it in other places, too. That's AI researcher, Sasha Lucioni. You can see her full talk at TED.com. Today on the show, Tech's climate conundrum. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and we'll be right back. Hey, before we get back to the show, want to let you know about our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus. It's an update from Psychedelics pioneer Rick Doblin. So Rick has spent years researching how MDMA can be used to treat PTSD. And the FDA is meeting to talk about whether to approve this treatment in the next few weeks. I talked about that and much more with Rick at the recent TED conference in Vancouver. He is a lovely and fascinating guy. That bonus episode is coming on Wednesday. If you're not a TED Radio Hour Plus supporter yet, please join your fellow listeners to get bonus content and all our episodes

sponsor free. Just go to plus.npr.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamorodi. On the show today, Tech's climate conundrum. We've all gotten the message. The era of gas-guzzling cars is slowly drawing to a close. Electric vehicles are the future. My administration is investing more than $135 billion to advance America's electric vehicle future. But we've also heard that the batteries needed to power these cars require rare minerals that are hard to get. And mining for those minerals is terrible for the environment.

But is that just the price we need to pay in the short term for the long-term benefit of transitioning to electric? The green energy transition, as it's often called by the politicians, it's actually maybe not as green as we once thought because it too will require a lot of mining. We're about to explore the trade-offs by tracing where exactly these minerals come from and how mining for them impacts the land and people who live there. Starting with NPR correspondent Kirk Ziegler, who's been reporting from the site of a new mine in Nevada at a place called Thacker Pass.

It's hard to describe just how vast it looks, even for someone who's used to these big wide-open western landscapes. It's ringed by mountains, huge mountains, with this massive carpet of three or four foot high sagebrush plants that unfold on the horizon for as far as you can see. Kirk says there's a push year to mine these minerals for EVs and do it fast. Minerals like cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, and graphite. Over the next 15 years, the U.S. government estimates the demand for lithium alone

will increase by 4,000 percent. I mean, this is a huge amount of lithium in Nevada that's sitting there in this deposit. It's often said that it's the largest lithium deposit in North America. And so now all of a sudden these lands that were largely forgotten are now very much in play, and it's very much the center of controversy. That controversy pitted a mining company called Lithium Americas and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management against environmentalists and some news. nearby native tribes.

We're at Packer Pass, and we've got protesters blocking down here. Back in 2021, Kirk talked to activists protesting at the site. One of them was Gary McKinney. Right here, I've been capped here for about a month and a half now. He's against the mine because it's on historic land and would destroy the natural environment. We can't flush out all the water from out of here and rip up everything that is out here. and call it green energy. That's greenwashing.

I'm prepared to stay out here and oppose this mine for as long as it takes, as long as it takes. That fight lasted three years. Eventually, the mining lease was upheld in court, and excavation began in 2023. General Motors has signed on to buy all the lithium produced here in the first decade.

One of the chairman of one of the tribes put it to me this way, that Native Americans are once again being asked to get out of the way for American progress. Yeah, that story is really repeated across the globe, whether it's South America or North America or Australia, across Asia. This is Elsa Dominoish, as a researcher for the Institute for Sustainable Futures in Sydney, Australia, she has a global perspective on the impact of mining and ideas about how to do it better. But she is quick to clarify that EVs are crucial to carbon reduction. So road transport is a huge emitter. It's 10% of global emissions.

And this sector's grown more than any other end-use sector. So getting those emissions down is essential. And EVs are one of the technologies to do that. And they're a very important one. EVs are a good thing. There's no question, and we need them as part of the transition. Here she is on the TED stage. But in many ways, isn't mining and overconsumption what got us into this problem?

And now we're trying to mine and consume our way out of it? So why does this matter? And surely this mining isn't as bad as mining fossil fuels? Well, yes, we need to put a halt to mining fossil fuels immediately. But it's not about what type of mining is better. or worse or more or less, all of it matters. Mining for the green transition has impacts, and that matters too. We're facing a climate crisis, but we're also facing a biodiversity crisis, and many of these minerals are found in sensitive and fragile ecosystems. Half of all these minerals

are found on indigenous lands. If we are doing this transition in the name of saving the planet, it should not come at the cost of sacrificing communities and ecosystems. And here, in Australia, we are the number one lithium producer, but we by no means have a clean record in relation to mining. And we are a world leader when it comes to biodiversity loss. Lithium mining was even being considered under old-growth forests in Western Australia until community protests brought this to a halt. How much of the country do we want to keep digging up when so far,

few wild places remain. Here and across the globe, mining continues to happen on land sacred to indigenous people who never had the option to say no. Okay, so lithium, we've talked about lithium, what are the other mines that you see being most problematic that are vital to making an electric car possible? Yeah, so cobalt is definitely the most widely known in terms of its impacts. Cobalt mining, 60-70% of that is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here, there's both industrial mining and also small-scale informal mining. This is one of the thousands of unregulated, unmonitored mines in the DRC. Sky News filmed children as young as four working in appalling conditions.

People live digging hand-dug tunnels, which are extremely dangerous. They extend, you know, tens of metres on the ground. They're obviously at risk of collapsing, of flooding, and there are many kind of deaths that have gone unreported from these mines. But the other big issue is industrial mines. I mean, I have seen videos from these mines. It's thousands of people, shoulder to shoulder, digging with their hands, simple tools, hauling out minerals with buckets.

People refer to it as modern-day slavery. Exactly. So, you know, a lot of these are foreign. owned. Workers here are exploited. They're facing racism and violence and the conditions are still unsafe. They're also often paid as subcontractors earning as little as $2.50 a day, which is below the living wage. And so they're working, but they're continuing to be trapped in poverty. Another mineral, nickel. Over half of the world's nickel is found in Indonesia. And recently, $14 billion of international investment has poured in for new mines and smelters.

contaminated soil from the mines has turned the ocean red and brown. Land and crops have been destroyed, and sometimes the air is so polluted that it's difficult to breathe. If we continue on the pathway that we are, we could need 40 times more nickel by 2040. Is that in any way feasible or sustainable? And even the remotest parts of the ocean are under threat from plans to mine the deep sea.

Communities in the Pacific are leading a protest against this, worried about the impacts it could have. have. We don't even understand the deep sea to know what we could potentially be destroying. Okay, so we've kind of laid out the conundrum here, which is we do need to get electric cars on the road. We have problems with how we are sourcing the materials we need to build those electric cars. So what do we do? What are the solutions? I mean, without just, you know, shrugging our shoulders and saying, well, to play the long game, we have to make some sacrifices in the short term. Yeah, so from what we've looked at, the most important thing we can do is to reduce the amount

of minerals we need. And to do this, the key thing is reducing our reliance on cars. As an American, I have to chuckle at that. Exactly. Because telling people to give up their cars here, I mean, not only is it like the American way, it's just impossible in a lot of places in the United States. Yes, exactly. And I hear that a lot. I'm talking about particularly in cities. Our transport system is already going to have to change,

so why don't we use this as an opportunity to redesign it to one that actually meets our needs? Instead of locking ourselves into a future based on cars and all the existing problems that we know they create, we need fewer cars, but we also need smaller cars. The bigger the car, the bigger the battery, and the more mining that is required. A small EV might have a battery that weighs 300 kilograms,

A big one could be two or three times that there are some companies in the US that have even stopped manufacturing small EVs in order to make more large SUVs and trucks. It's not because people don't want to buy small EVs, they do, but it's because the larger cars are more profitable. We also need to be designing them so that they can be repaired. Whole cars are being scrapped because of a problem with the battery. How is that sustainable? Swapping one car for another?

It's not going to solve our problems. Instead, we need to think differently, think bigger, and change the whole system. If we make our cities easier to get around without needing to drive, if we make public transport convenient and safe and affordable and accessible, people will use it. Okay, so public transport, smaller cars. What about recycling? Does that play any part here? So there's quite a few companies that are partnering, you know, manufacturers with battery

manufacturers and recyclers in order to create closed-loop systems where batteries from end-of-life vehicles are collected, they're recycled in a really high-value process, and then those minerals can go straight back into battery manufacturing. Changing the entire transportation ecosystem is the long-term goal, but we'll still need more minerals than ever before for EVs. So right now, people are working towards making mining possible, but changing how and where it gets done. My organization has a half dozen people who all day, every day, they fight for electric vehicles and battery storage for the renewable energy transition.

So we're all in. And that means implicitly we're all in on lithium mining. Patrick Donnelly heads the Nevada branch of the Center for Biological Diversity. He's trying to stop another proposed lithium mine from opening on the site of endangered wildflower. They chose to cite it in the middle of endangered species habitat, which they knew was there. And so people say, well, we don't have time for a planning effort. No, we don't have time for all these lithium companies to be messing around in court for a decade.

So we really need leadership in order to get a plan in place for how we're going to produce all this lithium without ruining the American West and driving species extinct and harming indigenous communities. Patrick points to an example in California as a model for how all sides, the government, industry, and conservationists can negotiate and find solutions that work for everyone. This was back in 2014, and the issue was solar, but the debate was similar. Lots of controversy. There was lots of litigation. Solar energy was like not taking off in the desert, especially in California, the way it was desired. And they basically looked at the whole California desert and said, where? Where are the places we can put solar with the least impact, and where are the places that are so sensitive we should never put solar? And in the end, they came up with the plan that designated half a million acres, which was more than enough for 20 years worth of solar development by their estimation. It also designated two and a half million acres for conservation.

So in other words, to compensate the desert for losing half a million acres to solar, two and a half million acres would be permanently conserved. What that did was really bring about a detomps in the solar wars. And so that's functionally what we need for lithium. If we frontload that work and expense on planning to begin with, we can actually end up with a much cheaper, faster, and more environmentally sound clean energy transition. When it comes to mining for EV batteries, deliberate, hard negotiation, and compromise, he said,

needs to urgently happen too. It won't be easy. That was Patrick Donnelly from the Nevada branch of the Center for Biological Diversity, Elsa Dominoish from the Institute for Sustainable Futures, and NPR correspondent Kirk Siegler. The audio you heard from Industrial Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo

came from Siddharth Kara and an episode by our colleagues at ThruLine about the history of extracting resources from the DRC called The Ghosts in Your Phone. It is really worth a listen. On the show today, tech's climate conundrum. It is going to take a global effort to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. And governments and companies are making big promises.

But how do we know if they're actually meeting their commitments? What can watch over them to see if they're truly reducing their emissions? Satellites can. Coupled with AI, satellites are one of the most effective monitoring tools. For instance, Elon Musk's company SpaceX recently launched MethaneSat for the Environmental Defense Fund. The satellite will monitor the oil and gas industry, specifically spotting methane that might be leaking during fossil fuel production. And it's not the only one up there. There are now literally thousands of eyes in the sky up above us,

and many of them are actually free and open to anyone to use that information. Gavin McCormick is the co-founder of Climate Trace, a coalition using publicly available images streaming from satellites to detect other emissions. It's possible actually to get photos every few days of every major power plant in the entire world. And so my organization, Wattheim and a number of other small NGOs have teams, teamed up to build an artificial intelligence algorithm that can scan visual imagery like this every few days and look without asking the polluters to see how much they are polluting for every power plant in the world. So satellites play a big role in solving the climate crisis.

They're also monitoring agriculture, tracking storms, predicting droughts. But as you might suspect, the wonders of technology also come with downsides. And that's where our next guest comes in. Right now, the end fate of anything we launch is for it to become junk. That is its end state. This is Morabajah. He's an astrodynamicist, which means that he studies how objects move in space. He is also a space environmentalist.

And it's my job to raise awareness and find ways of protecting it from pollution to make it sustainable for future generations. At this point, you may be thinking, though, Who cares? Why should we be concerned about pollution in space? The critical thing is none of these satellites are protected from getting hit by a piece of junk orbiting the planet and then rendering these services useless. Space junk. As junk collides, it creates more debris that disperses and could damage functioning satellites, including those we were. rely on every day for things like GPS. That blue dot on our cell phone that tells us how to get from point A to point B, Google Maps, planes, use this stuff like all modes of transportation.

Streaming and broadcasting. We can have satellite TV, dishes, banking, and emergency communications. Financial transactions, ATM operations, communications can be relayed across one part of the globe to us. So we get to understand more about how Mother Earth Gaia works because of satellites than by any other source of information. If the satellites that provide these services got hit by debris and then we're no longer working, talk about global panic and shutdown. Like that's a bad day. In a minute, what can be done about all that space junk? Today on the show, Tech's climate Conundrum. You're listening to NPR's TED Radio Hour. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and we'll be right

back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumeroody. On the show today, Tech's climate conundrum. We were just talking to astrodynamicist and environmentalists, Morabaja. He tracks everything that is orbiting the Earth and says that while satellites are crucial to tracking emissions and gathering climate data, those satellites and many others are in jeopardy. Space can become and is becoming unusable because of this idea of carrying capacity. We may think space goes on forever, but the region we humans use has its limitations. We only have so many highways where we put these satellites and they're becoming more and more congested as we were launching more and more things in a space.

any given highway can only carry so much traffic safely. And right now we're already seeing people unable to get the sort of services they want out of satellites because they have to be maneuvering out of the way of junk all the time. I mean, the International Space Station probably maneuvers about a dozen times a year out of the way of junk. When you're calling something junk or debris, what are you referring to? Are you talking about satellites that aren't being used anymore? more other things? So you have whole satellites or intact satellites that just die.

You have rocket bodies that were used to deliver some of these satellites to orbit. And then fragments all the way down to like, you know, nuts, bolts, chips of paint. You know, when we are on a highway and you run out of fuel, the car stops moving. In space, when satellites stop working, they don't just slow down. They keep on going at many times the speed of a bullet. Imagine a bunch of fuelless, driverless cars that are going at speed. We have to now avoid these things. That is what it is like on orbit.

Oh, that sounds crazy dangerous. Like, how many of these things are we talking about? Right now in 2024, we're tracking over. over 50,000, and the number of working satellites is over 5,000, and over half of those are owned by Elon Musk. So we just hope. Our strategy is hope that these things don't run into one of these satellites that we care about. Most of what we launch into orbit never comes back. Moribaja continues from the TED stage. Unlike highways on Earth, there are actually no space traffic rules, none whatsoever.

What could possibly go wrong with that? Now, what would be really nice is if we had something like a space traffic map that I could look up and see what the current traffic conditions are in space, maybe even predict these. The problem with that, however, is that ask five different people, what's going on in orbit, where are things going, and you're probably going to get 10 different answers. is because information about things on orbit

is not commonly shared either. In the absence of this framework to monitor space actor behavior, to monitor activity in space, where these objects are located to reconcile these inconsistencies and make this knowledge commonplace, we actually risk losing the ability

to use space for humanity's benefit. So what if we had a globally accessible, open and transparent space traffic information system that could inform the public of where everything's located to try to keep space safe and sustainable? And what if this system could be used to form evidence-based norms of behavior these space traffic rules? Really what we need is more observations, more eyes on the sky. I developed this thing called astrograph. An astriograph is a crowdsourced database of human-made stuff in space that then led me to make something much nicer and useful to people call Wayfinder. So if people go to like Wayfinder.com, they'll see kind of a current map of all these objects in space.

And every single dot is a human-made object that's currently orbiting the Earth. Yeah, I just went to wavefinder.priveter.com, and it's a rendering of our planet with dots in different colors all around it, particularly lots of green dots very close to the planet and then red dots kind of everywhere. What am I seeing? Yeah, so things that are in cyan, those are the working satellites, and everything else is garbage. The pink stuff are things that we don't know if they're. like dead rocket bodies, intact satellites, or fragments of stuff. So those are things that we haven't identified, you know, the type of thing, but we know that it's human-based. And then the other things in the legend that you can see is dead satellites, rocket bodies, which are also dead. And, you know, it says debris, these are fragments, you know, shards and pieces of stuff.

Wow. I'm just clicking. I mean, once you get rid of the active satellites, there's still so much to see. There's, as you said, pink, rocket bodies and debris and so many things out there. It's weird. You think of, you know, stars in space and maybe the International Space Station. The hope is that by having this become very transparent to the public, people can feel whatever it is that they need to feel. outrage would be great to say, we need to do something different and for people to hold their governments accountable for coming together and collaborating to fix this problem.

That was my nice question. Who is responsible then for pulling these satellites, I don't know, back to Earth or making sure that they're just kind of duds and not careening and causing problems for the satellites we do need? Yeah. So this is where I have bad news. Nobody. Nobody is. Nobody's. cleaning up anything. There is no actual space garbage, you know, retrieval system. The European Space Agency plans on launching a satellite that could clean up debris in 2025 called Clear Space. And there are a couple of companies like Astroscale out of Japan. They want to be a junk removal business, but then nobody's willing to pay for that. And the top three governments

responsible for 99% of all the junk are Russia, the United States and China. And none of those three countries are doing anything to clean up any of the debris that currently exists on orbit. I'm curious, with privateer, is that a private company? Are you thinking like, well, if people won't do it, you know, intergovernmentally, maybe we need to incentivize people, turn this into a business? Yeah. So certainly the monitoring and kind of doing a compliance, a sense, assessment, that's not going to be a lucrative thing. But I'm all about presenting people with the evidence. And I'll let you decide if this is something that makes sense. And if it doesn't, then we need to start holding people accountable. But there's no way to hold people accountable

without the evidence. And the thing is, nobody else is just trying to put the evidence out there and make that publicly accessible. We have a pollution problem on the planet, lands, ocean, air, and then you can add space to that. That might be super depressing to people because they might think like, oh my God, dude, we just, like, we accept that there's a big climate problem here on this planet. But now you're adding all of space to the conundrum. I know, I know. What do you say? We as a humanity failed to accept that we're living in an existential crisis.

That's one of the major problems. Many indigenous people accept that they are in an existential crisis. and the only way through it for them is to have a successful conversation with the environment. Imagine if we did that stuff kind of holistically said, hey, you know, we need to slow down our decision making so that we can get feedback from the environment on the unintended consequences of our decisions. Then we could actually make environmentally sound decisions that would lead to our sustainability. And so, interestingly enough, within wastements,

management principles, there's something called the circular economy, which is based on principles of reuse and recyclability to prevent pollution. We can apply that to space. If we turned our smarts and our innovation to develop, launch and operate reusable and recyclable satellites and rockets, we wouldn't have to send as much stuff up there because we could recycle and reuse the stuff on orbit, which would greatly diminish the junk that we're creating. We know that we can reuse rockets because Elon has demonstrated that with, you know, SpaceX. And for the things that do have to be single use, find responsible and environmentally sound ways of disposing of these things, not just abandon them on orbit. So it's not like, you know, satellites are a disaster. It's really,

we desperately need these satellites to help us Absolutely. Protect our planet, but we need to be just so much smarter about how we use them. Exactly. Right now, Elon is launching, on average,

more than a dozen satellites every week. It doesn't need to be that. It's like we're in this competition to see who can launch the most amount of satellites and we're hurting ourselves holistically by behaving that way. If we just took our time, we would realize how to make better decisions

for the sustainability of our species. That was Moribaja. He's a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and chief scientist at the company, Privateer. You can see his full talk at ted.com. We have talked a lot about the downsides of technology on this episode, but we want to end it on a positive note with a specific story about how

artificial intelligence is being developed to tackle climate change. At the AI Research Lab Deep Mind, Sims Witherspoon and her team are training AI to speed up the transition to renewables like wind. She explained the process at the TED countdown climate conference in Today, I'd like to talk about how we can use AI to harness a superpower we already have in this fight. Wind energy. Renewables are unquestionably a key to a sustainable future, but the problem is they're unpredictable. Sometimes the sun shines, the wind blows, and sometimes it just doesn't. For an electricity systems operator who needs supply to meet demand in real-time 24-7, This is hugely problematic.

Renewables can't be 100% reliably scheduled. Now, unfortunately, fossil fuel plants are the opposite. You can burn a specific amount of coal at a set time to deliver exactly the amount of electricity you want in a predictable time window. If you're a power systems manager whose job is to literally keep the lights on, which source are you more confident depending on? But here's one of the places where AI can come in. It is a powerful tool for forecasting.

AI systems can ingest vast amounts of historical data and help us predict future events. While we can't eliminate the variability of wind, we can use AI to more accurately predict its availability. That was my team's what to do. Use AI to accelerate the transition to renewables like wind energy. The tough part was the how to do it. Our team, which is a mix of research scientist, engineers,

product manager, program manager, and an impact analyst, decided that a neural net trained on historical weather data and turbine power production information would likely help us accomplish our goal. There are massive gaps in climate-critical data, not just in electricity, but in agriculture, transportation, industry, and many other sectors.

Some of our data we could purchase or download for free, weather forecasts, for instance. But some of the data we needed was proprietary. This would be like turbine power production information and other operational data from the wind farms. We needed that proprietary data so that we could train our models to learn the relationship between historical weather and historical power production.

So it could then make predict, about future power availability based on what data said about future weather. In addition to data, in order to prove that AI works, we have to have deployment opportunities in the real world. Luckily for us, Google was a ready and willing partner. They let us test on 700 megawatts of their wind power capacity, which is equivalent to a large wind farm in the United States. This made them an excellent proxy for external,

wind farm operators. They also lent us an expert team to advise on metrics and benchmarks and to share the data that we needed. So at this point, we have our idea, we have our data, we have our deployment partner. Now to test and deploy our system. Improving the accuracy of electricity supply forecast is incredibly important. If predictions are higher than actual generation, renewable electricity managers may not have enough supply to meet demand. This in turn drives the purchase of carbon-intensive fossil fuels to cover that gap because they're largely what makes up backup generation. Now, the good news? Our AI system performed 20% better than Google's existing systems. Even better news is that Google decided to scale this technology, and scaling is so important.

We will run out of time in the climate. countdown if we aren't deploying solutions that are widely applicable. This particular solution is being developed into a software product that French company, Angey, is among the first to pilot. But it doesn't even take a major research organization to do this kind of work, where we focused on AI for supply-side forecasting. A small UK-based nonprofit called Open Climate Fix is focusing on AI for demand-side forecasting. They found a willing partner in the UK. National Grid and are currently deploying forecasts that are two times more accurate than the

UK grids previously used systems. Now, all of this is to say that AI can help us with the transition to renewable energy, but scientists and technologists, we're not going to be able to do that alone. We need to be working with partners and experts who can teach us the how. Now for the warning label. AI is not a silver bullet. It will not solve all problems driving climate change. It isn't even the right tool for many of the challenges that we face. AI is also not a technology without tensions. It needs to be deployed safely and responsibly. Not to mention, until our grids are run on clean energy, the AI itself will carry a carbon footprint, as will any energy-intensive technology we use.

But AI can be a transformational tool in our fight against climate change. It's just on all of us to wield it effectively. Thank you. That was DeepMinds AI developer Sims Witherspoon. You can see her full talk at TED.com. Many thanks for listening to our show on Tech's climate conundrum.

This episode was produced by James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, Harshanahada, and Rachel Faulkner White. It was edited by Sanaas Meskampore and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montalione and Fiona Giron. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Helen Walters, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballorezzo. I'm Manus Zameroodi, and you've been listening.

to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.