Yeah.

Um, so I think I should start by saying, so what we do at Climate TRACE is we are a big coalition of NGOs, um, 150 different NGOs and universities who all specialize in satellites and measuring emissions.

So the reason that I'm talking to you today about this question is we got a whole bunch of experts.

I was an expert in electricity emissions.

We had experts in shipping emissions, mining emissions, and put it all together, kinda Wikipedia style, to monitor the world's emissions.

And last time I talked to you, we had just, like, hot off the press, finished the draft of now being able to measure all the emissions in the world, all sectors in.

We're talking physical emissions, not what a company say they are emissions.

Yeah

Who could have seen that coming?

Who could have seen that coming? So the whole notion that it's somehow good for the environment to use energy at off-peak times, and that you want to not use it when it's peak, that's true if you're talking money.

It's not always true for environment.

A different way to think about the problem is to say, if I use energy from the power grid at this time, what power plants are gonna turn on or off? And, um, so it turns out that research was coming out that right about 2012, and, uh, long story short, I was the grad student assigned to go actually operationalize some of those algorithms.

Um, and so, um, we just for fun on a weekend hit upon this idea that a few people from Google and Facebook and me met at a party and we're like, "What if we just put this on the internet? What if we just made it possible for anybody to know what time do you have to use energy for it to be cleaner or dirtier?" And we hit upon this idea that, um, in addition to charging batteries at the right time, you could use your dishwasher at the time that is good for the environment.

That would mean it's running on clean, renewable energy.

You could not charge your electric vehicle at the time.

Climate TRACE?

And so if you're charging that battery at the wrong time, you're really straining the grid and not doing the world a favor and, in fact, leading to deleterious outcomes.

Yeah, the way I like to think about it is there was a very concerted information campaign effort by electric utilities.

It kind of like predates a lot of the AI campaigns to convince everybody that the best thing for the environment was to do whatever was most profitable for the electric utilities.

Right.

Wow.

Who could have seen that coming? Who could have seen that coming? So the whole notion that it's somehow good for the environment to use energy at off-peak times and that you want to not use it when it's peak, that's true if you're talking money.

It's not always true for environment.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So call it 1.5%.

Yeah.

You need a whole lot of growth before 1.5% becomes a problem on energy.

And that could happen.

But there are people like Deep Seek saying, I'm not sure it's going to happen.

There's precedent from things like Bitcoin when Ethereum came out with something that used a thousand times less energy and everybody had said, that's not an option.

Tell me about Climate Trace, this organization you co-founded with Al Gore.