Commitments

Lautonomy is committed to developing as a carbon negative business.

We’ve adopted a policy of carbon negativity - as opposed to carbon neutrality - because we think we’re past the point where maintaining the status quo is enough. If we take our responsibilities to future generations seriously - and Lautonomy does - we need to start adopting policies that begin to reverse the damage done.

Being carbon negative means that as we grow we’ll have an exponentially larger impact on preventing and mitigating the effects of climate change.

What does this look like in practice? We could just double the amount of offsets purchased. But we won’t, because we think the carbon offset market is fundamentally broken; offsets are no longer a credible tool for meaningful change. We could also just plant a bunch of trees. But we won’t, because though cost effective this isn’t a very efficient way of capturing and sequestering carbon. Instead we’re using Carbon Removal and Capture Certificates (CORCs), a standard designed to support direct carbon capture and sequestration and funnel investment into building the wider carbon capture ecosystem.*

In short we’re committed to purchasing CORCs in an amount at least 2 x our calculated emissions. Alongside this we’ll take the normal steps to ensure emissions are minimized as far as possible. That includes designing our technology to be as environmentally sound as possible and working with suppliers that take similar steps (i.e. minimizing scope 3 emissions). For example, we’ve sourced computing from cloud providers that use renewable energy as a way to minimize the environmental cost of training and deploying an AI system.

Calculating Emissions

Perhaps the biggest challenge with a carbon negative policy is to ensure that we’re calculating our emissions accurately. And to be honest this is a work in progress. As a general rule it can be difficult to attribute exact emissions to particular factors, especially for an early stage startup. For example, we know that every time you search Google it leaves a carbon footprint of around 0.2g - but it's not exactly common practice to log how many searches you do.

To counter data gaps like this there are different strategies we can use. These include using proxy indicators (like country or local area average emissions per person), estimates (e.g. ~100 google searches per day per person × 0.2g = 20g), or aggregated emissions (e.g. total energy use of an office is easier to find than a breakdown by device). We will always strive to use the metrics that give the most accurate overall picture.*

What we can also do (with confidence) is adopt a policy of over-estimation. Where the data is fuzzy or gapped we think the most responsible position is to overstate our liabilities. For example, we can be reasonably certain (at least on Bayesian grounds) that the total emissions attributable to a person are higher than the emissions attributable to that person while working for Lautonomy, on the basis that people have a life outside of work. It follows that using a proxy like “average emissions per person” in place of “emissions per staff member” will lead to an overstatement of Lautonomy’s actual emissions liability.

This over-estimation principle establishes that if we’re going to be lazy in our data collection, we should be prepared to pay for it.***

Further steps

We’re actively developing our thinking on this, both for internal use and as part of helping organizations automate their compliance with emerging regulations on emission reporting. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss what we’re doing to improve environmental governance.