Remember reading about the days when they thought the world was flat? (No, that Columbus thing is a myth.)  Last week I spent a few days at the Augmented World Expo where the geekiest folks in this reality unapologetically rallied for the next reality, where the Internet is no longer flat, but a real live immersive 3D experience. Not an easy lift.

Each year the stalwarts gather, pushing ahead on the building blocks of VR, AR, and combined XR realities so that we can all move more of our daily lives: shopping, education, governments and cities, manufacturing and building, healthcare, entertainment and more into new digital experiences.

The show is ten years old and as delightfully geeky as ever. But this year two things stood out. One is that there has been real progress in creating 3D interfaces that don’t need headsets to be experienced. The second is that a new generation of headsets, hoping their time has finally arrived, are coming to market. To headset or not to headset? That is the question.

No Need for Headsets?

Browser based (i.e. no headsets) immersive experiences are getting better. These experiences are designed to give folks with nothing but a desktop, tablet, or phone a chance to meet in the same worlds as their glasses-wearing friends. Current browsers like Chrome were built for a 2D Internet but standards like WebGPU and WebXR are adding the graphics layer needed to experience the metaverse unencumbered by headgear. Companies like Niantic, especially with the acquisition of browser based AR creation platform 8th Wall, believe the phone is the ultimate AR/XR device.

Leslie Shannon, Head of Internet Trends and Scouting at Nokia  gave a talk where she said “The majority of metaverse experiences are happening on mobile phones. Presence is more important than immersion.” And Sightful introduced what it’s calling the world’s first AR laptop.  Put on your glasses, open your ten-inch laptop, and you can work on a full sized multiscreen AR environment.

Headset Mania

In the other corner of the immersive world are the headset evangelists. While Apple wasn’t anywhere to be found at the show the specter of its  impending announcement about XR glasses – unveiled yesterday – hung over the crowd like sword of Damocles. Apple has been super-secretive about what’s behind the curtain other than the fact that it will sit on your face, cost $3,000 and have some amazing optics. Apple’s announcement will certainly give a jolt of life into the headset industry. Whether the acceptance of this rather pricey device as a headset for gamers, enterprise, or both remains to be seen. And so does the killer app that it needs to succeed. Some believe this will be the company’s new “iPhone moment”.  Others say that Apple has failed at product launches before and this will be a repeat performance.

If $3,000 is too much to pay for to wear googles on your head, Meta announced its $500 Quest 3 this week. It’s thinner and more powerful than earlier versions. The Android-centric amongst us are watching for the Google/Samsung XR headset. Magic Leap showcased the Magic Leap 2 which allows for collaborative work in mixed reality and allows you to view the physical world with a VR overlay in a lightweight form factor.  (The lines at the booth to don a pair of glasses and see for yourself were long!)

According to Ori Inbar, the co-founder of AWE and longtime champion of immersive worlds, the  $38 billion XR industry is growing steadily at 30% annually. Fortune 1000 companies are donning optical headsets for everything from training to product collaboration. Already 1.2 billion users have experienced AR and XR, transforming verticals such as healthcare, entertainment, education, and gaming.”  “ Putting things over our heads is weird” says Inbar. “Even umbrellas took 200 years until they became culturally accepted by British men. I think that XR will be much faster.”

Neil Trevett, President of the Metaverse Standards Organization (MSO), has been working with 1,500 stakeholder companies to “tame the beast” and apply rigorous open standards to the creation of immersive worlds. The group upvoted which topics to tackle.  “Topping the list,” he says, “are interoperability, avatar creation, mapping formats, 3D object formats, and a big emphasis on privacy and security.”  Trevett believes that closed/proprietary systems like Apple’s offer healthy competition to the open systems that MSO is fostering.”

In the midst of AI mania, the headset/virtual worlds debate took a backseat in media coverage. In the coming weeks the headsets will be returning in full force to fight for their rightful place atop your nose.

Update:  On June 5^th Apple announced its much awaited Vision Pro, a $3,500 headset. Built into the ski-goggle looking device there are 12 cameras, 5 sensors, and 6 mics, explaining the price. The big idea is that you can experience a wide variety of XR experiences, including creating a larger than life desktop of apps, playing ultra high resolution games and experiencing a pass through experience where  you see the physical world while interacting with the virtual one. You can control the system with your eyes, voice, and hand flicks, and the UI lives in your space. Tim Cook called it Apple’s first product that you can look through, not at.

One of the catchiest jingles on US television, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” may need a rewrite after the insurance giant announced that, as of Saturday, it would no longer offer home insurance to new customers in California. Existing insurance policies are not affected.

According to a statement the company released on its website, the decision was at least partially motivated by the effects of climate change and “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.”

The seven largest wildfires in California’s history have all occurred in the past five years and, with global temperatures continuing to go up, there is a good chance that these fires will continue to wreak havoc on the state.

At least that’s what State Farm, the largest home and auto insurer in the US, seems to think.

“We take seriously our responsibility to manage risk,” the company said, adding that it recognizes “the Governor’s administration, legislators, and the California Department of Insurance (CDI) for their wildfire loss mitigation efforts.”

State Farm also cited “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation” as well as a “challenging reinsurance market” as reasons for taking this step.

Insurance companies have historically been on the frontlines of anticipating current and future risk. That is, after all, their business.

However, climate change and the weather catastrophes that come with it have made that job much more difficult.

Eric Anderson, the president of Aon PLC, a global insurance and reinsurance provider, told the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year that the uncertainty associated with climate change has created “a crisis of confidence around the ability to predict loss.”

This, Anderson said, has led reinsurance companies, which protect insurance companies from catastrophic losses, to withdraw from certain markets.

“Just as the U.S. economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is overexposed to climate risk,” the executive testified in March.

According to the World Property and Casualty Insurance Report 2022, “economic losses driven by climate change have increased by 250% in the last three decades.”

The report also found that 40 percent of insurers are “ranking climate change as a top priority, with insurability and profitability as leading climate-related issues.”

So, what does this mean for homeowners and businesses in California and other places at high risk of climate change-fueled natural disasters?

It is very likely that their insurance will either get much more expensive, or that they will be stuck paying for damages.

In a report published earlier this year, the reinsurance company Gallagher Re noted that weather events that were intensified by climate change caused direct economic costs of $360 billion in 2022. However, insurance providers only covered about 40 percent of that amount.

The report stated that last year was “another year where climate change, exposure growth and social inflation were the clear primary driving forces of loss,” adding that “the fingerprints of climate change were visible on virtually every major weather and climate event in 2022.”

June 7&8th, join Worth in Charleston for Worth Cities: Innovation and the Rising City. The conference will offer a diverse range of panel discussions, keynote speeches, and networking opportunities for attendees, as well as opportunities to experience Charleston’s renowned culture and cuisine. We will explore innovations, best practices, emerging trends, and new leadership from cities around the United States. To discover our speakers, full agenda, or register click here. 

During my second ride in one of Waymo’s autonomous-driving cars, there is a moment where I catch my breath and tense up. Waymo’s driverless car turns left at an intersection on a two-way, four-lane street in downtown Phoenix. The steering wheel starts rotating by itself. As the car accelerates into the intersection, I hear the whir of the Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV that Waymo has modified with autonomous technology. At the same time, I see a pick-up truck coming from the opposite direction bearing down on us, aiming at the passenger door next to me. That is when a pedestrian steps off the curb and starts walking across the street we must turn into to avoid being pancaked by the oncoming truck.

It all takes maybe a second or so, yet in that time, I can’t help but wonder: Are we going to kill this woman? The Waymo, however, handles it perfectly. The car pauses to let the woman cross the street, then accelerates quickly but smoothly through the intersection.

In 2016, Google renamed itself Alphabet and spun off the newly named Waymo—an acronym for “way forward in mobility”—as an independent subsidiary, ultimately funded by some five billion dollars in private investment. That same year, with the fervent support of Republican governor Doug Ducey, Waymo came to Phoenix.

Because of Ducey’s desire to attract Silicon Valley investment, jobs, and technology, Arizona was an early state to legalize ride sharing. Ducey wanted Waymo to make Phoenix its safe haven. “Over the past two years,” the New York Times reported in November, 2017, “Arizona has deliberately cultivated a rules-free environment for driverless cars, unlike dozens of other states that have enacted autonomous vehicle regulations over safety, taxes, and insurance. …The payoff for Arizona has been a tech boom.”

“When I see a Waymo gliding down the street, turning its own wheel, I think, ‘The future is Phoenix,’” Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego says now. To stay economically competitive with other cities and states, “deploying new technology is something we must do, and we pride ourselves on that. The technology of tomorrow is tested in Phoenix today.”

It’s now been about five years since Waymo has let members of the public ride in its cars, and the results are remarkable. Waymo has racked up over 1,000,000 miles of driving on public roads without a single “vulnerable road user contact,” says Waymo’s Amanda Ventura. (“Vulnerable road user contact” is Waymo-speak for hitting a pedestrian, a cyclist, a motorcyclist, a dog, a deer—anything living, basically.) The technology is also being deployed with Waymo One in San Francisco, and on trucks traveling between Phoenix and Tucson, as well as between Houston and Dallas, Texas. (Highways pose fewer challenges for Waymo technology than city-driving, Ventura tells me—there are fewer scenarios for the technology to anticipate.)

Autonomous cars will change the world in ways we can’t anticipate. And that future will unfold in Phoenix, first.

Every few years, the world’s top scientists come up with hundreds of different scenarios, all aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The successful plans all require serious emissions cuts — not surprising, as humans have put more than 1.7 trillion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the past three centuries. But many of those plans also require something else: sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The challenge is that no one can agree on the best way to do it.

Carbon removal is a catch-all term for anything that people do that pulls CO2 out of the air and stores it somewhere else. To meet the world’s climate goals, we would need to do this on a massive scale — anywhere from 440 billion to 1.1 trillion metric tons before the end of the century. That’s more carbon than the U.S. has emitted in its entire history.

So how do we remove all that carbon? There are two carbon removal ideas that have really captured the conversation. One is direct air capture, which involves big factories that suck in tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, chemically concentrate it, and store it deep in the ground. The other idea is to simply plant trees! After all, trees have naturally sequestered carbon for millions of years. These two approaches are often viewed as technology versus nature.

The world’s direct air capture factories currently remove around 10,000 metric tons of CO2 each year. That’s the equivalent of more than a million gallons of gasoline. But that’s small compared to the 2 billion metric tons of CO2 removed by the world’s trees and plants each year.

Trees are also a tried-and-true method for removing carbon. They’re ready to go compared to direct air capture, which is only a few decades old. The direct air capture industry does exist, with a few facilities up and running today, but experts say it still has a ways to go.

To better understand why pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is so difficult, imagine being given a martini and being asked to somehow extract all the gin. (Keep in mind, CO2 makes up a much smaller proportion of the atmosphere than gin does in a martini.) That’s part of the reason why carbon-removing machines have to rely on energy-intensive chemical reactions and processes, which come with a pretty hefty price tag. Critics of direct air capture think there are way better uses for all that energy and money. Trees, on the other hand, are pretty cheap, and they’re self-powered by the sun.

Given those arguments, trees seem like the obviously better approach for carbon removal. But the choice is not nearly as clear-cut as it might seem.

Scientists think direct air capture, once it is better developed, could potentially store a lot of carbon — more even than the potential of the vast majority of the “natural” forms of carbon removal happening today.

You also need to consider what happens to the carbon after it’s removed. Trees suck up carbon, turning it into wood as they grow bigger, storing this living carbon for decades or sometimes even centuries. But they can’t store it forever. Eventually, trees die and decompose, which means that carbon in plants doesn’t actually stay out of the atmosphere all that long. For this reason, scientists call this the “fast carbon cycle.”

If you want to remove carbon for a really long time, your best bet is the slow carbon cycle. This is all the carbon that’s stored deep in the Earth. Normally, it takes up to 200 million years for carbon in this cycle to move between rocks, soil, ocean, and atmosphere, but humans short-circuited this cycle when we started digging up fossil fuels. As we burned coal and oil from the ground, we were inadvertently pulling massive amounts of ancient carbon out of the slow carbon cycle and into our atmosphere, leading to the climate crisis we’re in today.

Technologies like direct air capture allow us to do the exact opposite: to put that carbon back into the slow carbon cycle where it came from. When direct air capture facilities put carbon back underground, that carbon could stay there for 10,000 years or more.

So while the goals of direct air capture and tree-based carbon removal are the same, they are really different approaches — and they’re not even the only ones. There are dozens of other ideas for removing carbon from the atmosphere, and they’re all a little different when it comes to cost, readiness level, capacity, and storage duration.

There are ideas for storing organic carbon in wetlands, in soil, and even in algae in the ocean.

Some plans propose converting CO2 into minerals, on land and in the ocean. You can even combine trees and direct air capture — using trees or plants for energy, and capturing and injecting the carbon into the ground.

Scaling up our carbon removal is going to be challenging, and there are legitimate concerns that it could distract from the highest priority goal of cutting emissions in the first place. But even with dramatic cuts to how much CO2 we release into the atmosphere, scientists say carbon removal is probably going to be necessary.––

Rebecca A. Fannin will be speaking at the Worth Cities Summit 2023 taking place on June 8th in Charleston, SC. Come to see Fannin speak live, in person by registering here.

What has been known as the Rust Belt—a symbolic name for the rusting out of idled steel mills and auto factories—is now shedding its rust and developing the shine of a Tech Belt. This former pinnacle of the U.S. economy is making a comeback, which bodes well not just for our country’s heartland but for our economy and morale nationwide.

It’s in sync with President Joe Biden’s vow to “Build Back Better”: to create millions of jobs, invest more in research and development and emerging technologies, and upgrade worker skills across a broad swath of America. This renewal promises to rebalance the money and power that shifted to Silicon Valley—and to China.

The Silicon Valley elite may have ridiculed the Midwest as “flyover country,” but the heartland has begun the road to recovery. The erosion of manufacturing work over the past decades can’t be replaced by minimum-wage jobs. Many inner cities and rural towns in Middle America continue to struggle with population decline, poverty, opioid addiction, weak or no broadband, poor social services, crumbling infrastructure, and a diminishing tax base. Trashed eyesores remain.

Despite these very real obstacles, the revitalization of bygone industrial regions built on coal, iron ore, and oil by legends named Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Frick is underway. Now, with more investment in startups, technologies, workforce retraining, infrastructure rebuilding, and R&D, the economic woes underlying mid-American gloom are being reversed and helping us maintain our global innovative edge.

The “flyover country” stereotype has existed for years. The Midwest has been seen as the home of manufacturing and mining dinosaurs. Of boring plodders. But these perceptions are outdated. Driving my Honda Element SUV, I started a grassroots reporting journey in the summer of 2020. It was a hands-on way of learning about the current state of the country. It was also a significant personal trip. Since graduating from Ohio University, I hadn’t been back much. There had been little reason to go home, other than for holidays and funerals.

Home is the town of Lancaster in Fairfield County, just north of the Appalachian foothills. It was a good place to start and a great centralized base for traveling throughout the heartland, from the hollows of West Virginia to the rivers Allegheny, Monongahela, and Scioto; to the factory towns of Pittsburgh and Youngstown; to the motor cities of Detroit and Flint; to Hoosier country and the bluegrass of Kentucky. Google Maps on my smartphone was an able navigator.

It was a trip down memory lane: I revisited the places of my childhood and the original homestead of my father’s family on Kentucky’s Zion Ridge, where there is still no running water and few paved roads, but a tobacco barn, a pond, cows, and mountain scenery. It was moving.

But I also brought my reporter’s eye. As I explored these rustic spots decimated by industrial decline, I knew that innovation springs from necessity, from the worst of circumstances. And my onsite reporting of emerging economies throughout Asia helped me to recognize a developing region, this time in the American heartland. I put eight thousand miles on my Honda Element, driving on winding country roads past cornfields and pastures, and on flat interstate highways with billboards and mileage posts signaling my next destination. It’s good that gasoline was cheap then.

Right here in Middle America, I discovered a reenergized economy built on optimism, innovation, sheer grit, and a strong work ethic. Throughout remote zip codes of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, I found aging, one-industry towns beginning to diversify. In previously forlorn places I discovered technologically advanced upstarts in biotech, 3D printing, self-driving cars, green energy, artificial intelligence, and robotics. I found all-American, higher-skilled (and higher-paying) jobs in a number of metro areas. I saw Zoom towns of remote worker bees that had popped up in Appalachia. It was a trend that wouldn’t have seemed obvious except that I took the time to explore, not just drive by on the freeway.

On my road trips, I interviewed countless innovators who are digging out from the shutdown of auto- and steelmakers, mines, and chemical plants. There was space robotics technology in Pittsburgh searching for water on the moon; brain stimulation research in West Virginia seeking to cure Alzheimer’s disease; and from Athens, Ohio, ultracold storage techniques for distributing vaccines to fight COVID.

Without fanfare, a pivotal movement has been growing to restore the American dream in towns like Lancaster and cities like one-time industrial center Dayton, home to the Wright brothers and their flying machine. Tech ecosystems—entrepreneurial talent, accelerators, incubators, universities, and scientific breakthroughs—are retooling midsized heartland cities and Appalachian towns. Remote regions that were nearly forgotten when the money and power shifted to Silicon Valley—and to China—are being rebooted. Who doesn’t want to be part of a reemerging American frontier that’s bringing back jobs, raising incomes, and helping us beat back China?

It’s true that the Midwest doesn’t yet boast a high-profile tech company like Apple or Tesla or Zoom (though Intel is investing $20 billion in a new semiconductor plant in central Ohio). Nor does it have a venture capital player in the league of Sequoia Capital or Accel or Andreessen Horowitz. But Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Detroit, and other cities that defined yesterday’s industrial revolution are evolving as high-tech centers. Over the past decade, venture capital investment has quadrupled and 18,000 startups have formed in the region. Tech talent is moving in from the coasts, and Columbus and Indianapolis are seeing a population boom.

Prominent Silicon Valley leaders such as Salesforce and Oracle are swooping in to acquire cutting-edge companies in the Midwest. Tech icons like Cisco’s John Chambers and Brad Smith, previously with Intuit, are creating entrepreneurial sparks in Appalachia with philanthropic and funding efforts to revitalize the poverty-stricken state. The venture firm Drive Capital, launched in Columbus by two former Sequoia Capital partners from the Bay Area, is bringing Silicon Valley-style investing to Middle America and has already backed more than sixty startups region-wide, with several wins, including language-learning app Duolingo.

As Drive Capital’s cofounder Mark Kvamme told me over lunch in the hip Short North district of Columbus, “You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to build a great technology company.”

With so much at stake in revitalizing the Rust Belt and bringing back jobs, it’s no wonder that big names in business and politics like Steve Case and Michael Bloomberg are putting time, energy, and money into a turnaround and an untapped entrepreneurial well.

Several midwestern tech hubs are at the starting gate to be the next Silicon Valley, following the evolution of Silicon Beach in Los Angeles, Silicon Hills in Austin, and Silicon Alley in New York City, but each developing its own distinct identity. It’s not about creating the next Pokémon Go or NFT. It’s about practical technology applications in healthcare, finance, education, and transportation. Unlike fads that flamed out, mid-American tech is grounded in robotics, artificial intelligence, software services, green energy, 3D printing, and biotech.

As the real estate saying goes, it’s all about location, but it’s also about proximity to resources. Sand Hill Road, the nation’s venture capital nucleus, sprang up right next to Stanford University. TusPark, Beijing’s tech and venture hub, developed just outside the gates of Tsinghua University. Likewise, hubs in the Midwest leverage nearby talent, R&D, and intellectual capital. There’s a tech buzz around such strongholds as the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the healthtech corridor around the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic, the 3D printing campus of the Youngstown Business Incubator, and Nationwide Insurance and Ohio State University in Columbus.

Pittsburgh’s so-called Silicon Strip was once mainly warehouses. Today, it sports a newly built, four-story space for virtual reality labs creating avatars at Facebook (now Meta). Pittsburgh’s remarkable high-tech climb from its Steel Town roots stems from engineering-strong Carnegie Mellon University. As former Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto has said, the city “still shows its scars from the past, but from fossil fuels and robotics, artificial intelligence, and biotech, we are building it better.”

Of course, the Rust Belt’s transformation hasn’t reached everywhere. In some devastated, off-the-grid areas, change is glacial and largely anecdotal. Inexperience, lower expectations, capital shortages, and few advancement opportunities stand in the way. Newly empowered startups may fall short of replacing work lost due to deindustrialization. Marginalized people may not make it into the much-heralded middle class. But this push forward could narrow the stark economic divide between elite coastal states, with their gated communities, swimming pools, and Tesla cars, and the old Rust Belt, with its rusted-out factories; dilapidated trailer homes; and front yards full of junk.

The collapse of steel mills, chemical plants, and coal mines over the past fifty years devastated

the region. And those blue-collar jobs aren’t coming back. Automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and offshoring production to China have seen to that.

But a new, innovative mindset has emerged, along with a new industrial policy to invest in America and compete with China. As John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco Systems, put it, “When the factories and mines closed, our drive, dreams, and curiosity were lost. Now we need to dream again, and to achieve those dreams we need to become a startup country.” His deeply ingrained lesson? “We need to stay ahead of market transitions, to disrupt or be disrupted.”

Silicon Heartland: Transforming the Midwest from Rust Belt to Tech Belt was published March, 2023, by Charlesbridge Publishing / Imagine

Rebecca A. Fannin is a journalist, media founder, and author of four books including Silicon Dragon (2008), Startup Asia (2011), Tech Titans of China (2019), and her latest, Silicon Heartland (2023).

Before she begins her talks about hydrogen’s potential at eco conferences and other events, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) senior climate scientist and Princeton Ph.D. Ilissa Ocko likes to ask how many people in the audience have seen the Hollywood film, Glass Onion.

A show of hands—and murmurings about whether or not attendees enjoyed it—ensues.

In the movie, Ocko continues, a reckless billionaire has found a solution to earth’s climate woes: a hydrogen-based clean fuel.

Pause.

Or…has he?

It’s a novel—and layperson-friendly—way to get into a sticky subject. Hydrogen has, in real life, been touted as a cure-all when it comes to creating a net-zero economy. Tens of billions of dollars from public and private spheres have been pledged to projects and within the next decade the amount is expected to grow to hundreds of billions. Those include $8 billion the Biden administration has set aside for the creation of clean hydrogen hubs, where producers and consumers can soon test out the most promising among them. But as Ocko and other experts know it’s, well, complicated.

First, the good news. Hydrogen comprises 90 percent of the universe’s atoms and is present in plants, animals, water and even our very selves—binding our DNA. So it’s abundant. It’s also carbon-free in the form we use it (as two hydrogen atoms bonded together). It’s versatile too. Hydrogen can be burnt as fuel, converted into electricity, used to refine or make other fuels, and to create chemicals used in everything from household cleaning products to butter.

But despite hydrogen being cited as a potential solution in almost all past energy crises, enthusiasm is typically short-lived. Why? Essentially: It’s always proven too expensive when compared to nonrenewable energy. Ocko is blunt when asked what’s different now: “Today, we have a crisis unlike anything we have ever known,” she told attendees at the Techonomy Climate conference in March. “And the entire world desperately and urgently needs to get off fossil fuels.”

But its problems don’t end with cost. For one thing, hydrogen rarely occurs on its own in nature and is often tied up in larger molecules like water, so it needs to be made. That process is rife with potential for greenhouse gas emissions. There are two fairly clean processes that are currently available: “Green” hydrogen is created using renewable electricity and water, and “blue” hydrogen uses natural gas—a fossil fuel—but captures most of the CO₂ created in the process. Still, the methods aren’t foolproof. In the former case: Renewables are limited and using them to create hydrogen could cut into wind- and solar-generated electricity needed to decarbonize the power grid. And in the latter case: today’s carbon capture technology varies widely in efficiency, sometimes only grabbing 65 percent of the emitted CO₂. Because blue hydrogen creation involves natural gas, which contains methane, and methane emissions from human actions are causing at least a quarter of the planet’s warming, leaks are problematic.

Hydrogen, while indeed being carbon-free, also isn’t climate neutral. Translation: It too can warm the planet. The process through which it does so is different than that of carbon dioxide, which itself traps heat. Hydrogen warms the earth as the result of reacting with molecules in the atmosphere—which trigger effects that ultimately lead to more greenhouse gasses. But it’s potent. Over a 20 year period, hydrogen emissions are roughly 40 times more powerful at warming the climate than an equal amount of carbon dioxide. Its effects though are short-lived, which again makes it different than CO₂, which can cause warming for centuries. But the leaks which lead to them are likely.

Is hope lost? Absolutely not, say Ocko and colleagues. But controlling leaks, as well as intentional venting and purging during hydrogen operations, is crucial. This may not be simple. Current sensors only monitor large leaks that threaten safety because they could lead to explosions. Detecting smaller leaks, like those that lead to hydrogen warming effects, is not possible, so getting a handle on the problem is challenging. Estimates of emissions rates across the value chain vary widely, ranging from less than 1 to 20 percent. The overall amount will make a difference. If green hydrogen leaks are kept to the minimum almost all warming can be curtailed and even if leakage is high at 10 percent, warming impacts from fossil fuel systems can be reduced by 80 percent over a 100 year period (the typical temporal metric). When considering the effects of 10 percent leakage in the next 20 years, however, green hydrogen lowers warming impacts by only 65 percent. That’s still beneficial but not ideal. When it comes to blue hydrogen the picture is worse. Keeping leaks of hydrogen plus the methane involved in that process to 1 percent would deliver a 75 percent reduction in emissions over 20 years. Again, that’s not bad. But if the emissions are 10 percent for hydrogen and 3 percent for methane, it could lead to 25 percent more warming than fossil fuels.

The key is to keep researching, innovating and adapting, Ocko says. At the top of EDF’s list of recommendations: Make sure green hydrogen is made without cutting into renewables used to decarbonize the electricity grid. Make sure blue hydrogen is made with the best carbon capture and storage techniques, and set a high bar for cutting methane emissions. And design systems strategically to minimize hydrogen leakage. (This will entail developing sensors to detect small leaks. EDF is partnering with the company Aerodyne, which is developing a first-of-its-kind instrument to do so. EDF will test and use the product.) Finally: Only use hydrogen in cases where it’s the most climate-friendly solution. When it comes to powering cars and heating homes, for example, direct electrification can be up to 9 and 16 times more efficient, respectively.

Ocko says, “Hydrogen has an important role to play” in a clean energy future. But it’s not a simple panacea, “and people need to be aware of that more.” To urge caution, she ends her talks by going back to Glass Onion. In the final scene protagonists sit in the dark, having made a series of disastrous decisions. An alarm keeps sounding.

> Watch Ilissa Ocko’s full talk – Hydrogen: Climate Risks and Rewards –
here.

What could a city like New York achieve if it repurposed some of its 3 million curbside parking spots?

It could get rid of rats by moving trash off the sidewalks and into containers. It could create safe, cool play spaces for the more than 1 million New Yorkers without easy park access. It could build bioswales to collect rainwater and prevent flooding during heavy storms.

It could even help drivers kick their addictions to cars and avert climate catastrophe, writes Henry Grabar, author of the new book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.

Instead, the city devotes most of its curb space — an area equivalent to 52 Central Parks, according to advocacy group Transportation Alternatives — to parking.

“We have all this land that’s being currently allocated in one of the least efficient and least environmentally sound ways possible,” Grabar said. “If you begin to think about retrofitting and adapting that, the possibilities are endless.”

Paved Paradise reveals how cheap and convenient car storage exacerbates the housing shortage (the U.S. allocates more land to car storage than to housing), siphons public assets into private hands, blights downtowns and fuels the climate crisis.

Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, grew up in Lower Manhattan in the 1990s. In the book, he recounts travails familiar to anyone who has ever looked for parking in New York: His father used to drop the family off in front of their building before he set off in search of a curbside spot; as a teenager, Grabar was often tasked with sitting behind the wheel of his parked family’s station wagon, “…hoping I would not have to move the car when the ticket cop came. I was too young to drive.”

He has written about housing, transportation, and urban politics for the last decade. “In story after story, I kept finding this hidden factor that seemed to be determinative of the way various projects turned out,” he said. “That system was parking.”

Grabar traces much of the design and feel of modern U.S. cities to the postwar era, when American car ownership skyrocketed and much of the middle class moved to the suburbs. “The question of where to park all these cars consumed American politicians, shop owners, traffic engineers, and urban planners in the 1950s and 1960s,” he writes. “Cities sought to emulate the suburban parking model and very nearly destroyed themselves in the process.”

Today, Americans drive more than almost anyone else in the world, and transportation is the U.S.’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. (Electric vehicles may reduce emissions, but the need for chargers brings a host of other parking challenges, Grabar notes.) Americans’ propensity toward driving isn’t simply a function of our size — Americans drive 60% more than Australians and Canadians — but rather, he writes, “we built a country with exceptional rewards for driving and punishments for getting around any other way.”

Parking exacerbates the problem. When it’s free, there are often shortages, incentivizing drivers like his father to circle the same block several times in search of a spot. Across the country, zoning laws often require new developments to build a set number of off-street parking spots. Those rules, Grabar argues, create sprawl (which in turn incentivizes more driving) and fuel the current housing shortage.

“I think people’s opposition to new neighbors is often motivated by their fear of traffic and parking problems,” Grabar said. If cities provide comfortable and convenient alternatives to cars, “you can defang one of the most prevalent NIMBY arguments, which is really about traffic and parking. Rarely do you hear people say, ‘There were too many people on the sidewalk’ or, ‘There are too many people at the park.’”

The U.S. has the highest rate of road accidents of any OECD country, and traffic fatalities are on the rise. In 2021, some 43,000 people, including more than 7,000 pedestrians, died on U.S. roads, making it an outlier among economically advanced nations.

The problem is particularly acute in low-income and minority communities, which are less likely to have sidewalks, marked crossings and other designs meant to make spaces safe for pedestrians. Black pedestrians are nearly twice as likely to be struck and killed in traffic as white pedestrians.

Low-income and minority communities are also disproportionately exposed to air pollution — often the result of traffic emissions — and suffer higher rates of asthma and other respiratory ailments.

Grabar points out another, perhaps overlooked way that parking contributes to the climate crisis: Cement is responsible for nearly 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, much of which goes toward the provision of parking. And all that pavement contributes to the loss of wetlands, forests and other greenspaces, a process that can release carbon into the atmosphere and reduce biodiversity.

Paving over our cities also makes them less able to adapt to a changing climate. Asphalt and cement contribute to the urban heat island effect, which means that these surfaces create areas that can be several degrees warmer than green spaces nearby. Because of historic redlining practices, minority and low-income communities are more likely to live in urban heat islands.

These impervious surfaces also make cities more susceptible to flooding, another phenomenon on the rise as the planet warms. In Houston, Grabar writes, 50 years of unfettered growth “have sealed a Belgium-sized section of Texas grassland beneath asphalt, concrete, and land.” When Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 100 billion tons of water on the state in 2017, the water had nowhere to go.

But if Paved Paradise is an indictment of what parking has done to the modern American city, it’s also an invitation to imagine what else is possible. In 2011, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation moved 1,200 employees to a new headquarters in Seattle, it began charging for on-site parking while offering free bike lockers and transit cards. The share of workers who drove to work fell from 90% to 34% in six years. In Paris, officials have removed thousands of curbside parking spaces, including in front of some 200 schools.

“It creates this beautiful intermediary space between the school and the streets where kids can play and their parents and people walking by can gather,” Grabar said.

As New Yorkers have seen in recent years with the construction of more than 12,000 outdoor dining sheds, repurposing the streets transformed the city’s restaurant scene and helped sustain thousands of businesses during a pandemic.

Of course, parking is a political lightning rod that Grabar grapples with throughout the book. Curbside parking is such a ubiquitous feature of urban life that many of us fail to see what it has taken away from our cities’ landscapes.

Returning to the New York proposal to convert curbside parking into trash containers, Grabar asked me to imagine a city with functional sanitation. “[Imagine] if the city said, ‘We found a way to create 150,000 extra parking spaces, but we’re going to throw the trash all over the sidewalk. You’re gonna have to walk through it, and there’s going to be a ton of rats,’” he said, describing the current state of affairs.

“I don’t think anyone would say that’s a better system.”

> For more content on cities, join us for the Worth Cities: Innovation & the Rising City event on Jun 8th, 2023 in Charleston, SC.

November is an auspicious month. It was in November 2022 that ChatGPT was thrust into the public domain. It was also in November (2014) when Alexa became available to the public – and she was everywhere. Remember the Alexa frenzy? You could not utter the name “Alexa” on a phone call, or in a home without snapping some random digital assistant to attention. Any parent who’d named their child Alexa rued the day. There was the unforgettable AARP meets Alexa SNL skit imagining an Alexa for old folks. Voice was all the rage. We were a nation held captive. Sadly, Alexa’s primitive chatbot-like capabilities are no match for today’s chatbots, most famously Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT. like But, like those early Alexa days, AI chatbots are becoming inescapable.

In the early days of ChatGPT, you had to make a conscious effort to actively seek it out and start prompting. Other generative AI programs like Dall-e also made you come to them. Fast forward a few months and you’re suddenly finding yourself hard-pressed to keep AI at bay. In much the same way that Alexa allowed 3rd party developers to build out multitudes of apps from shopping lists to bedtime stories, AI is following suit, building AI-enabled apps atop the major large language models.

I made the mistake of adding the Chrome extension for ChatGPT named Merlin into my browser.  Now Merlin appears (gobbling half my screen real estate) to summarize any website I’m contemplating visiting. On Expedia, you can use the ChatGPT engine as your travel agent. ChatGPT-powered Instacart can provide easy recipes. Over at Klarna, an online shopping company, you can query its ChatGPT-powered backend to “find the greatest new television set” and have a shopping dialog. Open AI, the parent company of ChatGPT, just announced 70 new plug-ins. The plug-ins were developed by third-party developers so that you never have to leave what you’re doing to access ChatGPT’s superpowers. (One caveat: you must be a “Plus” paying member of ChatGPT to access these features).

Grammarly used to do an awesome job of improving my writing by checking my grammar and punctuation. The new generative AI-powered Grammarly Go goes way beyond. It asks if want my writing shortened, made funnier, more assertive, or even whether I want to add images it can find for me.

Over at Adobe, I’m now using generative AI that’s been trained on voices to eliminate background noises (dogs, trains, dishwashers, or music in an exhibit hall) from my videos.  This week Adobe introduced its own generative AI features, dubbed Firefly that will generate images and font effects as its first salvo into the AI arena. Its model was trained on Adobe’s huge catalog of images along with openly licensed content and stuff from the public domain. Again, no heading off to an outside image creation you’re working in AI without leaving Adobe.

Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for developers, should have been called Google AI Paloozza. All of Google’s product lines were reimagined with a long-drink of AI razzle-dazzle. As demonstrated during the event, Gmail will now craft answers to your emails. Maps will provide high-fidelity views of places on your journey before you set out the door. Photos will use a magic editor so that your skies are always blue and your backgrounds are always beautiful. (Up for debate – are these deep fakes or better photos?) Docs, spreadsheets … 25 Google products in all will get an AI IV-drip from Google’s large language model PaLM 2. Again, AI is at your fingertips without ever leaving your workspace.

AI Is Coming for You, Not Vice Versa

The observation here is threefold. First, Amazon thus far has missed its opportunity to make Alexa into a really cool AI product. It’s sold more than 100 million Echo devices, integrated Alexa with 85,000 smart home products, and its app store now boasts over 100,000 skills. Yet the company’s AI focus has been almost exclusively on AWS. Amazon is not developing its own large language model but licensing others. But ‘come on. Wouldn’t it be so cool to have an AI-powered Chatbot you could talk to?

More importantly, if the past few months’ announcements of built-in AI capabilities into our everyday work tools keep up at this pace, AI will soon become a seamless part of everything we already do. You won’t have to travel to find your chatbot. It will be coming to everything, and I mean everything, near you.

And finally, the business model for generative AI has grown up (and quickly).  Licensing fees from developers, usage fees for AI-powered apps, Meta  toying with AI-generated ads, and giving away it’s model to third party developers at no charge. Experiment while you can, before the bill comes due.

Healthcare has long fallen victim to hyperbolic rhetoric. We casually declare it to be “broken” when evidence to the contrary can be found in every hospital and clinic. Others say that any day now, Amazon or another big tech player is going to either rescue or destroy us, when neither is likely. And it has become a well-worn trope to call for outside “disruption” when open-minded collaboration among health system leaders, providers, and tech entrepreneurs can yield more lasting value.

As a physician and CEO of a health tech company, and a writer-anthropologist who’s spent years observing this space, we think it’s time we put these tired narratives to rest and expand our thinking. Rather than fixate on the “what” — the next big thing, trend, or government rule that will save or squash us — we should instead focus on why we need to change and identify the barriers that stand in the way. Having defined the barriers clearly — the mindsets and mechanisms holding us back — we can get to the business of solving them with a responsible approach to innovation.

To paint a picture of what responsible healthcare innovation might look like and how it can create enduring value for all stakeholders, we reached out to industry leaders for perspectives from a variety of critical vantage points. From our conversations some key considerations and principles emerged.

Understand, and solve for, the right problem

Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director of General Catalyst (founder-investor in the company Zenooz leads) believes that to build enduring value in any industry, especially healthcare, we must reject the “false choice” between growth and good. “What that breaks down into as a framework is thinking about all the stakeholders that are relevant to your business. It means respecting people’s privacy, prioritizing equity and diversity, inclusive prosperity, and sustainability.” With this framework guiding investment and business decisions, he argues, we can then seek to align interests and solve real-world problems.

As the CEO of Chicago-based RUSH Health, one of the leading academic health systems in the country, Omar Lateef, MD has no shortage of problems to solve. For him, innovation is responsible when it is solving the right problem. “Right now, the environment in healthcare is very challenging. People are stressed. We have a labor crisis. We need people to do the work that needs to get done. The mistake that I have seen is you get very attracted by the shiny penny. And it may be that you just don’t need a penny right now.”

Rather than focus on selling the next shiny penny, tech companies should instead listen with humility, understand root causes, and tailor solutions to serve needs — even if that involves more modest enhancements to existing systems. As Lateef puts it, “everybody has a new platform, a new tool, a new something.” But health systems have made a lot of investments already and many are struggling to manage existing priorities with depleted resources. Without proper alignment, Lateef says, “we are not going to solve the challenges and the problems that we need to solve.”

Create change through “collaborative advantage”

Responsible innovation demands the opposite of a rip-and-replace approach to change, argues Taneja. “We can’t as technologists have a mindset that we’re going to go and disrupt healthcare and build a brand-new system. This is too big a problem. It’s beyond any single company. And so we have to build an ecosystem.”

Dr. Marc Harrison, an accomplished pediatric intensivist and the former president and CEO of Intermountain Health who recently joined General Catalyst, has witnessed this first-hand, including how so-called “outside experts” often miss the mark in their approach to provider organizations. “Some of the tech players can certainly come off arrogant with a disruptive ‘fix all’ approach to health systems, while some providers can be equally arrogant to assume we can ‘do tech’ without the benefit of tech leaders. Both stakeholders need each other to create the best possible outcomes for the system and the people it is meant to serve.”

The remedy to this unproductive stand-off, Taneja proposes “radical collaboration,” where investors, tech entrepreneurs, health system leaders and providers come together to solve problems with shared interests and a healthy dose of humility. At its best, such a partnership can achieve what Rosabeth Moss Kantor defined nearly thirty years ago as collaborative advantage, in which each partner benefits from the perspectives and skills the other brings to the table. Such alliances, as Kantor pointed out, yield more than just ROI; they create net new value.

At Intermountain, Harrison saw how this type of collaboration could move the needle on a problem as intractable as the transition to value-based care. With a spirit of radical collaboration, Intermountain and its tech partners stood-up a platform called Castell that “can take somebody who’s a really good doctor, or a really good clinical team, and prompt them to do what’s needed to manage the health of a population proactively.” The key to creating something that has not only achieved quality goals but improved provider satisfaction, he says, was engaging providers in the process. “You take really good well-intentioned providers with good leadership who want to make change, and pair them with a tech stack that takes the friction out and improves quality. That’s a beautiful thing.”

Such a spirit of radical collaboration is just as crucial among technology companies that typically see other vendors as competitors to be “boxed out” rather than as potential partners. The reason healthcare is so fragmented is because thousands of solutions are selling their own piece of the pie — which only adds more cost and disconnection. Responsible innovators in healthcare have the humility to know they can’t be a silver bullet for every single challenge. Any digital health company committed to driving enduring transformation should be prepared to put out the welcome mat to competitors and say: “If you’re innovating and bringing value to health organizations, and we already exist in the same space, we want to work with you — even if it means taking a smaller share of revenue.”

See the whole board

Unfortunately, we’ve seen again and again how otherwise desirable innovations can end up compromising ethics, outcomes, and equity: Racial and other biases that creep into our AI algorithms; clinical trials that fail to represent the diversity of populations that should benefit from discoveries; EHRs and other tools that promise efficiency but instead lead to provider burnout.

A responsible approach to innovation requires us to do better by seeing the whole board and gaming out downstream impacts. For responsible investors, Taneja says, this means asking the hard questions of portfolio companies up-front. “Every time you make a business model decision, or if you’re relying on AI to make important decisions in your business, it’s incumbent upon us as the fiduciaries to ask the questions around what perhaps might be the unintended consequences of those choices.”

At RUSH Health, whose health equity efforts were recently singled out by TIME magazine as a “blueprint for other hospitals,” Lateef has learned that a key way to see the whole board is to ensure you have the right lens. That means designing inclusive partnerships that bring a diversity of mindsets and lived experience to the table. “Whether it’s a potential technology partner or someone who’s going to fix our parking garage, we want to know who they are and what neighborhood they’re from. As an anchor network in Chicago, diversity and inclusion is core to our mission.”

Harrison argues that healthcare technology and innovation must aspire to do more than just avoid complicity; it should actively surface and eliminate biases or disparities that would otherwise remain hidden. At Intermountain, one data project designed with this intent showed that Spanish-speaking stroke patients had to wait longer for clot-busting treatment than English speakers. “When our emergency doctors and our stroke neurologists saw this, they were appalled. Using technology to identify these issues and make them transparent allows you to address them with targeted solutions. That is precisely why I’ve joined General Catalyst — to work in partnership with healthcare and tech leaders to seek to develop the solutions that ultimately allow us to deliver better care for all people.”

If there’s any upside at all to the current down market, it may be this: It’s as good a moment as any to collectively pause, take a step back, and recalibrate. A time to talk less about transformation as a buzzword and more about what we want healthcare to transform into — and how we realistically get there from here. It’s an opportunity to humbly seek allies from every corner of healthcare, turn competitors into collaborators, and make room for odd bedfellows — what Lateef pragmatically sums up as “a group of the willing.” Now is the time to gather forces to focus not on short-term wins and gains but on creating enduring long-term value for all.

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Ashwini Zenooz, MD is a physician and the chief executive officer of Commure.

John Fox, PhD is the co-founder and co-principal of Slipstream, reporting on the biggest health issues of our times.