Beating Climate Change—But Losing Democracy?

Plus we did the SXSW thing!

Hey friends,

First, if you joined us for our session at SXSW, thank you! If you missed us, we’ve decided to turn our panel into an episode to be released April 8, so subscribe to our YouTube to make sure you don’t miss it.

During our panel, we gave BLAIR a special assignment: listen to the conversation and every five minutes, generate some “art” to capture the recent moment. This was all in the spirit of experimentation. We promised to share those images out, so here is one along with the context BLAIR based the image generation on.

“Chromatic Chaos” generated by BLAIR using dall-e 3 from OpenAI

Preceding context: Baratunde leads the audience in a collective breathing exercise, introduces the panel’s theme: the interdependence of humans, nature, and machines and mentions his history with SXSW, his other shows, and his mother’s influence (coder, hippie, activist).

BLAIR’s prompt to dall-e based on this: Swirling cobalt and sunburst yellow collide! A fractured stage, thick with impasto, where “SXSW” bursts in fiery orange against a night-sky blue. Bodies, barely formed in frantic brushstrokes of emerald and crimson, inhale deep breaths of lavender, exhaling swirling plumes of ochre. A lone, stark white figure, “Baratunde,” stands firm amidst the chaos, anchoring the scene. “Machines” whisper in electric green, a future both terrifying and beautiful, rendered with trembling, hopeful strokes.

You can check out the full set of images here. Now back to thoughts on this week’s published episode…

What if I told you that the most important AI breakthrough isn’t about writing emails or generating six-fingered humans—it’s about saving the planet?

This week on Life With Machines, I sat down with Gavin McCormick, the co-founder of Climate TRACE, to talk about how AI is being used to track global emissions in real time—and why it matters more than you think. He’s also co-founder of WattTime which is helping reduce emissions in invisible ways. This conversation left me shaken, inspired, and honestly, a little scared. We might be closer to solving climate change than we realize. But at what cost?

Watch the full episode here:

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Baratunde’s Take

A few things I'm still chewing on after my talk with Gavin:

(1) Interns for the Win

Gavin and the Climate TRACE team didn’t have big government backing or deep-pocketed investors. No flashy business plan, no cloud contracts. Just a cold calling campaign and a lot of interns. And somehow, it worked.

More than 150 organizations—nonprofits, research labs, even ex-spy agencies—joined forces to build a shared emissions map. It’s the opposite of Silicon Valley’s monopolistic thinking. Instead of hoarding data and patents, they built a decentralized network of collaborators with one shared incentive: saving the damn world.

It reminds me of what Sarah Hooker is doing at Cohere for AI—distributing AI research across institutions instead of letting it get swallowed up by a handful of tech giants. The Climate TRACE model shows that the biggest breakthroughs might not come from trillion-dollar AI arms races—but from smarter thinking, sharper math, and the right incentives.

(2) Beating Climate Change, Losing Democracy

At one point, Gavin said, “We’re going to beat climate change—but what if we lose democracy in the process?” And the room went silent.

Here’s an audio version of this newsletter I recorded from Austin. It’s like a mini podcast about the podcast with much more thinking, insight, and reaction. If you can see it, thanks and enjoy. If you can’t see it, join our paid community to unlock this and the rest of the newsletter content.