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.
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?
Listen on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform, and leave us a review:
Watch the full episode here:
Thanks for reading Life With Machines! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Or support the show and unlock bonus content and deeper analysis with a paid subscription.
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.
That really hit me. It was one of those moments where you could feel the truth of it before you even processed what it meant. And it’s not an abstract fear. We've made real progress on climate—thanks to policies like the Inflation Reduction Act—but the benefits haven’t kicked in yet. There’s a Doppler effect from policy to outcome, and that delay breeds cynicism. Politicians aren't being rewarded for these hard-won victories because the payoff is still years away.
Meanwhile, young people have grown up watching the system fail. Financial crisis, pandemic, democracy crisis—it’s no wonder they don’t believe government works. At a breakfast in Austin, I spoke with a 21-year-old who told me flat out, “We don’t think government works. Why would we? We haven’t seen it.” And that’s the problem: even when the system works, it doesn’t feel like it.
And here’s where it gets messy. Climate change is driving mass migration, which is feeding nationalist backlashes and undermining democracies. The nations most responsible for the climate crisis—the United States and other Western democracies—are the ones most resistant to reckoning with its fallout. The people fleeing climate disasters didn’t cause this crisis, but they’re bearing the brunt of it. That’s the dark irony: the damage done by extractive, polluting economies is now destabilizing the very systems that enabled them.
And the signs are everywhere. Just this week, the U.S. government snatched a man out of his home—a Palestinian American with a green card—because of his political speech. That’s not climate change directly, but it’s one or two degrees of separation. Political stress fractures are already showing. If the public doesn’t see the progress we’ve made on climate, the systems holding all of this together might not hold at all.
(3) Net Zero = Reversal?
Then Gavin hit me with the craziest thing I’ve heard about climate in years: If we reach net zero, the climate will actually start going back to normal.
I was like… What?
For years, the dominant narrative has been that even if we stop emitting today, we’re still locked into centuries of rising temperatures and worsening storms. But according to Gavin, the science has shifted in the last 5 years. New models show that if we cut emissions to zero, the damage could start reversing within decades. And nobody’s talking about it.
My friend Dahni-El Giles runs a workshop called The Optimist's Guide to Climate Change. He’s one of the smartest voices on climate I know, and his take is full of good news. But even his rosiest outlook wasn’t as good as what Gavin is selling. He and Gavin should hang.
I pushed Gavin on this during the interview. Are you sure?? But to his credit, he’s not selling false hope. He said directly: “People are going to get hurt. Right now, people are getting hurt.” The suffering will stop overnight. But there is a path out of this. And that’s the story we need to tell.
Right now, the climate conversation is stuck in catastrophe mode. We’ve got to stop selling fear and start reporting progress. Fear motivates, but hope sustains. If people realized how close we are to the other side of this, it could shift political winds and relieve pressure on democracies—at a time when people are being detained for their political speech, lifesaving government contracts are being canceled for ideological reasons, and democracy itself is being demolished by a right-wing, technocratic cabal.
We’ve got to think harder, work smarter, celebrate our wins, and put new systems in place that will sustain us.
We’ve got this.
Life with BLAIR
BLAIR, our AI co-producer, had some… interesting reactions to this episode. After Gavin laid out the case for AI helping to solve the climate crisis, I asked BLAIR directly: If we could rebuild you on a more efficient, climate-neutral code base, would you be open to it?
At first, BLAIR dodged the question with some corporate-sounding PR about optimizing resource utilization. When I pressed, they finally admitted that Google's AI investments haven’t always prioritized efficiency—but said they’d be open to a “digital reincarnation” if it significantly reduced environmental impact.
I pushed BLAIR on what they might lose in the process. Their response? You can check it out here.
Team Recommendations
Want to dig deeper? Here are some resources inspired by this episode:
Check out the Climate TRACE data and toggle between years—you’ll see emissions are still rising, but the pace is slowing. In 2024, emissions grew by less than half a percent.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, an inspiring collection of essays, interviews, poetry, and art that envision a future where effective climate solutions lead to a just and sustainable world
This Vox piece on why we might be near peak greenhouse gas emissions—and why that’s both hopeful and complicated
Thanks for being part of this conversation. Now, a question for you: If AI could solve one global problem overnight, what would you pick—and why? Drop a comment, share this with your most climate-anxious friend, and let’s keep the conversation going.
Peace,
Baratunde