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Companies are backtracking on their promises to implement green policies, despite being incentivized. E- The Environmental Magazine reported that in February 2024 three major investment companies took a step back from plans to limit climate damaging emissions. However, they are not the only ones. Hundreds of companies across the world are going back on commitments toward emissions reductions, many of them being big names.

In 2023, Amazon dropped an effort to zero out emission on its shipments, despite publicly taking on The Climate Pledge in 2021. Another big name, Shell Oil, also stopped an initiative toward carbon absorbing projects after pledging that they would follow through. 

The non-profit watchdog Net Zero Tracker found that of more than 1,000 companies pledging to zero out emissions by 2050, less than 4 percent had done even “the bare minimum” to reach that goal.

There is a lack of government policy surrounding corporate emissions, which makes it easy for companies to not follow through with their promises. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act is designed to change that, providing billions of dollars in tax subsidies to companies that use green energy. Another method long proposed has been placing a blanket tax on each ton of greenhouse gas that is emitted. 

So far, however, companies initially agreed to implement green policies for the quick public relations boost, and not with true intention to make serious efforts. 

Some corporate news outlets have covered how companies are reneging, for example the New York Times  and Los Angeles Times are some of the only corporate news outlets reporting on this issue. However, a majority of news sources are reporting and applauding the efforts of companies taking the pledge toward green policies—however empty such pledges have proven to be.

Source: Taylor Connelly, “Why Are Companies Reneging on Emissions Reductions?” E- The Environmental Magazine, February 22, 2024. 

Student Researcher: Sophia DiSpirito (Frostburg State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University)

From concept to completion, the French architect Jean-Louis Deniot approaches every project in the style of a meticulous auteur — developing a new commission with a narrative and storyboard and executing every minor detail of a home, right down to the cutlery. “They might move in with just their toothbrush,” the 50-year-old says of his clients with a grin, one late summer morning in his Paris office on the Quai d’Orsay. 

Deniot’s HQ is one of the only office spaces in this mid-century apartment block — the French decorator Charles Sevigny once lived in the building, as did the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy — and he has taken care to preserve a certain residential feel. From the spacious living room where we sit, fitted with glass-panelled doors and a glossy painted ceiling to reflect the light and the water from the river Seine, the layout travels through his workspace, which resembles a dining room with book-lined walls, to a seemingly endless sequence of small rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows. 

In Hong Kong, he leans into rigorous lines and lacquered finishes. In New York, he works with steel and glass for reflection and transparency

It epitomises Deniot’s approach to orienteering design around natural light and how he creates balance and flow. For him, that flowing floor plan is like a sequence of vignettes. He eschews hallways in favour of the French enfilade layout to build a sense of rhythm and atmosphere. “The study of a layout is how you create energy in a space, and the more you progress throughout the home, the more detail you are fed,” he says, adding of the result: “It has to be captivating, optimistic, dreamy and contemplative.” 

Since launching his company in 2000, after graduating from the prestigious École Camondo, Deniot has built an architecture and interior design business spanning five continents. Today, pinned to the cork walls in one part of the office are 3D renderings of residential projects as far-reaching as Tangier, Palm Beach, Hong Kong, Taipei, Chandigarh, New York and Qatar. The latter, a palace-like 5,000 sq m villa, is an elegant new build steeped in such intricate artisanal craftsmanship — plasterwork, wood panelling, mosaics — that it looks like a historic site. As if it has always been there. 

Each of the projects on display bears Deniot’s signatures — sweeping volumes and dramatic symmetry, a richness in craft details and materials, and an overall soft and luminous palette. Influenced by his love for institutional and historic buildings (the Louvre is a recurring inspiration), his work combines the rigour and elegance of French neoclassicism and a flair for eclecticism in the tradition of Henri Samuel, whom he greatly admired. 

Yet, every different project also appears distinct to its locale. In Hong Kong, he leans into rigorous lines, ombré walls, and lacquered finishes; in Tangier, his interiors speak to the sea, sky and vegetation, and he employs local craft touches, such as wickerwork, terracotta and woven fabrics. In New York, he works with steel and glass for reflection and transparency, and focuses on scale and height, in reference to the skyline as well as the city’s majestic historic homes. “The work is site-specific and contextual,” he says of how a city’s character and cultural identity feed into his designs, comparing it to a recipe. “Around the world, we all cook with the same basic ingredients, in this case, materials, but it is the way of putting them all together that makes it unique.” 

He estimates around half of his projects are new builds, which allows him the freedom to create specific character profiles — a projection of sorts of the potential homeowner. There is nuance even within mere miles: between homes in Palm Beach and Miami, or between two recent London developments, a Mayfair apartment and a duplex penthouse for The Whiteley in Bayswater. “It’s quiet luxury and more suggestive, with beautiful materials and simple, clean lines,” he says of the latter, adding: “If I had to compare it to a fashion house, it would be Hermès. It’s quite masculine. Mayfair is more suited to something feminine. Chanel.”

It sounds light-hearted, but it’s big business. “Jean-Louis has a unique ability to do something really unique and arresting without making it look kitsch or over the top. His interiors are bold, and both of the moment and timeless,” says property developer Alex Michelin, co-founder of Valouran, who recruited Deniot for The Whiteley, along with US designer Kelly Behun, Linda Boronkay, Joyce Wang and others to design the 139 private apartments in all (valued from £1.5mn to penthouses upwards of £40mn). 

Timelessness is something Deniot aspires to, especially with historical sites such as Cambridge House, the Grade I-listed Georgian townhouse that will open in 2025 as an Auberge Resort luxury hotel. Fittingly, the architect went full anglophile, decorating the royal suites in the aesthetics of former monarchs, such as Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II, and King George, and blanketing the “joyful and decadent” common areas in what he calls “Wedgwood colours”. He was the first choice for developer Jamie Reuben, who says, “Jean-Louis’ understanding of listed buildings and passion for history enabled him to bring this incredible building to life and begin its new chapter as a landmark site in the capital.”

Such projects are so grand in scale that some take more than a decade to develop. In 2016, he began designing the 365 apartments (180 configurations) and more than 50,000 sq ft of shared space, including a new pool, for New York’s Waldorf Astoria Residences. He referenced the building’s Art Deco DNA but played with something more geometric and abstract — drawing from the modern lines of the constructivist movement. “It gives the impression of Art Deco without being too ornamental,” he says of the project, which will finally see the light of day later this year. “We don’t count the years — it’s a labour of love — but the design needs to be sustained with time, and when it does, it’s very satisfying,” he says.

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When Vinod Khosla had a skiing accident in 2011 that led to an ACL injury in his knee, doctors gave conflicting opinions over his treatment. Frustrated with the healthcare system, the leading venture capitalist proffered, in a hotly debated article, that AI algorithms could do the job better than doctors. Since then, Khosla’s firm has invested in a number of robotics and medtech companies, including Rad AI, a radiology tech company. The self-professed techno-optimist still stands by his assertions a decade later. “Almost all expertise will be free in an AI model, and we’ll have plenty of these for the benefit of humanity,” he told TIME in an interview in August.

One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures, Khosla, 69, co-founded the influential computing company Sun Microsystems in the 1980s, which he eventually sold to Oracle in 2010. His venture capital firm Khosla Ventures has subsequently placed big bets on green tech, healthcare, and AI startups around the world—including an early investment of $50 million in 2019 in OpenAI. When OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was briefly fired last year, Khosla was one of the investors who spoke out about wanting Altman back in the top job. “I was very vocal that we needed to get rid of those, frankly, EA [Effective Altruism] nuts, who were really just religious bigots,” he said, referring to the company’s board members who orchestrated the ousting. He contends with their concerns: “Humanity faces risks and we have to manage them,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we completely forgo the benefits of especially powerful technologies like AI.”

Khosla, one of the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024, is a firm believer that AI can replace jobs, including those performed by teachers and doctors, and enable a future where humans are free from servitude. “Because of AI, we will have enough abundance to choose what to do and what not to do,” he said.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Khosla Ventures has been at the forefront of investing in AI and tech. How do you decide what to put your bets on, and what’s your approach to innovation?

I first mentioned AI publicly in 2000, when I said that AI would redefine what it means to be human. Ten years later, I wrote a blog post called “Do we need doctors?” In that post, I focused on almost all expertise that will be free through AI for the benefit of humanity. In 2014, we made our first deep learning investment around AI for images, and soon after, we invested in AI radiology. In late 2018, we decided to commit to investing in OpenAI. That was a big, big bet for us, and I normally don’t make bets that large. But we want to invest in high-risk technical breakthroughs and science experiments. Our focus here is on what’s bold, early, and impactful. OpenAI was very bold, very early. Nobody was talking about investing in AI and it was obviously very impactful.

You were one of the early investors in OpenAI. What role did you play in bringing Sam Altman back into his role as CEO last year?

I don’t want to go into too much detail as I don’t think I was the pivotal person doing that, but I was definitely very supportive [of Altman]. I wrote a public blog post that Thanksgiving weekend, and I was very vocal that we needed to get rid of those, frankly, EA [Effective Altruism] nuts, who were really just religious bigots. Humanity faces risks and we have to manage them, but that doesn’t mean we completely forgo the benefits of especially powerful technologies like AI.

What risks do you think AI poses now and in 10 years? And how do you propose to manage those risks?

There was a paper from Anthropic that looked at the issue of explainability of these models. We’re nowhere near where we need to be, but that is still making progress. Some researchers are dedicated full-time to this issue of ‘how do you characterize models and how do you get them to behave in the way we want them to behave?’ It’s a complex question, but we will have the technical tools if we put the effort in to ensure safety. In fact, I believe the principal area where national funding in universities should go is researchers doing safety research. I do think explainability will get better and better progressively over the next decade. But to demand it be fully developed before it is deployed would be going too far. For example, KV [Khosla Ventures] is one of the few not assuming that only large language models will work for AI, or that you don’t need other types of AI models. And we are doing that by investing in a U.K. startup called Symbolica AI that’s using a completely different approach to AI. They’ll work in conjunction with language models, but fundamentally, explainability comes for free with those models. Because these will be explainable models, they’ll also be computationally much more efficient if they work. Now there’s a big ‘if’ in if they work, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I’d rather try and fail than fail. To try is my general philosophy.

You’re saying that explainability can help mitigate the risk. But what onus does it put on the makers of this technology—the Sam Altmans of the world—to ensure that they are listening to this research and integrating that thinking into the technology itself?

I don’t believe any of the major model makers are ignoring it. Obviously, they don’t want to share all the proprietary work they’re doing, and each one has a slightly different approach. And so sharing everything they’re doing after spending billions of dollars is just not a good capitalistic approach, but that does not mean they’re not paying attention. I believe everybody is. And frankly, safety becomes more of an issue when you get to things like robotics. 

You’ve spoken of a future where labor is free and humans are free of servitude. I’m wondering about the flip side of that. When we’re talking about replacing things like primary healthcare with AI, how does that shift the labor market, and how do we reimagine jobs in the future?

It’s very hard to predict everything, and we like to predict everything before we let it happen. But society evolves in a way that’s evolutionary, and these technologies will be evolutionary. I’m very optimistic that every professional will get an AI intern for the next 10 years. We saw that with self-driving cars. Think of it as every software programmer can have a software intern programmer, every physician can have a physician intern, every structural engineer can have a structural engineer intern, and much more care or use of this expertise will be possible with that human oversight that will happen for the next decade. And in fact, the impact of that on the economy should be deflationary, because expertise starts to become cheaper or hugely multiplied. One teacher can do the job of five teachers because five AI interns help them. 

That’s interesting because you’re suggesting almost a coexistence with AI that complements or optimizes the work. But do you see it eventually replacing those jobs?

I think these will be society’s choices, right? It’s too early to tell what’s there, and we know the next decade will be about this internship of AI expertise idea, in conjunction with humans. The average primary care doctor in America sees the average patient once a year. In Australia, it’s four or five times a year because they have a different doctor-patient ratio. Well, America could become like Australia without producing 5 more doctors. All these effects are hard to predict, but it’s very clear what the next decade will be like. We’ve seen it in self-driving cars. Apply that model to everything, and then you can let them go and do more and more, and society gets to choose. I do think in the long term, in 30, 40, 50 years, the need to work will disappear. The majority of jobs in this country, in most parts of the world, are not desirable jobs, and I think we will have enough abundance because of AI to choose what to do, and what not to do. Maybe there will be many more kids becoming like Simone Biles or striving to be the next basketball star. I do think society will make most of these choices, not technology, of what is permitted and what isn’t.

You’ve publicly disagreed with Lina Khan’s approach to the FTC. What role can regulators play in this need to strike a balance between investing in radical, untested new technologies at scale, and enforcement and regulation to make sure they are safe to use?

I think regulation has a role to play. How much, and when, are critical nuances. We can’t slow down this development and fall behind China. I’ve been very, very clear and hawkish on China because we are in the race for technology dominance with them. This is not in isolation. The Europeans have sort of regulated themselves out of any technology developments, frankly, around all the major areas, including AI. That’s going too far. But I thought the executive order that President Biden issued was a reasonably balanced one. Many, many people had input into that process, and I think that’s the right balanced hand.

Can you expand on where you see dominance within the global AI race? Do you think countries like Japan and India can become global AI leaders?

In the West, it’s pretty clear there will be a couple of dominant models. Places like Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic will have state-of-the-art models. So there won’t be 50 players in the West, but there will be a few, a handful, as it currently appears. Now, that doesn’t mean the world has to depend on the American models. In Japan, for example, even the Kanji script is very different, as are their national defense needs. They want to be independent. If AI is going to play a role in national defense, they will have to rely on a Japanese model. The same thing in India. If China has its own model, India will have its own model. And so national models will exist. There’s Mistral in the E.U., and that’s a trend we recognized very early, and we were the first to invest in this idea that countries and regions with large populations will want their own models.

In thinking about these nation models, how do you ensure greater equitable distribution of the benefits of AI around the world?

I do think we have to pay attention to ensuring it, but I’m relatively optimistic it will happen automatically. In India, for example, the government’s Aadhaar payment system has essentially eliminated Visa and MasterCard in their [fee] of 3% on all transactions. I’ve argued that if that same system is the key to providing AI services, a primary care doctor and an AI tutor for everybody should be included in the same service. It wouldn’t cost very much to do it. I actually think many of these will become free government services and much more accessible generally. We’ve seen that happen with other technologies, like the internet. It was expensive in 1996, and now the smartphone has become pretty pervasive in the West and is slowly becoming pervasive in the developing world too.

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“There is currently great danger,” a man wrote two years ago, “that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

It may surprise you to learn that the man in question was Elon Musk, who wrote these words when he bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter back in October 2022, stressing the need for humanity to have a “common digital town square” that was “warm and welcoming to all”, not a “free-for-all hellscape”.

And yet . . . and yet. 

Repelled by the direction that both the site now called X and its owner have taken, an exodus from the platform is under way. That exodus — oh go on then, Xodus — has been particularly apparent in Britain, having gathered steam since Musk starting posting things like “civil war is inevitable” during the riots that broke out over the summer. Many have left the platform entirely, while others merely lurk. “I have an answer to this, but discussion only on Bluesky these days am afraid [sic],” I saw someone reply on X recently. 

Either way, activity has fallen discernibly. Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots. The same thing is happening elsewhere, and not just in places where the platform has been banned, such as Brazil. Over the same 16-month period, X’s active users in the US have fallen by about a fifth.

As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X-users, they are finding their way on to alternative sites. With Mastodon having proved off-puttingly techy for many, that tends to either be Meta’s Threads app, or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped to start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers — about 1.4mn daily active users of Threads in the UK, compared with just over 100,000 for Bluesky — it is the latter that has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.

That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).

An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.

Many enthuse about how like “old Twitter” Bluesky is, which is telling in itself: in the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of how much they posted about politics on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took it over. According to the British Election Study, in the run-up to both the 2015 and 2019 elections, about 30 per cent of the most progressive Britons posted about politics on the platform. This year, while the most conservative Britons remained no less likely to post than before, the share of progressives posting on X had halved to 15 per cent; presumably that has since fallen much further, given that this survey preceded the riots.

In many ways this is all fair enough. Many of us use video-first platforms like Instagram and TikTok as procrastination-cum-entertainment; why shouldn’t the text-based social media sites be a place for procrastination-cum-cosy-filter-bubbling? Why not have a place on the internet that you can go and have a nice, civilised chat with someone who shares your worldview without the risk of coming across a load of vile racist content?

It comes down, in the end, to whether or not you believe that the “digital town square” Musk talked about when he bought Twitter can really exist and, if it can, whether it is of any benefit to anyone.

I have previously argued that a “digital town square” is a contradiction in terms — the internet is never going to enable the kind of engagement and understanding that comes from coming up against a real person in all their raw and imperfect humanity.

But while it will always be much messier and more maddening than we might like, I believe such a place is preferable to a series of siloed echo chambers. The irony is that it is the man who warned of the “great danger” of a splintering-off who is most responsible for making that a reality.

jemima.kelly@ft.com

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Tigers and dragons

The Home Office said 707 people crossed the English Channel in small boats on Saturday, the fourth highest daily total so far this year.

The total number of arrivals for 2024 now stands at 24,335. The highest number of people who have made the crossing in a single day was 882 on 18 June.

More than 10,000 people have made the journey across the Channel since Labour won the election in July.

The government said it is making progress in its bid to stop the crossings, having recruited former police chief Martin Hewitt as its new Border Security Commander.

The latest arrivals come just days after the prime minister said he is “not going to put an arbitrary date” on stopping the small boat Channel crossings.

In an interview with BBC South East, Sir Keir Starmer said he was “absolutely determined” to tackle the smuggling gangs who facilitated the crossings, but would not commit to a timeframe for doing that.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said the government will be working with European police forces to try and stop small boat crossings.

The prime minister recently discussed the issue with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security.

“We will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.”

On 15 September, eight people died when a small boat carrying 60 people got into difficulty off the coast of France. Forty-five people have died making the crossing in 2024.

The previous Conservative government made stopping the boats a central pledge, but the Labour government stopped short of saying the same.