After years of inaction, Congress finally took a step toward addressing climate change with a surprise — and surprisingly large — bill that funds everything from green hydrogen to cold-weather heat pumps. The Inflation Reduction Act seemed destined for failure, like every climate bill before it, until it suddenly wasn’t. Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) intransigence looked like it was a calculated effort to kill the bill, but in reality, it may just have been an attempt to guarantee American competitiveness in some of the more consequential industries of the 21st century. The law provides $369 billion toward a variety of climate initiatives, and while it’s not nearly enough to address the scope of the problem, it’s far better than nothing. And if investor sentiment is anything to go by, it may be the lure needed to get them rushing into climate tech.
–Tim De Chant
Generative AI has its problems, to be sure. But it also has undeniably +ve disruptive potential. As generative AI came to the fore this year, bolstered by emerging AI techniques, we got a glimpse of the labor it can save across the art (see: Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2), programming (GitHub Copilot) and writing world (GPT-3, ChatGPT). Art-generating AI can eliminate mundane work like sketching backgrounds for portrait photos, while code-generating AI can reduce the amount of repetitive coding a programmer has to finish. The jury’s out on whether it’s a net good, but if social media’s anything to go by, generative AI is already supercharging the workflows of the white-collar workforce.
–Kyle
The promise of satellite-based internet connections is coming true, though as usual the tech is not yet evenly distributed. But we’ve already seen Starlink connect Antarctica and war-torn Ukraine, both rather extreme test cases. If they can do it there (or on a yacht, for that matter), they can also do it in rural America, regions hit by natural disasters, or in far-flung villages in developing countries. We may even see pirate internet connections popping up in places like China and North Korea, circumventing their control over information. It’s a hugely enabling technology, and 2022 was the year it went from experiment to product. And just wait until you can do it with your phone one of the biggest mainstream critiques of crypto is just how energy-intensive it can be. Depending on how a blockchain validates its transactions, simply buying an NFT could use an outsized amount of energy, and as more people onboarded into the space in 2021, the environmental impact of the crypto industry has become increasingly concerning. For years, the team behind the Ethereum blockchain has promised a monumental event called The Merge, which would transition Ethereum from the energy-intensive proof-of-work protocol to the more environmentally friendly proof-of-stake process. In September, this change — The Merge, with a capital M — finally succeeded after a multiyear coding effort This year feels like it has been… several years, but believe it or not, it was this April when the Amazon Labor Union, led by future folk hero Christian Smalls, secured the first union election victory at Amazon in the U.S. People referred to this as a David and Goliath situation, and that’s not an exaggeration. Amazon pulled out all the stops — like violating labor laws and spending millions on anti-union consultants — to stop the Staten Island fulfillment center from advocating for themselves. But against all odds, Amazon now must contend with a union.
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