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For most of his career, Mike Kelland worked on software. But after selling his last startup in 2016, he decided to focus on climate change instead. He zeroed in on one key part of the problem: Cutting emissions is no longer enough to address climate change on its own. He’d read an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that explained that well also need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. We’re 30 years beyond the point where decarbonization alone was enough, Kelland says. He spent nearly a year meeting with scientists to learn about potential new carbon removal technology, and eventually met a researcher working on ocean alkalinity enhancementthe process of adding alkaline minerals to the ocean to help it store more CO2. The method can also help reduce ocean acidification. But the tech was stuck in the lab. I said, this is the moment to take this and turn it into something, Kelland says. In 2019, he cofounded Planetary, a startup focused on commercializing the idea. Now, at a site in Nova Scotia, the company is actively adding its antacid to the ocean. Earlier this year, it sold independently verified carbon credits to British Airways, Stripe, and Shopify for CO2 that it had already removed. And in a recent deal, Frontiera coalition of tech companies and others that are trying to help the nascent carbon removal industry grow committed $31 million to buy more than 100,000 tons of carbon removal from the startup over the next four years. It hasnt yet been tested at a large scale. But the goal is to scale up to remove gigatons of CO2and do that at a very low cost. How Planetarys ocean antacid works The method works by adding small amounts of minerals like lime (calcium oxide) or magnesium oxide into the ocean near the coast. Making the water more alkaline accelerates a natural process so the ocean can absorb more CO2 from the air. The CO2 reacts with the minerals to form bicarbonates that are dissolved in the water and can lock up carbon for thousands of years. The company works with power plants and other industrial facilities that already discharge water into the ocean, and then adds its minerals via those existing pipes. “Our philosophy is really the more that we can reuse existing infrastructure, the cheaper and more scalable this is going to be,” says Kelland. [Photo: Planetary] In Nova Scotia, the startup works with a power plant that circulates ocean water through its systems for cooling. On a tiny corner of the power plant’s property, the startup produces the minerals for the process, and then adds them to the power plant’s pipes before the water goes back in the ocean. The size of its operation is roughly 8% of a direct air capture plant, but can capture more carbon, Kelland says. The minerals aren’t unique. “This is literally Tums,” Kelland says. But because the standard way to make the product has a relatively large carbon footprint, the company couldn’t buy it off the shelf. Instead, the company uses alkaline byproducts of existing industrial production and mining that would otherwise end up in landfills. Then it purifies them so no harmful heavy metals or other pollutants are added to the ocean. [Photo: Planetary] The impact on marine life One benefit for marine life is clear: Locally, in the parts of the ocean where the minerals are added, the process can help reduce acidification. Extra CO2 in the ocean creates acid that makes it hard for species like oysters to form shells. (The bicarbonate formed by Planetary’s process, by contrast, helps form shells and coral.) Since the industrial revolution, the ocean has become around 30% more acidic. “That has really nasty effects on ecosystems, from the base of the food webthe tiny little plankton that form shellsall the way up to shellfish that we eat,” says Kelland. Fisheries are already being impacted by ocean acidification. Because of the ocean’s enormous scale, Planetary’s process can’t bring its pH back to pre-industrial levels. But if it’s done at scale in coastal zones, it can help counterbalance the pressure from human emissions. Like any form of geoengineering, this type of work also has risks. “Unintended consequences from ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) are still an active area of research, and the risks depend largely on the mineral used and how much alkalinity is added,” says Melissa Meléndez, an oceanographic researcher at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. “Some minerals could introduce trace metals that might be harmful to marine ecosystems, and certain organisms are more sensitive to abrupt chemical changes than others.” Because there’s still uncertainty, she says, field testing and monitoring are critical. Kelland argues that the risks can be controlled. There’s a risk to marine life if the water becomes too alkaline, but that’s already been well studied for the billions of tons of water that industry discharges into the ocean each day, which has to meet certain pH requirements. The levels can be monitored, and the system can stop immediately if needed. It’s also possible to carefully measure the amount of undissolved particles that go into the water and control that. The company can meet existing regulatory limits. Since Planetary is doing something new, though, it’s also continuing to work with scientists to do in-depth research on potential impacts. One large ecotoxicology study, for example, looked at the potential impact of the antacid on lobster larvae, and found no effect. Kelland argues that the science is already well enough understood for the copany to scale up to larger projects, though more research will be needed before the gigaton-scale would be possible. Even if there’s some environmental risk, the risk to marine life from climate change and ocean acidification is larger. With ocean acidification, for example, “we know that it poses very significant risks to any creatures that form shells in the ocean, which are a substantial portion of the food base,” says Brad Ack, CEO of Ocean Visions, a conservation organization that works on climate challenges to the ocean and studies approaches like ocean alkalinity enhancement. “So we’re already running a very signifiant risk just by letting this happen. You have to weigh the risk of doing things against the risk of not doing things.” (Ocean Visions has no relationship with Planetary or financial interest.) [Photo: Planetary] Scaling up Ocean alkanity enhancement has the potential to scale quickly, says Hannah Bebbington, head of deployment at Frontier. “We think you can get to gigatons of scale,” she says. “It has a minimal physical footprint. It requires very little energy and it piggybacks on some existing coastal infrastructure. So from a pathway perspective, we are really excited about this category.” In the carbon removal industry, companies are aiming for a cost of $100 or less per ton of captured CO2. But Planetary has calculated that it could get as low as $17 per ton. The low cost depends on sourcing its byproduct very close to its coastal operations. (In a pilot that it had planned earlier in the U.K., the startup ended up canceling the project because the cost of delivering materials was too high; now, material supply is one of its key criteria.) In an analysis of locations where it could access the right supply chains, it calculated that it could eventually scale up to around 2.9 billion tons of CO2 removal per year. Right now, society’s total global emissions are around 40 billion tons a year. [Photo: Planetary] Community opposition could be a challenge. In the U.K. pilot that the company scrapped for supply chain reasons, protestors fought the project, saying that they were concerned about marine life. Right now, the company operates under existing regulations for discharge from industrial plants, but it’s possible to imagine that some communities might pass new legislation banning the new practice. Still, the company managed to get widespread support for the project in Nova Scotia, including from indigenous communities like the Mikmaq. In some cases, Bebbington says, communities may actively want the company to set up operations. “We’ve actually seen that a lot of fisheries have been interested and engaged in this sort of ocean alkalinity enhancement,” she says. The technique can help support populations of oysters and other important food species. Business support is necessary to help the work grow, since carbon removal companies need to sell that service. While environmentalists often argue that supporting carbon removal is a distraction from the work of cutting emissions, Bebbington says that both are necessary. Frontier is working with Stripe, Google, Shopify, McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, and Workday to purchase carbon removal from the startup. (Other companies, from Canva to Zendesk, are participating through a partnership that Watershed, a corporate decarbonization program, has with Frontier.) “We make these commitments to proactively ensure that there will be carbon dioxide removal solutions in place to meet our net-zero target at the end of the next decade,” says a spokesperson from H&M. “As the first fashion retailer joining Frontier as a member, we want to inspire others in our industry to follow our example and become early buyers of carbon removal.” “When you look at what the IPCC report says, in order to limit global warming to either 1.5 or two degrees, we are going to need to both radically reduce the emissions we emitthat’s sort of 80% of the challenge ahead of usand then also proactively remove carbon dioxide permanently,” Bebbington says. Scientists estimate that we’ll need to remove between 5 billion tons and 10 billion tons of CO2 a year by 2050 (and even more if we miss targets for cutting emissions.) So far, we’ve only removed a paltry 100,000 tons. Getting to the goal “requires deploying technology, refining technology, scaling technology, bringing technology down the cost curve, which takes time, takes capital, takes talent,” says Bebbington. “The mandate today that we encourage corporates and countries alike to adopt is a dual mandate: You both need to radically reduce your emissions and starting today, work on proactively scaling carbon removal. Because if we wait until 2050, you can’t just flip a light switch and expect that we’ll have gigaton scale carbon removal that is safe, responsible, cheap, effective. That market, that technology, takes time to develop.”
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E-Commerce
Predicting the future can be fun, but you get the sense Judge Amit Mehta wasn’t having much of it in his ruling that declared the long-awaited remedies in the Google antitrust case. Although the case centered around how Google achieved its dominance in search over the past 20 years, Mehta also considered what’s to come, specifically the emergence of AI chatbots like Gemini as go-to information portals for large numbers of people. That’s important, especially to people in the media, many of whom were disappointed that the remedies weren’t harsher. While Mehta discarded industry-altering solutions like forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, the ruling does recognize AI assistants as core distribution infrastructure in the media ecosystem. They may be a different animal from search engines, but Mehta writes that there’s enough overlap that the courts should regard them similarly: “…the use cases for GSEs [General Search Engines] and GenAI chatbots ‘are not identical but they do overlap in a number of places’ like ‘a Venn diagram’.” That recognition is a significant step toward building a future AI ecosystem that works for everyone. There are of course myriad lawsuits and licensing deals between media companies and AI companies, and the ruling is a signal that the courts will treat AI assistants as critical distribution channels on par with browsers and search defaults. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Exactly what form that takes is far from clear, but something else is: publishers need to build for that future now. AI isn’t an add-on or a feature. Flawed as they may still be, AI portals are the new battleground for where the best information providers will duke it out, just like SEO used to be. There are different rules for AI answer engines (governed by GEO, or generative engine optimization), but the fundamental gamebeing the source that gets citedis the same. The shift from clicks to citations As AI engines grow in popularity, there’s been a parallel trend of declining search traffic. This was entirely expected, but reports from both Pew Research and Similarweb have put numbers on that uncomfortable and rapidly accelerating reality. In addition, TollBit’s most recent State of the Bots report showed the meteoric rise in AI scraping as well as the abysmal click-through rates from AI summaries. All of this has sent the media world in a panic since a great deal of the industry’s business model depends on that click-through traffic on search engines to fuel ad impressions. The understandable focus on revenue, however, overlooks the less tangible benefits of ranking in search: brand visibility and authority benefit from prominent placement in search resultsboth for publications and individuals. That same logic carries over into AI answers. Although click-through is borderline negligible, users do often see the source that’s being cited, even if it’s just a publication name in a footnote. It’s like being quoted on the evening newseven if you weren’t able to directly monetize the mention, it reinforces your credibility. In other words, the impression (meant both literally and figuratively) still matters. If your publication is cited in AI answers repeatedly, that can drive demand indirectly. Seeing the same name repeatedly in authoritative answers can influence whether that user decides to subscribe, recommend a source, or follow a journalist or outlet. Its a softer conversion path than direct clicks but not meaninglessakin to share-of-voice in traditional media measurement. The hidden value of AI summaries This isn’t to say such intangibles make up for lost revenue from referral traffic. But they do help publishers answer the question, “Why would you want to?” when considering whether they should compete for placement in AI summaries. And it’s not like monetization is out of the question: larger publications continue to sign licensing deals with AI companies, Perplexity is architecting a revenue-sharing system, and pay-per-crawl programs from the likes of Cloudflare continue to grow. In fact, seeking placement in AI answers and measuring success will be key data for any publication when the time comes to negotiate with AI companies on licensing. And there’s every chance that court rulings could force the issue in the future, especially now that Judge Mehta has established the importance of AI information portals. And let’s be real: If you choose to opt out or ignore AI summaries, someone else is going to be cited. As users often don’t just read answers, but copy them and even use them in their own documents and web pages (Perplexity even provides a button for this), that could have a compounding effect as at least some of that material ends up in data for AI training and web crawling. Since AI answers rely on citations more than links, it could be difficult to unseat a competitor once they secure a popular summary. The other shift the ruling underscores is that, in an AI-mediated world, discovery isn’t a single-platform game. The decision requires Google to share data with its rivals. And with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot all pushing aggressively into AI answers, publishers will need to think beyond optimizing for Google. That means monitoring how content surfaces across various AI gateways, each with different rules for visibility. Just as SEO once became a core newsroom discipline, the coming challenge will be multi-engine optimizationtreating AI portals as the front doors for audiences they are rather than optional experiments. The AI-first discovery era begins Many were hoping the Google ruling would rebalance the power between Google and publishes. While that mostly didn’t happen, it did create a clear signal that AI engines will be the next frontier where content will compete for attention. The rewards for publishers are less tangible, at least for the time being, but there are rewards. And they beat the penalty: disappearing from discovery altogether. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Some people are simply better at transforming casual human connections into social capital. Their network is their influence. My first career break was a simple introduction to a social entrepreneur. It led to who I am today. Networking isnt just social leverage. Its the art of making people remember you when they shouldnt have to. Its creating pull so strong, opportunities orbit you, not the other way around. You make yourself impossible to ignore. Turning networking into career gold is about playing the long game: human connection, done with intent. Start with a constellation Think of every person you meet not as a contact, but as a star. A single star is just a point of light. But connect a few and have a constellation. Connect enough, and you have a galaxy that can change your life. Your career is not a ladder; its a night sky. Your job is to populate it with bright, interesting stars. That means talk to everyone. The person next to you on the plane. You might as well make the most of it if you are going to spend hours with them. Introduce yourself to the quiet ones in the corner. Youre not pitching. Youre connecting. Youre finding out what makes them light up. Thats how you connect the dots. You never know who will say, Hey, I know a guy . . . Thats the constellation at work. Serendipity is just what happens when your network is wide enough for luck to find you. Give. Then give again. Expect nothing The fastest way to kill the magic is to keep score. How can I help you? is my mantra. If you find a book that reminds you of someone who might find it useful? Send it to them. Hear about a project that aligns with a contacts skills? Connect them. Your value isnt what you can get; its what you can give. It builds a currency of trust. People remember generosity. They are hardwired to reciprocate. But you cant do it by waiting for the return favor. You have to give like its your job. But dont expect them to return the favor. The ROI is trust. And trust is the only currency that never inflates. Be a person, not a profile Nobody connects with a LinkedIn headline. They connect with a human. Talk about your failed startup. Your weird hobby. The time you made a mistake. And of course, how you bounced back. Vulnerability is a superpower. Its the secret that bypasses the professional face and goes straight to the person on the inside. Your specific, unapologetic self is your greatest asset. Authenticity is magnetic. It draws the right people and repels the wrong ones. Its a filter. Use it. Get the follow-up right You met someone great. What now? If you send a generic LinkedIn request, youve already lost. The gold is in the specificity. Your follow-up should reference something unique to the conversation. Great talking about the future of work yesterday. Heres that book or post I mentioned. No need to reply. Just thought youd enjoy it. That simple follow-up makes you a person. A thoughtful one. Not just a networker. Youve added value immediately with zero ask. Youve deposited into the trust bank. Now youre not a forgettable face. The goal is to be a connector You gain more social capital by connecting other people than by connecting people to yourself. If you see a developer who needs a designer. Connect them. You hear a problem and know the right person who can solve it. You make the intro. You become a value creator. Youre the person everyone wants to know because knowing you means access to a whole world of other interesting, capable people. Thats when youve truly made it. Dont just be interesting, be interested. Be a giver, not a taker. Be a person, not a profile. Build your circle of influence, one genuine connection at a time. The gold was never the asset you acquire or invest in. It was in the people you meet along the way.
Category:
E-Commerce
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