Say hello to carbon killer Emma Stewart. She’s the latest person we know on the cutting edge of an industry that simply isn’t going away: scrubbing carbon out of almost everything we do, particularly in cities. We’ve known Emma for years and caught up with her this week. As the newest ambassador and head of campus and communities for ENGIE, Emma is about to begin working with local governments, educational institutions and businesses around the world to find creative ways to reduce their carbon footprints. Even better, ENGIE creates carbon revenue streams, by figuring out the long-term value for an organization taking carbon out of our global climate system.
ENGIE is further proof that the business of carbon reduction isn’t just accelerating, it’s becoming an everyday thing and an increasingly valuable commodity.
The company’s ambition is global. For example, it offers carbon-reduction strategies to help the UK meet its goal of eliminating diesel engines from the country, and it has formed multi-billion-dollar partnerships in carbon reduction for Ohio State and the University of Iowa in decades-long carbon reduction efforts. It also has programs to encourage more smart buildings that will pump out less carbon from our cities.
One of ENGIE’s key objectives is also to dramatically reduce the carbon that we create from our computers and digital infrastructure, such as server farms, essential to our digital society. As Emma suggests, imagine energy systems that harness solar farms and wind to power the energy-hungry server farms we now rely on, to make the digital society truly carbon neutral. With the price of carbon now in place, or at least being contemplated, in several major economies, the carbon reduction business is set to boom. “The issue is of crucial importance – since more than 4 billion people spend nearly 5 hours on the Internet every day,” notes ENGIE.
