Here’s what’s on our radar at the moment:

The rise of “deep decarbonization”

Reducing carbon emissions is a broadly held goal; even the biggest of the Big Oil firms acknowledge that there’s going to be significant shifts in the world’s energy consumption patterns in the coming years, and lower consumption of fossil fuel is going to be part of that picture. The most visible signs are things like the growth of wind and solar power, and the rise of fully electric vehicles. But Michael Liebreich, the founder of New Energy Finance, points to other, less obvious trends that comprise what he calls “deep decarbonization”:

Astonishing progress is being made on super-efficient industrial processes, connected and shared vehicles, electrification of air transport, precision agriculture, food science, synthetic fuels, industrial biochemistry, new materials like graphene and aerogels, energy and infrastructure blockchain, additive manufacturing, zero-carbon building materials, small nuclear fusion, and so many other areas. These technologies may not be cost-competitive today, but they all benefit from the same fearsome learning curves as we have seen in wind, solar and batteries.

Link: BNEF

• The proportion of Canada’s uninsured mortgages reached an eight-year high in January, says the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. The growth in such mortgages is due to rules instituted in January that impose stress tests for borrowers with a greater than 20% downpayment. They’re instead turning to alternative lenders. (Bloomberg)
• Health Canada released its proposed rules for the packaging and labelling of marijuana products when they’re legalized later this year. They prominently display health warnings similar to cigarettes. Scroll to the bottom for a mockup. (Health Canada)
• Toys “R” Us may be bankrupt, but its brand name still has tremendous equity with shoppers, and will likely be one of the more valuable things it sells off. (Reuters)
• IBM unveiled the “world’s smallest computer” at its annual conference yesterday. It’s about as powerful as a desktop computer circa 1990—but it’s smaller than a grain of salt and, in production, will cost about 10¢ to produce. (Mashable)

A self-driving Uber killed someone

A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona yesterday, the first such incident ever reported. A human “safety driver” was behind the wheel, but the car was in autonomous mode at the time of the collision. The exact circumstances are still being investigated, but Uber has halted other test programs underway in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

The fatal crash will most likely raise questions about regulations for self-driving cars. Testing of self-driving cars is already underway for vehicles that have a human driver ready to take over if something goes wrong, but states are starting to allow companies to test cars without a person in the driver’s seat. This month, California said that, in April, it would start allowing companies to test autonomous vehicles without anyone behind the wheel. Arizona already allows self-driving cars to operate without a driver behind the wheel. Since late last year, Waymo, the self-driving car unit from Google’s parent company Alphabet, has been using cars without a human in the driver’s seat to pick up and drop off passengers there. The state has largely taken a hands-off approach, promising that it would help keep the driverless car industry free from regulation. As a result, technology companies have flocked to Arizona to test their self-driving vehicles.

Link: The New York Times

12 truths about technology

Tech entrepreneur and commentator Anil Dash has been around long enough to see some booms and busts in the tech sector, and the evolution of the Internet from a loose constituency of hacker misfits to the defining technology of contemporary capitalism. He’s distilled his experience into this essay running down 12 things that everyone should know about technology, including point No. 2, which is that nothing about the technology we take for granted today was inevitable, nor is what happens next:

Popular culture presents consumer technology as a never-ending upward progression that continuously makes things better for everybody. In reality,new tech products usually involve a set of tradeoffs where improvements in areas like usability or design come along with weaknesses in areas like privacy & security. Sometimes new tech is better for one community while making things worse for others. Most importantly, just because a particular technology is “better” in some way doesn’t guarantee it will be widely adopted, or that it will cause other, more popular technologies to improve. In reality, technological advances are a lot like evolution in the biological world: there are all kinds of dead-ends or regressions or uneven tradeoffs along the way, even if we see broad progress over time.

Link: LinkedIn

The legal battle over colonizing Mars

It’s unlikely to happen as soon as the optimists think, but people are determined to go to Mars. It could be as part of a national or multilateral public project (U.S. President Donald Trump has talked about a militarized “Space Force” recently); but the likelihood of a private expedition is growing too, with (who else?) Elon Musk musing about the logistics of sending colonists to the Red Planet. But even if someone can clear the considerable technical hurdles, there remain the thorny problems of space law:

Legally speaking, settling space isn’t as easy as Trump and Musk suggest. The foundational piece of space legislation is the Outer Space Treaty, which was ratified by the U.S., U.S.S.R., and dozens of other nations in 1967. Per the treaty, nations aren’t allowed to place “nuclear weapons” or “weapons of mass destruction” in outer space, period. And any celestial body — such as an asteroid, the Moon, or Mars — must be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” Depending on what Trump had in mind for the “Space Force,” this may put a damper on his plans. The treaty spells problems for Musk as well. It states that nothing in space can become national territory, meaning that any base or settlement on Mars would have to be free to use by anyone else who can travel there. A person can’t just set up a colony, claim independence, and create rules that restrict access to it.

Link: The Outline