Urgency, part 1

Autodesk's statement of sustainability, June 2019

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I work for Autodesk, and am happy to do so. In contrast, I've also posted previously about how unhappy I was to be working for some other companies in the past. One of the most important distinctions between then and now is that I see my current employer as a "good" company. Autodesk espouses values I share, is active in good works, and is avowedly intent on helping our customers do more, for better, with less (a pithy rewording of our corporate mission statement). We even have our own Sustainability group, populated by smart, committed, overworked people. It is disturbing, therefore, to find us being called out on Twitter by an artist/environmental activist as a contributor to the on-going cultural and environmental destruction around one of Europe's most hellish coal mines.

An aerial shot of the RWE excavator 290, borrowed from @JoanieLemercier's Tweet; click through to see how enormous (and thus enormously destructive) this mind-boggling machine is

The question of corporate responsibility is much on my mind. I support those who are holding tech to account for its heedless dissemination of flawed facial recognition, mistruth engines, and other technologies inimical to the health of society. I am horrified by the fact that the US government, long since fundamentally compromised in its execution of its democratic duties by the influence of big business, is now directly controlled by the very worst of those business people. And I have come to realize that the climate crisis in particular is the fault not of each of us and the every-day decisions we make individually but, fundamentally, of a small number of predatory corporations led by a coterie of people whose business models feed on the destruction of the planet.

Autodesk is clearly no such predator, but do we enable those bad actors in their work? Joanie Lemercier, the artist/activist mentioned above, accuses us of just this, noting that Autodesk software is used to maintain the gargantuan excavator you see here. Our CEO, to his credit, replied to Lemercier's call for Autodesk to stop supporting the coal industry:

We give our software and guidance for free to startups (and other efforts) that are working on clean/sustainable technologies. Beyond it being impossible to police all the uses of our software (and judge which are good and bad), I believe this is the more impactful approach.

— Andrew Anagnost (@andrew_anagnost) March 30, 2019

In my work for Autodesk I am responsible for building analytics systems that translate data about product usage into judgements about that use, and I agree with Anagnost, we cannot feasibly police our users as Lemercier proposes, even if such a thing were permissible. But we could do something much simpler: we could stop doing business with the world's largest carbon emitters.

Autodesk, like all US-based companies, operates with export controls and related restrictions that require us to evaluate purchase orders and to build business processes to select among them. Furthermore, within certain limits (of which I admit I do not have a complete understanding) we are allowed to choose with whom we do business. And, like all businesses, we routinely make decisions that show a preference for certain industries and certain types of customers within those industries. The idea is practical. Beyond that, it is very much in keeping with the times. Zurich Insurance Group, one of the hundred largest companies in the world, has just announced such a decision:

Zurich generally will no longer underwrite or invest in companies that:

• generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining thermal coal, or produce more than 20 million tons of thermal coal per year;
• generate more than 30% of their electricity from coal;
• are in the process of developing any new coal mining or coal power infrastructure;
• generate at least 30% of their revenue directly from the extraction of oil from oil sands;
• are purpose-built (or “dedicated”) transportation infrastructure operators for oil sands products, including pipelines and railway transportation;
• generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining oil shale, or
• generate more than 30% of their electricity from oil shale.

s://twitter.com/Lucie_Pinson_/status/Auhasdfdsttps://twiIf Zurich can know this about its customers, Autodesk can too, and if they can so discriminate then--again asserting this within my limited knowledge of the differences between Swiss and American corporate law--Autodesk can too. And if we wish to continue to be a "good" company then we should.

A policy of this sort requires careful thought--some of these companies are also working on clean energy technologies, for example, and very likely use our software in those initiatives--but I say this to my colleagues: it's time to put in that thought and, having thought, to take action. Indeed, it's past time, because in the meanwhile events have moved on, drawing increased attention to the particular coal mine Lemercier visited and, potentially, to the role of any company that plays a part in its continued operation. For more on that, please read Urgency, part 2.