Fossil or Future?

Version for 2023:

Client: Matthew Postgate, Informeta Ltd <matthew.postgate@infometa.com>

Humanity needs to respond to climate change, but there is a lack of science-based policy for sustainable action. Legislation is not consistent, and corporate actors continue to lobby against climate legislation even while promoting environmental strategy in other areas. These factors make it hard for politicians to make essential choices between fossil fuel strategies that worked in the past, and the unavoidable future. The goal of this project is to develop a science-based decision tool, for use when drafting and reviewing policy proposals, that both analyses the language used and calculates realistic projects along the lines of David MacKay’s classic book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.

Older version discussed for 2022:

During the COP26 conference, it became clear that many politicians around the world do not necessarily follow the party lines of the 20th century left versus right, but are dividing themselves between those who mainly plan for the future, and those that focus on protecting the past. It should be possible to use natural language processing to help the electorate decide between these alternatives, by identifying the real allegiance of public officials to classify them as either fossil or future. Simple bag-of-words classifiers won’t be enough, because anybody could mislead readers by dropping in random words. It’s likely that you’ll need to use some kind of deep learning, and also plan for the possibility of inadvertent bias or even malicious sabotage when collecting the training set.