Every now and then, technologies come along that make a big difference. They might be public and sudden, like the development of Android and Apple smartphones. These were a game changer, and everyone knew it.
Other revolutionary technologies are less visible in the public eye, but no less important. The invention of software markup languages combined with Internet browsers changed the Internet from a thing only coders could do to a thing just about anyone could do. Breathtaking, but a bit more subtle.
Today, profound but similarly subtle revolutions are underway, and one of them is absolutely vital for LOT to succeed. I’m referring to Application Programming Interfaces, or “APIs” (you pronounce the individual letters, “A” “P” “I”). The simplicity of LOT’s carbon accounts will depend heavily on convincing companies that provide you services, to use APIs. I’ll explain.
Say you go to your supermarket and buy 35 items on Tuesday. You might want to measure the carbon footprint of each of those 35 items and add the items to your carbon account. How would you proceed? Well, here are your options, from worst to best:
- Assuming you have advanced to the most precise carbon account measurement level (don’t worry, this won’t be available for awhile), you would want to type in the name of each item and calculate the carbon footprint for each item into your carbon account. I personally don’t believe ANYONE will do this except on rare occasions.
- You might be more inclined to capture the items in your carbon account if you could use your phone to scan a barcode on the item, or take a picture and submit the item. LOT would then assign the name of the item and the carbon footprint to your carbon account. There are imperfect methods for carbon footprint assignment, but data scientists at LOT plan to come up with some pretty good estimates using various machine learning techniques.
- EVEN BETTER would be for your grocer to share an electronic list of the goods you purchased with LOT, at your request. The grocer can certainly do this if you are using your grocery loyalty card, because this card exists for the purpose of establishing a grocery account for you. The grocer would use an API to carefully and securely transfer the data to LOT.
The sharing permission would be yours to give and manage. You would sign into your loyalty card account, and direct the grocer to share transaction information with your (anonymous) LOT account. The shared information would likely be the items’ barcode number, trade name of the product, quantity/weight purchased, and transaction date. On LOT’s side we would assign a carbon footprint to the item and add it to your carbon account.
So how far are we today from executing APIs? The grocer CERTAINLY knows what APIs are, but may not be set up to execute them for all use cases. The good news is, once the grocer has set up APIs (The specific technical term is “API Endpoints) for external organizations in general, it is very simple to create more for different purposes. AND, the grocer is motivated to support this API endpoint because it will increase your loyalty. (Because it is easier for you to capture data in your carbon account!)
The LOT team are defining and designing API endpoints for a wide range of goods and services that generate carbon footprints. For example, a footprint generated by an airline flight might require miles flown, airplane make/model, and fill rate. LOT will need to research various industrial best practices and generate recommended API endpoint definitions for each. Even with these recommendations, however, individual companies will likely execute their API endpoints uniquely.
LOT will need to conduct high level business development to cajole companies to participate. In some industries like electric power, some leading companies are already enabling consumers to access their data through APIs, but the list of participants is short. We’ll need executives with contacts and influence to help companies prioritize this effort.
There are line items and categories up and down the LOT carbon account statement that could be made easier to collect, and more effective with APIs. Every utility–gas, electric, water–could be fed automatically into the statement with APIs. Airline loyalty cards are an obvious choice, perhaps along with 3rd party travel sites. Some kind of direct connection to a gas pump would be excellent. And connections with 3rd party carbon offset companies would be splendid.
There’s a lot to do here. We need to research various industries, design recommended API endpoints, and convince companies to implement them. It can be done but will require some drive and focus.
