Real decarbonisation won’t come from reports -it’ll come from AI, materials, and action on the shop floor.
Installing the world’s best fire alarm system while the building continues to burn — that’s what we are doing with emissions dashboards.
Measurement is essential -undeniably so.
You can’t fix what you can’t measure. But we are trapped in a loop due to climate tech investment trends.
An expanding maze of dashboards, audits, carbon credits, and clever financial engineering.
This has created a climate tech ecosystem optimised for monitoring emissions — while delivering minimal actual reduction.
Fog Machines and the Financial Theatre
Carbon Credits once imagined as a noble economic mechanism — are fog machines. It allows wealthy entities to buy the right to pollute. Outsourcing guilt, if you may say!
And AI ?
Much of it is being deployed not to solve emissions but to price them -adding efficiency to a flawed paradigm.
The Mismatch: GDP-Changing Industries vs. Climate Tech Dollars
Why Industrial AI Must Work in Steel, Cement, and Manufacturing.
Industries like cement, steel, chemicals, logistics, and manufacturing — the real engines of GDP — are also some of the largest contributors to carbon emissions. These are the industries that shape our modern world and build our physical reality.
At the fundamental level these industries are materials dominant and account for 60% of global emissions (IEA,2024).
And yet, they receive a fraction of the investment that software-based ESG tools or offset trading platforms do.
- Why? Because the hard stuff — material science, thermal management, process redesign — doesn’t demo well on pitch decks. It’s messy, capital-intensive, and slow-burn. and it means white-collared workers and their AI tools need to walk the shop floor! The Holy Grail of Industrial AI isn’t a dashboard — it’s walking the shop floor.
It’s the only path to actual decarbonization.
A perfect carbon report does not make your steel plant one degree cooler. Scientists and process engineers do!
A New Focus: AI/ML + Direct Materials = Real Reduction
If we’re serious about impact, we must pivot sharply to carbon reduction in manufacturing:
- Process-level heat signature analysis
- Process optimisation with AI
- AI/ML models that tune material mixes and energy inputs.
- Carbon optimisation embedded into the physical layer of production
- Accelerated and targeted material development to crash new alloy discovery time
- Material Science and Decarbonisation.
- New high-performance fuels developed in 5 iterations with AI
The future isn’t built-in spreadsheets. It’s forged in furnaces, extruded in polymers, sprayed onto crops, and pulsed into microchips.
That’s the AI we need. That’s the climate tech that matters.
The Big Idea: Reduce at the Root
We don’t need more carbon ledgers. We need much more investment in the machines and the materials than in measurements.
We need tools that reduce emissions at the atomic level — in industries that define GDP, growth, and infrastructure.
Meanwhile, climate tech start-ups in the industrials sector (which comprises industry, manufacturing and resource management) posted a relative decrease in financing. Their share of investment capital fell from 17% in 2023 to 7% in the first three quarters of 2024. (PWC State of Climate Tech 2024)
Because true climate impact isn’t what you report.
AI in Steel: Why a 10% Fuel Rate Cut Matters, and is achievable through materials and AI
A quick illustration of the impact. A 10% reduction in the fuel rate e.g from 550 to 495 per kg/tonne might sound minor, but at 1 million tonnes of steel production, it unlocks:
- A 10% fuel rate cut = $9.9m in savings (assuming $0.18/kg fuel cost)
- 110,000 tonnes of CO2 avoided
This isn’t a “cost centre optimisation” — it’s P&L transformation driven by AI.
Industrial AI isn’t about dashboards. It’s about combustion zones, chemistry, and margin.
“It’s what you change.”
Let’s shift the narrative.
- From offsets to outcomes
- From credit to chemistry
- From tracking emissions to transforming materials
The next wave of climate tech won’t be built in spreadsheets.
It’ll be forged in furnaces, coded into catalysts, and compressed into alloys.
And AI?
It won’t be just another layer on the screen.
It’ll be the invisible force that reshapes what we build the world with.
Real climate impact starts when AI steps off the dashboard — and into the factory furnace.
Image Credits
All visuals were generated using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL.E(prompting, concept design, and image editorial direction by the author)