TTo combat the effects of AI, one company is using, well, AI.

Catona Climatea Marina del Rey-based carbon finance company, announced in August that it had developed a financing model to embed carbon removal directly into artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Catona Climate sells emission rights to large companies to help them become carbon neutral or CO2-negative targets. Meta ordered 6.75 million tonnes of emission rights about Catona Climate in July. Catona Climate also worked with Microsoft Corp. in February to remove 350,000 tons of carbon in Kenya through a partnership with Trees for the future.

Catona Climate targets a growing problemlem for technology companies that have announced CO2 neutrality targets, but are now striving for AI that consumes so much energy that states revise carefully crafted, decades-long Environmental targets to keep coal-fired power plants running.

But Catona Climate also uses AI itself. The company uses bioacoustic information – sounds from birds and other animals – to measure the effectiveness of its climate projects and feeds this data into the AI ​​to better track progress.

“Our challenge in the coming years will be to harness the power of AI for good while mitigating its negative impact on the climate as much as possible,” Tate Mill, managing director of Catona Climate, said in a statement.

Catona Climate’s history is marked by controversy. The company was once the carbon arm of Aspiration Partnera climate-focused banking company that portrayed itself as “Wall Street’s greed’s worst nightmare.”

The company offered a debit card that could be used to contribute to tree planting, as well as mutual funds that excluded fossil fuel stocks. Aspiration Partners had prominent backing that included the following companies: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. And Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.

Just as Aspiration Partners was eyeing a $2 billion IPO, employees and partners became concerned that the firm was not accurately reporting its revenue or following standard procedures, according to Bloomberg. Now the firm has laid off the majority of its employees and is facing a handful of lawsuits from partners over unpaid bills and a Justice Department investigation.

Catona Climate did not respond to requests for comment.

But Catona Climate has survived. The company looks for carbon removal projects around the world, such as reforestation, direct air capture (building equipment that sucks carbon out of the air) or introducing no-till agriculture to extract carbon from the soil. It then converts these projects into carbon credits that companies can buy.

Several well-known technology companies such as Microsoft, Apple Inc. And Amazon.com Inc. have announced the goal of becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative by around 2030.

The cost of a single carbon credit can vary. In theory, a company could buy cheap carbon credits that go to projects that are not worthwhile and claim that it has achieved carbon neutrality in emissions.

“We need to go beyond advance purchase agreements and – in parallel with innovation in accelerating global decarbonization efforts – deploy more creative, accessible and automated climate solutions that embed carbon removal upstream in the fastest-growing and hardest-to-abate supply chains and technologies,” Mill said. “Including AI.”