Can climate education be fun? Yes, but only with a dog involved! So today, I’m introducing Decarb the Dog.
Who is Decarb the Dog?
Decarb is a climate activist. He gets the urgency of the climate situation, and knows it’s an all-dog-alert, all-paws-on-deck situation. He knows we need to stop burning fossil fuels asap, and push back on the economic forces and trillions of dollars still working to perpetuate and profit from burning fossil fuels, even as they burn up the planet.
But he’s also an optimist, and a tech geek at heart, who loves to play with the latest climate technologies and knows the awesome power of tech innovation plus people innovation (dogs are people, too). He knows that the technologies are all there for us to decarbonize the planet today, no breakthroughs needed, we just need to make it happen. And he sees the millions of smart people (and dogs) pushing hard on the problem at every level and from every angle, and tries to channel that energy into his own climate work.
The Evolution Of Decarb
Having used the AI image generator Dall-E to generate some fun climate images (avatars, art) in late 2022, I decided to try it again to generate some fun dog images for Decarb. And wow, has it improved! Here’s some camera roll to illustrate the process of creating Decarb. The sequence was this: first I asked Dall-E to generate some images of a modern day Reddy Kilowatt (I didn’t realize immediately that I needed a dog). It tried, but just came up with garden-variety superheroes:
Then I asked it to try a dog. Which it did, but they were all too animated:
Then I asked for more like a real dog, and it started to morph into a German Shepherd (after a brief, odd detour through Wolf).
At this point I said, just give me a 100% real dog. And it started to spit out pictures of Decarb. Here’s all the ones I used in our climate tech and innovation guide:
Here’s some more images that didn’t make it into the guide, but were interesting and fun anyway (e.g. an oversized Decarb in the rainforest, at a corporate board meeting, or participating in the U.N. climate talks):
That’s all for now, but stay tuned. You’ll likely be seeing more Decarb pics in the future!