The era of voluntary climate reporting in the US may be coming to a close.

In late March, the SEC proposed a rule that would require companies to disclose climate risk, both their emissions and their plans to meet any reduction goals they have set publicly.

• Raising climate reporting standards to the level of financial disclosures would force companies to find a more standardized, verifiable approach to measuring and disclosing their footprints.
• Carbon accounting software companies want to help with that.

Zoom in: Climate software firms say the proposal is accelerating the growth of their customer base, though the companies we spoke with declined to share specifics.

“We track why people come to us, and we had to create a new category, which was the SEC ruling,” Mauro Cozzi, co-founder and CEO of London-based carbon accounting firm Emitwise, told us.

Green accountants

Even before the SEC’s proposal, investment had been flowing into companies building data analytics platforms that help with carbon accounting and measurement.

• Carbon accounting companies raised at least $297 million in 2021, six times as much as in 2020, according to a Reuters analysis of PitchBook and Climate Tech VC data.

The SEC is still seeking comments on the rule, and it likely won’t be implemented until 2024 if it passes. This proposal is the culmination of years of investor and consumer pressure and would bring the US in line with reporting requirements in place in Europe since 2018.

Zoom out: Right now, the SEC estimates that only about one-third of public companies in the US disclose their emissions, even though companies listed on stock exchanges globally account for about 40% of all greenhouse-gas emissions, according to Generation Investment Management.

Read more about the boom in carbon-counting software.—GD

Synthetic data may not be generated by humans, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically free of human bias.

Quick recap: As we wrote in our primer, synthetic data is data that reads, looks, or acts like it’s been collected from real people, when in actuality, it’s been created by artificial intelligence.

• The field, seen as a privacy-preserving solution, is expanding fast: In two years, 60% of AI training data could be synthetic, Gartner predicts.

But while the field could help alleviate many privacy issues inherent to building training datasets, its synthetic nature won’t automatically solve another challenge: bias in datasets.

After all, if synthetic data carries over all the same insights and trends as the original dataset, what’s to prevent it from inheriting all of the original biases, too?

Right now, the answer seems to be “very little.” But some synthetic-data organizations and researchers are working to address it via an early-stage subfield: fair synthetic data.

• Some synthetic-data startups, like Mostly AI, Synthesized, and Hazy, offer clients the ability to fill out datasets with potentially more representative data or more heavily weight certain aspects of the data than others.

But, but, but...“It’s not a silver bullet in any way,” Vivek Muppalla, director of synthetic services at Scale AI, told us. He added, “These are still people who are creating some of these synthetic datasets, so we have to be very careful and measured in how we are approaching the space and always keeping the ethical considerations top of mind.”

Keep reading about the rise of “fair” synthetic data.—HF

Stat: 61% of the Salvadorans who signed up for the country’s Chivo digital wallet abandoned it after withdrawing their sign-up incentive, per a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research cited by Rest of World.

Quote: “I think these companies have realized that there are so many products that need to go into the home that they are not going to build them all…The hardware — like connected light switches and plugs — is not a great business, to tell you the truth.”—Tony Fadell, who co-founded and and later sold Nest Labs to Google, on the forthcoming Matter smart-home standard

Read: Nature’s best science images from last month.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• A lab-grown leather startup raised nearly $50 million this week.
• One of the US’s largest coal-mining companies is partnering with an…EV charging company?
• Residents of a California town agreed to a new solar farm under one condition: translucent panels.
• A startup launched and recovered a rocket in mid-air for the first time ever.

For a space simulation: A short simulated video of a car getting smashed using the gravity on different celestial bodies.

For picking fancy wines: Meet the AI sommelier.

For using your car as a generator: Ford confirmed that the device needed to use its F-150 Lightning to power a home will cost ~$3,900 before installation.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• This startup wants to help space companies navigate increasingly crowded night skies
• The “bug” that turns waste gasses into useful chemicals
• These robots could help uncover the ocean’s mysteries