IC14: What are the opportunity costs from Ecosia's pledge for a Clmate Nobel Prize and their integration of AI?

Show notes

This week, we look into two recent decisions from Ecosia, a really great not-for-profit search engine that make every Euro they earn available for climate action. We focus on their recent proposal and funding for a Climate Nobel Prize and their decision to integrate AI capabilities in their search engine by buying them from OpenAI. For both we look into what this is costing the immediate climate action and whether the decisions were a good one. As always it is very complicated and inconvenient.

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Sources

• Ecosia's successes in 2025 (LinkedIn post by CEO Christian Kroll) (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7412098653697482752/))
• Ecosia's announcement for a Climate Nobel Prize (ttps://blog.ecosia.org/climate-nobel-prize/)
• Nobel Foundation: there will be now new Climate Prize (https://table.media/en/climate/news-en/nobel-foundation-there-will-be-no-nobel-climate-prize))
• Ecosia's announcement on AI (https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-ai/))
• Ecosia's financial (https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planting-receipts/))
• OpenAI pricing structure (https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing))
• Estimate of Ecosia's per day searches (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/top-search-engines))