One of the most powerful tools in the fight against climate change is the money sitting in investment portfolios - especially the trillions of dollars invested on behalf of public retirees. That’s money that could continue to fund fossil fuel development, or help pay for climate solutions instead.

New York City has implemented an ambitious Net Zero plan for its public pensions. That plan includes divesting from some fossil fuel companies and investing billions of dollars in climate solutions. One company benefiting from that investment is NineDot Energy.

Wedged between an elementary school and a big box shopping center in the Northeast Bronx, NineDot Energy is operating a battery farm that the city’s utility company, Con Ed, can call on to help relieve the grid when it gets overstressed. “The batteries hold a combined three megawatts of battery storage. That’s enough to power about 3,000 New York City households for four hours on a hot summer day. Last summer, the battery farm was called half a dozen times, which was enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a combined 24 metric tons. That’s the equivalent of nine thousand car trips on the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Currently, the city has the dirtiest energy grid in the state. More than 90% of its power comes from fossil fuels. NineDot Energy is still in growth mode, but battery farms like this could eventually help the grid transition to renewable sources, like wind and solar.

“The sun only shines when nature tells it to; the wind only blows when nature tells it to, but people use electricity when they decide to,” explained Adam Cohen, co-founder of NineDot Energy. “A battery helps mediate that process. It pulls in the extra power when it's available, and then puts it back out when people call for it.”

On a recent visit to the Bronx facility, 12-year-old Virtue Onoja showed off a mural she helped paint along with other students from the elementary school across the street, envisioning a future powered by cleaner energy.

“One thing about me, I'm definitely an artist,” she said. “I drew a clear blue sky, no pollution, no nothing [and] beautiful yellow flowers and the sun.”

There are also drawings of windmills and electric school buses. “There's still a lot of pollution, not just in the Bronx, but just in New York in general,” Onoja said. “All of this is the goal that we want to achieve.”

This is an excerpt from the latest season of How We Survive. Listen to the full episode here.

Leyla Isik, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, is also a senior scientist on a new study looking at how good AI is at reading social cues. She and her research team took short videos of people doing things — two people chatting, two babies on a playmat, two people doing a synchronized skate routine — and showed them to human participants. After, they were asked them questions like, are these two communicating with each other? Are they communicating? Is it a positive or negative interaction? Then, they showed the same videos to over 350 open source AI models. (Which is a lot, though it didn't include all the latest and greatest ones out there.) Isik found that the AI models were a lot worse than humans at understanding what was going on. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes visited Isik at her lab in Johns Hopkins to discuss the findings.

It's the last Friday in April and it's time for Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review.

This week, we'll talk about how the Federal Trade Commission is suing Uber over its subscription service.

Plus, how the VC world is navigating the uncertainty created by the trade war.

But first, a nonprofit pivot is facing some challenges. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT was founded about a decade ago as a nonprofit research lab. It's now looking to restructure as a for-profit — specifically, a public benefit corporation

But that transformation is facing resistance.

About 10 former Open AI employees, along with several Nobel laureates and other experts, have written an open letter asking regulators in California and Delaware to block the change.

They argue that nonprofit control is crucial to Open AI's mission, which is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about how unusual it is to see this kind of conversion.

An Open Letter - Not For Private Gain

Ex-OpenAI workers ask California and Delaware AGs to block for-profit conversion of ChatGPT maker - from the Associated Press

OpenAI’s Latest Funding Round Comes With a $20 Billion Catch - from the Wall Street Journal

FTC Takes Action Against Uber for Deceptive Billing and Cancellation Practices - from the Federal Trade Commission

FTC sues Uber over difficulty of canceling subscriptions, “false” claims - from ArsTechnica

White House Considers Slashing China Tariffs to De-Escalate Trade War - from the Wall Street Journal

VC manufacturing deals were already declining before tariffs entered the picture - from Pitchbook

TikTok is going to be testing a new crowd-sourced fact-checking system called Footnotes. It’s seems similar to the Community Notes systems already in use on other social media, such as X and Facebook.

TikTok is also keeping its current fact-checking systems in place. The way these community systems generally work is, say someone makes a post stating "whales are the biggest fish out there." Another user could add a note saying "actually, whales are mammals, and here's a source with more information."

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Vanderbilt psychology professor Lisa Fazio about why this model of "citizen fact-checking" is catching on.

The use of algorithmic software in setting residential rents has come under scrutiny in recent years. In 2024, the Joe Biden administration sued real estate company RealPage, alleging that its algorithm, which aggregates and analyzes private data on the housing market, enables landlords to collude in pricing and stifles competition. There's no word yet on what the second Donald Trump administration's Justice Department will do with this case. But in the meantime, some cities are banning the use of these algorithms completely. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Robbie Sequeira, who has been reporting on the issue for Stateline.

We've sometimes wished we could have our own Wendy Rhodes, the performance coach at the hedge fund on the TV show “Billions.” Most workplaces, however, aren't bringing in billions and can't afford a Wendy. But an upskilling platform called Multiverse uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized, on-the-job guidance. Its AI coach, Atlas, helps workers expand their abilities and keep themselves relevant in an economy that makes skills obsolete faster than ever before, says Ujjwal Singh, chief product and technology officer at Multiverse.

Developers of mobile apps have "room for improvement" in making their platforms fully accessible for disabled users, according to a new report from the software company ArcTouch and the digital research platform Fable.

It looked at fifty popular apps and assessed them for features that improve accessibility like screen reading, text size adjustability, voice controls and multiple screen orientations. The apps were tested by disabled users who reported a poor or failing experience almost three-quarters of the time.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ben Ogilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch, to learn more about why so many apps are behind.

NVIDIA gets caught up in the trade war, the titans of Twitter/X debate intellectual property law — and the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta kicks off in court.

We're digging into all of it on today's Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about what we learned in week one of Meta's monopoly trial.