Actual Emissions by Tech Companies Far Exceed Claims ⇥ theguardian.com

Akshat Rathi, Bloomberg, in July:

The Alphabet Inc. unit [Google] has claimed that it’s been carbon neutral in its operations since 2007. The status was based on purchasing carbon offsets to match the volume of emissions that were generated from its buildings, data centers and business travel. But in its latest report, the company states: “Starting in 2023, we’re no longer maintaining operational carbon neutrality.”

It’s a sign of a company learning to adapt to strengthening sustainability criteria. “In line with a changing market — including a more robust carbon-removal ecosystem we helped catalyze — we’ve shifted our strategy,” a Google spokesperson said. “We aim to avoid or reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to reach our absolute emissions reduction target.”

Kenza Bryan, Camilla Hodgson, and Jana Tauschinski, Financial Times, in August:

Companies including Amazon, Meta and Google have funded and lobbied the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the carbon accounting oversight body, and financed research that helps back up their positions, according to documents seen by the FT.

But Big Tech is itself split on how to craft the rules. A coalition that includes Amazon and Meta is pushing a plan that critics fear will allow companies to report emissions numbers that bear little relation to their real-world pollution and not fully compensate for those emissions.

One person familiar with the reform discussions describes the proposal as “a way to rig the rules so the whole ecosystem can obfuscate what they are up to”. The coalition said its approach “emphasises accurate emissions data and transparency”.

The battle reported in this Times article is over renewable energy credits — previously — which are different than carbon offsets. This article paints Google’s credit accounting approach as more honest than the proposal from Amazon and Meta.

Isabel O’Brien, the Guardian:

According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are probably about 662% — or 7.62 times — higher than officially reported.

These businesses have different emissions sources — Amazon, for example, also factors deliveries into its environmental reporting; Apple accounts for device manufacturing and transportation. But the overall impact of these companies is far greater than they admit to. It is frustrating to constantly see messages of “net zero” accomplishments and know it is, by some measure, fake — but by how much is difficult to know for most of us laypersons.