Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030
blogs.microsoft.com
blogs.microsoft.com
I am genuinely surprised by the sincerity, cogency, and aspirational nature of this initiative and its associated PR glossies.
I am measurably more likely to work at and invest in Microsoft after reading this.
I guess they've hacked my demographic?
I tend to think YES, assuming you're actually doing the right thing instead of just saying you're doing the right thing. For example, when good ideas happen to coincide with profit motive, I think that's a wonderful thing, and really the best-case scenario in a market economy. Apple's seemingly genuine focus on privacy is a perfect example: many people criticize it as being driven only by profit (perhaps as a way to compete with Google), while I say it's great if that's true!
From my linked report; A more energy efficient supply chain.
In 2015, we started engaging directly with suppliers to help them reduce their energy use. We aim to educate them about energy efficiency, identify energy efficiency project opportunities, and manage those projects to completion. We prioritize facilities with the highest energy use and potential for improvement. Then we conduct energy audits and train suppliers to uncover opportunities for energy efficiency—like replacing outdated or inefficient heating, cooling, and lighting systems; repairing compressed air leaks; and recovering waste heat. The assessments provide suppliers with a cost-benefit analysis for implementing energy efficiency improvements. Since the inception of this program in 2015, we have engaged 59 suppliers at 85 facilities. In 2018, our program implemented energy efficiency measures that prevented 466,000 metric tons of CO₂e from entering the atmosphere.
So they are working with suppliers and have been for the past 5 years. They also have been cleaning up the chemicals their suppliers use.
You can't compare what they are doing to murder; it's legal for starters. But if you're relying on all the companies you do business with to make up your definition of 100% renewable, it's likely you'll never get there. They don't say anything about the energy used by the banks they do business with either.
They also make a distinction between Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (emissions created by energy providers), and Scope 3 (emissions created by suppliers). Their Scope 3 emissions are two orders of magnitude higher than their Scope 1 emissions, if I’m remembering it right. Their commitment is to be net negative including Scope 3 emissions.
I was impressed. They went well above and beyond a simple PR move.
"Microsoft" isn't an entity with a will, it's just a collection of people. To the extent it has a will, that will is set by people. People with the demographics of the Microsoft population.
If Microsoft wanted a pure "PR" move then climate change isn't a logical choice because it risks alienating members of one of the major domestic political parties, who have been conditioned to be hostile to the cause.
To point to a company as a collection of individuals isn't compelling to me, organizations frequently act in ways that individuals would not. This is because incentives and goals can be very different to that of an individual.
84% of individuals (US) say climate change is a threat, so there is not much risk in alienating individuals. A recent pew study shows ~16% of people list climate change as no risk in the US, globally that number is 9% on average[1].
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/18/a-look-at-h...
I have incredibly cynical views on corporations due to their strong incentives to put the bottom line before everything else. They have a legal obligation to shareholders who tend to either be sociopathic or low-information enough to not care about anything about the bottom line.
That all being said I do believe that do-gooders do try to push initiatives like this for ethical reasons and try to sell them to shareholders as helping the bottom line. Certainly IT will only come under more and more scrutiny in terms of its climate impact anyways.
Yes, and I get the reasons for that, but you have to retain the ability to step outside your biases and see exceptions, even if the biases are logical and usually correct. Otherwise you go through life treating everything and everyone as a stereotype, which won't be accurate.
It's not the case that a public company is legally forbidden from taking any action that can help the world more than the bottom line. They're openly taking the action anyway, it's not like the presence of sincerity in their motivation increases their legal exposure to shareholders.
https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
> As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so."
I see this in the workplace too. Some of the worst managers I've seen were people who were unable to accept "close enough" and instead just didn't get anything done.
https://cloudscene.com/news/2017/03/ethisphere/ https://www.worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/honorees/
Bill Gates has been investing his money for a long time now on potential solutions for climate change, Brad Smith seem to genuinely care about this issue as well.
Something I've been thinking about... certain politicians sometimes get crap for being wishy-washy or whatever, but we live in a representative democracy. A representative is supposed to do whatever his or her constituents want.
The ideal representative wouldn't have values. They would simply do their best to carry out their constituents's will, whatever it was at that moment.
So, congrats to Microsoft on their current environmental efforts! We'll be watching you very closely.
What are the right reasons here? We live in a capitalist system and the base assumption is individuals and institutions will contribute to the common good for their own selfish reasons. If that works out, it can't get much better than that.
My criticism isn't that this is Microsoft acting "for the wrong reasons" but that it is Microsoft acting on the wrong level. A large number of public facing corporations being carbon-negative is meaningless if many other corporations and consumers with no public face are carbon positive by a lot more.
Essentially, I'd put on my institutional economist hat and say the only solution to CO2 pollution problem, an externality of production[1], is state regulation. That is state regulation involving direct enforcement, not taxes, not incentives, not promises. The basic analogy is a leaking, pressurized container - you can't incentivize the water coming out, you can't slowly plug a few holes, you have to plug each hole together or the remaining holes just leak more (or at least leak unacceptable much).
And here the obligation is for public to only be satisfied with PR moves that aim to fight global warming centrally. And this is where the cachet of pathetic individual and group moves to (pretend to) "fight global warming" is destructive. We should demand things from corporations, which they can do for PR reasons but we should demand is them support strong regulation affecting all CO2 producers, not all the other (useless) moves.
Your demographic doesn't understand corporate propaganda.
In my dottage (lol), I believe that it's wiser and more honest to praise meaningful virtuous action than to dismiss it out of hand as "PR."
I'd think about whether and how you disagree with that statement carefully, particularly re: how you think knee-jerk cynicism improves the world you live in. In my experience, blind cynicism is a shield for people who are terrified of being duped because they are, at heart, deeply insecure (and possibly also exhausted, justifiably, by glossy PR bullshit). For my part, I don't mind taking calculated risks when I see action I agree with. If I were never right, I'd stop pretty quickly. But I find I'm right more often than I'm wrong, and I'm willing to tolerate a few mistakes in the process.
> By 2025, we will shift to 100 percent supply of renewable energy, meaning that we will have power purchase agreements for green energy contracted for 100 percent of carbon emitting electricity consumed by all our data centers, buildings, and campuses.
> We will electrify our global campus operations vehicle fleet by 2030.
> We will pursue International Living Future Institute Zero Carbon certification and LEED Platinum certification for our Silicon Valley Campus and Puget Sound Campus Modernization projects.
They're going to sign some contracts, buy some electric vehicles, and outfit their buildings with LED lights and recycled toilet paper.
If they truly wanted to make an impact, they'd lobby the government for proper environmental regulations instead of pursuing these vane corporate projects.
I'm thinking the carbon footprint of Windows update's endless (seemingly needless?) grinding and rebooting alone ends up being more than they ever emitted manufacturing and building software.
This starts at heating rooms like crazy (because it is unmanaged), having unneccessary equipment, computers and lights running all night (because they are unmanaged) and goes up to transportation. It's so simple things like truck drivers who prefer to keep their diesel running during loading/unloading. I guess they do so because either they were told by incompetent managament, have the wrong belief that their batteries could not power the lights, or some other disbelief.
Saving energy starts in the small, also if started by something big. Having said that, I guess a company of the size of Microsoft will have a huge potential to save energy.
All that water evaporating for nothing in the desert, where every drop of water is (or should be) precious, just seemed like such a gigantic waste.
Wasteful of energy? Probably. But the water evaporating into the atmosphere is not really lost either. It's short circuiting one major step in the water cycle to become usable (by us surface dwellers) again.
The water in the fountains is closer to grey water (toilets, shower, etc) than drinking water.
* Connector buses idle all of the time while waiting for passengers
* Certain cafeterias have gas ovens running 24/7 even if nothing is being cooked
* Dev boxes with huge Xeon chips being left on all night
I wonder if there may also be a push to reduce some compute-intensive workloads, like training/scoring ML models or refreshing analytics dashboards that are not mission-critical and maybe not even actively being used.
Not to mention the nightly vacuuming of entire floors. A waste of energy and time, that also made it really hard to get work done without noise cancelling equipment.
Many or most of the installs have occupancy sensors for general lighting, or a time clock that shuts them off during non-business hours.
A 32w LED 2x4 is roughly equivalent to a 96w 3-lamp CFL 2x4, or 3x as efficient. You can power roughly 135-140 32w fixtures on a 277v 20A circuit [(277x20x.8)/32] which will illuminate ~11k sq ft. With 2 20A circuits, you can light up an entire office tower floor (floorplates are generally 18-23k sq ft). Assuming a ~10,000 watt load, and $0.08/kWH, it costs $0.80/hr to illuminate 20,000 square feet. It’s not as big of an energy waste these days, but it’s still a waste.
Well, one reason is that it might not turn on again. A lot of mechanical faults happen at startup (or shutdown).
In the US Air Force, C-5s are notorious for not turning back on again once you power them off. Hence, if you just landed in a remote area, you better keep those engines going, because if you power everything off to save energy you might be stranded until a repair crew can fly out.
There was a women in an unknown and unadvertised location on campus who controlled all the climate controls in every building on campus directly. A supremely powerful position, almost like being the wizard of Oz. However, due to everyone emailing her constantly complaining about it being boiling hot or freezing cold every day, she opted to go dark and not answer any emails. So now nothing gets done.
Do they have a plan to prevent employees from driving 20 miles each way every day? Their new campus renovation has tons of parking for cars. Any bike lanes? Bus stops?
A significant amount of employees take MSFT shuttles/busses from around the greater Redmond area, and I imagine part of their plan is going to include electrifying those vehicles:
> We will electrify our global campus operations vehicle fleet by 2030.
In addition, Sound Transit's East Link will literally have a stop on the MSFT campus, which will eventually help people from all over the area (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond eventually) get to work in a significantly more carbon-neutral way, especially given electricity produced in the area is relatively clean.
https://aqua.kingcounty.gov/gis/web/VMC/misc/KC_HwysCitiesHS...
The only unincorporated land in that area is Marymoor Park and Bridle Trails State Park.
The Link Light Rail will be opening a station next to the Microsoft campus in 2023, and Microsoft is paying to build a bike/pedestrian bridge over 520 at that location.
vendors and contractors are not allowed to use shuttles and connectors, that probably adds another 5,000 cars
i want to believe they want to right their wrongs, but their initial decision to be far away from any population area has contributed a lot of co2 over the last 30 years.
>Given common usage, companies have typically said they’re “carbon neutral” if they offset their emissions with payments either to avoid a reduction in emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere. But these are two very different things. For example, one way to avoid a reduction in emissions is to pay someone not to cut down the trees on the land they own. This is a good thing, but in effect it pays someone not to do something that would have a negative impact. It doesn’t lead to planting more trees that would have a positive impact by removing carbon. In contrast, “net zero” means that a company actually removes as much carbon as it emits. The reason the phrase is “net zero” and not just “zero” is because there are still carbon emissions, but these are equal to carbon removal. And “carbon negative” means that a company is removing more carbon than it emits each year. While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be “carbon neutral” since 2012, our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we’re far better served by humility than pride. And we believe this is true not only for ourselves, but for every business and organization on the planet.
>Like most carbon-neutral companies, Microsoft has achieved carbon neutrality primarily by investing in offsets that primarily avoid emissions instead of removing carbon that has already been emitted. That’s why we’re shifting our focus. In short, neutral is not enough to address the world’s needs.
>While it is imperative that we continue to avoid emissions, and these investments remain important, we see an acute need to begin removing carbon from the atmosphere, which we believe we can help catalyze through our investments.
> Solving our planet’s carbon issues will require technology that does not exist today. That’s why a significant part of our endeavor involves putting Microsoft’s balance sheet to work to stimulate and accelerate the development of carbon removal technology. Our new Climate Innovation Fund will commit to invest $1 billion over the next four years into new technologies and expand access to capital around the world to people working to solve this problem. We understand that this is just a fraction of the investment needed, but our hope is that it spurs more governments and companies to invest in new ways as well.
This is one of the most exciting and potentially impactfull announcements. My biggest issue with companies that make a big deal about being "carbon neutral" and "carbon offsets" is that many times it is "voodoo accounting" in which they pay money to another company which claims to have prevented some carbon emission in an unaccountable developing country. Basically, these carbon fees just are another form of indulgences in which rich people pay money to be able continue their sins while feeling good about themselves.
However, "carbon removal" is a game changer. Based on human nature, I do not believe we will be able to change behavior enough to save ourselves. I think our only hope of preserving our civilization is with carbon removal technology.
That is why I am so glad that Microsoft is specifically focusing on this. If other large companies did this, I think there is a good chance that we could innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.
Are you sure MS is going to enforce their "carbon-negative" approach all the way down into their supply chain? If there is no word from them on this, I can only consider it a PR move without any substance, orchestrated by some M7 MBAs, nothing else.
You buy garbage from Germany to recycle in Poland. You store it in some field temporarily, before the recycling. You set them on fire, getting rid of the problem. To avoid liability you blame the badly recycled trash e.g. candles. Now it's hard to do in Poland, since the regulations have changed, but I bet you could pull it off in Ukraine.
So, Microsoft emits as much carbon as the whole of Ireland? Or did I get it wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
(1 ton of carbon = 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide)
Just because I have not seen does not mean its not there. But the meat and potatoes are missing -- especially a company that is building massive data-centers around the world.
How come Microsoft or Bill Gates don't invest in better CO2 scrubber technology that might make that feasible? Or do they and I just haven't heard of it?
Then again, maybe such a thing could become a "weather weapon".
> How come Microsoft or Bill Gates don't invest in better CO2 scrubber technology that might make that feasible? Or do they and I just haven't heard of it?
Bill Gates is doing just that: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/04/carbon-e...
It says much less about Microsoft and much more about the political state of affairs that a company appears more forward-looking than most other institutions. It's quite sad really.