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Comment by jknoepfler | Hacker News Reader

Alright, I'll drink the Kool-Aid. I think this is an excellent strategic investment for Microsoft that also aligns with timely ethical priorities. I didn't read the post and think "this is corporate glossy bullshit," I read it and thought "this is an actual strategic initiative that is driving broad organizational alignment, which has measurable success criteria, and which makes sense."

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?

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Should I be satisfied if you're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? I'm always unsure about this. If a politician is making all the right noises, but clearly doesn't care about the topic, should I be satisfied? I really don't know. That's how I feel about this, it's clearly a PR move, but I think I'm happy about that?

> Should I be satisfied if you're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons?

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!

I just want to mention that apple has been 100% renewable for a while now, and publish a detailed environmental report; https://www.apple.com/au/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental...

Yeah but they rely heavily on Chinese companies that are not 100% renewable. That's like someone saying they have never murdered anyone while routinely paying for hit men to get their hands dirty. Technically correct, but misleading.

I'm not sure what you're arguing, that nobody's perfect? Microsoft is aiming here to be carbon neutral in 2030. In ten years.

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.

In the article, Microsoft says they are carbon neutral today. They make a distinction between being carbon neutral—offsetting all their emissions—and being “net zero”. The latter is harder because it requires actually removing carbon from the atmosphere, not just paying someone else not to emit carbon.

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.

My concern with promoting that situation is the game theory of it. You hold people who are not aligned with what you're actually supporting in esteem as though they were. Being aligned on one issue due to convenience is different than being aligned on an issue based off fundamental views. I can't predict how you will act in future circumstances based off how you're acting now.

Worry about what people do rather than their internal state is the only way to be satisfied about anything. Even if I tell you my reasons for making this post, how do you know if that's the truth? (Also, how would I know that's the truth?)

Why is it clear that PR is the primary reason for doing it? A majority of Americans believe in climate change. What makes it hard to believe that an educated collection of people who make decisions at a large technology company sincerely care about doing something good about it?

"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.

I guess that's fair. Generally when a company acts, you can identify an upside for them. If you can't find any upside, then it may be a less obvious upside, PR being the most general category.

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...

>What makes it hard to believe that an educated collection of people who make decisions at a large technology company sincerely care about doing something good about it?

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.

> I have incredibly cynical views on corporations due to their strong incentives to put the bottom line before everything else.

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."

It's the nature of democratic politics. Given a broad enough group of people, you will never fully agree with your allies let alone everyone, so you may never fully agree with your allies' reasons for agreeing with you. However, in order to move the needle at all you will often have to accept "close enough."

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.

Of course we should take what people and organizations say with skepticism adequate for their record and scaled by impact. Microsoft had the reputation of "malicious monopolizer" in the 90s and had to change a lot of things to stay on top of their game. In the past years Microsoft has been rated as one of the more ethical companies out there by some organizations who monitor this sort of thing, so the carbon negative move just seems consistent.(took some willpower to not add current US leaders as counterexamples)

https://cloudscene.com/news/2017/03/ethisphere/ https://www.worldsmostethicalcompanies.com/honorees/

Reality isn't black or white. Clearly the PR impact was taken into account but Microsoft is made of people, and many of those people truly care about this issue.

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.

Well for politicians, you should definitely be satisfied.

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.

It's essentially impossible to make Microsoft go in this direction for the right reasons the way the incentives and laws around corporations are setup so the pragmatist in me says YES unless you're willing to resort to revolutionary measures.

My feeling is that we should treat the action is good, but always keep in mind that an entities motivations are the best predictors of its future actions.

So, congrats to Microsoft on their current environmental efforts! We'll be watching you very closely.

Should I be satisfied if you're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? I'm always unsure about this.

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

They are based in the pacific northwest. Electrical is mostly hydro. I wonder if they take into account the carbon footprint of that?

Azure datacenters are worldwide.

Sorry. they talk about making up for the entire carbon footprint of their existence, most of which is solely in the pacific north west.

Microsoft has over a 100 massive data centers throughout the world. The carbon footprint of their head quarter is just a small fractions of the massive amount of energy needed to power the millions of machines Microsoft deployed across the globe.

I imagine business travel is a fair chunk of a company's carbon footprint? That's unrelated to them being in the PNW.

okay. How's that have anything to do with what I'm commenting on?

> They are based in the pacific northwest. Electrical is mostly hydro.

I wonder if they take into account the carbon related to them using their customer's computers to distribute patches and send "telemetry" back to microsoft?

> I guess they've hacked my demographic?

Your demographic doesn't understand corporate propaganda.

If the actions are actually taken, I don't care if they were taken for propaganda purposes.

Quite the opposite... I grew up in the 80's thinking everyone was a brainless moron and all corporations were intrinsically evil. Corporate messaging was unbelievably, brazenly disingenuous, and political speech was worse (!) than it is today.

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.

It's a fancy blog post designed to hide the somewhat milquetoast announcement:

> 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.

The biggest way Microsoft realistically could make an environmental impact is having its products run more efficiently. Not attempting to regulate the world through lobbyists which in the first place is practically impossible politically without its shareholders crying foul.

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