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Comment by ohthehugemanate | Hacker News Reader

There's a really good explanation of different loopholes in calculating carbon emissions in the Microsoft carbon target announcement from last year[1].

Eg do you count secondary services your employees use, like food services or emissions from their commute? Do you count partner services, like shipping providers for physical product? These, along with your direct emissions, are categorized into three "scopes" of emissions. Do you include purchased offsets against emissions, and at what rate? This is what most companies (including MS, since 2012) use to be "carbon neutral". Companies are selective about which scopes they include, and they pay for the total in offsets.

The point of the blog lost is to be clear (and holier-than-thou) about MS's announced goal: to remove more carbon than they produce in all three scopes each year by 2030 ("net negative"), and to remove all the carbon Microsoft has ever produced in all three scopes from the atmosphere by 2050. Actual carbon removal, not offsets.

I have not read this article so I have no idea what google is or isn't claiming here. But I learned a lot from the MS blog post so I thought I'd share.

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...

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> do you count secondary services your employees use

I find this question to be a classic ridiculous slippery slope. For example: Do you count the foot print of the plane that takes employees on vacation bought using the company's salary? Or the foot print of the extra child they decided to bear thanks to the finical stability the company offers?

I feel these type of claims should not be taken literally but rather as "We made a substantial dent in our footprint".

It does not need to be a slippery slope though.

I would expect companies to count plane emissions when their employees go on business trips, but not on holidays.

I would also expect companies to count emissions produced by their employees when they work remotely, which should be a part of the total emissions of their home.

Sure, they may not be able to get an exact number, and it will be lots of estimates, but it does not mean that we should accept some approximate statement such as "We're trying our best"

If they didn't receive those high salaries they wouldn't be able to take those personal trips. The more employees the higher the multiplier. So what are we exactly offsetting.

But it makes no sense to attribute the personal decision of the employee into the carbon footprint. Because paying a high salary does not require that the person take airplane vacations. Some don't. And for those that do, they would have the option to pay to reverse or offset those emissions.

Should the company also reduce their carbon footprint calculations since paying employees more will make then more likely to own a tesla or other electric?

On average though, a reasonable very rough assumption is 0.5 kg CO2 / dollar (from what I read). You could make a complex model, but simply saying money = consumption = CO2 is a straightforward starting point.

A given employee might or might not fly or whatever. But statistically, the average is going to be pretty predictable, and it's not intellectually honest to pretend that because one doesn't know individual behavior, the average could be anything.

Microsoft is using the standard way to reckon GHG emissions in climate science, and accepting an order of magnitude more emissions into the calculation. The EPA has an OK explanation of the system:

https://www.epa.gov/greeningepa/greenhouse-gases-epa

Though I think the MS article is easier to understand. If you think this is not a reasonable or accurate way to measure emissions, there are some great peer reviewed journals you could write to.

Companies can't control their employees and you shouldn't be expecting them too. This is part of the problem. We are finally making headway yet people still complain and find ways to degrade. Just be happy that they kind of care and are trying to better our environment. Maybe instead of roasting them you could use your time wisely and suggest even more ways to reduce carbon foot prints.

Where to draw the line is a legitimate question and without it the claim that any real headway is being made is dubious. Some companies offer bussing services in the Bay for their employees so they don’t have to drive as far. If they remove those busses and their employees have to drive in is the company that much closer to carbon neutral even though now all their employees have to drive in and more carbon is in the atmosphere as a result?

Even with all those caveats, its still an impressive milestone and a step in the right direction.

I'm partially curious and partially skeptical. Is this "a step in the right direction" in the same way as recycling? (i.e. people thinking 100% of recyclables actually get recycled vs the reality being a lot of it end up in landfills or worse, and the parallel overproduction of plastics turned into a worldwide ecological disaster)

Maybe its a step in the rigt direction the way aluminium recycling is (i.e. actually useful)

I don't understand how we are comparing Energy generation with specifics about how it is generated and Plastic Recycling...what's that have to do with Energy production?

Totally separate things.

GP already provided some "devil-in-the-details" line items to poke holes at carbon offsets (e.g. are all types of emissions being considered correctly)

The parallel that I'm drawing is that recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems, but what ended up happening is that people's impression of recycling and their actual implementations turned out to be woefully out of sync. One can argue that the long term damage of this discrepancy is that people will mindlessly buy plastic bottles of coke, ultimately contributing to the microplastics problem because they've been largely trained to think that recycling plastics works (instead of a hypothetical alternative reality where people might instead bring reusable containers to stores to buy things).

> recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems

On the contrary that's not how i remember it - everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst out of reduce, reuse, recycle.

However people want to clear their concious for free, so they chose recycling above all else.

> everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst

Curious to hear some of these examples.

If you look at Japan, for example, they obsessively went all in on recycling. Look at how many different types of recyclables they have, the new electronics craze, the apartment complex obasans that would bring your unsorted garbage back to your unit door as a form of passive-aggressive social peer pressure, etc.

I distinctly remember being taught about recycling in school, and reading about it in children's books, but reduce and reuse were at best afterthoughts, if mentioned at all.

Governments spend a considerable amount on recycling education (e.g. pamphlets about what can and cannot go in a recycling bin), but the taxation incentives I'm aware of don't really paint a super convincing reduce/reuse-oriented strategy.

I think it is that Google says its carbon footprint is "zero", just like folks who maybe recycle 100% of everything they buy from the store, but in reality much of that isn't actually recyclable even if it has the logo on it. Thus this statement should likely be taken with a grain of salt.

I figure it's more money ("demand") going towards carbon offsets, which should mean increasing development in offsetting ("supply"). Whether that's R&D on carbon capture, greater economic viability for carbon free energy, or greater incentives for halting deforestation, it should all be a net good in a march towards drawing down carbon emissions.

One of the problems with the offset approach is it's not that repeatable. Only a certain number of companies can buy carbon offsets before there aren't really any more offsets to buy, and we have to start actually reducing the carbon to begin with.

Separately, one of the things that gets to me with companies like Google claiming a zero carbon footprint is that if you look at its corporate headquarters, it's mostly parking lot, and some building. The first time I visited Google's HQ, my first impression was just all the parked cars and no way to get to the HQ without Uber/Lyft. Same with Facebook. That picture alone seems wrong to me from an environmental standpoint. Why isn't there a train station there with electric trains instead of a parking lot?

(Google's Boston (Cambridge) office, on the other hand, is right across from a subway station which totally feels right.)

In which case the price of offsets spike, and actually reducing emissions become a more attractive option.

It aint perfect, but still seems to be in the right direction towards getting to where we need to go.

If history is any indication, I feel that what will happen instead is that someone else will start to sell "carbon offsets" for cheaper that secretly aren't quite following the spirit of carbon offset in some obscure overlooked sense. Then when the cat is out of the bag many years down the road, the big corps get to shrug and say "hey I did my part buying them" in some corporate speak that makes them sound good, and the rest of the public gets to feel smugly superior by tweeting at each other that Chinese carbon offset sellers or whoever aren't being ethical. Meanwhile the world continues to burn down, rinse and repeat until food/resource wars start.

And then you have laws and regulations for what is a valid offset.

Its not like this is a new problem - regulation of markets for fake goods has been a thing for a long time.

Don't they basically have a massive fleet of buses that cart in all the kids to work who cannot afford to live within 10 miles of the place? Are those buses natural gas?

But are the buses more efficient than 30 people driving separately?

With any reasonable passenger load, yes. It's fair for people to take that for granted and the burden of proof should be on someone trying to argue the opposite, that cars would be greener in this case.

Oh, sure, they exist, but why are there still parking lots almost full of cars?

And also, 10 miles is a really long distance. Most people consider anything more than 1 mile un-walkable for a commute, so what about all the people between 1 to 10 miles?

And what about visitors, contractors, interviewees, partner company employees, and everyone else who can't take the bus? Why aren't the buses a part of the local transit agency, and why does the local transit agency not even bother running frequent route anywhere near Google, Apple, Facebook, et al.? Why aren't there air-conditioned express Wi-Fi VTA buses, or better yet, fast (>80mph) electric trains, plying up and down 101 and 280 serving all the tech companies in one go, stopping at each HQ, considering they are almost all right next to either highway? That would be a low-carbon world.

Also, one of the inherent problems with employee shuttles instead is that they compete with public transit, and also reduce the flexibility for employees to go to other places after work. I've known many employees regularly go to FLAG companies via the shuttle but drive to work on days they have dinner appointments with friends. To a great degree this also propagates the cycle where public transit becomes progressively worse in coverage and maintainence, and progressively more for low-income individuals only.

Compare to many other public-transit-first countries which have trains/buses that are actually fast, clean, nice, comfortable, and not worse than taking a company shuttle + you have the flexibility to go whenever you want, as well as wherever you want after work.

> Why aren't there air-conditioned express Wi-Fi VTA buses, or better yet, ultra-fast electric trains, plying up and down 101 and 280 serving all the tech companies in one go, stopping at each HQ, considering they are almost all right next to either highway? That would be a low-carbon world.

You are describing something close to the original vision behind BART [1] that was proposed in 1956, but bear in mind that a significant number of people - predominately in the wealthy suburbs - opposed such a vision for a variety of reasons, and many of those same voices hold sway today.

> Why aren't there air-conditioned express Wi-Fi VTA buses, or better yet, ultra-fast electric trains, plying up and down 101 and 280

Rather than 280, they should serve 880, which goes to more affordable housing in the East Bay.

1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/This-is-what-BART-...

Last time I was in mountain view they were maybe 40-50% full, even by the 'main' campus - also they have a ton of free bikes to ride around, very rarely did I see Uber or Lyft (your point is well taken)

FAANG could easily pay for this and it would be approved almost without push back, but will they? And like in Demolition Man, there is a Taco Bell at every stop. Only Taco Bell.

Sure, but once you reach "zero" what's the incentive to improve now?

Offsets are better than nothing, but they're not sustainable. Low-hanging fruit will be used up at some point, and actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere is really expensive (most optimistic figure I've seen anywhere estimates $50/ton for the mid-to-long term). So the incentive is to push for actually zero emissions instead of net zero.

And as sibling comment mentions, climate change is bad for business too, so that's the incentive for net-negative.

Is $50/ton really so expensive? At that price you could sequester average household emissions for $375/yr.

Can't help but note, flood or wildfire insurance (for people in risk areas) has climbed in cost a lot more than $375/yr.

$375/household/yr sounds downright cheap to me, if it gets us out of this hurricane/wildfire/drought/flood cycle.

I get that, but they haven't actually arrived at zero. They've arrived at their version of zero, and thus have incentive to get to actual zero, since they're already at "zero".

Maintaining "net zero" takes a lot of work/money. It's not something you can do once. Every time you put carbon into the atmosphere, you have to go buy an offset. Over time those offsets get more expensive.

Wouldn't they be cheaper as businesses invest to use less carbon over time.

Like I said, low hanging fruit goes first. Later efficiency gains will be more expensive.

If all their current customers die due to global warming their profit will be lower, regardless of who created the carbon footprint.

You can sell the negative carbon as offsets to others. Lots of products are greened up by just buying offsets instead of really doing something, so there is lots of money in it.

Buying copious amounts of offsets is probably how Google gets to claim it’s carbon neutral in the first place.

Assuming they actually reached zero, who cares? I mean I'd love google to work on carbon removal efforts for the world at whole, but, capitalism.

Well presumably customers care. Azure positions itself in some markets as the ethical choice - large parts open source, actually net zero carbon, AI ethics board and terms that rejects dicey cases, etc etc. Argue against the usefulness or real impact of these moves all you want, the point is that they show the image MS is trying to build.

But speaking a bit more broadly, you'd get a good idea from the Wikipedia page on corporate ethics. It's a whole field of study.

they haven't, that's the point, and why I had the zero in quotes.

Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity —- think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)

I actually agree wholly - I think we should pass regulation. But I don't understand why we don't regulate zero carbon and that's that. Beyond that, presumably it'd be the government's responsibility to purge remaining excess carbon from the atmosphere.

> Capitalism does not mean we can’t have legislation to protect humanity

Mostly, it does.

> think of the clean air act and a host of others (e.g. OSHA)

Those laws are at odds with capitalism, because they limit the control of private capital owners over the application of that capital in favor of social direction or limitation by the State on others’ interest.

Now, you can support that as necessary for the good of society or oppose it as an infringement on the liberty of owners, but in either case you shouldn't mistake it for capitalism.

This is correct and shouldn't be downvoted. You can like capitalism while acknowledging its faults.

Its a very missing the forest for the trees definition.

Like how my computer is technically a regular expression because the universe is finite so it can be simulated by a large enough finite state machine.

The post is presuming that limitations can not be placed on capitalism. As it is verbally used, capitalism is compatible with regulation. For example, slavery and child prostitution are illegal in essentially every capitalist economy.

I think I am conflating capitalism and free markets.

> do you count secondary services your employees use

No, you don't. If you pull the food service thread, you can go through the food wholesalers to farmers, then to John Deere, then to steel plants, then to miners, then to hard hats and eventually you'll end up in China where the game will be declared lost.

It is commonly done. I work for John deere and we have a team dedicated to making sure that our products don't use conflict minerals, which if I understand correctly means mined with slave labor. I know for a fact that we have all of our suppliers traced 6 levels deep just to ensure that the whole chain is okay. We can put whatever want on the list, though we sometimes run into problems because we are too small to get any chip maker to care. (electronics are about the only thing that we are small players in, our list is in general common with the likes of GM so there is a lot of pressure potential suppliers for must stuff)

That's not what conflict minerals means. That term means what it says: that the minerals come from a (civil) war zone where people are killing each other over the right to extract them. That extraction may well also include slavery in some places, but it's not exactly the same thing.

While this is not exactly the same, the idea is very similar. I was very surprised to find out the corporations drill multiple levels down through the layers of contractors to promote ethical stuff. That's impressive.

The credit must be given when it's due.

Those multiple levels have proved very powerful. When the big earthquakes hit Japan industry all over the world was quickly able to figure out parts of the supply chain was most critical, vs what could be sourced elsewhere. (as I recall all the pure silicon for chips is made in Japan, so those factories were given all the electricity needed, while other factories that had competition elsewhere had to wait to get the limited power left). Companies that had their suppliers traced out that far were able to work stay in production much longer than those that didn't find out until months latter when things got through all the levels.

If you want to be realistic about your actual effect on the environment that's literally what you have to do.

This is not some abstract game to be won. This making real changes in the real world.

And no: when the stakes are this high, it being extremely difficult is no reason to just assume it's impossible.

I Am Not A Climate Scientist. If you take issue with the 3 scopes model of greenhouse gas emissions, go argue with the EPA. Here's their explainer on it:

https://www.epa.gov/greeningepa/greenhouse-gases-epa

There are many more academic sources just a duckduckgo search away. (Or Bing, I guess) personally I find the MS blog explanation really clear, but obviously the EPA or a peer reviewed climate science journal are more reliable sources.

> emissions from their commute

Isn't stuff like this kind of out of their hand unless the state itself tries to fix this.

Not really, for a couple reasons:

1) They have enough money to start initiatives, even geographically dispersed initiatives, independent from the state

2) They have a history of working hand-in-glove with the city of Seattle and the state of Washington; it can be hard to distinguish "What Microsoft is trying to do" from "What Washington state is trying to do" sometimes.

Companies can help a lot by locating their offices in places that enable less carbon intensive commuting, lobbying local government, supporting initiatives that promote density, and supporting local transit initiatives (example: [0]). When businesses speak up and say, local business needs workers to be able to commute without a car, our competitiveness will suffer without it and we will fall behind, that speaks to a large number of voters who don't respond to environmental appeals.

[0] https://www.kxan.com/news/downtown-austin-business-leaders-s...

Most corporate campuses are located such that public transportation cannot serve it well. They tend to be isolated islands surrounded by parking lots and grass land, with no through street that transit could take that would get from on place to another. Thus the only transit ends at their building, this is okay for a zoo or shopping mall where people come and go all day, but offices tend to be everyone arriving at the same time and then no riders, so to make it worth while to serve you all day you have to be on the way to someplace worth serving. If you are not on the way then people with a choice will prefer to drive just for the one time that the kid gets sick and they have to leave early. (note places where traffic is a problem are also places that are on the way to elsewhere)

Yep. Carbon initiatives like the Microsoft one will force them to rethink the wisdom of building corporate campuses.

> people with a choice will prefer to drive just for the one time that the kid gets sick and they have to leave early

This used to be a major (underestimated, in my opinion) issue, and I used to bring it up all the time as something that needed to be addressed before people who were accustomed to driving would voluntarily leave their cars at home, but I think Uber and Lyft solve it, full stop.

Uber and Lyft are not a good solution. I could every trip on them as worth a weeks worth of driving alone since you don't know where those drivers are driving (or sitting stopped waiting for a call) when you call them. If everyone is normally using transit they are okay - but then there should be all day service to the campus so you don't need them. (I will agree if you say I'm over counting their environmental costs - I do that to make a point that is often ignored)

Or allowing work from home.

Work from home is useful, but there are real advantages to face to face conversation.

On the other hand, if people work from home then more people will focus on improving the "work-from-home experience" and making the business more suited for working from home.

>>supporting initiatives that promote density

This is not going to help you with "speaks to a large number of voters who don't respond to environmental appeals"

There is a MASSIVE over lab in people that do don't respond to (government regulation based) environmental appeals AND have no desire to live in densely populated cities.

Speaking as one of those people, the idea of living in an area of high population density is a non-starter for me, my current area is about 2,000 people per square mile that that is FAR FAR too dense for me. living in Seattle or LA with a Population density of 4x time is something nightmares are made of, and NYC at about 13x that is just a total night terror....

When people who don't like big cities are voting on transit and density initiative, it's because they live in or on the fringes of a big city. Most likely they are there because the money to be made is more important to them than their dislike of cities. Ergo, when business leaders say transit and density are needed for further economic growth, that message appeals to a strongly held value.

That's fine, you keep doing you. Just done stop other people from living the way they want to.

There is one group politically that wants to prevent people from living they way they want, and it is not Rural people

Not sure what "rural" has to do with this, because nearly all land in the US is rural and it's super easy to find any sort of rural life one wants, in addition to it being super cheap.

However, there is a massive undersupply of dense living in the US, because it has been legislated out of existence, not because people don't want it.

And I would point out that many "rural" towns have fantastic dense living in their core, that allow people to walk for daily errands, etc.

The real enemy of density is not rural vs. urban, because these do not tough each other at all. The people who prevent density are the suburban enclaves that, through heavy and excessive regulation, prevent people from building anything except for single family residential sprawl for miles upon miles, necessitating a car for something as simple as getting a pint of cream.

Which is the way that many people want to live, which is great for them, and they should be allowed to do that! But we need to stop letting them say to others: "I don't want to live in density, so you shouldn't have the very option of it because the mere existence threatens me."

I've been fighting for smart density in my town for quite a while, and no rural person would ever oppose this, because they are not in town! And I think they realize that the more people in town, the fewer crowding into their rural life.

Why would an employees commute be out of the hands of the employer? Companies already provide incentives to help employees with commutes: public transit benefits, wfh days, shuttle services.

It seems especially obvious at the moment that companies could simply eliminate tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of commutes instantly by letting the vast majority of their employees wfh permanently (or much more frequently at least).

Additionally it'd probably be pretty easy to brainstorm a dozen more less common ideas/incentives companies could start trialing: pay people to take public transit instead of just subsidizing partial costs, have more satellite offices or pay for wework type space, a welcome packet that includes an option for a bicycle and fitness trainer, additional shuttle services, long term plans such as working with the government to invest in bicycle/public transit infrastructure, etc etc

Because I can just not use those services and take my car to work? Like large employers can dangle some pretty substantive carrots but I don't think courts would let them get away with any sticks.

>Like large employers can dangle some pretty substantive carrots but I don't think courts would let them get away with any sticks.

The courts already let them get away with it. There's nothing illegal about discriminating against people based on their commutes. The employer can do anything they want, up to and including termination (or refusal to hire someone in the first place).

Commute discrimination already happens, here's one article detailing research on the topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/inner-cit...

Here's another article about it: https://www.boston.com/news/jobs/2018/03/26/no-offer-because...

No, they choose their location, and some tech companies provide transportation. Facebook is even building their own employee housing.

Look at the Apple spaceship. It will require tons of employee driving.

Companies do provide credits towards cycling and FB does this for even tube in London, but that will be still limited based on location. Though you are right about the location bit, they should force the hand of the state by speaking with their foot, I guess fear of losing talent opportunity scares them.

> Facebook even builds their own employee housing.

I wasn't aware about this, where are they building these?

Menlo Park, and apparently Google’s up to something similar in San Jose: https://levels.io/facebook-city/

Meh, if the tech workers lived in the city it would just be "gentrification". There's no winning.

Isn't this the definitive cultural bubble? Jesus.

The FAANG companies are so rich and so big that they’re now providing some of the commuting infrastructure for their employees in the form of buses. They certainly have quite a lot more control over their employees commuting impact than most companies, even if it isn’t total control.

Well, the model is not designed as a target for companies. It's designed as a way to categorize indirect emissions. It's 100% Microsoft's decision to take the broadest possible definition of their carbon footprint to target.

Where a public transit alternative exists, employers can often create strong incentives by limiting or charging for parking and/or subsidizing public transit.

Google could provide electric vehicles from zero-carbon-emission sources, if they wanted to.

No such vehicle exists. All vehicles require carbon-intensive processes in their manufacturing.

That's pretty much everything. I feel like that's a cop-out. Just as you can't be neutral on a moving train, you can't manufacture anything that isn't carbon neutral. Something somewhere is going to do something bad to the environment. Where's the goal post and how fast is it moving?

Isn't that better than petrol or diesel cars?

The short answer is yes, the long answer is "it depends on your local electricity generation but probably still yes." There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.

'There are some places in the world where gas wins out because they burn coal to produce electricity but it's rare.'

This statement always throws me - did we just make a complete context-switch from talking about car emissions to talking about gas turbines? Or is "gas" being used to refer to petrol ("gasoline")? The subject of the previous post was clearly cars, but that sentence is talking about gas and coal, better re-read the entire statement several times to double-check the context!

I don't want to be rude and shit on peoples' language, but FFS I hate the shortening slang-version of "gasoline" so much. THAT WORD IS TAKEN, IT MEANS VAPOUR.

It might be a US-ism? I've never heard anyone in casual conversion call it gasoline or petrol. You would get weird looks if you called it gasoline.

"You fill up your gas tank at the gas station and get a gas can just in case you get low on gas before you can hit the next station to gas up."

Not hard to see how it's confusing - you call it gas but it's not a gas, it's a liquid.

But it’s just a case of a word with two meanings that depends on context. That’s like the least weird thing that happens in English.

“You call returned soldiers vets, but they don’t work with animals.”

I always found the acronym LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) funny for similar reasons.

The definition of the difference between gas and vapour is that a gas cannot be liquefied by pressure (so water vapour heated over ~374°C becomes a gas)

Reminds me of “I, Pencil”. Here’s Milton Friedman’s 2 minute video about it:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

The sheer number of vendors google has makes it nearly impossible to be 100% carbon neutral.

If microsoft can do it, why not google? They have a vendor qualification process that includes a carbon assessment. Internal POs to the given vendor incur an extra "tax" based on the cost to remove (or offset, in Google's case) the calculated amount of carbon.

Large vendors already offer the estimated carbon emissions of an order, and they certainly do when Microsoft or Google ask them to.

Aside: the moral high bar MS sets here is being "net zero", which is quite different than carbon neutral.

> If microsoft can do it, why not google?

If you watch the two minute video or read the 5-page essay “I, Pencil”, you will see why.

The vendors’ vendors’ vendor is not in the loop. They will not know that the raw materials they are mining in a 3rd world nation are being consumed ultimately by google.

> to remove all the carbon Microsoft has ever produced

Does this include all carbon produced by all devices that have run MS OSes? All servers, computers, mobile devices, gaming platforms, etc.?

I Am Not A Climate Scientist, but here's the EPA's page explaining the three scopes model of emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/greeningepa/greenhouse-gases-epa

(IMO the MS post does a better explanation but this is obviously a more reliable source)

I doubt anyone counts indirect use of a general purpose tool, but hey read the link and you tell us.

How would one even begin to track that?

I assume MS has records of how many licenses they've sold (not much they can do about pirated software). They could come up with an estimate of how long a particular OS was probably used on average and calculate how man licenses were sold times how long they were used and then convert that amount of energy use into carbon credits. It's not perfect, but probably good enough.

Sorry, buts carbon offsets are utter BS. Google has a 500,000 square foot office in Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles gets 20% of its electricity from a coal plant in Utah. Power is fungible, you cannot select the source for your power if on the city's grid. Therefore, Google's electricity comes from burning coal.

Seriously, you cannot just cut a deal with the building next door and say, I'll give you a bunch of cash if you claim you're using the coal power so I can claim I am using the solar power. And then pretend to be carbon free.

> carbon offsets are utter BS

You seem to be mixing green energy and carbon offsets.

I'm not convinced that offsets are complete BS, even though a lot of bullshitting and optimistic metrics are likely involved.

"Additionality" and accurate measurement are usually the big questions. I'm pretty sure many "offsets" are just getting extra money from credit-selling for measures that would be taken anyways because they make economic sense, but in theory, additionality (e.g. by pushing something that wouldn't make economic sense into economic feasibility through the added reward from selling credit) is a requirement for offsets (or at least "high-quality" offsets).

Let's say you go to a third world country where people are cooking with wood on open fireplaces, and start handing out stoves that need 1/3rd of the fuel. (This is actually a real offsetting effort). You've not only improved the lives of those people, but you've also reduced the amount of wood that will be burned (and potentially forest that will be cut for it), which creates a calculable impact.

At least that's the theory. The carbon savings from all of these projects are estimated, and of course everyone involved is incentivized to make the project look successful by overestimating. For example, the cookstove projects' effects are disputed: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/08/10/are-carbon-mark...

Seems like its BS, but lets boil it down to a simple unit example:

Company g pulls 1 unit of electricity from a coal power plant that produces just that 1 unit of electricity. By buying carbon offsets, g indirectly funds a power developer to replace the coal plant with a solar plant.

In this example, offsets produce the same net reduction as building their own solar power plant. As long as you purchase offsets from reputable organizations that require the deployment of proceeds to directly offset carbon that would not otherwise have occurred, then it works.

Power may be fungible, but purchase agreements are less so. Someone has to contract with that coal plant. If nobody is buying from them they have to close. And if there's a lot of companies that want to give themselves a grain paint then there'll also be more demand for renewables than supply and more will have to be built. That is of course entirely dependent on the accounting being done correctly.

Right, that's what microsoft (nicely) says in the blog post, too. Read it! I promise it's interesting.

That's even their reasoning for targeting "net zero" instead. They are actually paying to have carbon removed from the atmosphere, and funding companies who are trying to make that cheaper.

> I have not read this article

Technically, this is also a small contribution towards reducing the carbon footprint.

Right. Just considering how Chrome uses energy on my Mac, I think they might have further to go before they are truly mitigating their own impact and reaching carbon neutral.

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