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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, at this stage, if it doesn't align directly with increasing the baseline on the short term, it's hard to see any sort of pledge from large companies as anything more than PR. Amazon backed out, but they could very well have done like the others and buy bullshit carbon offset credits - I guess the math on their tax deductions didn't work.

Assuming that we think within system, till incentives like punitive taxation are devised to force the hand of big corporations on that topic, nothing will change. But that won't happen because of lobbies and yaddi-yadda. And even if, I doubt if they wouldn't find ways around it.

So, yeah.

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I think microsoft is the only large hyperscaler that seems to take this as more than a shallow PR push. Their goal is carbon zero by 2030 - not net zero, but actually removing as much carbon from the atmosphere as they put in. They pay for actual carbon removal and help develop that tech in order to get there. And their targets are all three classes of emissions (ie including indirect emissions) which no other tech company even talks about. That's recognized within the carbon monitoring industry... I think they're on the CDP A list for carbon for the third year in a row now? (Amzn and goog have never been there)

On the other hand, I don't see people in tech making buying decisions based on this. Why does your company use AWS or GCP, and did the "nothing more than PR" state of their climate commitments even come up in that decision?

Complaining on the internet is fun, but changing buying habits is better.

Microsoft also bet for nuclear fusion. I wonder are both really work by 2030 or scam.

Alphabet is also on CDP A list for climate in 2022, and they have the similar commitment for zero carbon by 2030.

I don't see significant enough difference in climate response regarding between Azure and GCP.

If you look at my post history, you will see a lot of angry posts about Teams and other Microsoft products, but after reading this I'm probably going to take it easier on them.

Legitimately turned me around on them, thanks for sharing.

That is nice and great if true. However, what if I moved the goalpost just tiny bit to include all the emissions, that MS' ever more resource demanding OSes and the bad engineering and unwanted stuff inside them causes? That would include the emissions and environmental harm caused by not too technical people being forced to buy new computers every 3 years, because their old ones become unbearably slow by normal usage or become slow due to being tricked into upgrading to the next Windows version, which is more demanding on the hardware.

MS would probably be bankrupt soon, if they paid for repairing that damage to the environment.

I mean if the company market cap is skyrocketing and they're making money hand over fist, I think you can read any pledge as "we pledge to do this thing as long as the money continues to pour in at the current rate or better."

Whenever revenue starts contracting, all the old promises are basically empty words.

Same way if it gets cold, or food is missing from the supermarket everyone will temporarily stop caring about the environment. Priorities are there for a reason.

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