Apple endorses bill that forces companies to disclose their carbon footprint | Hacker News Reader

Apple endorses bill that forces companies to disclose their carbon footprint

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33 pointsstalfosknight27 comments

I've never understood how "carbon footprint" can reasonably be assessed. What gets counted? The fuel used to power the diggers that mine the materials to make an iPhone? The salaries paid to employees to take vacations to Fiji?

It will be assessed how it is defined by the legislation. This isn't a "gotcha" or whatever. Nearly every single measured value in human existence depends on agreed upon standards.

You misunderstood the question. It wasn't "how can anyone possibly figure out what is supposed to be measured" but rather more like "what if we measure the wrong thing".

OP's question stipulated "reasonably".

And congress has the power to define weight and measures =)

Sure, but not specifically for the sake of enabling the count of a carbon footprint. There's tinfoil hats, and then there's paper hats with big crayons.

But isn't this clause how we got NIST? Who, among other things, regulates time itself?

Employee commute method & distance would be an interesting datapoint to factor in.

Apple is a very profitable company, with the largest market cap in the U.S. Its cost of computing a carbon footprint as a fraction of its revenues is probably much lower than for most other companies. It is common for companies and professional groups to endorse legislation that will hamper competitors.

part of that cost likely comes from the information being hard to obtain, but if EVERY company was required to publish that information it'd be much easier for any other company to do it too, no?

for example, right now a given company has no idea how much carbon their electricity/building/deliveries/whatever cost, so they'd have to figure that out themselves... but if everyone knew that from the ground up, that'd be a lot easier for any other company to produce.

there could also be network effects if those reports had to be public, because common vendors' data could be re-used. e.g. UPS knows that their carbon costs for delivering packages are X KG of carbon per KgKm of package-travel, or something, so then everyone can use that factor in their own maths.

It'd be incredible effort still, but I see the value. So much "climate damage" now is just classed as economic externalities simply because we don't have a good way to quantify it reliably. Requiring companies to know and disclose that would go a long way to addressing that, and enabling strategic policy response.

Sure. It is still unambiguously a good thing in principle.

There will probably be attempts at watering down the proposal or leave loopholes for greenwashing. But the simple fact that these things get discussed and that major companies move to the right direction is a form of progress in itself.

They don't want to hamper competitors... it's right there in the letter: Apple has invested considerably in measuring and modeling to get a reasonably correct value.

The part that they didn't put in the letter:

Now they want to make a law to sell that methodology and model. iFootprint will presumably be announced at the wwdc just before the law takes effect.

It's not just that it is a small percentage of their market cap. You're completely leaving out all of the effort and resources they commit to being environmentally responsible¹.

1. https://www.apple.com/environment/

That’s just corporate greenwashing BS. Apple should put their money making hardware: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch on a 3 year product release cycle (since barely anything changes year to year). They should make their products repairable. They should not be asking employees to RTO. Once they do those then I’ll believe the corporate marketing slideshow.

Angry cynicism doesn’t refute any of my points which I have backed up with a citation.

We can't really make use of this citation because it's marketing, not objective scientific data. This page was done by a marketing team who want to sell you a nice story and a nice picture, not by scientists who are seeking some kind of truth.

This web page that says Apple is environmentally friendly weighs more than 20 MB.

edit: I just read it, there isn't anything about screen, battery and chipset / CPU production and material sourcing. In short, the big part of what is an actual issue with computer hardware and the environment.

It's a legal document containing the public written statements of a publicly owned corporation including a PDF report with actual data and figures. If you're so sure it's a bunch of "marketing" lies then sue them for false advertising and get that easy win.

I didn't say they are lying. But it's very easy to cherry pick and arrange the looks of things. The kind of stuff you avoid when you are actually seeking truth.

Look, I'm not going to convince you at this point. You are also absolutely not going to convince me that this page should be trusted.

Let me just suggest you that if you are going to take marketing material at face value, be my guest, but I suspect you are in for some fun rides.

And good luck convincing people with (arguments coming from) marketing material too. I suspect this won't work with many people seeking more robust stuff.

See my other comment on actual elements that show that Apple is not that geared toward being environmentally friendly. These elements need to be addressed before I start changing my mind on this.

They could start by not forcing shops and recycler to shred perfectly good hardware [1-5].

They could continue by not making you want to buy shiny new devices each year, growing crazy hype for their annual event, and instead they could base their communication on the idea that you should avoid buying unnecessary stuff, and keep your hardware as long as possible.

Then, they could let us install third party OSes on perfectly good hardware they decided to stop supporting. Or at least let us install an up to date (third party) browser on this hardware. Yes, the iPad 2 is stuck in 2015 for instance. I'd very much like to be able to install some lightweight linux distro on the one I got which was left unused in a drawer so it can be useful again and do something else than displaying PDFs.

Then, they could stop gluing all the things together and not force you to change the whole motherboard if one key from their fragile keyboard died, and make their hardware at least somewhat repairable. They could stop handing you out a new device when something minor broke on yours.

So far from environmentally-friendly. It's like they haven't even begun trying, actually. It's almost as if it were against their bottom line. They wish it weren't like this not too hard. It's not like they are lacking the money, they are the richest company in the world.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

Does Apple include Foxconn and all its other vendors in its calculation, including materials producers? Or does if not counf if you outsource?

Is there any reason to believe "offsets" won't be used to game these numbers?

Is that not the point of carbon offsets, at least in principle. If you emit X and sequester Y then it would be correct to consider your net emissions to be X - Y.

No. In an alternate universe something that work. In ours they're basically scams at this point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37284764

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/24/carbon-c...

https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+offsets+site%3Anews.y...

P.S. I don't believe it's "sequester Y", but something more like "promise we wouldn't burn Y that we also promise was otherwise definitely going to be burned". I could be off here, feel free to double check.

The news article you’ve linked seems to suggest that these scam offset companies may soon be losing their ability to sell their credits.

Carbon offset startups are booming right now, not all of them will succeed, but there are viable technologies already being scaled up. For example, Heirloom Carbon has just made front page news today with a 200 million dollar deal they signed with Microsoft.

All this is to say, I agree that there are some bad actors in the space, and it’s great that they’re being called out for it. To suggest they’re all scams is an unfair, and largely inaccurate statement.

> To suggest they’re all scams is an unfair, and largely inaccurate statement.

It's jarring to read this when earlier you believed carbon offsets represent actual sequestration, and I pointed out that wasn't the case.

> Carbon offset startups are booming right now, not all of them will succeed [...] For example, Heirloom Carbon has just made front page news today with a 200 million dollar deal they signed with Microsoft.

Are you aware of how plastic recycling was a scam? or do you believe that is a "largely inaccurate statement" too? Businesses "booming" or signing massive deals with each other in no way tells you anything about the planet benefiting as a result. If anything, it tells you they've found a very effective way to spend money on PR. Historically that hasn't frequently been a good sign for the planet.

> but there are viable technologies already being scaled up

There were viable plastic recycling technologies already being scaled up too.

Obligatory reminder that ‘carbon footprint’ as a term invented by BP after the gulf oil spill

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

Hmm. Interesting theory. But I just ran a google query of "carbon footprint", searching the internet until April 19th 2010, the day before the oil spill happened. There are thousands and thousands of results. I am seeing results well into the 1990s.

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