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Corporate climate claims can be confusing—and sometimes entirely unintuitive.
Tech giants Amazon and Google both recently released news about their efforts to clean up their climate impact. Both were a mixed bag, but one bit of news in particular made me prick up my ears. Google’s emissions have gone up, and the company stopped claiming to be “net zero” (we’ll dig into this term more in a moment). Sounds bad, right? But in fact, one might argue that Google’s apparent backslide might actually represent progress for climate action.
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My colleague James Temple dug into this news, along with the recent Amazon announcement, for a story this week. Let’s take a sneak peek at what he found and untangle why corporate climate efforts can be so tricky to wrap your head around.
To make sense of these recent announcements, the most important phrase to understand is “net-zero emissions.”
Companies produce greenhouse-gas emissions by making products, transporting them around, or just using electricity. Some corporate leaders may want to reduce those emissions so they can be a smaller part of the climate-change problem (or brag about their progress). Net-zero emissions refers to the point at which the emissions a company produces are canceled out by those it eliminates. But very different paths can all lead to that point.
One way to get rid of emissions is to take actions to reduce them in your operations. Imagine, for example, Amazon replacing its delivery trucks with EVs or building solar panels on warehouses.
This sort of direct action tends to be hard and expensive, and it’s probably impossible for any company to totally wipe out all its emissions right now, given that so much of our economy still relies on fossil fuels. So to reach net zero, many companies choose to disappear their emissions with math instead.
A company might buy carbon credits or renewable-energy credits, essentially paying someone to make up for its own climate impact. That might mean giving a nonprofit money to plant some trees, which suck up and store carbon, or funneling funds to developers and claiming that more renewables projects will get built as a result.
Not all credits are all bad—but often, carbon offsets and renewable-energy credits reflect big claims with little to back them up. And if companies are going after a net-zero label for their business, they may be incentivized to buy cheap credits, even if they don’t actually deliver on claims.
As James puts it in his story, “Corporate sustainability officers often end up pursuing the quickest, cheapest ways of cleaning up a company’s pollution on paper, rather than the most reliable ways of reducing its emissions in the real world.”
This sort of issue is why I tend to be suspicious of companies that claim to have already achieved net-zero emissions or 100% renewable energy. Cleaning up emissions is hard, and if you’ve already claimed victory, I’d say the odds are good that you’re taking an easy way out.
Which brings us to Google’s news. Google has claimed that its operations have operated with net-zero emissions since 2007. Now it’s not claiming that anymore—not really because it suddenly decided to take huge steps back in how it operates, but because it’s stopped buying carbon offsets on a massive scale. Instead, it’s focusing on investing in other ways to tackle emissions.
So what’s the next step for big companies looking to have a material impact on climate action? James has us covered again: In a 2022 story, he laid out six potential ways to rethink corporate climate goals.
Instead of buying up credits, companies can instead put that money toward investing in permanent carbon removal. Developing more reliable methods of pulling climate pollution out of the atmosphere and locking it away might be more expensive, but investing in those efforts will help the market mature and support companies that need commitments.
Companies can also contribute money to research and development for areas that are difficult to decarbonize—think aviation, shipping, steel, and cement. Those sectors touch basically every industry, so helping them make progress could be a worthy use of dollars.
If there’s one takeaway in this tangle of news, I’d say that we could all ask more questions and dig a little deeper into claims from big corporations. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Related reading
Read more about Big Tech climate action, including why Amazon’s renewable-energy claims might be more complicated than they appear at first glance, in James’s latest story.
And here’s his piece on six ways that we can rethink net-zero climate plans.
For more on how the climate “solution” of carbon offsets might be adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, read this 2021 deep dive.
KPOP4PLANET
Another thing
A small group of K-pop fans is working to clean up music streaming. Streaming can consume a lot of computing power, and all that energy used in data centers supporting it can mean big-time emissions.
A group called Kpop4planet put pressure on a streaming service to commit to using 100% renewables for its data centers by 2030. And the fans’ organizing paid off, because the service agreed.
Read more about the power of K-pop fans in this latest story from my colleague Zeyi Yang.
Keeping up with climate
It’s been mixed news this year so far for the EV market in the US. Overall sales are up, but some automakers are seeing deliveries stall. Also notable: Tesla has historically dominated, but it just dropped below 50% of the market for the first time. (Inside Climate News)
New materials that help tackle humidity could make air-conditioning a lot more efficient. Several companies are trying to bring machines based on these desiccant materials to the market. (Wired)
→ I wrote last year about how these moisture-sucking materials could help us beat the heat. (MIT Technology Review)
Electric vehicles are associated with lower emissions over their lifetimes than gas-powered cars, but they don’t start out that way, largely because of the climate cost of building their batteries. This calculator estimates how far you need to drive for EVs to break even with gas vehicles. (PNAS)
Nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems is selling its high-tech magnets now. The company is still working toward flipping on its fusion reactor. (TechCrunch)
The near-term future of EVs might include gas tanks, since some automakers are building electric vehicles that include gas-powered generators. The difference between these and plug-in hybrids is subtle, but basically these would have simpler guts inside. They could help bring more drivers onto team electric. (Heatmap News)
San Francisco launched a new ferry that runs entirely on hydrogen fuel cells. It’s the first such commercial passenger ferry in the world. One challenge could be securing a reliable source of low-emissions hydrogen. (Canary Media)
File this under weird effects of climate change: Melting ice sheets are making days longer. Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica makes the Earth wider, slowing the planet’s rotation. It’s only on the scale of about a millisecond per century, but it could be enough to throw off precise timekeeping. (The Guardian)
Rules around tax credits for hydrogen fuel were proposed to ensure that the money went to projects that help the climate. Now those rules seem to be in trouble. (Heatmap News)
