Big tech companies and climate change

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon all signed up to the “we’re still in” campaign whose signatories promise to “pursue ambitious climate goals ... as part of the global effort to hold warming to well below 2°C.”

In terms of brute financial self-interest, you’d expect the IT sector to be somewhat less negatively inclined towards climate action than some other industries. While IT obviously does have a climate impact (particularly making the actual devices), it is a big part of most low-carbon future scenarios – ‘dematerialisation’ into the weightless digital world is often discussed as a way to cut emissions.

The IT companies are certainly trying to position themselves as climate leaders. In January, Microsoft published a detailed ‘carbon negative by 2030’ plan, and Amazon has pledged to get to neutral by 2040 (‘neutral’ or ‘negative’ here do not just mean offsetting).

They are also throwing some money around: Microsoft’s plan includes a $1 billion fund to “accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture and removal technologies”.

And, in February, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos announced his not-so-humbly named “Bezos Earth Fund”, a $10 billion fund to help tackle climate change. That’s more than double the tax that Amazon has deigned to pay globally since 2010.

Oil in the cloud: Creating AI for oil and gas extraction

However, how deep the tech giants’ climate commitments run looks rather questionable – as one hand is writing them, their other hand doesn’t seem to have quite got the message.

In May 2020, Greenpeace produced a report called ‘Oil in the Cloud’ detailing the partnerships that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have with oil companies to create bespoke artificial intelligence (AI) software for oil and gas extraction. The fossil fuel industries are increasing their use of AI at an astronomical rate – in 2018, they spent around $1.75 billion on it.

Microsoft is the most involved and has explicitly said that its ‘carbon negative’ plan will not include cancelling these contracts.

After Greenpeace’s report came out, Google, which was already winding its oil and gas contracts down, pledged to stop them altogether. Greenpeace is encouraging people to contact the other two and ask them to follow suit. You can do so here.

Microsoft and the Climate Leadership Council

There are yet more disturbing ideological shenanigans from Microsoft. Tucked away in its ‘Carbon Negative by 2030’ plan – much of which does look genuinely good, is an ominous section on “using our voice on carbon-related public policy issues”. It calls for “the removal of regulatory barriers to help catalyse markets to enable carbon- reduction technologies”.

What this means is made clear by Microsoft’s membership of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a lobby group composed largely of corporations – including Shell and ExxonMobil (which should ring some alarm bells), and right-wing economists.

CLC is pushing for the dismantling of most of the Obama administration’s climate policies, to be replaced with a slowly rising carbon tax starting at $40 per tonne, with the money returned to citizens in dividends.

In its original proposals it also demanded that fossil fuel companies be given immunity from legal liability for climate change. However, after a backlash, it dropped that part in September 2019.

However, the CLC’s proposals are still deeply problematic. A carbon price is a good idea. But the neoliberal idea of trading everything else for one (thus leaving nearly everything up to the market), is not. Sectors vary hugely in how hard they are hit by any particular price, so unless the price is complemented by targeted interventions, you cannot set it high enough to get the required changes in some areas without decimating other ones. As nobody is really prepared to do that, a carbon price on its own will always be set too low to do much.

And indeed, the CLC’s proposals amount to a 2030 carbon price of $60- $65 a tonne. The UN estimated that $135 to $5,500 would be needed by 2030 to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming, and noted that unless complemented with other mechanisms, the required price rises implausibly high.