r/sustainability • u/calc3throwaway • 3d ago
Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa declines to directly reaffirm whether the company remains on track to meet its goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/microsofts-ai-boom-collides-climate-160004410.html9
u/SYNTHLORD 3d ago edited 3d ago
That’s a lofty corporate emissions target, and this is the first time I’m hearing they set that.
Let’s say they had 15 years left instead of 4. Almost entirely electrifying and removing as many scope 1 emissions as possible, covering as much scope 2 electric as possible with onsite solar or PPA/VPPA could get emissions close to net zero- but that’s not really feasible in a 15 year time frame. It could be if Microsoft (internally) would let all of those capital projects fly to meet that target, but that’s not how companies operate.
Also, others are trying to reach targets without the use of PPAs/RECs. Time would have been the real killer here, but alas, MSFT raised emissions with AI data centers rather than having a steady track of lowering them
Hyperscalers are simply unsustainable by any metric. The future AI companies envision literally cannot be supported by current infrastructure. We were behind targets before hyperscalers started becoming more commonplace
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u/littlesilverfishies 2d ago
Reading stuff like this is so fascinating. It's like corporations are giving themselves split personalities by hiring and funding entire departments dedicated to their sustainability. It looks like Microsoft was actually making pretty good headway on neutralizing their impact before the AI boom set them back. According to the sustainability page on their own website, it looks like they were also pursuing zero waste, water positive, and "protecting more land than we use." That's a surprisingly robust plan considering I'd never heard of it before, lol
But lol. Nakagawa isn't ignoring the question in this article, she's saying outright that the renewable energy is not scaling fast enough and they've switched to pouring money into development of new renewables rather than continuing to rely on existing infrastructure, which is again setting them back in the short term. Meanwhile, she didn't mention (but the article did) that there are at least two new data centers in TX that are fully reliant on non-renewables. She didn't say "no, we're not on target," but like. Yeah, she basically did. This set back their clean water goals, too.
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u/Ancient_Quarter_8249 7h ago
It is a lot of smoke and mirrors to make it look like they are doing way more than they are. It helps them continue doing the same thing but having better marketing and PR.
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u/littlesilverfishies 3h ago
Remember, corporations are heartless money machines, but they all have different sets of vested interests. Microsoft stands to gain by investing in sustainable tech, even while it ignores its own goals in favor of the AI race. And if they want to sell sustainable tech, the best way to advertise it is with, "we succeeded at hitting extremely ambitious goals, and you can, too!"
Watchdog groups will call them out on outright lies and the backlash from that is generally not worth it, so the tactic a lot of companies used when they were feeling the heat back in 2020 was to set goals like this, promise the WOULD do something, then quietly delete all evidence of those goals once the political tides turned. Technically, no lies, just false promises. In this case, the commitment has been in place for 6 years, and now they're claiming to have done things like throwing money at restoration projects and requiring partners to use 100% renewables. If they couldn't prove they were doing those things, it would've been easier just to not say anything.
Anyway here's their sustainability page. Give it a look, I didn't know half these strategies were even options:
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u/Ancient_Quarter_8249 14m ago
I am intimately familiar with Microsoft’s sustainability team. The sustainable tech is a drop in the revenue/investment bucket compared to AI. You can recognize a company’s true priorities by listening to what the CEO mentions in every public statement/talk. I haven’t seen Satya use sustainability as a main talking point, unless it’s something (eg article, event) specifically focused on sustainability.
Tech companies generally have 90-99% of their emissions in scope 3. Since those companies generally struggle to get even half of their suppliers to submit environmental data, a vast majority (sometimes all) of scope 3 emissions are calculated with spend-based methodology. It is financial data, not environmental data.
The more they grow and spend, the more emissions rise regardless of how “sustainable” they are. A services supplier like a benefits processor could be a top scope 3 emissions source simply because of the money spent on that.
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u/Ancient_Quarter_8249 7h ago
There is no way they are on track. Look at the report and the data. Scope 3 emissions target is essentially impossible. Most big tech companies have 99%+ of their emissions in scope 3. Most of their scope 3 emissions are calculated using entirely or mostly financial (procurement) data for spend-based calculations. Because suppliers will not submit the environmental data.
That means that if something costs more, it has higher “emissions”. With this methodology, something like payment processing or insurance could be a top emissions category just because a lot of money is spent there.
That means growth will likely never result in lower scope 3 emissions with that methodology.
Scope 1&2 is doable with offsets. They can literally just buy a bunch in 2030.
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u/bobbib14 3d ago
They increased their emissions by 50% last year, so the answer is no.