Alright, I'll drink the Kool-Aid. I think this is an excellent strategic investment for Microsoft that also aligns with timely ethical priorities. I didn't read the post and think "this is corporate glossy bullshit," I read it and thought "this is an actual strategic initiative that is driving broad organizational alignment, which has measurable success criteria, and which makes sense."
I am genuinely surprised by the sincerity, cogency, and aspirational nature of this initiative and its associated PR glossies.
I am measurably more likely to work at and invest in Microsoft after reading this.
Should I be satisfied if you're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? I'm always unsure about this. If a politician is making all the right noises, but clearly doesn't care about the topic, should I be satisfied? I really don't know. That's how I feel about this, it's clearly a PR move, but I think I'm happy about that?
> Should I be satisfied if you're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons?
I tend to think YES, assuming you're actually doing the right thing instead of just saying you're doing the right thing. For example, when good ideas happen to coincide with profit motive, I think that's a wonderful thing, and really the best-case scenario in a market economy. Apple's seemingly genuine focus on privacy is a perfect example: many people criticize it as being driven only by profit (perhaps as a way to compete with Google), while I say it's great if that's true!
Yeah but they rely heavily on Chinese companies that are not 100% renewable. That's like someone saying they have never murdered anyone while routinely paying for hit men to get their hands dirty. Technically correct, but misleading.
I'm not sure what you're arguing, that nobody's perfect? Microsoft is aiming here to be carbon neutral in 2030. In ten years.
From my linked report;
A more energy efficient supply chain.
In 2015, we started engaging directly with suppliers to help them reduce their energy use.
We aim to educate them about energy efficiency, identify energy efficiency project
opportunities, and manage those projects to completion. We prioritize facilities with the highest
energy use and potential for improvement. Then we conduct energy audits and train suppliers
to uncover opportunities for energy efficiency—like replacing outdated or inefficient heating,
cooling, and lighting systems; repairing compressed air leaks; and recovering waste heat.
The assessments provide suppliers with a cost-benefit analysis for implementing energy
efficiency improvements.
Since the inception of this program in 2015, we have engaged 59 suppliers at 85 facilities. In
2018, our program implemented energy efficiency measures that prevented 466,000 metric
tons of CO₂e from entering the atmosphere.
So they are working with suppliers and have been for the past 5 years. They also have been cleaning up the chemicals their suppliers use.
You can't compare what they are doing to murder; it's legal for starters. But if you're relying on all the companies you do business with to make up your definition of 100% renewable, it's likely you'll never get there. They don't say anything about the energy used by the banks they do business with either.
In the article, Microsoft says they are carbon neutral today. They make a distinction between being carbon neutral—offsetting all their emissions—and being “net zero”. The latter is harder because it requires actually removing carbon from the atmosphere, not just paying someone else not to emit carbon.
They also make a distinction between Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (emissions created by energy providers), and Scope 3 (emissions created by suppliers). Their Scope 3 emissions are two orders of magnitude higher than their Scope 1 emissions, if I’m remembering it right. Their commitment is to be net negative including Scope 3 emissions.
I was impressed. They went well above and beyond a simple PR move.
My concern with promoting that situation is the game theory of it. You hold people who are not aligned with what you're actually supporting in esteem as though they were. Being aligned on one issue due to convenience is different than being aligned on an issue based off fundamental views. I can't predict how you will act in future circumstances based off how you're acting now.
Worry about what people do rather than their internal state is the only way to be satisfied about anything. Even if I tell you my reasons for making this post, how do you know if that's the truth? (Also, how would I know that's the truth?)
Why is it clear that PR is the primary reason for doing it? A majority of Americans believe in climate change. What makes it hard to believe that an educated collection of people who make decisions at a large technology company sincerely care about doing something good about it?
"Microsoft" isn't an entity with a will, it's just a collection of people. To the extent it has a will, that will is set by people. People with the demographics of the Microsoft population.
If Microsoft wanted a pure "PR" move then climate change isn't a logical choice because it risks alienating members of one of the major domestic political parties, who have been conditioned to be hostile to the cause.
I guess that's fair. Generally when a company acts, you can identify an upside for them. If you can't find any upside, then it may be a less obvious upside, PR being the most general category.
To point to a company as a collection of individuals isn't compelling to me, organizations frequently act in ways that individuals would not. This is because incentives and goals can be very different to that of an individual.
84% of individuals (US) say climate change is a threat, so there is not much risk in alienating individuals. A recent pew study shows ~16% of people list climate change as no risk in the US, globally that number is 9% on average[1].
>What makes it hard to believe that an educated collection of people who make decisions at a large technology company sincerely care about doing something good about it?
I have incredibly cynical views on corporations due to their strong incentives to put the bottom line before everything else. They have a legal obligation to shareholders who tend to either be sociopathic or low-information enough to not care about anything about the bottom line.
That all being said I do believe that do-gooders do try to push initiatives like this for ethical reasons and try to sell them to shareholders as helping the bottom line. Certainly IT will only come under more and more scrutiny in terms of its climate impact anyways.
> I have incredibly cynical views on corporations due to their strong incentives to put the bottom line before everything else.
Yes, and I get the reasons for that, but you have to retain the ability to step outside your biases and see exceptions, even if the biases are logical and usually correct. Otherwise you go through life treating everything and everyone as a stereotype, which won't be accurate.
It's not the case that a public company is legally forbidden from taking any action that can help the world more than the bottom line. They're openly taking the action anyway, it's not like the presence of sincerity in their motivation increases their legal exposure to shareholders.
> As the U.S. Supreme Court recently stated, "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so."
It's the nature of democratic politics. Given a broad enough group of people, you will never fully agree with your allies let alone everyone, so you may never fully agree with your allies' reasons for agreeing with you. However, in order to move the needle at all you will often have to accept "close enough."
I see this in the workplace too. Some of the worst managers I've seen were people who were unable to accept "close enough" and instead just didn't get anything done.
Of course we should take what people and organizations say with skepticism adequate for their record and scaled by impact. Microsoft had the reputation of "malicious monopolizer" in the 90s and had to change a lot of things to stay on top of their game. In the past years Microsoft has been rated as one of the more ethical companies out there by some organizations who monitor this sort of thing, so the carbon negative move just seems consistent.(took some willpower to not add current US leaders as counterexamples)
Reality isn't black or white.
Clearly the PR impact was taken into account but Microsoft is made of people, and many of those people truly care about this issue.
Bill Gates has been investing his money for a long time now on potential solutions for climate change, Brad Smith seem to genuinely care about this issue as well.
Well for politicians, you should definitely be satisfied.
Something I've been thinking about... certain politicians sometimes get crap for being wishy-washy or whatever, but we live in a representative democracy. A representative is supposed to do whatever his or her constituents want.
The ideal representative wouldn't have values. They would simply do their best to carry out their constituents's will, whatever it was at that moment.
It's essentially impossible to make Microsoft go in this direction for the right reasons the way the incentives and laws around corporations are setup so the pragmatist in me says YES unless you're willing to resort to revolutionary measures.
My feeling is that we should treat the action is good, but always keep in mind that an entities motivations are the best predictors of its future actions.
So, congrats to Microsoft on their current environmental efforts! We'll be watching you very closely.
Should I be satisfied if you're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? I'm always unsure about this.
What are the right reasons here? We live in a capitalist system and the base assumption is individuals and institutions will contribute to the common good for their own selfish reasons. If that works out, it can't get much better than that.
My criticism isn't that this is Microsoft acting "for the wrong reasons" but that it is Microsoft acting on the wrong level. A large number of public facing corporations being carbon-negative is meaningless if many other corporations and consumers with no public face are carbon positive by a lot more.
Essentially, I'd put on my institutional economist hat and say the only solution to CO2 pollution problem, an externality of production[1], is state regulation. That is state regulation involving direct enforcement, not taxes, not incentives, not promises. The basic analogy is a leaking, pressurized container - you can't incentivize the water coming out, you can't slowly plug a few holes, you have to plug each hole together or the remaining holes just leak more (or at least leak unacceptable much).
And here the obligation is for public to only be satisfied with PR moves that aim to fight global warming centrally. And this is where the cachet of pathetic individual and group moves to (pretend to) "fight global warming" is destructive. We should demand things from corporations, which they can do for PR reasons but we should demand is them support strong regulation affecting all CO2 producers, not all the other (useless) moves.
Microsoft has over a 100 massive data centers throughout the world. The carbon footprint of their head quarter is just a small fractions of the massive amount of energy needed to power the millions of machines Microsoft deployed across the globe.
I wonder if they take into account the carbon related to them using their customer's computers to distribute patches and send "telemetry" back to microsoft?
Quite the opposite... I grew up in the 80's thinking everyone was a brainless moron and all corporations were intrinsically evil. Corporate messaging was unbelievably, brazenly disingenuous, and political speech was worse (!) than it is today.
In my dottage (lol), I believe that it's wiser and more honest to praise meaningful virtuous action than to dismiss it out of hand as "PR."
I'd think about whether and how you disagree with that statement carefully, particularly re: how you think knee-jerk cynicism improves the world you live in. In my experience, blind cynicism is a shield for people who are terrified of being duped because they are, at heart, deeply insecure (and possibly also exhausted, justifiably, by glossy PR bullshit). For my part, I don't mind taking calculated risks when I see action I agree with. If I were never right, I'd stop pretty quickly. But I find I'm right more often than I'm wrong, and I'm willing to tolerate a few mistakes in the process.
It's a fancy blog post designed to hide the somewhat milquetoast announcement:
> By 2025, we will shift to 100 percent supply of renewable energy, meaning that we will have power purchase agreements for green energy contracted for 100 percent of carbon emitting electricity consumed by all our data centers, buildings, and campuses.
> We will electrify our global campus operations vehicle fleet by 2030.
> We will pursue International Living Future Institute Zero Carbon certification and LEED Platinum certification for our Silicon Valley Campus and Puget Sound Campus Modernization projects.
They're going to sign some contracts, buy some electric vehicles, and outfit their buildings with LED lights and recycled toilet paper.
If they truly wanted to make an impact, they'd lobby the government for proper environmental regulations instead of pursuing these vane corporate projects.
The biggest way Microsoft realistically could make an environmental impact is having its products run more efficiently. Not attempting to regulate the world through lobbyists which in the first place is practically impossible politically without its shareholders crying foul.
The bigger, of course also more distant and vague, announcement is that "by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."
Begs the question does this include the inefficiencies in its products over the years, which due to their breadth of their adoption, effected hundreds of millions of computers?
I'm thinking the carbon footprint of Windows update's endless (seemingly needless?) grinding and rebooting alone ends up being more than they ever emitted manufacturing and building software.
How would they decide that some computation was "needless"? If it was the best they could do at the time I'd argue it wasn't needless. If they were intentionally wasting CPU/energy for no reason it would be a different story.
Something I notice regularly on large companies and universities, literally any organization which is bigger then a single building: The vast amount of energy waste.
This starts at heating rooms like crazy (because it is unmanaged), having unneccessary equipment, computers and lights running all night (because they are unmanaged) and goes up to transportation. It's so simple things like truck drivers who prefer to keep their diesel running during loading/unloading. I guess they do so because either they were told by incompetent managament, have the wrong belief that their batteries could not power the lights, or some other disbelief.
Saving energy starts in the small, also if started by something big. Having said that, I guess a company of the size of Microsoft will have a huge potential to save energy.
The most ostentatious waste that I've seen has been in Las Vegas, where they had gigantic pools of water and gigantic fountains running all day, in 120 degree heat.
All that water evaporating for nothing in the desert, where every drop of water is (or should be) precious, just seemed like such a gigantic waste.
Well, it does cool people walking on the sidewalks. It is also more comfortable to breathe than 120 degree dry air.
Wasteful of energy? Probably. But the water evaporating into the atmosphere is not really lost either. It's short circuiting one major step in the water cycle to become usable (by us surface dwellers) again.
It's lost in the sense that water used for one purpose is not immediately available for something else, even if it will eventually turn into usable water again.
I also wonder if we'll see a greater push toward remote-first work, given the high carbon costs of physical facilities.
I wonder if there may also be a push to reduce some compute-intensive workloads, like training/scoring ML models or refreshing analytics dashboards that are not mission-critical and maybe not even actively being used.
Indeed, also at every tech office I've worked at, late at night I'd see all the lights in the entire building on until 11pm on the chance the cleaning crew might still be emptying a wastebasket.
Not to mention the nightly vacuuming of entire floors. A waste of energy and time, that also made it really hard to get work done without noise cancelling equipment.
In MN, “daylight harvesting” must be provided for fixtures within 15’ of a window, this can be automatically done by a photocell connected to a dimming relay, or manually with a dimmer switch. Offices with windows must also have controls, either photocell or manual-on/auto-off (vacancy sensor). Interior enclosed spaces are allowed to have standard single-pole switches, but these days we’re putting in occupancy sensor switches, the tenants prefer them.
Many or most of the installs have occupancy sensors for general lighting, or a time clock that shuts them off during non-business hours.
A 32w LED 2x4 is roughly equivalent to a 96w 3-lamp CFL 2x4, or 3x as efficient. You can power roughly 135-140 32w fixtures on a 277v 20A circuit [(277x20x.8)/32] which will illuminate ~11k sq ft. With 2 20A circuits, you can light up an entire office tower floor (floorplates are generally 18-23k sq ft). Assuming a ~10,000 watt load, and $0.08/kWH, it costs $0.80/hr to illuminate 20,000 square feet. It’s not as big of an energy waste these days, but it’s still a waste.
salt on the wound is when you see a new mixed use apartment with the vacant retail on the ground floor being a pit of coarse gravel before a tenant (and their custom floor) are found, but lit up like a target all the same.
> It's so simple things like truck drivers who prefer to keep their diesel running during loading/unloading
Well, one reason is that it might not turn on again. A lot of mechanical faults happen at startup (or shutdown).
In the US Air Force, C-5s are notorious for not turning back on again once you power them off. Hence, if you just landed in a remote area, you better keep those engines going, because if you power everything off to save energy you might be stranded until a repair crew can fly out.
What's worse, is the lack of control the actual tenants have over their building. My old professors office got so hot he had to open the window all winter. The thermostat on his wall didn't do anything, by design.
There was a women in an unknown and unadvertised location on campus who controlled all the climate controls in every building on campus directly. A supremely powerful position, almost like being the wizard of Oz. However, due to everyone emailing her constantly complaining about it being boiling hot or freezing cold every day, she opted to go dark and not answer any emails. So now nothing gets done.
It really depends on the building. Office buildings generally have heat pumps or VAVs w/ reheat coils (in MN) with tenant controls. Older buildings/facilities/institutions may have older HVAC or boilers that don’t have automatic controls, but when this gear gets replaced, it usually gets replaced with kit that has building automation controls for much more efficient energy usage.
Most cities these days have regulations limiting the amount of time you can idle (and rental trucks shut the engine down after a certain amount of idling). This of course become annoying if you don't want to drain the battery when using the liftgate...
30,000 employees drive their cars every morning to their suburban campus, conveniently located in unincorporated land between Redmond and Bellevue. Are they going to neutralize that CO2?
Do they have a plan to prevent employees from driving 20 miles each way every day? Their new campus renovation has tons of parking for cars. Any bike lanes? Bus stops?
Disclosure: I work at MSFT, but not on any campus. I do, however, live in the Seattle area.
A significant amount of employees take MSFT shuttles/busses from around the greater Redmond area, and I imagine part of their plan is going to include electrifying those vehicles:
> We will electrify our global campus operations vehicle fleet by 2030.
In addition, Sound Transit's East Link will literally have a stop on the MSFT campus, which will eventually help people from all over the area (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond eventually) get to work in a significantly more carbon-neutral way, especially given electricity produced in the area is relatively clean.
The only unincorporated land in that area is Marymoor Park and Bridle Trails State Park.
The Link Light Rail will be opening a station next to the Microsoft campus in 2023, and Microsoft is paying to build a bike/pedestrian bridge over 520 at that location.
If we're going to start counting 2nd and 3rd degree connections, why not count people that are home playing video games on a Microsoft console instead of driving somewhere?
Microsoft is investing massive resources into the Sound Transit system. They just donated acres of land to the city (as well as a bunch of money) to add a train stop right next to their campus. Microsoft is one of the main reason the East Link Extension was funded (new train line connecting Seattle to Mercer Island to Bellevue to Redmond).
business travel is different from commute. they chose to save money by building away from where people live. most of their employees drive, redmond campus has more than 15,000 parking spots.
vendors and contractors are not allowed to use shuttles and connectors, that probably adds another 5,000 cars
i want to believe they want to right their wrongs, but their initial decision to be far away from any population area has contributed a lot of co2 over the last 30 years.
Then do you count emissions from Microsoft's suppliers? This announcement says they are considering emissions from their entire supply chain, so I can't imagine a reason why this wouldn't also apply to people they pay to work for them.
I believe that this is addressed in their "Scope 3" section that is mentioned, and they are looking to cut that figure in half by 2030, and it is included in their "net negative by 2030" considerations.
They can tell their suppliers to be carbon neutral or lose contracts. But this is a free country, there isn't much they can do about the employees beyond what they're _already doing_, and have been doing for at least a decade now. I live in the area, you see MS buses all the time, and many of their employees use them.
All that "offsetting" is mostly for rich people to feel good about themselves as they fly their private jets to climate summits, it does little to nothing to reduce the actual CO2. Once that CO2 leaves the tailpipe, the only way to reduce it for real is by capturing it.
>There’s another aspect of carbon math that’s also essential. This is the difference between being “carbon neutral” and being “net zero.” While they sound similar, in fact they’re different.
>Given common usage, companies have typically said they’re “carbon neutral” if they offset their emissions with payments either to avoid a reduction in emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere. But these are two very different things. For example, one way to avoid a reduction in emissions is to pay someone not to cut down the trees on the land they own. This is a good thing, but in effect it pays someone not to do something that would have a negative impact. It doesn’t lead to planting more trees that would have a positive impact by removing carbon.
In contrast, “net zero” means that a company actually removes as much carbon as it emits. The reason the phrase is “net zero” and not just “zero” is because there are still carbon emissions, but these are equal to carbon removal. And “carbon negative” means that a company is removing more carbon than it emits each year.
While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be “carbon neutral” since 2012, our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we’re far better served by humility than pride. And we believe this is true not only for ourselves, but for every business and organization on the planet.
>Like most carbon-neutral companies, Microsoft has achieved carbon neutrality primarily by investing in offsets that primarily avoid emissions instead of removing carbon that has already been emitted. That’s why we’re shifting our focus. In short, neutral is not enough to address the world’s needs.
>While it is imperative that we continue to avoid emissions, and these investments remain important, we see an acute need to begin removing carbon from the atmosphere, which we believe we can help catalyze through our investments.
> Solving our planet’s carbon issues will require technology that does not exist today. That’s why a significant part of our endeavor involves putting Microsoft’s balance sheet to work to stimulate and accelerate the development of carbon removal technology. Our new Climate Innovation Fund will commit to invest $1 billion over the next four years into new technologies and expand access to capital around the world to people working to solve this problem. We understand that this is just a fraction of the investment needed, but our hope is that it spurs more governments and companies to invest in new ways as well.
This is one of the most exciting and potentially impactfull announcements. My biggest issue with companies that make a big deal about being "carbon neutral" and "carbon offsets" is that many times it is "voodoo accounting" in which they pay money to another company which claims to have prevented some carbon emission in an unaccountable developing country. Basically, these carbon fees just are another form of indulgences in which rich people pay money to be able continue their sins while feeling good about themselves.
However, "carbon removal" is a game changer. Based on human nature, I do not believe we will be able to change behavior enough to save ourselves. I think our only hope of preserving our civilization is with carbon removal technology.
That is why I am so glad that Microsoft is specifically focusing on this. If other large companies did this, I think there is a good chance that we could innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.
If they take every dollar Chevron is paying them to enhance oil recovery with deep learning and then put it in this climate innovation fund then maybe I'd believe them.
While I agree with the point you are making, it must be noted that garbage is not "dumped", like someone is throwing stuff across a wall. I am sure Poland is paid lots of money to take the garbage.
They pay some peanuts to Polish companies that dump the garbage onto some green field where it "accidentally catches fire". German green stats go up considerably, Polish people get cancer.
Are you sure MS is going to enforce their "carbon-negative" approach all the way down into their supply chain? If there is no word from them on this, I can only consider it a PR move without any substance, orchestrated by some M7 MBAs, nothing else.
There should be a ban on exports, unless it is proven they are recycled.
You buy garbage from Germany to recycle in Poland. You store it in some field temporarily, before the recycling. You set them on fire, getting rid of the problem. To avoid liability you blame the badly recycled trash e.g. candles. Now it's hard to do in Poland, since the regulations have changed, but I bet you could pull it off in Ukraine.
I have not seen anything in this letter than #2 Cloud provider in the world is going to be carbon-neutral in 10 years.
Just because I have not seen does not mean its not there. But the meat and potatoes are missing -- especially a company that is building massive data-centers around the world.
They said they are already carbon neutral. Now they are aiming for net zero or lower and also including their supply chain. They included quite a few concrete details about how they will do it, including an internal carbon “tax.”
Is their carbon accounting public? Is anybody auditing it? Not really familiar with how this works. Quick googling didn't turn up anything. Could anyone point me in the right direction?
We still shouldn't let them off the hook for their invasive telemetry lately, but for such a large, energy hungry company to be carbon negative is legitimately a great thing.
That's all great, but it's not really enough. We're past the point of no return for global warming unless we remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
How come Microsoft or Bill Gates don't invest in better CO2 scrubber technology that might make that feasible? Or do they and I just haven't heard of it?
Then again, maybe such a thing could become a "weather weapon".
This article is talking about removing CO2 from the atmosphere, did you not read it before commenting?
> How come Microsoft or Bill Gates don't invest in better CO2 scrubber technology that might make that feasible? Or do they and I just haven't heard of it?
also probably noteworthy to add that Microsoft is a private firm who is not directly incentivized economically to do this (apart from maybe attracting some environmentally conscious workers), so this is already quite a lot.
It says much less about Microsoft and much more about the political state of affairs that a company appears more forward-looking than most other institutions. It's quite sad really.
I am genuinely surprised by the sincerity, cogency, and aspirational nature of this initiative and its associated PR glossies.
I am measurably more likely to work at and invest in Microsoft after reading this.
I guess they've hacked my demographic?