Are big tech companies greenwashing their sustainability credentials as regulatory pressures mount?, The Green Network

“Let’s start at the beginning,” as Dylan Thomas recently put it, the big tech giants that currently dominate the world are start-ups, outsiders that are disrupting the status quo that has long been established and seemingly impregnable by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and the like. Facebook (now the “wannabe” all-encompassing Meta), Alphabet (Google), Amazon, etc. have created new business models with the intention of taking market share from “established” corporations by gaining access to the personal data that millions of users voluntarily (and permanently) provide in exchange for access to supposedly “free” services.

The collected, manipulated and reused data was then used to limit competition, as the extremely wealthy, de facto monopolists could acquire and then exploit or destroy any new generation of start-ups that were deemed to be a threat to their hegemony or to possess technologies that could be useful for the further expansion of big tech companies into other areas or sectors.

Thanks to this, it was possible to achieve constant double-digit growth, which translated into huge profitability and the feeling that companies associated with large technology companies must maintain their position in the hierarchy by all available means.

Meanwhile, as these companies have grown inexorably, their regulation, through competition law and national, regional and international legislation, has been slow, partial and wildly ineffective – not least because, in addition to creating wealth and profit, these companies have become so large that they have also amassed enormous market power, far, far beyond what was permitted in other industries, such as finance and insurance. And with that has come an ironclad political power, usually exercised through the velvet glove of ubiquitous lobbying power.

So far, efforts to curb big tech’s excesses have yielded little success, but as AI proliferates and the law of unintended consequences looms, calls for controls on companies that are in many cases already monopolies are beginning to take on the characteristics of oligopolies are growing, and regulators and lawmakers are finally taking action to impose meaningful controls that could break up companies like Meta and Google into their component parts. Well aware of this, big tech companies are trying to prove they pose no threat and have humanity’s best interests at heart. One tactic is to burnish and renew their green and sustainability credentials.

Last week, journalists received a slew of press releases from Amazon in which the company taken over The company has already purchased and secured enough clean electricity to meet the energy needs of all its data centers, headquarters, regional offices and warehouses worldwide – seven years ahead of its “sustainability goal.”

This claim comes even as climate scientists have begun to agree that a planned, long-term path to net-zero emissions would be more important and effective than jumping quickly from ostensibly offsetting every ton of carbon dioxide emitted to offsetting actions to mitigate such discharges, and then claiming to be carbon neutral (and claiming praise accordingly). Interestingly, Google he confessed that its AI operations caused a 13% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions last year and now no longer claims to be a carbon neutral company. Given Amazon’s massive AI plans, we also need to know what impact they will have on emissions.

Fast, simple and cheap answers always win out over slower, more complex and more expensive solutions.

The problem with most existing corporate net-zero plans is that they’re complicated and expensive. They typically require participants to fully offset every ton of carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gases) they emit—and one quick and relatively inexpensive way to offset emissions is to buy carbon credits to “offset” them. That essentially means paying a company to plant trees, clean up polluted industrial sites, or lobby to restrict or ban agricultural pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

With the best will in the world, these solutions, which can never be more than partial, are very difficult to monitor or quantify, and will take many years to reduce emissions by even a few percentage points. Now the compass is turning toward the point where the emphasis will be on requiring the big techs themselves to remove their own emissions at source, and that will cost them a lot of money.

Amazon says it has achieved its clean electricity goal impressively early because: this is an argumentIt is reducing emissions, improving energy efficiency, purchasing more guaranteed carbon-free energy, building renewable energy projects at its facilities and supporting similar projects around the world. It has done this by “purchasing additional environmental attributes (such as renewable energy credits) to signal our support for renewable energy in the networks where we operate, consistent with the expected generation of projects we have contracted.”