Washed Up
The doubtful promise of net zero emissions from Big Tech
Both Google and Facebook announced that they would reach net zero emissions by 2030. While it seems really promising for the environment, some scientists are still skeptical about the feasibility of such an impressive goal.
Maxime Mohr
Digital technologies have never been as much as important in our everyday life than today. Covid-19 crisis and lockdowns proved it with the increasing practice of remote work. Obviously, this mean that people need a wider access to those technologies and all the services available through them. Therefore, we can’t deny the ecological impact of that new way of life. Google and Facebook are two tech giants, known as “Big Tech”, which provide many of those digital services. Whether it is for entertainment, work, or communication, providing all those services requires a lot of energy which lead to carbon emissions. Based on this reality it is not surprising that Google and Facebook both decided to act in reducing their emissions. Which is why Google officially stated that it wants to only be powered by renewable energy by 2030. While Facebook wants to achieve its goal of net-zero emissions for its entire “value chain”, both from suppliers and users of its services, also by 2030.
Absence of credible carbon removal technology
Both those goals seem almost too good to be true. To better understand what these tech giants really want to achieve, it’s important to define what is “net zero”. In an article published in The Conversation by three researchers, net zero is describe as “the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.” But in fact, the whole concept of net zero can be really misleading. As explained by James Dyke, senior lecturer in Global Systems at the University of Exeter, there is a “continual absence of credible carbon removal technology” as of today. However, this reality doesn’t seem to affect the net zero policies from companies. The problem doesn’t come from the fact that those carbon removal technologies don’t exist at all. On the contrary, such technology already exists, but companies are being deceptive when they assume they could deploy it at a very vast scale, as explained by the three scientists.
Obscuring indirect emission
In 2021, Facebook announced that it reduced its emissions by 94% since 2017 based on that “net zero policies” and the use of renewable energy. Interviewed by the french media FranceInfo, César Dugast, member of the Carbon 4 consulting company, explains that Facebook only considers its own buildings and data centers energy consumption when measuring its emissions. The company doesn’t take into account every other “indirect emission” coming from building construction, data centers computer manufacturing and transport. Lastly, business trip, mostly by planes, are also not considered. Those indirect emissions have grown 10 times higher since 2017, linked to the global growth of the company.
Hard to believe carbon negative policy
Meanwhile Google and Facebook want to reach net zero emissions, Microsoft on its side as gone even further, promising it could become carbon negative by 2030. It’s even more unbelievable because, based on the International Energy Agency, carbon negative means that the company will remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. To reach this impressive goal there are different solutions such as reforestation but also technological solutions as the one mentioned earlier. But then again, the feasibility of implementing this kind of device on a very large scale is still doubtful.
