How Big Tech is quietly trying to reshape the way pollution is reported

In essence, big tech companies have made so many fine resolutions that in practice they break with reality: their data centres consume too much water and electricity – the cover below is from Lifegate –, much more than they save by investing in renewable energy or purchasing REC certificates (every time a wind, solar or hydroelectric plant generates a unit of clean energy, its owner can issue an energy attribute certificate, typically known in the US as a renewable energy certificate, or REC), a system that is supposed to generate ‘clean energy’ and offset emissions.

But that doesn’t seem to offset harmful emissions, is contested and is being redefined (although ‘Amazon, the [world’s] largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy’) and is acting as a powerful lobby: the influence of Amazon and Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion charitable group on the carbon credit market is raising alarm bells, in a growing battle over how Big Tech and corporate groups try to meet tough climate targets. The Bezos Earth Fund is among the largest funders of the Science Based Targets initiative, a world-renowned body relied on by groups like Apple and H&M to set voluntary standards and strict limits on the use of carbon credits to offset emissions…

p.s.: Big Tech’s capital expenditure is on track to exceed $200 billion this year and increase further in 2025, with anxiety growing on Wall Street about the returns on rising investments in artificial intelligence.

The four biggest US internet groups – Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google’s Alphabet – this week offered investors brief glimpses of the benefits they are seeing from their headlong rush (*) into generative AI, claiming it was boosting the performance of core services and helping to contain operating costs…

And at the COP 29 climate conference : Power-hungry Big Tech shies away from the spotlight at UN climate summit Executives are keeping a low profile at COP29 as attention increases on the power demands of artificial intelligence.

According to a recent analysis by Morgan Stanley, global data centre emissions will almost triple by the end of the decade due to the development of generative artificial intelligence, compared to a scenario in which this technology was not used. According to the study, data centres could contribute 5.1 per cent of global emissions by the end of the decade, compared to 1.9 per cent this year, in both cases compared to global emissions in 2022.

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