This Grist article from last week is a very familiar story. I shared some of these examples and more back in 2021 as I was considering my second departure from Microsoft for greener climate waters.
So long as the credit for doing good is separate from the actual good we’ll continue to get a climate show instead of climate action. Microsoft has been very up front about claiming the revenue and results from these projects, but when it comes time to account for those impacts in one’s Scope 3 emissions they are strangely impossible to calculate.
The article here touches on this press release (Microsoft-Exxon Permian Basin Feb 2019) from 5 years ago and you can see a claimed 50,000bpd impact — that’s 23,500 tons of CO2 every day, or 8.5 million tons of CO2 annually, from one customer, from one oil field. We’ve all seen the bar chart with Microsoft’s drawdown plan to zero out all historic emissions, that chart peaked at 11–12 million tons of CO2. While the revenue is clearly claimed on the profit side as impact of product sold, it always seems to be missing on the emissions side of scope 3 as the impact of product sold. I wrote about this in 2021(Scopes for Dopes), essentially reprising my own reasons for departure in 2019; my internal feedback was registered that same week in February (to Satya, Brad, and Lucas). In practice the alignment problem isn’t at the top; I counted 350 Corporate Vice Presidents at one point and they have all been trained their whole careers to favor conformity to the status quo. By November of 2019 I was experiencing the micromobility startup life.
Microsoft calls out downstream emissions as the bulk of their emissions story, but I’d look very closely at who they attribute the data center emissions to (both build and operations) — is Microsoft claiming to be operating on behalf of their clients and shifting the tracking into the client’s ledger? Microsoft will build and operate data centers for customers who are large enough — who gets credit for those emissions? Games like those deployed for revenue reporting are easier to play in the unregulated emissions scoring world. Playing games with the accounting isn’t illegal (yet), and in the voluntary market there are no rules to break anyway, but it certainly isn’t in keeping with a righteous purpose for any corporation (Deming: the purpose for any organization is for everybody to gain — stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment — over the long term).
The campus remodel follows the same program. The publicity is on net-zero-in-operations for the facility but we’ve neatly excused the embodied carbon of construction, the thousands of underground parking stalls baking in ongoing personal vehicle use, and the bit where the demolished buildings were not yet at end of life (so *their* embodied emissions weren’t fully amortized), the goal isn’t a measurable impact on the world around us, but credit for being a climate good-guy company.
I spent 6 months incubating towards a voluntary carbon market with standards enforced by Microsoft, since there were only a few companies with the market power to make that happen. Ultimately, I couldn’t find a business line executive able to accept a funded team to build this product into their existing portfolio, thus answering the question/criticism “is this really a Microsoft business?” No, Microsoft pays their sustainability tax to placate their employees, customers, and clients out of CELA (Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs). Sustainability is a stated value and aspirational goal, but it isn’t a Microsoft business. Announcing $500k in spending on performing independent validation of candidate offset purchases in 2020 was meant to show strength of commitment, but that’s… less annual cost than a fully loaded veteran engineer on a product team. It inadvertently makes it crystal clear the strength of that commitment. Stripe & FrontierClimate launched their attempt to move the voluntary market shortly after I left Microsoft to work on wildfire mitigation: doing the work in the forest before the fires come.
We all want a feel-good story with groups that are clearly in the good or bad bucket, but we live in a world of nuance. Some very good and worthwhile outcomes can come from otherwise odious operators, just as sometimes the best can make a mess of things. Microsoft is pretty straightforward once you realize the climate work is paid out of Brad Smith’s org; CELA doesn’t make the company money, rather it limits liabilities. Yesterday I received a notice from Bird’s ongoing bankruptcy (my first attempt to leave Microsoft): class 8 (equity holders) would be zero’d out as a result of the restructuring plan. Our companies do not treat stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, and the environment as equal in need or worth in fact of practice. These stakeholders are lumped into classes and some are just more important to the day to day operations of the businesses than others. The small zero-sum games of short term performance lead us away from long term sustainability, and we all suffer for it.
