The Surreal Doublespeak of Big Tech at Climate Week
I’m not a fan of New York City’s Climate Week. As I wrote last year, the annual programming timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly has “devolved into a marketing opportunity for all the worst capitalists.” This year, the prominence of heavily polluting tech companies among the sponsors—in a year when Kamala Harris, the most climate-friendly major party presidential candidate on offer, is emerging as a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Valley—is especially worrying. Is there no limit to the amount of abuse and gaslighting we will tolerate from the tech billionaire class?
The theme for this year is “It’s Time.” In her opening address, Climate Week CEO Helen Clarkson emphasized the peril of delaying action on the climate crisis, warning that “history will judge us.” She imagined the people of the future asking, “How many warnings from scientists did they need? How many people needed to die in heat waves for them to believe what was happening?”
But some major polluters—Apple, Google, and Meta—are on the list of Climate Week sponsors. These indignant future humans Clarkson imagines might also ask: Why did even those most concerned—the people dedicating their lives and careers to solving this problem—tolerate such bad actors, enabling big polluters to look like climate heroes?
While its native California burns and thirsts, Meta—though it has attempted to confuse the public on this point—has by some measures increased its greenhouse gas emissions steadily since 2019, spewing more than 14 million metric tons of carbon last year. Many of us fret about our personal carbon footprint—and sure, we should—but Meta’s is the equivalent of three million individual humans’. Though Meta has been proactive about renewable energy, including geothermal, its data centers are still largely dependent on fossil fuels. It’s still recklessly pouring energy into planet-killing and pointless A.I. Despite constant wildfires, heat waves, and drought and unprecedented public awareness of what is causing such symptoms of crisis, Meta’s carbon footprint is worse now than it was in 2020.
In addition to being a giant energy suck, Meta is also a climate offender in its role as an information source: Numerous advocates, climate scientists, and journalists have said that Meta suppresses climate information and boosts denialist disinformation. Meta has called some of these instances a “security error.”
By its own admission, Google has also increased its carbon emissions by 13 percent in 2023 alone, to 14.31 million metric tons, about the same as Meta’s. That’s a whopping 50 percent since 2019, and with similar causes to Meta’s: energy use of the data centers that power its A.I.
Last year, Apple boasted about its green commitments and achievements in one of the most cringe ads ever, in which “Mother Nature,” played by Octavia Spencer, shows up to a team meeting and yells at them, and walks away placated, even impressed after hearing about the company’s reforestation work and the alleged carbon neutrality of its new Apple Watch. I’m not the first to feel embarrassed for the company every time I watch this ad: Others have called it “greenwashing” and the “Mother of All Virtue Signals.”
Undeterred, Apple published a lofty white paper earlier this year deeming its global corporate operations “carbon neutral.” The company’s “Environmental Progress Report” in April boasted of reducing its emissions by 55 percent since 2015.
Yet the company’s carbon footprint is even a little bit higher than Google’s or Meta’s, at 16.1 metric tons. Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, has said that Apple’s definition of “carbon neutrality” is arbitrary and unambitious, relying on offsets, which are such a scam that much of the private sector—even Shell and Nestle, not exactly shining paragons of the triple bottom line—has given up on them.
Much of what’s holding back progress for these companies—besides the blinding entitlement of a Silicon Valley culture that believes fervently that it is saving the world just by existing—is A.I. I’ve previously discussed the horrific environmental and climate costs of the technology, and the lengths to which tech companies are going to avoid public disclosure of those costs. They can spout on all they like about renewables and forests, but the fact is that A.I. is vastly complicating the shift away from fossil fuels and even perpetuating our coal use because the data centers the technology requires put so much pressure on the grid.
All three companies—Meta, Google, and Apple—have a net zero-goal for 2030, and all three are moving in exactly the opposite direction, poster children for the meaninglessness of such goal setting. Together, they have a carbon footprint greater than many countries’.
After record heat this summer, as a hurricane barrels into Florida and much of the West remains on fire, the standards for climate discourse and “climate action” should be higher. Exxon Mobil isn’t listed as a Climate Week sponsor, and other big polluters and purveyors of climate disinformation shouldn’t be able to launder their reputations by sponsoring Climate Week either. Big Tech is enjoying a moment of liberal legitimacy, with presidential nominee Kamala Harris benefiting from its campaign largesse. But, coming back to Climate Week’s theme, “it’s time” to recognize these companies for the noxious environmental offenders they are.