Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon: What do all these climate pledges mean?
Apple announced a plan to be carbon-neutral by 2030, joining tech giants Amazon and Microsoft with ambitious climate pledges.
Despite a pandemic, companies are releasing climate plans like they’re going out of style. This week, Apple announced a plan to be carbon neutral by 2030, joining tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, who made similarly ambitious climate pledges earlier this year.
“Businesses have a profound opportunity to help build a more sustainable future, one born of our common concern for the planet we share,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement.
On the same day of Apple’s announcement (coincidence?), Microsoft also re-upped the ante on its January announcement to go “carbon negative” — laying out some specifics on that plan, which included its participation in a new coalition: Transform to Net Zero.
That coalition is made up of eight companies — including Nike, Starbucks, and Unilever — committed to achieving net-zero emissions. According to its press release, Transform to Net Zero will focus on reaching net-zero emissions “no later than 2050,” with a cross-sectoral approach that dips into policy, finance, research, and industry.
As Grist points out, going carbon negative is something a company can’t do alone (because, well, supply chains), so Microsoft is recruiting other companies to lend a hand.
In that same lens, back in January, Microsoft announced a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund, set up to invest in technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Amazon did something similar with its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund, announced in June, set up to invest in companies that can help transition to a low-carbon economy.
This is all good news — on the surface, at least — for two reasons. One, as Axios notes, many climate plans to date have lacked specifics. Microsoft and Apple’s recent plans begin to lay out actionable paths forward. And two, these plans are decades ahead of the targets outlined by the Paris Climate Agreement, which gives us till 2050 to go net zero.
And since we’ve really been screwing the pooch when it comes to meeting these targets, any extra ambition is welcomed.
But at the other end of the narrative is where these companies are coming from. This week, more than 30 companies admitted they were part of the climate problem when they penned a letter to Congress calling for green energy in COVID-19 relief packages.
“We are large consumers of energy and, while navigating and addressing the complex business impacts of Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19), we all agree that we cannot put on hold our efforts to combat climate change,” read the letter, signed by companies like McDonalds, Nestlé, and PepsiCo.
The letter went on to ask for integrating renewable energy sources, expanding infrastructure, creating new clean energy jobs, and incentivizing electric transit and energy efficiency. (So far, none of the United States’ $3 trillion stimulus funds have gone to addressing climate change.)
Apple seems to be on the same page. To go back to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook: “Climate action can be the foundation for a new era of innovative potential, job creation, and durable economic growth.”
Economically, investing in climate makes good sense. And socially it does, too. Three out of every five of Americans now see climate change as a major threat, up 9% from a decade ago, according to a recent survey by Pew.
But the latest pledges are just that — pledges. And, like the nations of the Paris Agreement have shown, commitments are easy to ignore, or, in the case of the U.S., abandon all together.
They’re also really tough to pull off, especially for companies that have giant, sprawling carbon footprints. For example, on the same day Amazon announced its new climate initiative, it also reported that its carbon footprint grew 15% last year. Amazon is obviously much more than an online bookstore now — the company has to deal with the emissions of acquisitions, like Whole Foods, and products it sells, like Kindles. And then, of course, all the emissions of transporting goods.
As the saying goes, hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Still, the wave of companies’ commitments, and specifics, gives us more reason to be hopeful than ever before.