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Impact Scoop

🔎 Special Edition Scoops: Big Tech Emissions

November 21, 2021

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Special Scoop:Emissions in Tech

Big Picture

Tech companies generate a lot of emissions to enable us to communicate on a daily basis.
Most of their emissions come from powering their data centers.
These companies are working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by increasing energy efficiency across their data centers and matching their energy consumption with renewable energy purchases.

What's Happening?

Technology companies

like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce help their customers

store, access, and transfer data

. You most likely use products or services from these companies on a daily basis when you're checking your Gmail, playing Xbox, scrolling Instagram, or calling an Uber.

These companies use data centers to store, process, and disseminate data and applications. Data centers are basically huge warehouses filled with computers. Since they are

processing data 24/7, data centers generate a lot of heat and consume a lot of energy.

If these tech companies power their data centers with

electricity generated from the burning of fossil fuels

, that makes the data centers responsible for a significant amount of emissions. Until the energy needed for these data centers comes from clean energy sources, these computer rooms will be

responsible for the majority of these companies’ emissions

Company Scoops ❤🌎💰

(Click to dig in & vote your reaction, see how others feel)

Microsoft

is a huge tech company best known for its products and services like Surface, Xbox, Microsoft Office, OneDrive, Skype, and their cloud platform Azure.

Employees: 181,000
Valued at: $2.2 trillion
Annual Emissions: 11,164,000 metric tons of CO2
Huh?: It would take a forest almost as big as West Virginia to sequester that much CO2 from the air that same year.
What are they doing? Read & react

IBM

sells software, cloud offerings, and IT services worldwide. The company was founded in 1911, so they’re kinda the OG tech people.

Employees: 345,900
Valued at: $127.9 billion
Annual Emissions: 1,327,658 metric tons CO2*
Huh?: It would take a forest the size of Delaware to sequester that much CO2 from the air the same year.
What are they doing? Read & react

Alphabet, Google's parent company,

provides a wide range of free internet infrastructure, from web browsers (Chrome) to communications (Gmail), YouTube, Maps, and more. It makes most of its money in advertising, selling virtual billboard space in its digital world.

Employees: 139,995
Valued at: $1.9 trillion
Annual Emissions: 950,109 metric tons CO2 (Scope 1 & 2 only)**
Huh?: It would take a forest almost as big as Delaware to sequester that much CO2 from the air the same year
What are they doing? Read & react

Cisco

develops and sells tech stuff that helps businesses build and maintain data centers, including IT equipment, servers, routers, security systems, and more.

Employees: 79,500
Valued at: $232.8 billion
Annual Emissions: 25,070,371 metric tons CO2***
Huh?: It would take a forest the size of Mississippi to sequester that much CO2 from the air the same year.
What are they doing? Read & react

Salesforce

creates customer relationship management (CRM) software, offers cloud storage, and computing solutions for businesses.

Employees: 56,600
Valued at: $269.6 billion
Annual Emissions: 283,000 metric tons CO2***
Huh?: It would take a forest less than half the size of Rhode Island to sequester that much CO2 from the air the same year
What are they doing? Read & react

(These links only work for 24 hours while the story is live)

🤓 Inside Scoops...

Achieving

net-zero

involves taking steps to reduce a company's emissions to the lowest amount, so no emissions need to be captured or offset elsewhere.

Carbon neutral

is about balancing emissions by offsetting carbon production with carbon removal or sequestration. This can be achieved by buying 'carbon credits' or funding projects to offset emissions. A company is

carbon negative

when they are removing or sequestering more CO₂ than they are emitting.

Carbon-free

energy comes from resources that generate no carbon emissions. All renewable energy is carbon-free, but not all carbon-free energy is renewable. Nuclear power is a form of carbon-free energy, but it is not renewable because it is produced using uranium, which is a finite resource.

Matching energy consumption with renewable sources

does not mean a company is powering its operations with renewable energy. It means an amount of renewable energy equal to the amount of energy the company consumes is purchased and added to the power grid somewhere.

This Data Isn't Widely Accessible

Corporate emissions reporting is neither standardized nor required yet,

so it is often challenging to find and compare data across companies. Wheels are moving towards standardization and regulation.

Total emissions were sourced from the companies' environmental reports or were calculated by aggregating the individually-reported Scope 1, Scope 2 (market-based), and Scope 3 emissions (unless noted otherwise).

Specifically...

IBM

pledges to specifically address the Scope 3 emissions associated with data center electricity consumption only.

Google

has not disclosed their Scope 3 emissions for 2020, so only Scope 1 and 2 emissions were included in their total. In our research, we couldn't find concrete information on

Google's Scope 3

reduction progress or targets, other than minimizing business travel, encouraging video conferencing, and facilitating sustainable employee commuting options.

*** Microsoft, Google, and Cisco sell products, but from our research, it seems that

Cisco

is the only company accounting for emissions from sold products in their environmental report.

****

Salesforce

will decarbonize their value chain, implement a work-from-anywhere model, and operate more sustainable cloud infrastructure to reduce Scope 3 emissions

Note: All other company profile data sourced from Yahoo Finance, November 2021.