CSO Connect - 15 Oct.
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Hello !
Welcome to your new fortnightly business and climate briefing, which summarizes everything you ever wanted to know about CSR !
Today's CSO Connect issue includes:
Enjoy... and good luck on your net zero journey!
The Greenly team
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Insights ??
Big Oil vs Big Tech: net zero pledges that go awry or AWOL
After a period of big announcements and all-out net zero forecasts, it's now time to give up bragging. As you may have gathered, greenwashing is gradually being replaced by “greenhushing”. Following the big promises made at the G7 summit in 2021 and the various COPs that followed (up to the one coming up in Baku in November), many of them have now simply abandoned their net zero pledge.
Big Oil: absent without leave
That's what The New Republic reveals this week , explaining point by point how fossil fuel companies are backtracking on what they had planned since 2020. With the Covid crisis and demand at its lowest point in 2020, the oil majors had little choice but to lay low and prepare for a decline in their respective extraction and distribution activities. But the tense geopolitical situation (Ukraine, Iran) and the economic upturn have changed all that. The war in Ukraine has enabled European oil companies to achieve record profits and position themselves as “essential”, with a simple mantra: “the energy transition will be financed with oil”. Whether it's Shell , BP or TotalEnergies: net zero is now a distant mirage, which we'll reach... if we get there! So we might as well put it to one side for now, eh?
Big Tech: go hard or go home
On the tech side, giants Alphabet and Amazon are getting tangled up in dubious net zero claims, as the MIT Technology Review explains . According to the American publication, the problem is not so much getting to net zero as quickly as possible, but rather figuring out how to get there without messing things up. And it lifts the veil on the very average methods employed by Amazon, whose objective is based almost exclusively on credit acquisition (carbon credits and REC - renewable energy credits). Google, for its part, looks like the good guy, declaring that from now on it will no longer purchase carbon emission credits from one year to the next to offset its annual operational emissions, but will concentrate on the electrification of its energy supply.
Now what?
In any case, the targets of the net zero standard will have to be more precise, relevant and useful. The SBTI (Science Based Targets Initiative) is announcing a forthcoming revision of the standard with four main objectives: to align it with the latest scientific advances and best practices, to meet the challenges of scope 3 , to integrate continuous improvement and achieve the targets set, and finally, to improve the structure and interoperability with other standards. This revision should come into force by the end of the year.
?Behind the Numbers ??
Twice as much
There's no stopping China: according to the latest figures, the country is currently developing twice as much renewable energy (solar and wind) as... the rest of the world combined! The result: in some parts of the country, the price of electricity is downright negative . As a result, Beijing is being accused of killing off competition internationally. To curb the outsider's ardor, the EU and the US are imposing high “punitive tariffs” on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles.
领英推荐
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Phony Quote of the Day ???
? We are never going to meet our climate goals anyway ?
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has unshakeable faith in the future... or not! The proof: for him, reducing our CO2 emissions is out of the question, as he believes that “we're never going to meet” the objectives of the Paris Agreement. So, what do we do? Well, we wait patiently for AI to solve the problem . Except... it's not that simple. As you probably know, AI is as water-hungry as a runner in a marathon. Also, the construction of data centers requires the use of a host of rare earth elements, the extraction of which is, in part, complicated, if not downright disastrous. These infrastructures also consume enormous amounts of electricity. According to the very serious International Energy Agency , the global energy needs of data centers could soon reach those of a country like Germany. And that's not all: it's estimated that training an AI similar to GPT-3 swallows up around 700,000 liters of drinking water to cool the servers. So, Eric, what do you think?
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The Unknown Footprint
The iPhone
As Tim Cook celebrates Steve Jobs and Apple releases a new batch of products, we wondered: what exactly is the carbon footprint of an iPhone? According to Apple, an iPhone 13 128 GB emits a total of 64 kg CO2eq, which can be broken down into :
According to Greenly , emissions linked to use - around 10 kg CO2eq - are underestimated as they do not take mobile data into account. Based on the emissions induced by the 4G network in France, we would need to count more like 60 km CO2e for use. ? i.e. a total of 114 kg CO2e for an iPhone 13
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