Big tech’s pro-climate rhetoric is not matched by policy action, report finds

>Lets strip mine 1000s of tons of rock to get lithium batteries and charge them with coal and claim the cars are climate friendly!

works about as well as their 'self-driving' shtick

We need to be very skeptical of arguments that say “only X%” without explaining what they think the number should be and why. Is there any value of X where this article would not have been written?

I always have appreciated the fact that EVs are future proof- older model vehicles can benefit from clean energy advances in power generation. Today my car may be partially coal powered but tomorrow it could be ??? Compare that to ICE MPG improvements like start-stop tech, while it is a neat development it does nothing for older vehicles

>Tech companies, which have some of the deepest pockets in corporate America, have been racing to come out with increasingly ambitious climate pledges. Amazon has a target to be net zero by 2040 and to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, and Facebook has a target of net zero emissions for its entire supply chain by 2030.

>In 2020, Microsoft pledged to become carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to have removed all the carbon the company has ever emitted. Apple has committed to become carbon neutral across its whole supply chain by 2030.

>And Google has pledged to power its operations with 100% carbon-free energy by 2030, without using renewable certificates to offset any fossil-generated power. “The science is clear, we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable course for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a video announcing the policy.

>Yet this strong pro-climate rhetoric is not being matched by action at a policy level, according to the report. “These gigantic companies that completely dominate the stock market are not really deploying that political capital at all,” said InfluenceMap executive director Dylan Tanner.

So it seems that Big Tech is actually taking concrete steps to become carbon zero, and even carbon negative. The article is complaining that they are not spending enough money lobbying for climate legislation.

I actually think that they are doing the right thing, taking concrete steps to prevent adding more carbon, and actually removing carbon from the atmosphere (Microsoft). And they are at least spending some money lobbying for more climate policy.

However, with regards to climate policy, most governments are where pro-climate rhetoric is not matched by actual action (see Paris Accords, for example). I think Big Tech is actually doing a lot better than a lot of other institutions.

Lithium is not typically mined from rock today, though it may be in the future.

And "concerns" about that mining would carry far more weight if there was also concern about one or both of 1) extracting 1000s of tons of rock for steel and other parts of car manufacturing, or 2) extracting many multiples of that from the earth in the form of fossil fuels, which end up in the atmosphere and change the climate.

If a typical car travels for 200,000 miles, and gets 30mpg, then that car will consume 47,000 pounds of gasoline (requiring even more oil extraction), and emit 128,000 pounds of CO2 in its lifetime.

Though all of my personal political effort is directed at ways for people to live their lives with less car and still live their life as happy or happier, I find gripes about lithium extraction to be completely counterproductive to my goals. For all their faults, EVs' extraction of lithium is an order of magnitude better than the alternative and the status quo. And the people complaining about lithium are not proposing anything better, the are proposing sticking with fossil fuels.