Unraveling corporate environmental claims can be a daunting task these days, and reading Meta's latest article sustainability report is no exception. Depending on how you look at it, the company's greenhouse gas emissions grew either It fell last year.
Depending on how you look at it, the company's greenhouse gas emissions grew either It fell last year
Confused? The discrepancy is over whether total or net emissions are being assessed and, crucially, whether the local impact that Meta has in the places where it operates is being considered.
It’s helpful to take a look at the chart below, taken from the sustainability report. The light grey bars show Meta’s total “location-based” greenhouse gas emissions. Those bars have been steadily increasing since 2019, reaching a total of 14,067,104 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023. This is a slight increase in planet-warming pollution from last year.
On the other hand, the darker bars in the same chart show that “market-based” emissions have decreased over the past year. Looking at these figures, Meta’s carbon footprint appears to be almost half that, reaching just 7,443,182 metric tons in 2023.
So which figure should we believe? Unsurprisingly, Meta highlights the smaller figure near the top of its report, a couple of pages before the chart. But it’s important to keep both figures in mind, especially considering how difficult it is to determine how effective market-based mechanisms can really be at eliminating fossil fuel pollution that causes climate change.
“On paper they have almost halved their emissions, but it is very difficult to say how much they have reduced them in reality,” says Rachel Kitchin, a corporate climate campaigner at the environmental organisation Stand.earth.
As far as the larger location-based emissions go, he says, “you could argue that’s about what their emissions actually are.” Those taller gray bars on the chart reflect local pollution from the electricity the company uses wherever it’s based. Data centers are typically connected to the local power grid, so they run on the same mix of fossil fuels as everyone else. Most of Meta’s data centers are located in the U.S. Data centers are located in the US.where 60 percent of electricity It still comes from fossil fuels.
But Meta says it matches 100 percent of your electricity consumption comes from renewable energy purchases, allowing you to show a much smaller carbon footprint on paper. You can do it through something called a Renewable Energy Certificate, either REC, which represents a claim for the environmental benefits of renewable energyPower companies that generate renewable energy can sell both the electricity and the REC, which is supposed to provide additional revenue to support the development of new renewable projects.
Companies like Meta can ostensibly cancel out or offset carbon emissions from their electricity consumption by purchasing those RECs. Unfortunately, the math doesn't always add up in the real world. Companies often overestimate how much greenhouse gas emissions they think they're reducing through RECs, a Study 2022 115 companies were found. The problem is that RECs have become so cheap that selling them is not necessarily enough to finance new clean energy projects.
There are ways around those pitfalls, however. That's why it's worth looking at Meta's market-based emissions, which take into account RECs and other commitments to support renewable energy growth.
Buying locally makes a big difference. Companies like Meta can agree to buy pooled RECs specifically tied to new renewable energy projects in the same region where they operate. That way, they can help get more clean energy onto the local grid and into local homes, businesses, and data centers. Commitments to match electricity use with renewable energy on a permanent basis, rather than on an annual accounting basis, can also have a bigger impact, as they incentivize the construction of additional clean energy sources that can offset each other when the sun isn’t shining or the winds are calm.
Buying local makes a big difference
Meta says supporting new wind and solar projects near its data centers is a priority. economic impact study A study it conducted last year found that its support for 86 new wind and solar projects in 24 US states should add up to 9,800 MW of renewable energy to local grids by 2025. By comparison, Texas had more than 15,000 MW of large-scale solar power capacity as of last year.
“I would say that from reading their report, it seems that Meta has generally taken a high-impact approach to renewable energy,” Kitchin says. This week, for example, Meta announced a new initiative to develop geothermal energy for new data centers.
Finding new sources of clean energy has become even more challenging due to the high energy consumption required to train new ai tools. “As we want to build more data centers, it will be very important for the power grids around us to continue to decarbonize,” said Urvi Parekh, director of renewable energy at Meta, on a call with The edge This week, our data centers are online 24 hours a day so that users can access products like instagram, WhatsApp and others. And the great thing about geothermal energy is that it can also supply electricity 24 hours a day.
There is still much work to be done. Meta obtained 8.5 percent of its renewable energy purchases from less efficient and disaggregated RECs, according to an assessment of renewable energy spending by technology companies that Stand.earth published Earlier this year, Meta would not confirm in an email whether that figure is still accurate, only that unbundled RECs represent a “small percentage” of its portfolio. Meta says it mostly enters into long-term agreements to buy renewable energy from new projects.
But whether you look at location or market-based emissions in its latest sustainability report, Meta's carbon footprint is still significantly higher than it was in 2020. That's the year it tech.facebook.com/ideas/2020/9/facebooks-path-to-net-zero/”>Fiance achieve net-zero emissions by 2030 across its operations, supply chain and consumer use of its products. It is now even further from that goal than when it started.
