Greening Digital #0 - What to expect
The one sent on the global climate strike day (well, one of them)
Greetings,
I’m writing this from a small rented room in Barcelona after, announcing this newsletter yesterday. Amazingly, enough people have signed up to make this experiment worth going ahead with. Thank you!
I’m still not sure of the best format for this newsletter, and I’m trying this format to bring make it easier to receive thoughtful responses to what I’m writing, and force me to arrange thoughts in a more coherent way.
Here’s the menu today. Skim as you see fit, but if you do, please let me know where did glaze over:
0.1 A litmus test for tech companies that suddenly, visibly care about the climate emergency
0.2 A thing to try if you can’t join a strike, but still care - minimum viable protest
0.3 Link Grab Bag - developments that caught my attention, and are worth monitoring in future.
Cool? Let’s go.
0.1 - A litmus test for tech companies taking the climate emergency seriously
If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I assume you’re aware there’s a global climate strike taking place today, in a good number of large places around the world.
Lots of companies are talking about supporting the strikes, or letting people take time away to attend them, or making announcements to show that they are doing their part too.
And given there’s been this rash of tech companies sharing information about how green they are, I figured it might be nice to open with sharing a simple test I now use to help detect greenwash in tech companies, along with the reasoning behind for each part.
This is informed by my understanding of how bad things really are climate wise, and it really isn’t designed to take away from the heroic efforts from dedicated employees in companies, who are making them better.
Maybe greenwash is too strong a term.
I’d appreciate a better phrase if there is one, but for now, here’s my definition of greenwash I’m working with.
When I see “wash”, added to a term, like greenwash, or purposewash, I take it to mean actions that give the impression of an organisation taking a given issue seriously, that means it gets the credit for doing so.
However, instead of actually following through with the action that you would expect to see if they did take the issue seriously, the organisation invests money in making it look like they are instead, and cuts corners wherever it thinks it can get away with it.
Why this matters
If we want to do the right thing ourselves, because we’re all interconnected, and rely on help from other organisations, this makes the act of choosing who to work with much harder, and it lets organisations get away not doing enough.
Which means, collectively, we keep accelerating towards disaster.
An example
A a good example would be a company like BP plastering display ads about how excited it is about wind power on in its corporate communications, using pics like this:
When you see this, you’d be forgiven for thinking
Look at that happy dog in all the wind! Doesn’t BP stand for something like Beyond Petroleum these days anyway? Maybe things aren’t as bad as people are saying, and we don’t need to do much.
The reality is, investments from big energy companies look more like this set of charts from 2018 in the Graun. It’s got a slightly better of late, but not that much better:
That’s not so good.
So, here’s the test I use now when I’ll be reading the announcements in more detail.
I generally assume greenwash from an organisation if I see a shiny looking website, but I see:
no public commitment to net zero emissions
no public timeline to reach net zero emissions
no public independent audit of progress on the way
no disclosure of % business coming from fossil fuel companies
I’ll run through these in detail now:
No public commitment to net zero emissions
The science has said for years now, that we need to more than just stop increasing emissions. There is a carbon cycle, and we need to stop being net emitters of carbon into the sky.
This might be hard, but the science is basically settled. Settled enough for there to be legally binding targets for countries to be following, and more on the way.
This really needs to be up there in terms of organisational priorities along with we will earn enough money to pay our staff and suppliers. It also needs to be a thing you might be able to ask about if deciding to work with an organisation. Making it public helps.
This is not a niche thing any more. You can see an how many countries and companies already have net-zero targets with this report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
No public timeline to reach net zero emissions
If the science says we need to reach zero emissions, on a specific timeline to avoid the worst impacts from climate change, then we don’t get to negotiate on this timeline, like we might negotiate about which features make it into a release, or when we want to ship something.
When there aren’t public targets, it’s easy for companies to quietly ease off their efforts to change, and delay them - because right now, structurally, there’s a greater incentive to do things like hit a given revenue target by a certain date (We make our bonus! We keep our job!), than reducing emissions by a given date (when was the last time you heard of someone being fired for missing carbon reduction targets?).
There’s a good term from this delay now from Alex Steffen - predatory delay, which I find useful.
This was one of the key things the Amazon For Climate have pushed for, and this was in the shareholder resolution employees used to get the discussion on the table in the first place. Speed is justice.
No public, independent audit of progress along the way
Of an organisation has public targets, and you don’t have to blindly trust a single source with figures or statements where there’s a clear incentive to (see above) to make it look like you’re doing better than you really are, a few things happen.
First of all, there’s at least a chance that that people in leadership positions have to explain why they are missing the targets, to stakeholders.
Secondly, it’s possible to make comparisons between organisations. No one wants to be at the bottom of a league table that everyone else can see, and we know that these are a useful tool to bring about action.
Also, the most commonly accepted ways of tracking your own emissions rely on this. If you want to have an accurate idea of what your the emissions are in an organisation you work in, you really need an idea of what the emissions in your supply chain are. In most orgs, more than half of your emissions from your supply chain.
I’ve now had countless conversations, in public and private sector people which largely go along the lines of “how can I work out my own figures, if I’m reliant on $HUGECORP, and $HUGECORP won’t give me the figures that I depend on to that?”.
This is done right now, but not universally.
Apple does this, including statements from a third party it in their own reports (see appendix C). Google have nice reports about their datacentres but they also get independent verification like this. Even smaller companies at least provide statements from their energy providers.
No disclosure of % business coming from fossil fuel companies
I don’t think this one applies to every organisation, but because once again, the science is utterly settled here, that burning more fossil fuels is incompatible with any targets we might have to avoid further harm from a changing climate.
If it does apply, it’s really, really important, because without this, I really think the enabling of really, really destructive activity will keep happening.
Often companies that otherwise would do pretty well on the top three will still continue to prioritise earning decent sums supporting these companies, while at the same time saying how green and compassionate they are, with no real incentive to stop doing so.
If you had joined a company thinking they really care about science and justice, and then you were assigned to a project to help out one of the fossil fuel giants, there’s a chance you might feel you’re in a position where you can leave, or turn it down. For many people who just want to get on with their lives, that’s much less likely.
There’s also an increasing body of evidence, that making it harder to get cheap finance or insurance fossil fuels, has been one of the key drivers in encouraging them investments in alternative forms of energy. Don’t listen to Bill Gates here, listen to Michael Leibreich instead.
This is already being done in creative agencies in with the Creative Climate Disclosure project. If you’re in a company that already does work with fossil fuel companies, being grown up enough to admit the conflict and talk about it, at least makes it easier to have a discussion about not doing it in future, and give an way out for both parties.
If an organisation isn’t passing this test, is it a bad one?
There will be very few companies that are passing all the tests above. Does this mean they’re all full of terrible greenwashing people?
In a word, no.
So much of this is structural, and I think the system we’re in makes hypocrites of us all.
Ad the same time, I think many of us are in positions where we can push for things like the above, and we know how high the stakes are. I wish there was nice way to say, yeah, the default sucks, but we still need to change it.
0.2 A thing to try if you can’t join a strike, but still care - minimum viable protest
If you’re unable to join the climate strikes, but you still care about the people who will be affected by our changing climate, there’s an interesting thing happening on the #11at11climatestrike hashtag on twitter.
I learned about it in the ClimateAction.tech community, which I’m an active part of.
The idea is as follows:
At 11am, step outside of to work, for 11minutes. This is about as long as a long cigarette break, or cup of tea.
If others join you, use it to start a conversation among you about how you feel about climate at work.
Take a pic, or if you have a sign, include that.
Share however you feel appropriate to create social proof.
After 11minutes head back in.
Repeat on an ongoing basis on Fridays.
This is much easier to start than demanding a full day off, and the main feeling I’ve heard back is relief that they’re not alone in feeling strongly about this.
A number of companies have been doing this for a few weeks now in support of the kids and their #FridaysForFuture protests.
Link Grab bag
Okay, there, this is already too big, but I want to share them with you.
I’m running a meetup around climate and tech in London thus coming Wednesday. Come say hi if you’re in town! I’ll also be doing one in Glasgow in October too, as part of my low carbon developer relationships tour on an interrail pass.
Amazon made a pretty huge announcement last night about aiming for net zero emissions by 2040, and entirely renewable energy by 2030. It passes two of the four criteria for test above. Here’s Amazon’s new microsite. Here’s Amazon For Climate’s response. Here’s my reply on twitter when asked about it.
There’s a bunch of interesting events and discussions around the design of public services in a climate emergency on the #designandclimate hashtag on twitter, and a series of workshops going on around the world exploring it.
There’s some interesting stuff going in Switzerland about coming up with an alternative model to us relying on huge centralised cloud datacentres for the IT services we need, from the folks at OpenComputing.cloud. The approach is largely based on finding ways to use and pay for capacity in existing spare datacentres, to avoid needing to create new buildings full of whirring machines in the first place. This also opens up the possibility of integratin datacentres into the design of cities in a much more complementary way, and use the heat they produce to heat homes, rather than citing them miles away, and using loads more energy trying to get rid of the heat, which is the current default.
It also paves the way for shifting computing workloads to wherever the energy is cleanest and greenest in the world, as discussed in this academic paper released earlier this year, for a low carbon kubernetes scheduler. That paper outlines a working example run on Microsoft’s datacentres, and I’d be surprised if heliocentric computing doesn’t become a thing.
How was that?
I’m still figuring out the format for this whole newsletter. Please let me know which bits worked for you, and which bits didn’t, and I’ll take it into account for the next one.
Thanks!
C