{"id":177609,"date":"2025-09-29T13:24:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T13:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/177609\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T13:24:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T13:24:13","slug":"metas-carbon-emissions-are-absolutely-bonkers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/177609\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta’s carbon emissions are absolutely bonkers"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are deep into a completely new era of greenwashing, where some clever companies and countries have finally understood it makes more sense to erode our shared capacity to measure the hard reality of climate-change-causing gases, rather than to bother with easily debunked offsets.<\/p>\n

Big tech is living this philosophy at every conceivable level, most obviously through the invention and widespread deployment of a machine that fabricates<\/a> text, images and videos based off the mass-theft of most of humanity\u2019s creative digital output.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are rapidly losing friends and family to the \u201clet me just ask ChatGPT\u201d infoslop curse. Increasingly fascist-friendly<\/a> tech companies are now free to spin hidden dials and shift global perceptions of an issue even worse than they could with social media algorithms. But that does not make the hard physics of greenhouse gas molecules, electrons and the roiling heat of the atmosphere any less real.<\/p>\n

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Meta stands out as a fantastic example of a corporation with rapidly rising climate and environmental impacts that aims to deal with them not through traditional greenwashing, but through a subtle and complicated sabotage of how impacts are measured and reported; far more nefarious than anything we\u2019ve seen before.<\/p>\n

Instead of a debate about rhetoric and claims (like Apple\u2019s \u201ccarbon neutral\u201d lawsuit<\/a>), Meta has helped form a coalition of companies (known as the \u201cEmissions First Partnership\u201d) that directly lobbies for the adjustment of how its worst environmental impacts are measured, biased obviously towards minimising the numbers spat out the other end.<\/p>\n

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The context for this push is Meta\u2019s frantic, anxious, infrastructure expansionism frenzy, and it\u2019s worth understanding this before we dive into what it\u2019s lobbying to change. Part one of this series will focus on the company\u2019s current presentation, and part II will focus on its desires and dreams.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s latest sustainability report<\/a> came out only last week, oddly released with zero orchestrated media coverage (I keep a running compilation of big tech climate and energy data here<\/a>). Like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, Meta\u2019s total electricity consumption has been on a massive tear for a half-decade, driven primarily by the expansion of data centres:<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: manual compilation of company emissions data<\/p>\n

To its credit, Meta discloses information down to the level of individual data centres. You can see from this breakdown that most of its energy consumption rise stems not from its own construction of new data centres, but from a massive increase in leasing, and the on-site expansion of facilities in Iowa and Oregon:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: Meta 2025 sustainability report<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t surprising. A few years ago, Meta was forced to fundamentally redesign its data centre capacity, packing existing facilities with mountains of additional hardware<\/a> and even cancelling<\/a> some builds halfway through to redesign them from the ground up. The company clearly hit a wall, shifting towards leasing data centre space from third parties, but it can\u2019t do that forever.<\/p>\n

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This is likely all about to change: Meta is not just only building its own data centres, it is building its own fossil-fuelled power plants to run them. Analyst Nat Bullard recently revealed<\/a> that Meta was the mystery name behind 600 megawatts of new fossil gas in Ohio. \u201cCombined, there is a city\u2019s worth of behind-the-meter, data-center-only power generation being built in one corner of one state\u201d, he wrote<\/a>. In Louisiana, Meta is partnering with Entergy to build a whopping 2,262 megawatts of new fossil gas (Entergy recently announced<\/a> it won\u2019t be hitting its 2030 climate targets thanks to its new fossil-fuelled power stations).<\/p>\n

Meta attributes emissions to its data centres by first taking how much was consumed, and multiplying that by the emissions intensity of the power grid at the time it was consumed. It\u2019s a rough estimate, but it\u2019s the least bad way to guess what the climate impact of power consumption is. Meta, and some various other companies I\u2019ve compiled, look like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: manual compilation of company emissions data<\/p>\n

As you expected, everyone is getting worse, fast. Meta, like others, has chosen to respond to this not by reducing its consumption, but by distorting the reality of how emissions are measured.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The current technique is pretty blunt. Meta purchases what are known as \u201crenewable energy certificates<\/a>\u201d, or RECs. Every time a renewable energy facility generates a megawatt hour of energy, it sells a \u201ccertificate\u201d of clean power output alongside selling the physical unit of electrical energy into the grid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta, in buying that certificate, claims its power consumption had zero emissions. The logic is this: the decision to purchase that certificate was causally necessary in the coming-into-existence of that wind farm. If Meta hadn\u2019t bought that certificate \u2014 if no-one did \u2014 no bank would\u2019ve ever leant cold, hard cash to the developers due to the lack of that additional income stream, and there would be no wind farm.<\/p>\n

I know your head is spinning, but don\u2019t let yourself be dazzled. This is just the weird cousin of carbon offsetting. They call this adjusted figure \u201cmarket-based\u201d emissions, and ensure that it\u2019s this number that\u2019s presented right up top in the headline figures (again to its credit, Meta discloses the \u201cunadjusted\u201d numbers clearly, where others obscure them as much as possible, such as Apple hiding it in auditor report footnotes).<\/p>\n

By changing the basic reality of how it reports its power emissions, Meta\u2019s compliance with its climate goals looks like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meta isn\u2019t denying climate change; nor is it being selective with its disclosures. It is taking a form of carbon offsetting and applying them not on top of reported emissions, but at the most basic structural level of emissions measurement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This technique is beginning to hit a wall. There has been rising scrutiny<\/a> of dodgy claims of zero emissions through the purchase of certificates (sometimes relating to ancient hydro power stations on the other side of the planet). Google, for instance, consumes so much energy it couldn\u2019t sign enough power purchasing deals to fully zero out its power consumption emissions for its latest report. So where to next, now that the renewable well is running dry?<\/p>\n

Stay tuned: part two will explore Meta\u2019s current lobbying efforts to create a new way of zeroing out its greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are deep into a completely new era of greenwashing, where some clever companies and countries have finally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1337,64,63,68,1772,114950,75,114951,1333,2577,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-177609","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-apple","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-climate-change","12":"tag-data-centres","13":"tag-emissions-targets","14":"tag-environment","15":"tag-mark-zuckberg","16":"tag-meta","17":"tag-microsoft","18":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}