At scope 3 when you are leveraging industry average values... you aren't talking about material decisions on your business (or shouldn't be). When your corporate decisions are distinct from industry norms it is easier to measure and more directly under your control. Two examples stand out from Microsoft's Scope 3 emissions omissions (to …
At scope 3 when you are leveraging industry average values... you aren't talking about material decisions on your business (or shouldn't be). When your corporate decisions are distinct from industry norms it is easier to measure and more directly under your control. Two examples stand out from Microsoft's Scope 3 emissions omissions (to take a large example with a reputation for being climate aware): their new campus remodel and their Data and AI services utilization by companies in the Permian Basin.
The new campus is meant to be net-zero in operations, to much fanfare. But before building it a significant facility that was not at end of life was torn down to make room, the rebuilt campus has significant embodied carbon in the vast quantities of concrete, and a proliferation of underground parking ensuring a long tail of personal emissions from the personal vehicles leveraging that capacity over its lifetime. These emissions don't count anywhere in Scope 1 or 2, obviously, but the central planning for the corporate campus remodel is exactly the point of intervention to influence this 30-year legacy physically embodied in the form of the facility. The same goes for Apple or Amazon or Google's corporate campus remodels. Because the corporate goal is public credit for compliance, rather than emissions control, there is no incentive to go out of one's way to own such decision making, even when such decisions are only ownable by that corporation.
In use of services sold when you are providing cloud software services it can be challenging to foresee all ends for a given piece of software. Does the email provided by exchange server have a material impact on ExxonMobile's emissions tail from extracted oil and natural gas? That's a long draw of the bow to make stick. But in some specific and material examples it is very easy - the corporate PR already has done the work. When Microsoft penned deals in the Permian with Chevron and ExxonMobile they announced 50,000 BPD capacity impact for the use of cloud services within the Permian Basin for one of those projects - and oil production is a promise by the market to burn that oil (people aren't collecting it to put on shelves to admire). Those emissions alone would dwarf the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions for Microsoft at the time (forward looking, the AI-Data Center boom might start to rival that directly) - and it was the in-house PR department that already worked the numbers. The choice to leave this out of emissions accounting is deliberate and exposes the whole reason Scope 3 accounting must be advocated for by external regulatory bodies - the corporate machine is seeking permission to operate (the positive PR) and not seeking to control their emissions for the sake of controlling their emissions. We've externalized that environmental health in our economic thought, to our own detriment, and until we go full-Deming, where it becomes the responsibility of the Corporation to exist in a system of profound knowledge, this forcing function needs to come from the outside.
At scope 3 when you are leveraging industry average values... you aren't talking about material decisions on your business (or shouldn't be). When your corporate decisions are distinct from industry norms it is easier to measure and more directly under your control. Two examples stand out from Microsoft's Scope 3 emissions omissions (to take a large example with a reputation for being climate aware): their new campus remodel and their Data and AI services utilization by companies in the Permian Basin.
The new campus is meant to be net-zero in operations, to much fanfare. But before building it a significant facility that was not at end of life was torn down to make room, the rebuilt campus has significant embodied carbon in the vast quantities of concrete, and a proliferation of underground parking ensuring a long tail of personal emissions from the personal vehicles leveraging that capacity over its lifetime. These emissions don't count anywhere in Scope 1 or 2, obviously, but the central planning for the corporate campus remodel is exactly the point of intervention to influence this 30-year legacy physically embodied in the form of the facility. The same goes for Apple or Amazon or Google's corporate campus remodels. Because the corporate goal is public credit for compliance, rather than emissions control, there is no incentive to go out of one's way to own such decision making, even when such decisions are only ownable by that corporation.
In use of services sold when you are providing cloud software services it can be challenging to foresee all ends for a given piece of software. Does the email provided by exchange server have a material impact on ExxonMobile's emissions tail from extracted oil and natural gas? That's a long draw of the bow to make stick. But in some specific and material examples it is very easy - the corporate PR already has done the work. When Microsoft penned deals in the Permian with Chevron and ExxonMobile they announced 50,000 BPD capacity impact for the use of cloud services within the Permian Basin for one of those projects - and oil production is a promise by the market to burn that oil (people aren't collecting it to put on shelves to admire). Those emissions alone would dwarf the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions for Microsoft at the time (forward looking, the AI-Data Center boom might start to rival that directly) - and it was the in-house PR department that already worked the numbers. The choice to leave this out of emissions accounting is deliberate and exposes the whole reason Scope 3 accounting must be advocated for by external regulatory bodies - the corporate machine is seeking permission to operate (the positive PR) and not seeking to control their emissions for the sake of controlling their emissions. We've externalized that environmental health in our economic thought, to our own detriment, and until we go full-Deming, where it becomes the responsibility of the Corporation to exist in a system of profound knowledge, this forcing function needs to come from the outside.