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Microsoft Makes Ambitious Carbon Neutral Pledge
Qedward writes "Chief operating officer Kevin Turner says Microsoft will be 'carbon neutral across all our direct operations including data centers, software development labs, air travel, and office buildings' from July 1, the start of the 2012 fiscal year. Turner added: 'We are hopeful that our decision will encourage other companies, large and small, to look at what they can do to address this important issue."
I think this is a great initiative by Microsoft. They have shown that they greatly care about the environment and common good. Not only that, but they spend lots of money on their R&D (Microsoft Research) which has come up with tons of great things that has made the world better.
On top of that Microsoft's founder Bill Gates has spent most of his fortune to help the world, especially for healthcare and making the poor countries better. Even if you don't like MS products you have to have deep respect for them for this reason. Compare this to Google CEO's who spend their money on luxury yachts.
Other companies large and small will probably be wondering why they couldn't just pay less for their MS licenses instead.
Sounds like a lot of hot air to me.
Microsoft to hire Accenture to audit these claims ...
Dog is my co-pilot.
They use a lot of electricity. Unless Microsoft is planning to buy "carbon offset" credits, so they can pollute and yet just handwave it away.
I'd prefer they take a pledge to be megabyte neutral, and learn to develop a new OS that doesn't use any more megabytes of RAM (or virtual ram) then Windows 7. Ditto for Office, Visio, and other products.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I am strongly ambivalent on this story.
Will this help prevent global climate change? To quote Futurama: "Neutral President: All I know is my gut says maybe."
Heh. "Carbon neutral" is mostly a bunch of BS.
The cheapest way to be "carbon neutral" is to hand some country, preferably the cheapest one possible, a bunch of cash to plant some trees that they might have been planning to plant anyway, probably some monoculture to replace hills that had been burned or chopped clear of trees already.
Or you can pay someone to promise not to burn stuff through a project they may not have been wanting to do anyway.
If the world actually tried to make the human race anywhere *near* carbon neutral it *would* be hideously expensive.
"herp derp"
Great that Microsoft is going carbon-neutral, that they're "hopeful that our decision will encourage other companies, large and small, to look at what they can do to address this important issue," but Google's been carbon neutral since 2007:
http://www.industryleadersmagazine.com/how-has-google-managed-to-be-a-carbon-neutral-company-since-2007/
Dell has been carbon neutral since 2008:
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/dell-reaches-carbon-neutrality-goals-5-months-ahead-of-schedule.html
If anything, Microsoft is a bit late to the party. Still, good work.
They are extracting energy from flying chairs. Ba-Dum-Tssssss
839*929
Microsoft's pledge includes their use of the services you mentioned. If all the customers of all airlines, for example, were carbon neutral including their use of air transport, then the problem is solved. Whether that's possible I don't know, but since we are hardly even making an effort yet, large gains are relatively easy.
They aren't just a software company. They have a huge amount of online services which consist of a large number of datacenters and hundreds of thousands of servers around the world. not to mention all their offices and services staff.
...Is sort of like Starbucks pledging to stop using the red bug dye. Some people will say it's responsible of them, but I really don't give a rat's ass.
*I can't believe I'm doing this*
Green is fine (a few things, here and there, as a libertarian, I'd have to differ over, but many of their ideas are sound).
New Green is insane (they're going places which make many of the older Greens say 'WTF').
I am John Hurt.
Since you're arbitrarily comparing Microsoft founders to Google CEOs (as if that was even in any way relevant to his story) it seems a little ironic you'd bring up private yachts, when Paul Allen is infamous for his own "mega yacht"
Are you seriously under the delusion that the climate change brought about by greenhouse gases is going to /improve/ agriculture?
from what I have read on Slashdot,l going green means massive taxes, a completly lock down on personal freedom, and removing the ability for companies to succeed. herp derp.
Good Job MS.
Do you learn everything you know from Slasdot? I mean, if I went by your posts, I'd be miguided, too. Open a book, dummy.
Microsoft is EVIL EVIL EVIL they're a MONOPOLY!!!!!
"Green" is a farse and it IS a way to tax us more, limit our FREEDOMS, and bring our way of life to an END! The fact that MS is involved just proves that "Green" is EVIL!!
AAHHHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHH!! Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg.
*Head assplodes*
This must be a corporation with personhood who's achieved self awareness. Yeah, I guess it would seem bad to this...uh..."person".
I favor people being completely free to do anything that has no impact on shared resources. So build all the coal plants you want, as long as they don't vent to our shared atmosphere. Build a pipeline, but if it spills, you better have insurance sufficient to pay for the worst case cleanup effort. Etc. It's really all pretty straightforward and sane if you think about it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
now if only they could become product neutral.
By my estimates Alcoa uses 22.4 billion kw/h per year smelting Aluminum. (One of the most electricity intensive industries).
All data-centers in the US used 66 billion kw/h and Microsoft has some of the largest data-centers in the world. I'm sure they're not up to Alcoa's standards but they also aren't insubstantial.
Really? How much would that be?
And how much would it cost the world not to become carbon neutral?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
https://pinterest.com/climatebrad/heartland-institute-sponsors/
Looks like almost $60k and they haven't withdrawn their support (yet?)
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
It's also less impressive when you consider that Washington state, where MS is headquartered, produces nearly 75% of its electricity from renewable sources (hydroelectric source) anyway. In effect, MS could easily be making zero effort at all to use "green" energy, and still be able to quote impressive looking figures.
Consider what tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a percent they'd have to drop CPU load in every copy of windows, in order to equal the trivial saving they are attempting to make.
They are going to resurect the dead. Slow down the speed of light. Create a working teleportation machine. Create a device that cleans the air from polutants, it is free to make, does not polute during manufacturing and they are going to give it away!
Yes. We must be very diligent to spend effort to minimize our use of these rare and precious memory. We must save memory for future generations, because if we're not careful, we'll run out. It's become so expensive at $10/GB. What will we do? Help us!
MS can power their data centers from the hot air put forth by Ballmer's mouth. /.
This is the second time I have posted this comment... the first mysteriously disappeared. I am really beginning to wonder who foots the bills at
Silence is a state of mime.
They've managed to fiddle the figures to show virtually no taxable profit, so fiddling them to show zero carbon emissions should be a piece of well-iced cake.
Vik :v)
AS sson as you can keep all the impact form those things only on you property,. go for it. But tyou better gaurentee it, and you better clean of every molecules the goes onto someone else property.
", every company that emits CO2 was going to have to buy offsets from other companies/countries that didn't, and many liberals were planning on taking a percentage of every one of those trades."
well that's completely wrong, . you need to find someone who doesn't actually follow the details of these things to peddle your shit.
I can list a whole bunch or reports and research that's right down the hallway. But instead I will simply point out the lowest common denominator.
If what you said is true, it would be all over the republican ad campaign. Instead we have implied lies that have been thoroughly discredited.
Sorry jackass you are wrong and your view is wrong.
More oil is drilled in US territory the there has been in 50 years
I also can't go into my neighbors yard and shit on his lawn. Oh the terrible lack of freedom I suffer from~! woes is me~ woes~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Half of the MS employees perish in a cave collapse during the company picnic.
The CEO explained to the press that MS had found the way to combine "carbon secuestration" with "reduced operation costs"
Why can't
No, but apparently you learned your sense of humor from nobody.
I read more book before I was 20 then most people read in their lifetimes.
Although now that I have a kindle, I don't even like to read hard copies.
Except for engineering and mathematics.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Furthermore, that's a scheme to make money.
You want freedoms limited? Try building a coal fire power plant. Try putting in an oil pipeline between Canada and the US. Try and drill for oil or get a lease to drill for oil on any federal land.
Now you must be the one trolling or joking. Those aren't personal freedoms.
Finally, you're presumably saying Al Gore et al are bad because they're enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. That's what coal-fired power plants do, UNLESS you make them pay for the external costs (pollution, climate change). Which you're also arguing against.
Solar cells wear out you know...
And they are hardly energy neutral to create.
But I suspect we will need all of the above.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3000/followup-why-dont-we-ditch-nukes-em-and-em-coal
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The manufacture of solar cells and LFP batteries is not a carbon-neutral process. You would need to plant a lot of trees to make up for the coal and oil that was burnt to make your home energy-efficient.
We also have finite resources. It might cost you $10,000 today, but there is almost no demand for household solar. The real marginal cost of solar power adoption would be much higher than that.
Yeah, Jesus Fucking Christ. Microsoft does something good, going carbon neutral by trying to reduce their energy use and paying for carbon capture through trees and such and the entire comment threads are just anti-Microsoft crap:
"Carbon neutral doesn't mean anything"
"Google was already carbon neutral"
"i don't like windows"
"microsoft is going to fake it"
"blah blah blah"
Why can't we just be glad they're doing something they don't need to for social (and sure reputation) good?
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
Don't forget that this is a company whose entire business model is based on planned obsolescence and the endless hardware upgrade treadmill. Without that carbon-belching "ecosystem" of hardware "partners", Microsoft would be toast.
A similarly meaningless situation would occur if Bucyrus, the producer of gargantuan coal strip mining machines, had made their factories "carbon neutral".
I didn't realize that we lived in a socialist economy
I see I have indeed been trolled. Well, good job I guess? May your life measurably improve as a result of me foolishly taking you seriously.
So Microsoft is going green.
Easy for a company that makes ones and zeros.
Not so easy for a steel mill, a trucking company or auto manufacturer.
...omphaloskepsis often...
What about carbon emitted by users fuming at Windows numerous bugs?
Pollution due to throwing away perfectly good computers that user erroneously thought broken due to various Windows problems or Trojan infections?
Maybe we should drop the term "carbon neutral" and call it environmentalism.
Also, is global warming, if it exists, man-made or not? Does it matter? Environmentalism for the sake of less pollution. I don't care if being "green" stops global warming. Stop pollution for the sake of stopping pollution.
I agree that pollution can't be good, so we should stop it irrespective of whether it can be proved to be actually linked to specific badness like climate change. However, Using the term "environmentalism" is a bad idea - to most people, an "environmentalist" is a wannabe do-gooder with no real grasp of reality. You know, the sort that seem to think we should ditch nuclear power because everyone knows that *every* power station chernobyls after a few years and that we can supply our entire power demand with windmills.
And businesses should focus on being more efficient rather than dealing with "offsets".
The whole offsetting or plant-a-tree thing is a complete fraud anyway. You want to be "carbon neutral", so you pay someone to plant a tree. You get a nice feel good glow. In 10-20 years time, someone chops that tree down and uses it for firewood, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere. Unless you can *guarantee* those trees will be protected over geological timescales (hint: you can't), its all a bit of a waste of time and money. Far better to spend that money *actually* reducing your carbon (or other pollution) footprint.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Or you could pocket the money you saved on the solar installation, put it into a 20 year bond, and have $40,000 minus the $8000 in electricity for that interval. Just saying.
A big reason why alternative energy is not taking off, is because the economics are not attractive yet. If the economics were attractive, then there would be a massive demand for solar and wind, and that isn't happening very quickly
Do you have and evidence to support your claim? Or are you just inventing this? I don't see any theoretical reason why we could be net carbon neutral, or even net sequesterers.
Buying cheap is BS? I thought it was the capitalist way.
Note "illegal polluting." That means all the liberal government has to do is define anything as "illegal polluting" in order to implement your authoritarian dream. The concept did make sense for actual pollutants that actually hurt real people now, but that's not what you want. You want them to kowtow to you, bow to your god. Greenpeace was a good example in viciously and unfairly going after Apple in environmental reports purely because Apple refused to play their game (or donate any money) even when Apple had a better environmental record than higher-rated companies.
I agree with that, but only the totally naive think the authoritarianism will be felt only by the companies. This is designed to control people, too. Simple example: Want to force people to stop using incandescent bulbs? Force the companies to stop manufacturing or selling them.
Those of us in the carbon offset industry will smile for the few more years the scheme will last.
It's even worse than that. You'd need to KEEP planting trees so you could replace the cells (both solar and LFP) to keep them running. Going solar isn't a one-time cost, it's an ongoing cost.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Eh, not much. Here is a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Using today's technology, if we build new power plants to produce our electricity from wind power rather than natural gas (the cheapest option) then we pay twice as much per kWh. (That's including standby costs.)
Now obviously using current technology we can't go 100% wind power (something has to *provide* standby), plus we'd need electric cars to reduce carbon emissions from transportation. However we have everything to get started now, and costs from wind power can only go down as operations scale up. In time we'll find the best way to handle standby (e.g. via hydrogen or improved battery technology, electric cars could help). Fossil fuels can only go up in costs, and always mean dependence on other countries in mainly unstable regions of the world.
How much of a price increase that means for an individual is hard to predict - there are many factors: how fast power plants get replaced (cheapest option would be to run them until they would normally go out of service anyway), how soon production costs go down, how much more efficient appliances get etc.
If we end up paying about twice as much for our electricity is that really the end of our lifestyle? Plus we'd have much reduced pollution allowing us to breathe much cleaner air, keep energy producing jobs in the country and would not flood our coastal cities. The US might even keep Florida around, and that's a nice place to retire, I hear.