
Microsoft Leads Movement to Offset Emissions with Internal Carbon Tax - adventured
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/business/energy-environment/microsoft-leads-movement-to-offset-emissions-with-internal-carbon-tax.html
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WalterBright
Congrats to Microsoft for being ahead of the curve on this.

The way to reduce CO2 in a simple, straightforward, and fair manner is to tax
it. The "cap and trade" is a complex, inefficient and ultimately silly poor
sister to that.

The same goes for other pollutants. The idea is:

"If you want less of something, tax it. If you want more of something,
subsidize it."

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shoo
First up: Microsoft is doing something progressive here, even if it is only a
little step in the right direction, so they should be commended for it.

That said, the article (annoyingly) doesn't give any information to help the
reader decide if this is a meaningful improvement or not. Neither does
microsoft's "carbon fee impact" report [1].

Here's a crude estimate by looking at the financials from microsoft's 2014
annual report [2]:

    
    
        revenue:		87b
        income tax:		6b
        salaries:		30b	(my crude guess)
        other expenses:	30b	(my crude guess)
        profit:		22b
    
    

To sort-of-emulate the GDP calculation, let's combine profit and salaries into
one USD$52b bucket. Let's round it to USD$50b / year.

The carbon intensity of the US economy is somewhere between 0.4 and 0.3 kg CO2
/ USD$. Let's say it is 0.35 kg CO2 / USD$ [3].

Based upon these figures, assuming that microsoft is a "typical" subset of the
entire US economy (almost certainly not true, but we have no data otherwise),
we might expect it to be responsible for an emissions footprint of USD$50b /
year * 0.35 kg CO2 / USD$ = 17.5 * 10^6 tons CO2 / yr.

Back to the article. The article mentions the figure of a reduction of "7.5
million metric tons of CO2". Note that this isn't a reduction per year, I
believe it is a estimate of lifetime net reduction in CO2 emissions due to the
long-term projects they've funded both internally and externally.

So, now we're in a position to claim (very crudely) something like: assuming
microsoft has a typical carbon intensity for subset of the US economy, the
profit and salaries claimed by microsoft in 2014 indicate that microsoft is
responsible for something like 17.5 million metric tons of CO2 / yr. So, in a
single year, we expect them to produce more than twice as much CO2 pollution
as the total projected lifetime impact of their environmental projects to
date.

That said, it is great that they are doing this! They should merely do more of
it! So should other companies and countries!

[1] [http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-
us/wo...](http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/working-
responsibly/principled-business-practices/environmental-sustainability/)

[2]
[http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar14/index.html](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar14/index.html)

[3]
[http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Friedlingstein...](http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Friedlingstein_2014_Persistent%20growth%20of%20CO2%20emissions%20and%20implications%20for%20reaching%20climate%20targets.NatureG.pdf)

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cmarschner
>assuming that microsoft is a "typical" subset of the entire US economy

As you note yourself, this is where the argument likely falls apart. Given
that you average wirh energy-intensive industries like aluminum production
(well: any kind of production most likely) the figured might be not even in
the right order of magnitude. Energy consumption is probably to a large part
data centers (usually built close to energy sources like dams, though I'm not
sure in the MS case), production and shipping of SKUs (less and less) and
offices for 100k+ employees. Perhaps a large impact is also due to commutes.
Are there any more tangible calculations around this?

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ZoeZoeBee
Rumor has it they've hired VW engineers to help.

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superDaveFunk
LoL, that's assuming they don't bug out.

