Newsletter: An OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries on men it describes as “subhuman”, and promoting misogynist ideas sourced from online incel forums.
“Without surgery, you won’t mog genetically superior guys head-on,” it tells one man.
Ich wollte eigentlich schon ins Bett, habe mir aber noch ein paar Videos von YouTube vorschlagen lassen. Bin dabei auf diesen Clip gestoßen. Ein absolut geiler Auftritt von Matthias Kümmert und Beth Hart in Bremen. Der Hammer. Beide sind Ausnahmekünstler und dann auch noch eines meiner Lieblingsstücke. So muss der Blues klingen.
@binary_kitchen hat jetzt einen Kaffeeröster (und dafür keine Popcornmaschine mehr). Wir haben sie umgebaut mit Temperatursensor und SchnickSchnack und können jetzt alles wiederholgenau rösten. Kaffeebohnen zB. github.com/smicbee/CoffeeRoast
chomsky bets the differ 😛 "The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains."
However, politicians exist to convince voters that everything is ok as they pass policy that funnels wealth away from them and to the lobbyists that got them into power.
Civil servants make this happen.
Unfortunately, in this dystopian world, the people serve the people whom the government serve.
#Russia militarism and rewriting of history continues - the administration of #Voronezh unearthed a time capsule buried in 2000 and opened it, after which town’s mayor read the letter stored inside. Except for this second paragraph:
No one needs war, not anyone. We have lived through them — civil war, the Great Patriotic War, the Afghan War, the Chechen War — and let them remain in the 20th century.
After skipping this paragraph he said the following, completely reversing the message from 2000:
The military operation is still ongoing. Once again, we are forced to defend our right to life and freedom. I believe that we will prevail and that we will fulfil what has been imposed upon us.
The missing fragment was however spotted by Alexandr Shtefanov t.me/alexandrshtefanov/9882 on the photo published by the mayor.
В Воронеже вскрыли капсулу времени из 2000-го года. Оно начинается со слов
18+ НАСТОЯЩИЙ МАТЕРИАЛ ПРОИЗВЕДЕН, РАСПРОСТРАНЕН ИНОСТРАННЫМ АГЕНТОМ ШТЕФАНОВЫМ АЛЕКСАНДРОМ АНДРЕЕВИЧЕМ
«Не нужны войны, никому и никакие.
Quarter pound burgers sold in supermarkets and butchers are too fat and not wide enough. It's like having a massive meatball in the middle of a bun three sizes too big.
Paris Saint-Germain ist am Ziel der Träume. Beim 5:0 im Finale ragt ein 19-Jähriger heraus, der auch beim FC Bayern mal im Gespräch war. Für einen DFB-Nationalspieler ist der Abend doppelt bitter.
Die labern von "länger arbeiten bis zur Rente". In welcher Welt leben die? Ich schicke seit seit Monaten Dutzende Bewerbungen raus und werde nicht ein Mal auch nur zu Erstgesprächen eingeladen bevor die Standard-Absage per Mail kommt. Mit 56.
Die labern von "länger arbeiten bis zur Rente". In welcher Welt leben die? Ich schicke seit seit Monaten Dutzende Bewerbungen raus und werde nicht ein Mal auch nur zu Erstgesprächen eingeladen bevor die Standard-Absage per Mail kommt. Mit 56.
Ich bin ja grade auf Jobsuche. Und habe mir mal in meinem Blog etwas den Frust über meine Beobachtung zum Arbeitsmarkt, speziell (aber wahrscheinlich nicht nur) in "meiner" ach so hippen, innovativen, modernen und "jungen" Branche von der Seele geschrieben.
Ist ein längerer Text geworden, wie das so passiert beim therapeutischen Schreiben.
Nun du hast die falsche Qualifikationen. Versuch es mal mit Arschkriechen und Ja-Sagen. Das haben die drauf und deshalb haben die den Job und du nicht. Wer nicht moralisch Flexibel ist, der hat keinen Platz in Merzens Deutschland. Zumindest ist es, dass was ich aus allem entnehmen kann was die CXU in der letzten Zeit sich hier geleistet hat.
Ist in der Schweiz nicht besser. Es wird verlangt: Den Job bereits schon 4 Jahre gemacht, Total 30 Jahre Berufserfahrungen, min. Bachelor, alle Zertifikate und max. 35 Jahre alt. Ich suche mit über 60zig seit 18 Monate. Die meisten IT-Jobs sind als Systemtechniker (Netzwerk, Server) ausgeschrieben.
Willkommen im Club. 38 Bewerbungen und nur ein Vorstellungsgespräch. Von den meisten noch nicht einmal eine Antwort. Jetzt zum 01.08. ein Job. Aber was für ein Stress. 🥵🥵🥵 Mit 57 Jahren! 🤷♂️
@andijah Grafikdesign/Mediengestaltung. Von alles was man in Print machen kann bis fast alles was man in digital machen kann (ich kann - und will - keine TikTok-Reels.) inklusive Consulting, fachliches Projektmanagement, von Konzept bis Produktion. Heißt: klassisch überqualifiziert.
Am liebsten würde ich die Seiten wechseln und nicht mehr in eine Agentur sondern z.B. in eine Marketingabteilung.
@grouchox Grafikdesign / Mediengestaltung. Und es gibt in dem Bereich fast nix, das ich nicht schon gemacht habe. Was mich wahrscheinlich "überqualifiziert", ergo "teuer" macht.
Das ist so das Ding. Die Firmen suchen billig, um den Preis der Planlosigkeit. Aber es gibt eben demographisch niemanden mehr. Ich frage mich, wann das Umdenken beginnt.
Der Witz ist, dass sie - in meiner Branche jedenfalls, aber ich denke, das ist nicht exklusiv - über hohe Fluktuation jammern und dass Leute nach "grade Mal 3 Jahren weiter springen" im Job-Hopping Game, weil teures ständiges Onboarding und sobald endlich Routine da ist alles von vorn. Holen aber niemanden, bei dem sie ziemlich safe davon ausgehen könnten, dass sie ihnen die 10-15 Jahre bis zum Rentenalter erhalten bleiben würden, solang sie nicht komplett toxische Umgebungen sind.
ich hatte das schon vor 12 jahren … mit über 55 bist du müll … gleichzeitig jeden tag ein artikel in der zeitung: die wirtschaft klagt über riesigen fachkräftemangel … 🎸🚲
Das tut mir leid und, ja, die Politik adressiert dieses weit verbreitete Problem nicht.
Vielleicht hilft das:
Eine Kollegin erzählte mir am WE vom „Eingliederungszuschuss“, der Arbeitgebern die Anstellung älterer Mitarbeitender schmackhaft machen soll. Ist wenig bekannt.
Meine Ü60-Kollegin hat AG in Bewerbungen darauf hingewiesen, dass es das gibt, und so eine Stelle bei einem StartUp mit wenig finanziellem Spielraum gefunden.
Ich wünsch dir trotz allem viel Glück! Ich erinnere mich, als ich mit knapp 40 vom Freiberuflerdasein aus mal eine Anstellung suchte und zu hören bekam, sorry, ich sei über 35, das gehe gar nicht. Journalismus. Zu alt = zu erfahren = zu teuer = potentiell zu aufsässig. Da ich erst nächstes Jahr in Rente gehe, sollte ich es nochmal versuchen?
Du missverstehst das. Du sollst nicht da arbeiten wo Du meinst das Du richtig aufgehoben bist, sondern da, wo billige Arbeitskräfte benötigt werden. Wart ab, bis zur Bekämpfung der Altersarmut die Ausnahme auf den Mindestlohn für ältere Arbeitssuchende kommt.
Ja, und dass es Frauen ab meinem Alter immer noch noch schwerer haben als ich ist besonders absurd, weil da ja im Normalfall nicht einmal mehr die üblichen Vorurteile "könnte Kinder kriegen" und "wird wegen dauernd kranker kleiner Kinder in Kita oder Schule ständig ausfallen" zutreffen. Also nicht mal "theoretisch".
jup. Ich hab mit mehr Glück als Verstand mit 48 nochmal gewechselt, aber das war in Frankfurt. Da geht immer irgendwas, zur Not Zeitarbeit. Hast du da mal angefragt? Hab über ZA mehrfach gute Jobs bekommen, wo ich dann übernommen wurde. Gibt sicher immer noch Arbeitgeber, die auf die Art testen, bis wer passt. Und war nie öde, bis ich was gefunden hab, was auch mir passt. Da ist auch Alter nicht so das Problem.
ich hab ja noch einen Job, aber ich glaube mit meiner nicht vorhandenen Ausbildung, Abitur und Führerschein, und nur "30 Jahre Erfahrung", würde es mit 55 auch recht schwer werden, irgendwo nochmals neu Fuß zu fassen. Es sei denn die Kontakte die ich mir über viele Jahre aufgebaut habe, könnte ich aktivieren. Daher bleibe ich meinem derzeitigen AG auch treu, auch wenn es zunehmend schwerer fällt, wenn ich mir manche Entscheidungen anschaue. Angebote kommen ab und zu noch.
Kontakte sind ja nie verkehrt, aber im aktuellen Arbeitsmarkt stellt sich mir die Frage, ob Kontakte einem dennoch einen Job vermitteln können, der dann auch langfristig hält.
Für mich selbst bin ich da inzwischen sehr pessimistisch.
LinkedIn und ab und zu Glassdoor und tatsächlich vor kurzem bei XING. Obwohl das eigentlich tot ist. Du musst aber halt ein gepflegtes Profil haben. Ich suche ja nicht wirklich, vielleicht hilft das auch. Und Anfrage und Angebot ist ja noch lange nicht "Interessant und genommen"
Über LinkedIn bekomme ich einiges rein (aktivieren, dass man einen Job suche, im Profil), wobei ich das meist auch auf den anderen Portalen finde. Ich bin da wenig bis fast nicht aktiv, aber halte zumindest das Profil aktuell. Ein Parallelcheck mit anderen Jobportalen (bzw. auch immer ein Blick auf die eigentliche Homepage eines Anbieters) hilft auch ein bisschen, die Scams auszufiltern. Und nein, ist kein bezahltes Profil, ich zahl kein SoMe, das trotzdem meine Daten zieht.
die meinen ja so Knochenjobs wie Bäcker*innen, Verkäufer*innen, Paketausfahrer*innen - also gerne schlecht bezahlte. Und ungelernt kannst du auch in der Pflege für Mindestlohn deine Gesundheit und deinen Schalfrhythmus ruinieren - in jedem Alter.
@AchimTheobald Ich sehe keinen Vorteil darin, an einer Autobahn zu liegen, auf der man dennoch mindestens 200km fahren muss, um in das nächstgelegene zivilisierte Gebiet ohne im Outback streunende Wolfsrudel zu gelangen..
@DanKen Es geht nicht um "ruhig". Ruhig hab ichs hier auch. Es geht darum, dass jemand dort bundesweit nach Fachpersonal sucht in einer Branche, in der mindestens hybrides Arbeiten zum Standard gehören sollte, aber die drauf bestehen, dass man da hin umziehen soll.
immerhin ist es ein Katzensprung nach Pilsen. Was ich lustig fand, die ersten Bilder die ich sah, als ich danach suchte, waren Bilder verschneiter Landschaften...
Ein Witz, dass noch keiner JournalistIn in den letzten Wochen eingefallen ist, mal diese Frage zu stellen. Oder wie der "Fachkräftemangel" dazu passt, dass große Unternehmen zehntausende Stellen in dieser Altersgruppe frühverrenten.
Es gibt seit vielen Jahren eine … ahem … Diskrepanz zwischen den Ideen des Wirtschafts-Akademiker*innen-Elfenbeinturms und der Realität der Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Diese beiden Meinungsmengen scheinen weitestgehend überschneidungsfrei zu sein. Und es ist auch keine Seite daran interessiert, das zu ändern.
@_RyekDarkener_ Die tatsächlichen Wirtschafts-Akademiker - also die, die forschen - sind da sogar völlig up-to-date. Das ist ne andere Blase, die da den Anschluss verpasst hat. Aber leider an der Macht ist.
@_RyekDarkener_ Ich bin kein Freund von Wissenschaftsbashing. Die Wirtschaftswissenschaften sind viel weiter als Politiker und/oder angebliche "Wirtschaftsexperten", die am Ende auch nur in Posten reingeerbte Leute genau ohne oder mit Jahrzehnte veraltetem wissenschaftlichen Background sind.
Es geht mir nicht um Bashing. Aber ich habe – gerade im wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Bereich – den Eindruck, dass sich da jeder sehr wohl in seiner Ecke fühlt und der Rest der Bevölkerung sowie eine funktionierende Zivilgesellschaft nur temporäre Randerscheinungen sind. Insbesondere auf LinkedIn – trotz der handwerklich hohen Qualität der Beiträge.
@_RyekDarkener_ Wie gesagt: solange du zwischen der wirklichen Forschung (von der halt kaum wer was mitkriegt - auch, weils nicht zu dem passt, was die "Experten" sagen, die dauernd in der Öffentlichkeit Zeug sagen) und den Lobbyisten, die eben keine Forscher sondern Industrie-Lobbyisten sind, auch wenn sie als "Experten" in der Öffentlichkeit dargestellt werden unterscheidest und die letzteren meinst bin ich dabei.
Würde mich auch interessieren, wo ich mit 65 oder so einen Job als IT-Muckel kriegen soll. Ich kann ja jetzt schon „nur“ noch als Architekt losziehen, weil man mit 50 als Coder nicht mehr genommen wird…
@zappes Im alten muss man gefälligst aufsteigen. Das ist aber eine Pyramide und es gibt zu wenig Führungsrollen, damit jeder ab 40 Teamleiter aufwärts geht.
Das Altern auf der Position, Karriere als Senior ist zu progessiv.
Dazu kommt, dass durch die Demokratie eben keine Horde 25er mehr angeschossen kommt. Vielleicht möchten Coder Coder bleiben (oder in allgemein operativer Bereich), im Gehalt aufsteigen, aber kein Management.
Preislich würde sich das mit kleinerem Seniorteam genau so rechnen wie mit inflationären Post-Teenies, weil die Arbeit schneller geht und dann mehr Output da ist.
Bin kurz vor der 61, habe nur mittlere Reife und bin männlich. Selbst mit zwei Ausbildungen, diversen Zusatzqualifikationen suche ich mich ebenfalls seit zwei Jahren dumm und dämlich. Ich bekomme oft noch nicht mal eine Absage...
Wenn wir dann alle in entsprechendem Alter sind, tun wir uns zusammen und machen eine Seniorengilde auf, die die ganzen Probleme löst, die Gen Y + Z trotz KI nicht hinbekommen.
Gute Idee. Wäre zwar nicht nötig, hätten wir denen die Lösung der Probleme, die wir verursacht haben, nicht bereits komplett aufgedrückt, aber lieber spät als nie 😄
Du vermischst grad systemisch mit individuell. Das geht immer schief. Entweder reden wir über komplette Jahrgänge/Generationen, oder wir reden über Individuen. Da nach Gusto hin und her zu schwenken macht keinen Sinn. Das ist wie beim Patriarchat: Männer haben Privilegien gegenüber Frauen. Systemisch. Aber nicht jeder einzelne Mann kann davon profitieren. Was aber das systemische Problem nicht widerlegt.
Teilweile habe wir das verursacht, teilweise geerbt und weiter verschlimmert. Gelöst oder verbessert haben wir davon nichts. Und derzeit sind es Boomer und GenX die die Millenials und Folgegenerationen aktiv daran hindern, etwas daran zu ändern.
Wir können helfen. Aber es gibt keinen Grund zur Überheblichkeit. Im Gegenteil.
@jensscholz Sorry aber das ist schlicht nicht richtig.
1. Die meisten von Dir genannten Probleme sind geerbt von den Gen vor X.
2. Die meisten Probleme werden gerade von Gen X bearbeitet (auch wenn es Jahrzehnte dauert) und ist noch 20 Jahre am ackern bevor Gen Y + Z alleine da steht.
3. Gen X vererbt dies NICHT an die Generationen nach uns.
Du scheinst Boomer und X nicht zu trennen und Du scheinst zu ignorieren, dass Gen X ja noch 20 Jahre Zeit bleibt.
@markus @jensscholz Als Millenial [* 1981-1996] sehe ich die Generation X [* 1965-1980] als Ganzes eher wenig zum Problem beitragen oder gar das Problem zu verstehen (wollen). YMMV.
Auch hier wieder, wie schon angesprochen: systemisch vs. individuell. Ich zweifle nicht daran, dass einige Angehörige der Generation X sich ernsthaft um Lösungen bemühen und daran aktiv arbeiten.
@joschi @markus "...oder gar das Problem zu verstehen (wollen)."
wie sich ja gerade auch wieder zeigt.
(Mal ab von der Ironie der Projektion, mit der er hier angefangen hat, Generationen anzupissen und sich dann persönlich angefasst fühlt, obwohl ihn individuell niemand für irgendwas verantwortlich macht.)
@jensscholz @joschi "wie sich ja gerade wieder mal zeigt"? Das ist doch Unsinn. Ich lerne sehr gerne dazu, aber bislang kamen nur widerlegte Behauptungen und nicht haltbare Beschuldigungen gegen eine Generation, die so viel für Klimaschutz usw getan hat, wie keine andere zuvor.
Übrigens bin ich nicht "angefasst". Ich warte nur darauf, dass wir mal zu den belastbaren Fakten kommen. Hier wurde eine Behauptung aufgestellt und ich warte auf deren Beleg. That's all.
@jensscholz @joschi Beleidige mich gerne weiter in jeder Art die Du willst (was ja mehr über Dich als über mich sagt), aber ehrlich gesagt bin ich wohl blind: *Welche* Behauptung von mir wurde widerlegt, *wann/wo* und *durch welchen Fakt*? 🤔
@markus @joschi Es gibt mehr als einen semantischen Unterschied zwischen "du hast mich beleidigt" (hab ich nicht) und "Ich fühle mich getriggert" (was offensichtlich der Fall ist).
Wobei ich dich natürlich inzwischen nur noch vorführe, das gebe ich freimütig zu.
Der Grund ist, dass wir inzwischen alle wissen, dass du Sealioning betreibst, daher ist es müßig, was anderes zu tun als dich entweder zu ignorieren (wie die meisten) oder halt noch ein bisschen weiter zu beschäftigen.
@jensscholz @joschi Erstens: Jemand vorzuführen *ist* eine Art ihn zu beleidigen.
Zweitens: Entgegen Deiner Annahme betreibe ich *kein* "Sealioning" (auch wenn Du es aus Deinem Blickwinkel so wahrnehmen magst) sondern versuche lediglich eine *ernsthafte und faktenbasierte* Diskussion zu führen. Leider entziehst Du Dich dieser, und beschränkst Dich darauf, mir "Sealioning" und anderen Quatsch zu unterstellen.
Sehr schade, denn ich denke, wir sind gar nicht so weit auseinander.
@markus @joschi Erstens: Das tue ich "inzwischen", nicht von Anfang an.
Zweitens: Du bist ein Paradebeispiel für Sealioning, "ich will eine ernsthafte Diskussion führen" ist ein so treffender Teil des Tropes, dass es schon wieder unfreiwillig komisch ist.
Dein einziger Punkt war, dass Millennials und GenZ nichts zustandebekommen und "wir" ihnen helfen müssen. Das ist weder "faktenorientiert" noch ernsthaft und das ist lange beantwortet. Daher ist da auch nix mehr zu diskutieren.
Zweitens: Da liegst Du vollständig falsch. "Sealioning" geht von einem *bösen Willen* aus. Den habe ich nicht, aber den unterstellst Du mir. Exakt dieser böse Wille ist aber der kleine Unterschied zwischen "Nachbohren" und "Sealioning".
Drittens: Empirische Beobachtung; ein Fakt *in meinem Umfeld* (YMMV). Die Studienlage ist m. E. bestenfalls "uneindeutig". Tatsächlich meinte ich dieses Zitat auch nicht völlig ernst.
@markus *huschrein* Sealioning - wie Mansplaining, Ableismen, manchmal auch Rassismen o.ä. - setzt keinen bewussten "bösen Willen" oder Absicht voraus, sowas passiert. Weil Internalisierungen, erlente Rollenmuster, Privilegienblindheiten u.ä.. Das Problem ist da nicht, DASS es einem mal passiert. Das Problem beginnt dann, wenn man, wenn jemand einen drauf aufmerksam macht, reflexhaft abgewehrt wird statt zu reflektieren und eventuell was zu ändern. *huschtwiederraus*
Äh... nö. Siehe u. a. Wikipedia / Oxford Disctionary: "Dabei täuscht die als Sealion bezeichnete Person Höflichkeit und Interesse an einer Diskussion vor, ..." - Vortäuschen ist ganz klar ein böser Wille. Ich täusche nichts vor, ich interessiere mich *wirklich* für die These "Generation X blockiert". Das "Vortäuschen" ist der eigentliche Kern des Wortes.
Aber okay, kein Ding, wenn Ihr nicht diskutieren wollt, wird ja keiner gezwungen! Dann lassen wir's gut sein!
Manno, und ich bräuchte dringend Leute wie Dich, hab aber kein Budget und die Arbeitszeitinvestition würde sich erst in ein oder zwei Jahren rentieren.
ich stimme dir total zu, dass es eine Katastrophe ist. Reine Ideologie. Agism in einer Leistungsgesellschaft. Ich habe in meiner Erfahrungswelt nach Beispielen gesucht. Bei uns wurden "ältere" männliche Bewerber auch nicht genommen, aber das lag daran, dass sie als überhebliche Selbstdarsteller rüberkamen. Einer wurde eingestellt, aber der hat sich von Frauen nichts sagen lassen. Vielleicht verpestet zusätzlich zu Agism die toxische Männlichkeit einiger die Chancen aller anderen.
Das kann sein, eventuell verballern sich entsprechende Menschen - Männer - in entsprechenden Einstellungsgesprächen ihre Chancen mit internalisiertem patriarchalem Duktus der 80ger und 90ger oder fallen während der Probezeit entsprechend auf und zu recht raus.
Dazu muss man allerdings auch erst einmal überhaupt zu einem Gespräch eingeladen werden. Ich krieg' ja nicht einmal diese Chance.
ohje. Das tut mir leid. Ich fürchte halt, dass sie auch für andere die Chance verballern, nicht nur für sich selbst. Also zusätzlich zu den anderen Vorurteilen würde dieser Verdacht hinzukommen.
@caralara Das würde in den Fall zutreffen, wir hätten in den Technikbranchen außer im PMO und Sekretariat stetig steigende Frauenanteile.
Dann sind es einfach die simplen Zahlen, dass Berufseinsteiger charakterlich noch ungefestigt sind und fürs halbe Geld arbeiten. Ebenso preislich abgewertet werden Kollegen mit ausländischen Abschlüssen und Deutsch schlechter als C1.
Ich finde es toll, dass du das thematisierst, ich kenne das selbst aus der Vorgeneration in der Familie und irgendwann werden auch die 20 jährigen mal 50, weswegen ich schon früh mit Solidaritätsbekundungen angefangen habe. Wenn man das anfänglich weiss hat man schon fast keine Lust anzufangen.
Oft fehlt es an Empathie und 17 jährige Rekruter finde ich in jedem Alter ungeeignet eine professionelle Stelle für Berufserfahrene mit mitunter bewegtem Lebenslauf zu vermitteln.
Tatsächlich gibt es da draussen Firmen, die gezielt nach Erfahrung suchen, die Rekruter selbst erfahren und in guten Positionen.
Diese Massenportale sind schon für Berufseinsteiger mies und entgegen eines gutes Rotweins reifen die im Alter nicht nach.
Danke für den Blogpost, bin gerade in der fast gleichen Situation: Mitte 50 und arbeitssuchend, die letzten 10 Jahre in der gleichen Firma, die sich nun auflöst.
Apply for a Frontend Engineer II career at Storyblok. Our team is made up of smart, passionate individuals who excel in their work. With a dynamic team spanning 45+ countries, we're not just breaking boundaries; we're redefining them!
At least they don’t tell you that they and their partners totally care about your privacy. But yes, in this case I also see it as especially problematic.
@alex_mastodon Da steckt ja schon wieder das falsche Dilemma drin, dass Werbung nur mit Usertracking oder gar nicht möglich wäre. @jzakotnik @larsmb @der_mit_ph
Eigentlich wollte Novak Djokovic lieber Fußball schauen. Doch dann machte er auf dem Tennisplatz kurzen Prozess. So konnte er zumindest die Siegerehrung des Champions-League-Finales noch im TV sehen.
Es ist eine Demontage: PSG fertigt Inter Mailand mit 5:0 ab und gewinnt den ersten Champions-League-Titel der Vereinsgeschichte. Die Italiener blieben über 90 Minuten blass.
Die Islamisten akzeptieren den Kern eines Plans für eine Waffenruhe im Gaza-Krieg. Mehrere Geiseln sollen freigelassen werden. Doch die Hamas stellt weitere Bedingungen.
I think I'm starting a series of my everyday Leatherman use. People usually make fun of me wearing a holster with my slightly heavy #Leatherman Surge Multi-Tool. Asking what I'd need this for. But my reality is, that I'm using it almost every day. There are so many situations the thing comes in handy...
Happy weekend, friends. After five years, Microsoft has officially dumped the 'moonshot' metaphor for its climate goals. They took off in a rocket flying in precisely the wrong direction. Better to delete the original destination than change course, right?
While it hasn't officially dropped its goals, it's clear that those targets have been effectively ignored by the company, seeking mostly to paper over its massive rising energy consumption and associated fossil fuel combustion - both direct (for its data centres) and indirect (in its supply chain). Accounting tricks mute the severity of how seriously bad things have gotten for the corporation.
False narratives around 'AI for climate', the company servicing the fossil fuel industry directly, and a serious lack of disclosure that would allow real scrutiny of their claims all contribute to this shocking illustration of the tech age we are in right now: one driven by generative software anxieties, and a consequent lack of concern about who gets burned up in the wake of Microsoft's big new rocket.
Have a read, here:
... mehr anzeigen
Happy weekend, friends. After five years, Microsoft has officially dumped the 'moonshot' metaphor for its climate goals. They took off in a rocket flying in precisely the wrong direction. Better to delete the original destination than change course, right?
While it hasn't officially dropped its goals, it's clear that those targets have been effectively ignored by the company, seeking mostly to paper over its massive rising energy consumption and associated fossil fuel combustion - both direct (for its data centres) and indirect (in its supply chain). Accounting tricks mute the severity of how seriously bad things have gotten for the corporation.
False narratives around 'AI for climate', the company servicing the fossil fuel industry directly, and a serious lack of disclosure that would allow real scrutiny of their claims all contribute to this shocking illustration of the tech age we are in right now: one driven by generative software anxieties, and a consequent lack of concern about who gets burned up in the wake of Microsoft's big new rocket.
RIP to Microsoft’s moonshot. 2020 – 2025. Born in an era of ‘climate pledges‘, months after the 2019 global climate strikes. Found dead in May 2025, crushed under big tech’s generative “AI” stampede.
For five long and beautiful years, Microsoft has tortured the ‘moonshot’ metaphor when describing its climate goals. In its landmark 2020 announcement, VP Brad Smith said: "Reducing carbon is where the world needs to go, and we recognize that it’s what our customers and employees are asking us to pursue. This is a bold bet — a moonshot — for Microsoft. And it will need to become a moonshot for the world"From their 2021 update It was big talk, but big talk was common at the start of this decade. After the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, high-emitting companies and countries realised you could deploy grandiose Obama-style speechifying without really having to demonstrate real, immediate emissions reductions. The moon landing is a favourite in this category of intense over-promising. Norway’s failed adventure in CCS was presented in the 2000s as the ‘moon landing‘ project. Google’s ‘moonshot factory’, the now-awkwardly-named X, is closing down without having solved climate change.
In 2021, after seeing mild emissions reductions and some purchased carbon removal, the company said: "Using our moonshot analogy, I think of it this way – if our goal is to get to the moon by the end of this decade, this is the equivalent of sending an astronaut into orbit around the earth. It puts us on the right path, but we have a long journey ahead" The astronaut is in space! Good news. Now let’s take a big sip of coffee and check the status in May 2024: “In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence......so in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs" Oh no, the moon moved five times further away. I hate it when the moon does that.
Here’s what actually happened: Microsoft built the rocket, left the atmosphere, and shot off in precisely the wrong direction. Then blamed the moon for suddenly being too far away, as they intentionally hurtled away from it.
The company’s decision makers have actively chosen to massively expand the energy they directly consume (mostly in data centres), and the energy they indirectly consume (mostly manufacturing devices and building new data centres). These numbers have risen massively in recent years, and that means the company’s emissions have risen too, garnering headlines last year about the company missing its targets.
In February 2025, Microsoft offered an ‘update‘: "In 2020, Microsoft leaders referred to our sustainability goals as a “moonshot,” and nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away. However, the force creating this distance from our goals in the short term is the same one that will help us build a bigger, faster, and more powerful rocket to reach them in the long term: artificial intelligence (AI)" This contains a tacit admission the company’s AI-specific investments are a rocket that’s blasting them in the wrong direction – but also that the rocket will become so powerful they can turn around and zoom back towards the moon. In case you were thinking ‘that sounds like hyperbole’, just relax. This is what they put at the end of that paragraph: "This is not hyperbole" Fast forward to May 2025. The moonshot has met a sad and subtle end: Microsoft’s latest update unceremoniously dumps the metaphor, unmentioned in the blog post or the full report. We have lost all communication with the rocket, and it’s being scrubbed from the databases.
We have come back down to Earth with a far simpler analogy: As we remain focused on sustained progress towards our 2030 goals, it has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon, not a sprint. Okay, it’s a marathon now. But the same problem exists: on a journey towards a goal, you should be heading towards the goal, not away from it (whether that’s the moon, or a finish line). This is really the absolute basics of running a marathon.
For every step the company takes towards the end, they take another 500 backwards. Microsoft is rocketing / marathon-running / whatever-ing in the wrong direction.
It is clear that however climate factors into the company’s decisions, the anxious chasing of maximum generative content infecting every piece of software takes precedence every time. That is a race the company is truly invested in: the frantic, senseless and hyperactive competition to inject generative text, images and videos into every single piece of software in existence, in the hope that something sticks, and that the thing that sticks saves an industry that stopped inventing new and useful things a decade ago. An industry that stopped inventing useful things a decade ago is resorting to environmentally ruinous anxiety-driven growth mania. Let’s dig into the details.
Power and glory
Big tech consumes a lot of electrical energy. Data centres provide cloud services (like emails, file storage, video calls or streaming) but in recent years, they’ve increasingly been used to both train and operate generative machine learning models, which output text, images, and video based off vast amounts of scraped content, mostly used without permission. These processes tend to use different chips: devices that run far hotter, and consume much more energy than traditional chips in data centres. Very soon, machine learning will surpass Bitcoin mining as a driver of data centre expansion.
The latest update1 from Microsoft shows that the electricity consumption of the company continues to rise. It isn’t linear – the amount by which it rises is rising, too. That is to say: its growth is accelerating. Meta and Microsoft in particular are on an absolute tear: Amazon pointedly did not disclose its energy or electricity consumption for 2023 in its latest report, which is really dodgy In Microsoft’s latest report the company brags about how it has ‘only’ seen a 23% increase in emissions, relative to a 168% increase in energy use, and a 71% increase in revenue growth. We’ll come back to emissions, but implicit in that statement is the fact their energy consumption is growing far faster than their revenue: For the company to make a million bucks in 2020, it burned through 75megawatt hours of energy. To make a million bucks in 2024, it had to burn through 122megawatt hours: a 60% increase.
It also matters where their facilities consume electrical energy. The vast majority of Microsoft’s power consumption is concentrated in the United States: Which is important, because American power grids tend to be heavily reliant on fossil gas. When you multiply the amount of power consumption by the average emissions intensity of the grids on which Microsoft consumes power, you get ‘location based emissions’ – a rough but reasonable estimate of the emissions relating to that power consumption. In 2024, it was just under ten million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Microsoft does not include this in its headline emissions data – it uses an adjusted figure known as “market based” emissions. In short: Microsoft claims its actions were the reason some renewable energy came into existence, and generated energy. In claiming that for itself, it also claims the actual electrical energy as its own: clean, and zero emissions. It all depends on whether the company really did cause the renewable energy to exist.
I know this is confusing and I am sorry, but please stick with me, because it’s important.
Microsoft can claim to have caused new renewable energy additions in two ways: either by buying certificates generated by clean energy facilities, or entering into power purchasing agreements with new or existing sites.
In practice, the ‘certificates’ option makes little sense. Buying an old certificate that was generated by a hydro plant built in the 1980s on the other side of the world is dodgy: there’s no chance your purchase helped incentivise that hydro plant. You didn’t cause climate action, and it’s wrong to claim that renewable power as your ‘own’. It has a lot in common with the problems around carbon offsetting. The ‘contracts’ are a bit better, because there’s more chance it helped bring renewable energy online, but not much better.
To demonstrate why this matters so much, here are a bunch of ‘actual’ (location, purple) vs adjusted (‘market’, green) data for some large tech companies:
Microsoft has shifted away from the heavily criticised certificates towards doing deals (‘power purchase agreements’, or PPAs) with clean power facilities. These deals are much more likely to be a thing that helps bring a wind or solar farm into reality. Now, only 22% of the company’s ‘market based’ reductions came from certificates: “Direct” is a weird way of saying that this is renewable power from a contract. It’s a little confusing because some might think it means literally installed on site, but it’s not. On-site power was 0.01% of total…..’direct’ here just means PPAs PPAs, however, exist on a big fuzzy spectrum. Can Microsoft really claim to have been responsible for a wind farm generating power if it already exists? As analytics firm NewClimate Institute wrote2: "While this shift to PPAs is positive, it is not a silver bullet for reducing electricity-related emissions: long-term contracts for local PPAs are more likely to provide effective support for increasing renewable capacity in a grid, but the causality regarding the additionality of this support is complex and uncertain" The company’s nuke deals are a great example of this: "Indeed, Microsoft has recently signed agreements with existing nuclear plant operators in the USA and Canada to purchase RECs on an hourly basis (Microsoft, 2022c; Constellation, 2023) and signed a PPA for a fusion power plant that is scheduled to start operating in 2028 (Helion, 2023). Buying RECs from existing nuclear power plants does not drive the development of additional zero-carbon energy capacity" Microsoft has also promised to use a significantly more accurate method for matching its power demand to renewable energy output (‘hourly matching’), but this only garners one brief mention in the report, and they share no details on progress.
This is a big part of how companies that are seeing their electrical energy consumption skyrocketing (away from the moon) take the edge off that trend. Microsoft highlight the discrepancy between their emissions and energy increases because they’re good at ‘adjusting’ the data. But that is purely contractual, rather than a measured physical change in real emissions.
The supply chain question
As Microsoft acknowledge in their own report, there is a massive supply chain flowing into the company (think: steel used in a data centre) and flowing out of it (think: the power consumption of a Surface laptop).
Microsoft report far more of these ‘scope 3’, indirect emissions than most other major tech companies do – and with more detail. But read the footnotes, caveats, and adjustments, and you start to recognise a few worrying things.
The first is the use of something Microsoft calls ‘management criteria’. A few scope 3 categories are calculated using a unique methodology. Here’s an example: instead of calculating the lifetime emissions of every product sold in that year, they calculate the 1-year emissions of every product sold prior. Here’s the ‘adjusted’ figures against the ‘raw’ (again, the ‘adjusted’ numbers the ones used in the headline emissions figures) for all scope 3 emissions: 96% of this difference comes from the ‘use of sold products’ calculation mentioned above, for 2024 In 2024, the difference between the two methods isn’t massive. And the ‘unadjusted’ numbers above look…okay? The company’s scope 3 emissions seem to have fallen for the first time in a long time. But when you break it down into the categories, a lot of weird things emerge. Category 2 – ‘capital goods’ – is rising fast thanks to the company’s continued heavy investments into building new data centres. Their investments in green steel and green concrete are clearly dwarfed by the massive scale of their build-out.
But emissions from the use of sold products have plummeted, and category 1 emissions have fallen slightly. Why? Are these due to material reductions in energy consumption (such as Xbox’s energy saving features), or are Microsoft being told by third parties that they’ve bought renewable energy certificates?
One estimate comes from a 2024 report from Stand.Earth, which found that most of Microsoft’s suppliers mostly rely on fossil fuels, and where they claim to be using renewable energy, most of that comes from the highly suspect certificates rather than any less-bad claims of renewable sourcing. I would bet there’s a good chance Microsoft is simply accepting the claims of supplier’s ‘cleanliness’ here, and reproducing them as if they count as real climate action and falling scope 3 emissions. Tellingly, for Scope 3 Category 3 (the emissions that relate to extracting, processing and using fuels for energy, like methane dumping for fossil gas), Microsoft oddly stopped reporting unadjusted (‘location-based’) figures starting in last year’s report. In fact, every scope 3 category is ‘market based’ – with no view of what the unadjusted (‘location based’) numbers actually look like. As good as Microsoft is at disclosing more supply chain information than most, it is pretty clear that there is still a lot being hidden here – things that very materially impact the overall picture the company is presenting on its emissions. All we can say for sure is that even the “unadjusted” numbers for scope 3 are actually adjusted – and that the real impacts are higher than the company is reporting. Again: taking the edge off the severity of the company’s direction as it races frantically towards higher consumption of fossil fuelled energy.
The carbon removals bubble
Microsoft don’t count carbon offsets against their total headline emissions numbers – this is good. But Microsoft talks about carbon removal a lot. It features prominently on their website, in this sustainability report and across social media and in interviews. There is a new headline about the company’s carbon removal contracts seemingly every few weeks.
While their contracts with renewable energy deliver electrical energy rapidly after signing, there doesn’t seem to have been any material delivery of ‘contracted’ carbon removal, with the space in between the amount delivered and amount contract widening each year: Microsoft promises to ‘remove’ all of its operational emissions since 1970 – and if the reported contracts in this report are fulfilled and the companies actually remove and permanently store carbon, that’ll be fulfilled comfortably.
Here’s the problem: while the carbon removal industry has been going wild with contracts, pre-purchases and trading, only a small fraction of those future contracts have actually been delivered as real permanent removal of carbon from the atmosphere. All the hype and hysteria of big tech combined with the physical challenges of removing carbon from the atmosphere are combining to create what looks alarmingly like a removals bubble3.
This could be accepted as the expected circumstances of an early-stage atmospheric clean-up project. But the world’s biggest polluters, fossil fuel lenders, and worst-emitting tech companies are the ones lining up to buy contracts, and carbon offsets from undelivered removals are being traded and claimed against emissions. That makes this industry look way more like CCS than solar.
You can see this same pattern of massive contracting and under-delivery reflected in global carbon removals (partly because Microsoft comprises such a wildly huge proportion of global pre-purchasing): CDR dot fyi 2024 annual report What actually happens if Microsoft’s all-in bet on carbon removal does not eventuate? It has clearly skewed its efforts towards emitting first and removing later, rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the source. If the bubble pops, the company will simply be left a decade of absurdly steep emissions growth.
Post-Moonshot Microsoft
Microsoft claim that their emissions rose 23%, from 2020 to 2024. That alone is not a good look, but if you take away the certificate / contractual adjustments to emissions (at least, the ones we know about), and the company’s own ‘criteria’ for scope 3, and you get something more like a 55.4% increase: If Microsoft disclosed unadjusted numbers for scope 3, I guarantee this would look even worse This becomes even more stark when you compare the latest data to the chart4 of projected emissions reductions and carbon removal depicted in the 2020 report, when the moonshot was announced: What are we even doing here? There is no relationship between this panicky software goliath going all-in on energy-intensive generative slop and the hard physical reality of what an explosion in energy demand means for fossil fuel combustion.
The industry is pivoting to claiming their “AI” investments will create climate solutions that undo all the damage and solve the climate crisis. It is the same break-first-fix-later wishful thinking as we see in high-emitting carbon removal investments, or in geo-engineering. Microsoft obscures what proportion of its energy usage goes to what type of applications of “AI” because the reality is most of it probably relates to the Copilot-generating-spam type, not the AI-predicting-the-weather type.
Microsoft also intentionally excludes its sales of machine learning software services to the fossil fuel industry from its reports. The “Enabled Emissions” campaign, helmed by two former Microsoft sustainability folks, explains how Microsoft once bragged openly about helping oil and gas companies figure out how to extract significantly more fossil fuels.
The moonshot era is done. While Microsoft is keeping its climate targets on paper, it treats them as functionally non-existent. Nothing will override the panicked expansion of data centre power consumption, and nothing will truly neutralise the increase in fossil fuel combustion that occurs as a consequence.
Increasingly, people in tech, data centre and fossil fuel industries are saying out loud what was once whispered in secret: there is no point trying to limit emissions or fix climate change, when you can promise a future super intelligent robot will pick up the pieces.
The shallow promise of a sci-fi future climate-fixing machine intelligence is sometimes believed sincerely, and sometimes presented cynically. Either way, it does the same job: hype-washing the material, real and measurable damage these companies are doing today.
Microsoft’s blend of righteousness and destructiveness is exceedingly dangerous. Explosive energy demand incentivises fossil fuels. It redirects new renewables into servicing the anxieties of tech executives rather than the deep machete cut into fossil fuel combustion we need right away. The glossy, shallow stories of ‘AI for climate‘ instil a wide-eyed overconfidence, as their bloated generative slop rocket fires them in precisely the wrong direction, burning us up in their wake.
The era of the empty climate pledge is over. No logical plea will pierce the buzzing illogical anxiety driving these business decisions. The only way to protect ourselves is to criticise this mess directly, and forcefully. If they aren’t stopped, the damage they’ll do is physically irreversible.
This is not hyperbole.
You can access the full dataset I’ve created collating tech company emissions data here 🙂 ↩︎
The whole report is really worth reading if you’re into a more technical analysis of the company’s renewable claims – it also goes into detail on the whole concept of time-matching renewable energy, which very interesting. ↩︎
Joe Romm has been writing in plenty of detail about many of the problems with Microsoft’s carbon removal deals, including in this seminal paper from a few years ago. ↩︎
May I strongly suggest using Webplot Digitizer if you want to extract data from charts! ↩︎
Carbon offsets — whereby one party pays another party to reduce carbon emissions — have always been dodgy, but now they are threatening to undermine the Paris climate agreement.
Newsletter: An OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries on men it describes as “subhuman”, and promoting misogynist ideas sourced from online incel forums.
“Without surgery, you won’t mog genetically superior guys head-on,” it tells one man.
Conversations with the bot are littered with jargon like “PSL” and “hardmaxxing”, which come from online misogynist communities including incel forums.
Users are invited to upload photos of themselves to receive their “PSL ratings” which range from things like “Subhuman” to “Low Normie” to “Borderline Chadlite”. Some of the feedback is explicitly racist.
For the man deemed “subhuman”, the bot writes: “Hardmaxxing is NECESSARY. Softmaxxing alone will NEVER mog you into viability — it’s like putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling building.” It recommends $200,000 in invasive facial surgeries alone.
OpenAI is not just hosting but prominently featuring chatbots that suggest dangerous medical interventions as crucial to men’s sexual and romantic success, and parrot extreme ideology around gender dynamics, sex, and dating.
I’m a completely independent researcher and writer, and investigations like this are made possible thanks to support from readers like you. Consider supporting my work with a pay-what-you-can subscription: citationneeded.news/signup/
After reviewing reports about the chatbot that rates men “subhuman”, encourages dramatic surgeries, and repeats incel beliefs about how women are “unfair” and “hypergamous”, OpenAI has chosen to leave it available and prominently featured on their shared GPTs page.
RIP to Microsoft’s moonshot. 2020 – 2025. Born in an era of ‘climate pledges‘, months after the 2019 global climate strikes. Found dead in May 2025, crushed under big tech’s generative “AI” stampede.
For five long and beautiful years, Microsoft has tortured the ‘moonshot’ metaphor when describing its climate goals. In its landmark 2020 announcement, VP Brad Smith said: "Reducing carbon is where the world needs to go, and we recognize that it’s what our customers and employees are asking us to pursue. This is a bold bet — a moonshot — for Microsoft. And it will need to become a moonshot for the world"
... mehr anzeigen
The life and death of Microsoft’s Moonshot
RIP to Microsoft’s moonshot. 2020 – 2025. Born in an era of ‘climate pledges‘, months after the 2019 global climate strikes. Found dead in May 2025, crushed under big tech’s generative “AI” stampede.
For five long and beautiful years, Microsoft has tortured the ‘moonshot’ metaphor when describing its climate goals. In its landmark 2020 announcement, VP Brad Smith said: "Reducing carbon is where the world needs to go, and we recognize that it’s what our customers and employees are asking us to pursue. This is a bold bet — a moonshot — for Microsoft. And it will need to become a moonshot for the world"From their 2021 update It was big talk, but big talk was common at the start of this decade. After the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, high-emitting companies and countries realised you could deploy grandiose Obama-style speechifying without really having to demonstrate real, immediate emissions reductions. The moon landing is a favourite in this category of intense over-promising. Norway’s failed adventure in CCS was presented in the 2000s as the ‘moon landing‘ project. Google’s ‘moonshot factory’, the now-awkwardly-named X, is closing down without having solved climate change.
In 2021, after seeing mild emissions reductions and some purchased carbon removal, the company said: "Using our moonshot analogy, I think of it this way – if our goal is to get to the moon by the end of this decade, this is the equivalent of sending an astronaut into orbit around the earth. It puts us on the right path, but we have a long journey ahead" The astronaut is in space! Good news. Now let’s take a big sip of coffee and check the status in May 2024: “In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence......so in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs" Oh no, the moon moved five times further away. I hate it when the moon does that.
Here’s what actually happened: Microsoft built the rocket, left the atmosphere, and shot off in precisely the wrong direction. Then blamed the moon for suddenly being too far away, as they intentionally hurtled away from it.
The company’s decision makers have actively chosen to massively expand the energy they directly consume (mostly in data centres), and the energy they indirectly consume (mostly manufacturing devices and building new data centres). These numbers have risen massively in recent years, and that means the company’s emissions have risen too, garnering headlines last year about the company missing its targets.
In February 2025, Microsoft offered an ‘update‘: "In 2020, Microsoft leaders referred to our sustainability goals as a “moonshot,” and nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away. However, the force creating this distance from our goals in the short term is the same one that will help us build a bigger, faster, and more powerful rocket to reach them in the long term: artificial intelligence (AI)" This contains a tacit admission the company’s AI-specific investments are a rocket that’s blasting them in the wrong direction – but also that the rocket will become so powerful they can turn around and zoom back towards the moon. In case you were thinking ‘that sounds like hyperbole’, just relax. This is what they put at the end of that paragraph: "This is not hyperbole" Fast forward to May 2025. The moonshot has met a sad and subtle end: Microsoft’s latest update unceremoniously dumps the metaphor, unmentioned in the blog post or the full report. We have lost all communication with the rocket, and it’s being scrubbed from the databases.
We have come back down to Earth with a far simpler analogy: As we remain focused on sustained progress towards our 2030 goals, it has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon, not a sprint. Okay, it’s a marathon now. But the same problem exists: on a journey towards a goal, you should be heading towards the goal, not away from it (whether that’s the moon, or a finish line). This is really the absolute basics of running a marathon.
For every step the company takes towards the end, they take another 500 backwards. Microsoft is rocketing / marathon-running / whatever-ing in the wrong direction.
It is clear that however climate factors into the company’s decisions, the anxious chasing of maximum generative content infecting every piece of software takes precedence every time. That is a race the company is truly invested in: the frantic, senseless and hyperactive competition to inject generative text, images and videos into every single piece of software in existence, in the hope that something sticks, and that the thing that sticks saves an industry that stopped inventing new and useful things a decade ago. An industry that stopped inventing useful things a decade ago is resorting to environmentally ruinous anxiety-driven growth mania. Let’s dig into the details.
Power and glory
Big tech consumes a lot of electrical energy. Data centres provide cloud services (like emails, file storage, video calls or streaming) but in recent years, they’ve increasingly been used to both train and operate generative machine learning models, which output text, images, and video based off vast amounts of scraped content, mostly used without permission. These processes tend to use different chips: devices that run far hotter, and consume much more energy than traditional chips in data centres. Very soon, machine learning will surpass Bitcoin mining as a driver of data centre expansion.
The latest update1 from Microsoft shows that the electricity consumption of the company continues to rise. It isn’t linear – the amount by which it rises is rising, too. That is to say: its growth is accelerating. Meta and Microsoft in particular are on an absolute tear: Amazon pointedly did not disclose its energy or electricity consumption for 2023 in its latest report, which is really dodgy In Microsoft’s latest report the company brags about how it has ‘only’ seen a 23% increase in emissions, relative to a 168% increase in energy use, and a 71% increase in revenue growth. We’ll come back to emissions, but implicit in that statement is the fact their energy consumption is growing far faster than their revenue: For the company to make a million bucks in 2020, it burned through 75megawatt hours of energy. To make a million bucks in 2024, it had to burn through 122megawatt hours: a 60% increase.
It also matters where their facilities consume electrical energy. The vast majority of Microsoft’s power consumption is concentrated in the United States: Which is important, because American power grids tend to be heavily reliant on fossil gas. When you multiply the amount of power consumption by the average emissions intensity of the grids on which Microsoft consumes power, you get ‘location based emissions’ – a rough but reasonable estimate of the emissions relating to that power consumption. In 2024, it was just under ten million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Microsoft does not include this in its headline emissions data – it uses an adjusted figure known as “market based” emissions. In short: Microsoft claims its actions were the reason some renewable energy came into existence, and generated energy. In claiming that for itself, it also claims the actual electrical energy as its own: clean, and zero emissions. It all depends on whether the company really did cause the renewable energy to exist.
I know this is confusing and I am sorry, but please stick with me, because it’s important.
Microsoft can claim to have caused new renewable energy additions in two ways: either by buying certificates generated by clean energy facilities, or entering into power purchasing agreements with new or existing sites.
In practice, the ‘certificates’ option makes little sense. Buying an old certificate that was generated by a hydro plant built in the 1980s on the other side of the world is dodgy: there’s no chance your purchase helped incentivise that hydro plant. You didn’t cause climate action, and it’s wrong to claim that renewable power as your ‘own’. It has a lot in common with the problems around carbon offsetting. The ‘contracts’ are a bit better, because there’s more chance it helped bring renewable energy online, but not much better.
To demonstrate why this matters so much, here are a bunch of ‘actual’ (location, purple) vs adjusted (‘market’, green) data for some large tech companies:
Microsoft has shifted away from the heavily criticised certificates towards doing deals (‘power purchase agreements’, or PPAs) with clean power facilities. These deals are much more likely to be a thing that helps bring a wind or solar farm into reality. Now, only 22% of the company’s ‘market based’ reductions came from certificates: “Direct” is a weird way of saying that this is renewable power from a contract. It’s a little confusing because some might think it means literally installed on site, but it’s not. On-site power was 0.01% of total…..’direct’ here just means PPAs PPAs, however, exist on a big fuzzy spectrum. Can Microsoft really claim to have been responsible for a wind farm generating power if it already exists? As analytics firm NewClimate Institute wrote2: "While this shift to PPAs is positive, it is not a silver bullet for reducing electricity-related emissions: long-term contracts for local PPAs are more likely to provide effective support for increasing renewable capacity in a grid, but the causality regarding the additionality of this support is complex and uncertain" The company’s nuke deals are a great example of this: "Indeed, Microsoft has recently signed agreements with existing nuclear plant operators in the USA and Canada to purchase RECs on an hourly basis (Microsoft, 2022c; Constellation, 2023) and signed a PPA for a fusion power plant that is scheduled to start operating in 2028 (Helion, 2023). Buying RECs from existing nuclear power plants does not drive the development of additional zero-carbon energy capacity" Microsoft has also promised to use a significantly more accurate method for matching its power demand to renewable energy output (‘hourly matching’), but this only garners one brief mention in the report, and they share no details on progress.
This is a big part of how companies that are seeing their electrical energy consumption skyrocketing (away from the moon) take the edge off that trend. Microsoft highlight the discrepancy between their emissions and energy increases because they’re good at ‘adjusting’ the data. But that is purely contractual, rather than a measured physical change in real emissions.
The supply chain question
As Microsoft acknowledge in their own report, there is a massive supply chain flowing into the company (think: steel used in a data centre) and flowing out of it (think: the power consumption of a Surface laptop).
Microsoft report far more of these ‘scope 3’, indirect emissions than most other major tech companies do – and with more detail. But read the footnotes, caveats, and adjustments, and you start to recognise a few worrying things.
The first is the use of something Microsoft calls ‘management criteria’. A few scope 3 categories are calculated using a unique methodology. Here’s an example: instead of calculating the lifetime emissions of every product sold in that year, they calculate the 1-year emissions of every product sold prior. Here’s the ‘adjusted’ figures against the ‘raw’ (again, the ‘adjusted’ numbers the ones used in the headline emissions figures) for all scope 3 emissions: 96% of this difference comes from the ‘use of sold products’ calculation mentioned above, for 2024 In 2024, the difference between the two methods isn’t massive. And the ‘unadjusted’ numbers above look…okay? The company’s scope 3 emissions seem to have fallen for the first time in a long time. But when you break it down into the categories, a lot of weird things emerge. Category 2 – ‘capital goods’ – is rising fast thanks to the company’s continued heavy investments into building new data centres. Their investments in green steel and green concrete are clearly dwarfed by the massive scale of their build-out.
But emissions from the use of sold products have plummeted, and category 1 emissions have fallen slightly. Why? Are these due to material reductions in energy consumption (such as Xbox’s energy saving features), or are Microsoft being told by third parties that they’ve bought renewable energy certificates?
One estimate comes from a 2024 report from Stand.Earth, which found that most of Microsoft’s suppliers mostly rely on fossil fuels, and where they claim to be using renewable energy, most of that comes from the highly suspect certificates rather than any less-bad claims of renewable sourcing. I would bet there’s a good chance Microsoft is simply accepting the claims of supplier’s ‘cleanliness’ here, and reproducing them as if they count as real climate action and falling scope 3 emissions. Tellingly, for Scope 3 Category 3 (the emissions that relate to extracting, processing and using fuels for energy, like methane dumping for fossil gas), Microsoft oddly stopped reporting unadjusted (‘location-based’) figures starting in last year’s report. In fact, every scope 3 category is ‘market based’ – with no view of what the unadjusted (‘location based’) numbers actually look like. As good as Microsoft is at disclosing more supply chain information than most, it is pretty clear that there is still a lot being hidden here – things that very materially impact the overall picture the company is presenting on its emissions. All we can say for sure is that even the “unadjusted” numbers for scope 3 are actually adjusted – and that the real impacts are higher than the company is reporting. Again: taking the edge off the severity of the company’s direction as it races frantically towards higher consumption of fossil fuelled energy.
The carbon removals bubble
Microsoft don’t count carbon offsets against their total headline emissions numbers – this is good. But Microsoft talks about carbon removal a lot. It features prominently on their website, in this sustainability report and across social media and in interviews. There is a new headline about the company’s carbon removal contracts seemingly every few weeks.
While their contracts with renewable energy deliver electrical energy rapidly after signing, there doesn’t seem to have been any material delivery of ‘contracted’ carbon removal, with the space in between the amount delivered and amount contract widening each year: Microsoft promises to ‘remove’ all of its operational emissions since 1970 – and if the reported contracts in this report are fulfilled and the companies actually remove and permanently store carbon, that’ll be fulfilled comfortably.
Here’s the problem: while the carbon removal industry has been going wild with contracts, pre-purchases and trading, only a small fraction of those future contracts have actually been delivered as real permanent removal of carbon from the atmosphere. All the hype and hysteria of big tech combined with the physical challenges of removing carbon from the atmosphere are combining to create what looks alarmingly like a removals bubble3.
This could be accepted as the expected circumstances of an early-stage atmospheric clean-up project. But the world’s biggest polluters, fossil fuel lenders, and worst-emitting tech companies are the ones lining up to buy contracts, and carbon offsets from undelivered removals are being traded and claimed against emissions. That makes this industry look way more like CCS than solar.
You can see this same pattern of massive contracting and under-delivery reflected in global carbon removals (partly because Microsoft comprises such a wildly huge proportion of global pre-purchasing): CDR dot fyi 2024 annual report What actually happens if Microsoft’s all-in bet on carbon removal does not eventuate? It has clearly skewed its efforts towards emitting first and removing later, rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the source. If the bubble pops, the company will simply be left a decade of absurdly steep emissions growth.
Post-Moonshot Microsoft
Microsoft claim that their emissions rose 23%, from 2020 to 2024. That alone is not a good look, but if you take away the certificate / contractual adjustments to emissions (at least, the ones we know about), and the company’s own ‘criteria’ for scope 3, and you get something more like a 55.4% increase: If Microsoft disclosed unadjusted numbers for scope 3, I guarantee this would look even worse This becomes even more stark when you compare the latest data to the chart4 of projected emissions reductions and carbon removal depicted in the 2020 report, when the moonshot was announced: What are we even doing here? There is no relationship between this panicky software goliath going all-in on energy-intensive generative slop and the hard physical reality of what an explosion in energy demand means for fossil fuel combustion.
The industry is pivoting to claiming their “AI” investments will create climate solutions that undo all the damage and solve the climate crisis. It is the same break-first-fix-later wishful thinking as we see in high-emitting carbon removal investments, or in geo-engineering. Microsoft obscures what proportion of its energy usage goes to what type of applications of “AI” because the reality is most of it probably relates to the Copilot-generating-spam type, not the AI-predicting-the-weather type.
Microsoft also intentionally excludes its sales of machine learning software services to the fossil fuel industry from its reports. The “Enabled Emissions” campaign, helmed by two former Microsoft sustainability folks, explains how Microsoft once bragged openly about helping oil and gas companies figure out how to extract significantly more fossil fuels.
The moonshot era is done. While Microsoft is keeping its climate targets on paper, it treats them as functionally non-existent. Nothing will override the panicked expansion of data centre power consumption, and nothing will truly neutralise the increase in fossil fuel combustion that occurs as a consequence.
Increasingly, people in tech, data centre and fossil fuel industries are saying out loud what was once whispered in secret: there is no point trying to limit emissions or fix climate change, when you can promise a future super intelligent robot will pick up the pieces.
The shallow promise of a sci-fi future climate-fixing machine intelligence is sometimes believed sincerely, and sometimes presented cynically. Either way, it does the same job: hype-washing the material, real and measurable damage these companies are doing today.
Microsoft’s blend of righteousness and destructiveness is exceedingly dangerous. Explosive energy demand incentivises fossil fuels. It redirects new renewables into servicing the anxieties of tech executives rather than the deep machete cut into fossil fuel combustion we need right away. The glossy, shallow stories of ‘AI for climate‘ instil a wide-eyed overconfidence, as their bloated generative slop rocket fires them in precisely the wrong direction, burning us up in their wake.
The era of the empty climate pledge is over. No logical plea will pierce the buzzing illogical anxiety driving these business decisions. The only way to protect ourselves is to criticise this mess directly, and forcefully. If they aren’t stopped, the damage they’ll do is physically irreversible.
This is not hyperbole.
You can access the full dataset I’ve created collating tech company emissions data here 🙂 ↩︎
The whole report is really worth reading if you’re into a more technical analysis of the company’s renewable claims – it also goes into detail on the whole concept of time-matching renewable energy, which very interesting. ↩︎
Joe Romm has been writing in plenty of detail about many of the problems with Microsoft’s carbon removal deals, including in this seminal paper from a few years ago. ↩︎
May I strongly suggest using Webplot Digitizer if you want to extract data from charts! ↩︎
Carbon offsets — whereby one party pays another party to reduce carbon emissions — have always been dodgy, but now they are threatening to undermine the Paris climate agreement.
Ich muss heute mal was zum Thema #radfahren sagen: wenn ich joggen gehe, muss ich mir oft den recht engen Weg mit #Radfahren|den teilen. Aber anstatt dann auch mal etwas langsamer zu machen oder freundlich zu sein, wenn ich versuche, Platz zu machen, ernte ich meist nur grimmige Blicke. Es wird Rücksicht von #Autofahren|den erwartet, aber das gleiche erwarte ich als joggende oder laufende Person auch.
@Ursuursulala Genau ich kann mich noch an die Tröts erinnern, in denen die Radfahrer immer Opfer der bösen Autofahrer waren. Radweg teilweise zugeparkt und so, die waren immer OPfer und haben immer alles richtig gemacht @lifeinstereo
Ein gesundes Miteinander im Straßenverkehr - warum ist das so schwer?
Das Problem sind nicht Fußgänger. Auch nicht Radfahrer. Übrigens auch nicht Autofahrer.
Das Problem sind - Arschlöcher. Und die verteilen sich leider auf alle Mobilitätsformen.
From their 2021 update
Amazon pointedly did not disclose its energy or electricity consumption for 2023 in its latest report, which is really dodgy
“Direct” is a weird way of saying that this is renewable power from a contract. It’s a little confusing because some might think it means literally installed on site, but it’s not. On-site power was 0.01% of total…..’direct’ here just means PPAs
96% of this difference comes from the ‘use of sold products’ calculation mentioned above, for 2024
CDR dot fyi 2024 annual report
If Microsoft disclosed unadjusted numbers for scope 3, I guarantee this would look even worse
Irina
Als Antwort auf Anna • • •Erna
Als Antwort auf Irina • • •Rinske
Als Antwort auf Irina • • •