From Bloomberg:
“Apple Inc. has gone carbon neutral. But in order to say the same for its flagship iPhone, it’s going to need help from Taiwan.
“More than three-quarters of the emissions that come from making Apple’s ubiquitous products come from outside suppliers, according to the company’s Environmental Progress Report. That includes Taiwanese electronics giants like TSMC and Foxconn, which still get about 90% of their power from non-renewable sources, according to company reports.
“That’s changing though. The firms are installing solar panels and buying power from offshore wind farms in line with Apple’s target of having all of its products be carbon-neutral by 2030. It underscores how climate pressure is increasingly coming not only from activists, but from within company’s own supply chains.”
Foxconn getting from 90% non-renewables to 100% renewables in ten years? Get the popcorn ready!
“Wind and solar power can be as cheap as fossil fuels, but they don’t produce at all hours of the day, so it isn’t feasible for major factories to run directly on renewables alone. Improvements in battery technology might soon change that, but at the moment Apple isn’t pushing its suppliers in that direction.
“Instead, Apple wants them to invest in enough renewable energy in their home region to cover their power use. That way even if a factory requires coal-fired electricity in the middle of the night, it will have invested in enough wind or solar to keep an equivalent amount of coal from being burned at other times.”
If you think about this for a moment, it half-makes-sense if they invest in so much daytime renewable energy that they power not only themselves during the day, but also say a nearby city or three—that would have still been using coal or gas power during the day. That’s the part that makes sense.
The part that doesn’t make sense is that you still have to power cities and factories at night.
The magical thinking is that a factory can pretend to be carbon neutral because it’s swapping its night-time coal-burning CO2 with “a drop” in CO2 emissions in nearby cities during the day due to renewables it produces for them.
But this can only go so far at night, and only nuclear is a high-capacity low-carbon nighttime source at present (but blows up occasionally causing other minor problems).
So, it may be a step towards less CO2 overall, but it’s only half a solution.
Changing the subject slightly, deep down I can’t help but feel that selling billions of energy-intensive shiny toys to the masses is not the way to save humanity as we know it, let alone the planet’s ecosystems, no matter what environmental claims you make.
But if this mega-company pressure pushes the whole grid green faster, then I’ll take it, I guess?
it’s not really clear though, is it?
For instance, is Apple growing faster than the rate at which it forces its supply chain to go “green”?
Who the fuck knows.
Also, ten years from now is plenty of time for the whole shebang (aka the planetary system) to go seriously downhill and the last thing we’ll be doing is checking back to see if Apple kept its word.
[The very lonely wind turbine in the cover photo is brought to you by Billy H.C. Kwok and Bloomberg]