Net Zero? The old ISP? Nope, this would be referencing climate goals. Specifically to reach the goal of net zero climate emissions. Sounds good doesn’t it? And it is, but you may have noticed that the goal isn’t ‘zero’. It’s ‘net zero’. What that means is that reaching net zero emissions means that a company or country that sets that goal is doing something to offset their emissions. That could be a lot of things. It could be planting trees, contributing to renewable energy, or technology that reduces vehicle emissions. Depending on who is doing the counting, things like cleaning up landfills and recycling might be considered as offsetting some emissions. More on that sort of thing in a minute.
Many companies have announced their intention to reach this goal at some point in the future. The latest among these is credit giant Mastercard. However, you might want to hold the fireworks and the kazoos. Keep that champagne corked y’all. Why? Because the powers that be have set their net zero goal for 2050, a timeframe that was actually called ‘audacious’. Really? Thirty years is ‘audacious’? Next week, that would be audacious. And unachievable but that’s beside the point.
So why aren’t we celebrating? Isn't it good that Mastercard is at least trying? That’s the wrong question. The right question is, are they really trying at all with a goal like that? If the goal were five or even ten years, that might be considered trying. Thirty is a virtue signal. It’s made to make people think that they are trying.
I get it. That seems unfair. Stop to think though. How many times have you heard of some long term goal getting set by any organization and then heard of it actually being met? Whether we are talking about countries, the UN, companies, or charities, long term goals or pledges like that rarely amount to much. Just think of all the ‘moonshots’ the US government has announced over the years. Whether it’s going to Mars, curing cancer, eradicating poverty, etc. They never go anywhere.
The fact is, there isn’t any sort of long term planning ability in most organizations. Most executives won’t last anything like the amount of time needed to make the goal a reality. And that’s if they even mean it in the first place. So even if the current Mastercard CEO and Board of Directors are well intentioned, the chances of the next two or three having the same vision are pretty darn slim. And even if they were going to try to get somewhere with it, there are creative ways of accounting that could very easily be applied to the net zero concept. In fact, so many unrelated issues have been bound up with climate change and environmentalism in general in recent years that almost any donation to anything could wind up counting.
Let’s say for a moment though that Mastercard was actually interested in reducing its emissions and doing so in a reasonable period of time, how might it go about that? Well, the company has 180 data centers worldwide. They no doubt suck up a fair amount of electricity so that would be a good place to start. Is there a more efficient way to store and process the data? Could they actually collect less of it? Could the buildings those data centers are in be made more efficient so they take less to heat and cool? What if they powered the climate control systems at least from solar panels on the buildings in climates where that makes sense?
Mastercard could also do the classic thing and plant some trees. Surely they could spare money to take some brownfields and turn them into greenfields, something that would benefit the local community as well as the environment. There are plenty of options available to organizations that are willing to take the goal of net zero emissions seriously.
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