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Microsoft Earth

Microsoft, Unilever Join Amazon's Pledge To Fight Climate Change (bloomberg.com) 28

Amazon.com has added a competitor to its year-old coalition of companies pledging to reduce their contribution to climate change: Microsoft. From a report: The two technology giants, neighbors in the Seattle area and rivals in cloud computing and business software, have each spent much of the last two years announcing increasingly aggressive climate targets, including dueling umbrella organizations for companies willing to do their part to avert the catastrophic warming of the planet. On Wednesday, Microsoft said it had signed onto Amazon's pact, alongside consumer products giant Unilever and several other new signatories. Amazon, long a laggard among its peers in publicly addressing its impact on the environment, reversed course in recent years, bolstering an internal sustainability team and vowing to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. The company also invited others interested in matching that commitment to sign on to what it calls the Climate Pledge, a forum for comparing notes on best practices and climate-friendly investment opportunities.
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Microsoft, Unilever Join Amazon's Pledge To Fight Climate Change

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  • Going to stop making under powered PCs? I bet that would reduce a lot of carbon if they stop selling the XBoxes.
  • Amazon? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Wolfier ( 94144 )

    How about they take care of their return problem first.

    https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

  • against meaningful change, right? No large scale government action to get off fossil fuels. Nothing to address large scale water shortages that are on the horizon. Still going to take advantage of weaker EPA rules that lead to dirty air to keep costs down and profits up?

    It's easy to vow big changes 20 years from now when you're not likely to be responsible for them.
    • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      Much though I love to bash Microsoft for their third rate products they are actually doing well on environmental issues. Amazon has pledged to make the whole company carbon neutral by 2040 and are working hard on making that happen. These companies want a world to sell products in, serving shareholders isn't just selling tomorrow for profits today.

  • by Tulsa_Time ( 2430696 ) on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @12:05PM (#60812078)

    You are a GIANT monopoly and control 50% of the market...

    Sure... clamp down on any competitor, small business that cannot scale to meet the same goals...
     

  • Expect them to act it, but not do it. Because in the end, it is exclusively about profit

  • ... but why so late? We know about climate change for a while now. So what recently changed for these companies to make this commitment now?!

    This is the result of the coming change in US government! It's an attempt by PR to ride on the public's sympathy. They're going where the wind blows them and they now want to get ahead of the coming change. They know that if they don't change then the new coming laws will force them to make changes. So now they're galloping through town, waving their flag for climate c

    • "If Trump had been reelected then they'd be doing nothing"

      Wrong! They would be doing the exact same thing. Corporations rarely choose a side, since the safe bet often is to pay both sides at the same time and just tweak the details here and there.
    • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      This is just the latest in years worth of announcements. You can't attribute everything to actions of the US government.

      • ... You can't attribute everything to actions of the US government.

        I am attributing it as being one of their PR actions. We get to see this type of horseshit quite often from the big companies. Yet it gets celebrated by gullible people who believe these companies are now pioneering climate change.

        They're not leading climate change, they're trailing it. The only times you see Amazon trying to pioneer something is when they believe it could give them more sales, like using drones for delivery. But take their web page design for instance and you find them trailing again. Or

  • climate-friendly investment opportunities.

    I thought you were here to save the planet, instead you just want to make more money.

    • I thought you were here to save the planet, instead you just want to make more money.

      We can't do both at the same time? If it takes losing money to save the planet then what happens after we spend all our money and destroy the economy?

      Nobody seems to care if electrical utilities make money on solar panels because they are cheaper than natural gas. People get real excited when Tesla makes a profit. That's because profit is good. If you didn't make a profit going to work then you would not go. Microsoft needs to make a profit or next year you won't get your Windows security updates.

      If th

  • why I can no longer find Unilever's Simple face moisturizer in the store any longer. They're cutting down on their plastic waste by mass producing metric tons of face wipes.

    • Your sig explains the problem well.

      We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

      If we bankrupt ourselves in the search of "saving the planet" then there's going to be people in poverty and misery for... what exactly? People starving and dying of exposure isn't helping the planet. It only drives people to do desperate acts. Find a way to both "save the planet" as well as save the people. I know that there's a cult out there that believes humanity is a blight on the planet and we should plan for our own extinction. That is a mental illness and thes

  • Start by stopping this "everything must be a micro-service/nano-service/..." that required MASSIVE resources : dozen of servers, network hardware, cooling, wiring, ... and software to manage all of this requiring a lot of CPU/RAM/..., In most case, it required much more resources just to manage this mess that energy required to provide the real service (business value).

    Microsoft can just start by removing everything not required in Window : telemetry, all AI stuff that "think for me" (no!!), ... and any r

  • Monopoly will gladly charge you more to demonstrate its social virtue.

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