The conflict over Big Tech’s emissions has caught the Greenhouse Gas Protocol in the crossfire

Requested last week The General Comment from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) does not appear to the naked eye to be a huge win for the tech giant. In fact, it sounds almost biblical. But for Google and Microsoft, the announcement represents a major win in their years-long battle against their rivals over how to account for carbon emissions from data centers and, by extension, artificial intelligence.

The announcement shows that the GHGP is one step closer to implementing a mandatory hourly accounting method for electricity emissions, a carbon accounting system that Google and Microsoft have been calling for since 2020 and 2021 respectively.

“We support the proposed Scope 2 updates, which would increase the accuracy of carbon inventories and their impact on decarbonization,” says Mara Harris, a Google spokeswoman. Microsoft declined to comment.

While Google is celebrating the GHGP’s move, other emissions players, even those traditionally aligned with Google’s preferred carbon accounting methodology, note that the battle to get to this point hasn’t been all pretty.

“There’s intense lobbying going on here, and these big companies have bet their reputations and their money big, and they’ve gotten a little ugly,” says Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University and head of the Google-funded ZERO (Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Improvement) Lab.

Out of range

Scope 2 is a subcategory used by GHGP to calculate a company’s indirect emissions resulting from the purchase of electricity, steam, heat or cooling. For tech giants, Scope 2 emissions have risen as artificial intelligence has led to explosive growth in energy use in data centers. As these burdens have increased, so have the pressures to find a new way to account for them.

GHGP announced its intention to review its Scope 2 accounting standards at the end of 2022, eventually accepting a $9.25 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund. Suddenly, the battle between the tech giants has spilled from the white papers into the real world, with a GHGP-sponsored “working group” set to work out the details of what the new standards should look like.

However, some believe it was not a fair fight at all.

“Our understanding was that we would have an arena to exchange ideas back and forth. It seemed like that [from the beginning] “It was very well thought out where it was going to go,” says a working group member and proponent of an alternative form of Scope 2 accounting, known as “Emissions First,” who was granted anonymity to speak frankly.