{"id":119117,"date":"2021-04-13T10:15:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T10:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=185602"},"modified":"2021-04-13T10:15:00","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T10:15:00","slug":"lobbying-for-good-new-campaign-asks-big-tech-to-push-for-bold-climate-action-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/13\/lobbying-for-good-new-campaign-asks-big-tech-to-push-for-bold-climate-action-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Lobbying for good? New campaign asks Big Tech to push for bold climate action"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no doubt that Big Tech has been talking a big climate game lately. In the last two years, Microsoft committed<\/a> to running its operations entirely on renewable energy by 2025; Apple pledged<\/a> to become carbon neutral across its supply chain in a decade; Amazon announced<\/a> it would be putting 100,000 electric delivery vans on the roads by 2030; and Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet, committed<\/a> to operating all of its data centers on carbon-free power round-the-clock within a decade.<\/p>\n

But while major tech companies are making genuine efforts to clean up their own climate pollution, they\u2019re doing very little<\/a> to lobby for pro-climate policies at the state or federal level, despite the fact that such advocacy could play a much bigger role in helping the United States meet its climate targets. Now, one organization is trying to change that by calling on tech industry employees to tell their bosses to step up.<\/p>\n

On March 31, ClimateVoice<\/a>, a corporate climate advocacy nonprofit, launched the \u201c1 in 5 Campaign<\/a>,\u201d which is asking the five biggest tech companies in the U.S. \u2014 Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook \u2014 to devote one-fifth of their lobbying dollars to climate policy in 2021. That would amount to a seismic shift for corporations that only devote a small fraction of their lobbying resources to climate issues today. ClimateVoice founder Bill Weihl<\/a>, a former sustainability executive at Google and Facebook, believes that if major tech corporations want to show true climate leadership, there\u2019s never been a better time for them to put their money and influence where their mouth is.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got a window politically,\u201d Weihl told Grist. \u201cWe\u2019ve got an opportunity in Washington where we could pass major climate legislation. Big tech companies have the resources and ability, if they choose to, to really dig in here and make a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly true that Big Tech has the resources. As of December 2020, the five largest U.S. tech companies had a combined market value of $7.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly a third of U.S. GDP<\/a>. And while many sectors of the economy have suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, tech corporations have reaped record<\/a> profits<\/a>, further consolidating their power as hundreds of millions of people worldwide became more dependent on online shopping<\/a>, video-conferencing platforms, and other tech services and products. <\/p>\n

But to date, major U.S. tech corporations haven\u2019t used their financial resources and political clout to push for bold climate policies, despite the fact that all of them have adopted internal climate goals and made climate action a centerpiece of their marketing and public relations strategies. Between 2019 and 2020, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook spent a combined $127 million<\/a> on federal lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But a January report<\/a> by the think tank InfluenceMap found that just 4 percent of the federal lobbying activity at those companies went toward climate issues. By contrast, Big Oil devoted nearly 40 percent of its lobbying muscle to climate policy in the same time frame \u2014 mostly to fighting against it. <\/p>\n

InfluenceMap executive director Dylan Tanner says it\u2019s possible Big Tech doesn\u2019t prioritize climate lobbying because companies don\u2019t see policies like clean energy standards or national carbon taxes \u201cimpacting them directly in the immediate future.\u201d <\/em> Weihl suspects that \u201crisk aversion\u201d also plays a role, given the highly partisan nature of many climate policy debates. \u201cBig companies are generally afraid if they take a strong stand on a controversial issue, somebody who\u2019s not happy with that might do something that hurts their core business,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

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Amazon boasts 68 solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers. Amazon<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

To reach its goal of getting tech companies to commit a fifth of their lobbying dollars to climate this year, ClimateVoice is mobilizing tech industry employees, as well as students at universities that Big Tech regularly recruits from, using a combination of direct outreach, digital advertisements, and social media campaigns. Employees at the five tech companies ClimateVoice is targeting can sign a petition<\/a> urging their employers to lobby for climate action in 2021. While signatories\u2019 names are being withheld to avoid any employer retaliation, Weihl says that ClimateVoice is in touch with executives at each of the companies and will be \u201cengaging with them regularly\u201d to let them know how many of their workers have signed the petition and what those workers are saying. The campaign is employing \u201cmultiple levels of screening,\u201d he says, to verify the employment status of tech workers who sign the petition, and it is offering an alternate version<\/a> of the petition for members of the general public to voice their support.<\/p>\n

While the 1 in 5 Campaign hasn\u2019t shared any numbers yet, so far, Weihl says that the response has been \u201creally positive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had lots of people signing the petitions and sharing things on social media,\u201d Weihl said. \u201cLots of responses by email from people asking what they can do to help.\u201d <\/p>\n

Representatives from Google and Microsoft both declined to comment on the 1 in 5 Campaign. A Facebook spokesperson said in an email that the company is \u201ccommitted to fighting climate change\u201d and supports the goals of the Paris Agreement, but did not address lobbying or the new campaign specifically. Neither Amazon nor Apple responded to Grist\u2019s request for comment on the campaign.<\/p>\n

Whether pressure from anonymous tech employees will be sufficient to get these large corporate actors to change their lobbying practices remains to be seen. Anecdotally, recent employee pressure campaigns seem to have had an impact on Amazon, which made its 2019 climate pledge only after thousands of workers signed an open letter<\/a> to Jeff Bezos calling for the release of a company-wide climate plan, and on Microsoft, which announced<\/a> it would be restricting sale of facial recognition software to police departments last June following an open letter<\/a> from hundreds of employees. <\/p>\n

But the tech industry\u2019s response to employee activism hasn\u2019t just been a string of concessions: companies have also retaliated against some of their most prominent internal critics. Last April, Amazon fired<\/a> two of the women who helped organize the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice for allegedly violating corporate communications policies by criticizing the company in public \u2014 retaliation that a National Labor Relations board investigation recently deemed illegal<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Lindsay Baker, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute and the former head of sustainability at WeWork, is unsure to what extent employee pressure campaigns versus other factors \u2014 such as peer pressure from competing tech firms \u2014 have motivated the recent slew of climate- and justice-oriented commitments from Silicon Valley. But in general, she thinks \u201cemployees getting involved works well in tech\u201d given that top companies are competing fiercely to recruit the most talented individuals.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving worked in a tech company in the sustainability realm, I can say it matters what employees think,\u201d Baker said. \u201cIf they feel like there\u2019s a genuine threat people will leave, they will act.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s for that reason that Baker is optimistic about the 1 in 5 Campaign\u2019s prospects. At least one Google engineer who signed the petition shares her optimism. \u201cMaybe we won\u2019t get to the 20 percent mark, but I think any movement toward that is great,\u201d said the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about company policies. <\/p>\n

Like Weihl, the Google engineer sees a window of opportunity, albeit a slightly different one: Google recently announced<\/a> that it would not make any political contributions this election cycle to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the recent U.S. presidential election.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s going to hopefully release capital,\u201d the Google engineer said. \u201cWhy not deploy it to a more noble cause that represents employees and our customers?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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