If you don't like the thought of lions killing deers, would you sympathize more with a lion in a jungle with 9 other lions and 100 deers or a lion in a jungle with no other lions and 20 deers? May be this not a great analogy for what I have to say, let's see.
Without wading into socialism vs capitalism, I suppose we can all agree, if you are really rich and doing something voluntarily and trying to take credit for it then you should be taking on some pain in doing the voluntary action and so the person taking the greater pain deserves relatively more goodwill even if they are both causing harm. By that measure, I feel the tech companies deserve no more goodwill than fossil companies but while we are hyper about fossil companies today we seem to be giving the really wealthy tech companies a free pass. And I say this notwithstanding the fact that the harm done by fossil energy to the environment is greater than the tech companies both in aggregate and per unit of their economic output, but please remember each's value addition is not easily compared.
Here is why
Since I just picked on Google in the last post (please read that one first for this to make better sense), as a Californian, let me pick on the other big fruit (sorry I don't like to pick on Fish, big or small), Apple this time. Phasebook's turn will come in due course and I hope to eventually move up the coast (not down) to the Amazon and MostlySoft. But my point applies to these companies as well.
If you look at the fossil companies and their major products - coal, oil products and gas, and when you look at the life cycle green house gas pollution from each product, only a small share 10% (maybe little more) happens in the process of getting those to the ultimate end user. The rest of the pollution happens when we actually burn those fuels to make electricity or when we drive our car or heat our homes. For computers etc. most of the harm (specifically, GHG and some types of air pollution) happens when the consumers use them (from emissions associated with the electricity they use) and when they trash them or recycle them (a lot of which could eventually be landfilling). Apologies for a casual error in an earlier version of the post where I claimed the same for phones but they are not in the same league as laptops or pcs
Now here is the question, Apple, Google and the like seem to be really flaunting their plan to make their offices, factories, and suppliers go renewable or clean or whatever, and people seem ok with it, whereas I am sure if Shell or Chevron said we are making our refineries become carbon neutral we would call that putting lipstick on something we should not be putting it on (I am sorry, I would rather take a cheap shot at the rich as opposed to a more benign creature we have chosen to treat like a ...)
Let me reiterate, fossil fuel companies cause disproportionately more environmental harm in aggregate compared to tech companies. (I am steering clear of non-environmental harm, at a certain level technology is not different from cigarettes, a whole another issue) and the former needs to have their feet held to a blast furnace not just any fire. But given they are both obscenely wealthy (at least the very big ones in each) and when you control for the fact one can more easily afford to do more (again, read the last post), isn't it time tech companies really do substantially more or just shut up and have the guts to say we are doing our bit but it is not that hard instead of painting themselves like warriors. In fact, if you factor how much they are paying their employees, investors and stockholders and how that wealth gets spent in turn generating additional emissions and how much more easy and wasteful consumption the tech giants are enabling by making it easy to consume and the attendant pscyhological costs (of living in a bubble), I am not sure the tech industry's footprint is all that less than fossil fuel's and perhaps even worse.
So what has this to do with lions and deers. The nine (arbitrary number) lions situation refers to fossil fuel industry where there is more competition within it even if as whole they are not in competition with renewables except in some cases, while the lone lion situation is the limited competition environment within which each of the major tech giants operate. I still don't know if the analogy I opened with makes sense, but I hope the rest does.
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