Green IO #69 Big Tech carbon emissions by the millions with Cathleen Berger
Nov 18, 2025
Cathleen Berger, a sustainability researcher and former head of sustainability at Mozilla, dives deep into Big Tech's emissions reporting. She discusses why accurate data is crucial and how many companies misreport figures to downplay their emissions. The conversation touches on the challenges posed by geopolitical factors and AI hype, and critiques methods used to obscure true impacts, especially around scope 3 emissions. Cathleen highlights companies that excel in transparency, like Apple, while revealing the pitfalls of others, including Microsoft and Meta.
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Why ESG Data Became Obsession
- Cathleen Berger began scrutinizing ESG data because numbers exposed gaps between corporate claims and reality.
- She now tracks big tech emissions yearly and finds the trend increasingly worrying.
Transparency Improved But Data Remains Hard To Use
- Reporting improved: more companies publish scope 1/2/3 but data often hides in long PDFs and isn't machine readable.
- That makes year-to-year comparison manual, slow, and error-prone.
Emissions Drops Can Be Accounting Tricks
- Companies manipulate historical emissions by excluding sold subsidiaries to show reductions in marketing copy.
- Those reductions can be purely accounting moves, not real emissions cuts.