Technology giants under pressure: Climate goals in criticism!

Technology giants under pressure: Climate goals in criticism!

Celle, Deutschland - Today is June 26, 2025, and the debates about climate change and the necessary measures to combat climate warming are more current. Leading technology groups such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have undertaken to be climate -neutral by 2030 or 2040. But how credible are these promises? According to an investigation by the Newclimate Institute and the Carbon Market Watch, companies such as Microsoft, Meta and Amazon consider their climate strategies to be "poor" - while Apple and Google perform "moderately" in this regard, such as leman bleu reported.

A reason for these critical assessments is the immense power consumption of data centers, which is considered the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in the technology area. For example, Google almost doubled its CO2 emissions between 2019 and 2023. Despite high investments in renewable energies, the electricity requirement of the sector remains a central problem that endangers the climate goals. In addition, many companies obtain their data center energy from subcontractors, whose emissions often do not flow into their own footprint. This makes the entire supply chain an important set screw in the fight against climate change.

The challenges of climate neutrality

The situation in France is also interesting, where a comprehensive plan was launched in order to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. One central goal is to reduce energy consumption by 40 % and the drastic increase in the production of decarbonized electricity. In a study by RTE, various scenarios were outlined to cope with the challenges of energy consumption reduction. It also makes it clear that a significant increase in electrical consumption between 16 % and 60 % is expected, even if the total energy consumption drops, as is explained by rte france.

Another component to achieve these climate goals is electrification in various areas such as traffic and residential construction. Here, too, the improvement of energy efficiency through new equipment plays a central role. But the expansion of renewable energies faces challenges: the weather variability is to be compensated for through new tools such as battery storage and green gas.

A look at Germany

What remains is the challenge of reconciling all of these great goals and at the same time keeping the increased consumption of electricity under control through digitization and other technologies. The future will show whether the large corporations and politics can contribute their part to achieve climate neutrality and whether ambitious plans are actually put into practice. One thing is clear: there is still a lot of work ahead of us!