Microsoft accused of 'greenwashing' as AI used in fossil fuel exploration Microsoft shareholders may be exposed to the "material financial risks" from its links with the fossil fuel industry, which the megacorp identified as the top growth target for its AI and cloud computing services. Redmond-based Microsoft reckons its agreements with the oil and gas industry could represent a market opportunity …
....many of these activists, such as the "Stop Oil" campaigners are just utterly deluded.
Oil is not going anywhere soon, and if you live in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere, there's a damned good chance, no, there a 100% chance you use oil.
"Oh but I live a 100% organic lifestyle with nothing made from oil "
Those clothes
"Oh they are hemp using natural dyes"
"And that hemp and dyes cane from.....?"
"Ahhh shipped from abroad"
There is no reason they can't use "AI" to explore for oil AND look for long term replacements.
AI does not necessarily suck up tons of energy. I wish people would fuck off with that.
A general purpose large language model or a generative image model sure....but AI based on machine learning to make predictions from known data vectors...absolutely not.
They aren't using fucking ChatGPT to find oil...they will be using datasets containing mineral compositions from soil samples etc then using some kind of ML based sorting algorithm to predict and categorise unknown samples with Euclidian, Minkowski etc distance (or a combination) as a measure of confidence.
You can do this sort of thing on CPUs from over a decade ago...please for the love of Christ Almighty go and learn something.
Some types of AI can use a lot of energy, but most of them don't in fact they can use relatively little.
Whilst your comment does include some truths you fail to miss a few points.
Whilst an old CPU can run the models you talk about we start to hit problems with larger datasets and complex models. Those two factors increase the time taken by an order of magnitude so while you are using less power it's taking a lot longer negating the savings you talk about. People also don't want to wait and they also don't have 10 year old CPUs lying around to do AI work on.
Then we have the multiple problem. Think of this way. One car is not going to cause any issues for the planet but millions of cars will. Not only that but when refining these models you will be running this hypothetical car many many times. Many newer "cars" are also more energy efficient vs performance than older "cars".
AI whether we like it or not has an energy cost and over time that energy cost is going to increase. I hope my comment has helped you learn something.
No I learnt fuck all. You are talking specifically in terms of LLMs and image diffusers, which are a small area of AI, but not the entirety of AI.
The vast majority of the energy consumption there is in training the models, not prompting them so the energy use doesn't scale as linearly as you'd like, especially when you take into account quantisation of models and ever more efficient algorithms used for prompting...if anything, over time the energy consumption of AI will plateau at worst...especially as models become more specialised...anyway that is beside the point, I don't disagree with you necessarily where LLMs and diffusers are concerned, I disagree with you referring to a very specific area of a very broad category of tech and tarring the whole industry with the same broad strokes.
I build AI solutions for a living, and most of the time those solutions run on low power equipment...like very low power equipment. A computer vision AI can run on a single core ARM processor that sucks less than 3W and can have a latency faster than you can blink...OpenCV for example can run on 4GB of conventional RAM with a single core and it is still pretty damned quick.
AI is all around you and has been for quite a long time now...at least 15 years. Image recognition, spam filtering, number plate reading, weather forecasts, online ads...all use AI to some degree.
I've built AI solutions for all kinds of things ranging from detecting nutritional deficiency, to matching body shapes to clothing, to analysing MRI data, to predicting financial markets...all kinds of stuff...and it's very rare to require massive amounts of energy sapping kit for it to work and for it to work quickly...collecting the data probably uses more energy than the resulting solution.
I don't disagree that LLM usage will increase energy use over time including diffusion models, in fact I agree with you to a certain degree (not entirely though)...but lumping in the rest of the AI industry is just stupid and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how AI is used, developed and implemented and how it progressing over time and how different situations call for different AI implementations. Large Language Models and Image Diffusers are not used in oil exploration. Never have been, probably never will be because a large language model is the wrong kind of AI for that sort of task...same applies to image diffusers. The kind of AI they use for oil exploration, or any kind of predictive modelling is nothing like a large language model / diffuser...not even close...you typically train those on the fly, because you're using dealing with very specific data, not a nebulous amount of loosely connected data. E.g. something like this local weather dataset (https://github.com/AbdullahZahid77/Weather-Prediction-using-Machine-Learning-Python-)...that is 60 years of detailed data and it fits in 2.6MB...it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot of power or time to crunch that...even on old shitty hardware...and once it has been crunched (which on a dataset that size would take maybe a minute) running predictions against it will be near instant...even on a shitty low end CPU.
Where LLMs / diffusers are concerned, they will become more energy efficient with each new generation of hardware because even though the hardware might use a little more power with each generation, the leaps in performance and optimisation massively increase the efficiency of training. This generation might take a week on 20 GPUs using 650W to train a specific type of model. Next generation might only need 4 GPUs at 700W for a day. That's orders of magnitude better, so even though the power usage creeps up, what you get in return for that power is orders of magnitude better. So if you look at it from an "hallucinations per watt" point of view, then power consumption will in fact be decreasing, if not metric other than the sheer wattage matters then yeah power will creep up, in the short term...then on the inference side, factor in the efficiencies that are being found there...there are models that have been quantised to half their size that provide near as damn it exactly the same results and therefore require far less grunt and power consumption to operate....short term, in this area will energy use continue to increase...yes, but not for the reasons you think...is it increasing proportionally to the expected results? No, the results are getting better all the time, at a rate faster than the power consumption is increasing...there will be a point of diminishing returns eventually with these types of AI because there is only so much data you can train them on, and beyond that no amount of power will improve the results...therefore we will likely hit a plateau followed by a gradual decrease in energy consumption as things become more optimised...there are no secret herbs and spices involved with training LLMs, the difference between them all is simply the data they are trained on and the amount of money spent acquiring it, there are probably minor differences in the way the data is vectorised, tokenised, filtered, "woked" etc but those aspects aren't really that critical and don't really have an impact on energy use, they're more like fighting over a duvet with your wife, you tweak something to change and improve one aspect of the result, but inevitably you're going to make another aspect worse, that's just how it goes with these things, training models is very unforgiving when you tinker with data and the more you tinker the harder it is to objectively establish whether the results are accurate...the only reason you need more power for training LLMs is to get to market quicker and beat the competition. If you have to organisations with identical training data, one has 1000 GPUs and the other has 2000 GPUs...the one with 2000 GPUs gets to market twice as fast, but both organisations will produce pretty much identical models...the reality is the datasets vary wildly...and at the moment ChatGPT has all the money to be able to buy access to vast swathes of data and stacks and stacks of GPUs...eventually the playing field will level because data will become cheaper and cheaper to access, because the people selling it will want to continue to sell it, but the customers able to buy it will have ever shrinking budgets.
Your car example is sort of right in a way...but the context is wrong...you're essentially doing maths based on cars to argue against commercial aircraft....blaming drivers (people using models) for the fuel burn of an airline (ChatGPT, Microsoft etc)...the power consumed by people using large language models pales in comparison to the energy used to train large language models...I don't blame you for your piss poor example, because it's very easy to quantify millions of hypothetical john smiths using LLMs, because that's data that is easy to understand and extrapolate...but it is very hard to quantify the energy use of OpenAI, Microsoft etc etc because nobody has a clue, there is no data to extrapolate from and therefore that side of the equation is very abstract...if you throw an apple at a target and the lady falls in the water...she must be a witch right?
"resources that can't be put into replacing the fossil fuel industry."
It's a dilemma in that we have to keep the old until we have enough new to replace it with. It's getting harder and harder to find oil reserves of high enough quality as not all oil is the same. More is being used than new reserves are being found. Consider that we have deep sea oil rigs and companies have gone to the bother of taking tar-laden sand in Canada and refine that goo into petroleum based products. Neither of those things would go on if there were easier reserves to be found. It's not about expanding the petroleum business but running as fast as they can to stay in one place.
Perhaps countries can pull back from subsidizing electric cars (as much as I'd like to get one) and instead fund viable projects to replace fossil fuels where initial investments don't have the sorts of returns that the private sector will invest in. I think EV's are great and reducing power used at refineries to put in an EV battery is more efficient, but "the grid" isn't configured to distribute the power required. To replace a 40MW service to one commercial location is much easier than sending that to all of the homes it would take to use it. So, instead of giving Elons a DoE low interest loans to build EV's, maybe it would be better to give a company that makes sub-station gear a low interest loan to expand their production capabilities.
"It's getting harder and harder to find oil reserves of high enough quality"
It's really not...the problem is political.
Antarctica has vast fields of oil, we just can't drill for it because of a treaty that exists...similar problems exist elsewhere. There is shit loads of oil off Ukraine which stretches from one end off the coast to the edge of the Crimean peninsula that we aren't currently extracting, right on the edge of Europe...why do you think Putin is keen to hold the coast line down there and hasn't bothered to go elsewhere further inland in Ukraine?
Enjoy your Red MAGA Hat (made in China coz Trump is a cheapskate)
Many of us are actively reducing our carbon emissions. Sure, 'Stop Oil' are a bit extreme but there is a middle ground.
I've
- given up flying (no flights since 2016)
- use 100% renewable electricity
- Generate my own with solar and a small wind turbine which I store in my own batteries
- Drive an EV... Fuelled by green leccy
- Buy locally produced food wherever possible
- Grow my own fruit and veg.
- Make my clothes last a long time. I've spent less than £80.00 on clothes this year.
What have you done then?
A lot of us would like solar but can't afford it. I'm in a conservation area so not allowed panels on the roof, besides, the old Victorian roof probably wouldn't be able to handle them. Wouldn't mind an EV but go nowhere to charge it as don't have a drive, don't want to go anywhere near Chinese EVs.
Making clothes last longer, I bought some offcut leather from the local haberdashery and used it to patch up my dewalt trousers I use for DIY instead of throwing them and replacing. They are still fine, just had a arse in the arse area. The leather works well.
Fast Fashion should be banned.
I've been pointing out for a while with using Microsoft's CoPilot we're contriubuting to that energy waste. Falls on deaf ears. Microsoft carbon emissions have increased this year by at least 20% purely because of AI bollocks.
What have you done then?
Composted a few vegans* who annoyed me with their incessant virtue signalling, and turned them into tasty tomatos!
- use 100% renewable electricity
Extremely unlikely, unless you're entirely isolated from the grid supply. But that's just another example of greenwashing. All your supplier has done is bought enough REGOs (Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin) to pretend the electrons shuffling your way aren't in fact being supplied by gas, coal, nuclear, burned forests etc etc. At least with 'smart' meters, it should be possible to actually disconnect customers on 'renewable' tariffs when it's dark and the wind drops. But with Ed Millibrain in charge of the UK's energy supply, that's very unlikely to happen.
*Do I really need to add a /sarc tag?
We need most of it because we have not made any significant efforts to not use them, and not in a timely fashion.
Not because oil is somehow divinely ordained.
There is almost nothing we use oil for that we do not have existing technical replacements for, but we are 50 years late in rolling out the changes, and continue to prioritise the stupid and unnecessary over the future.
Pouring vast resources into AI, whose primary current job is "optimising" advertising, instead of building the electricity infrastructure is emblematic.
"You miss the point completely, which is that we need oil and gas for far, far more than as fuel."
That's very true. The trouble right now is we use the majority for transportation sending a component into the atmosphere as we do. If there were an engine that ran off petroleum based fuel at 90%ish efficiency, it wouldn't be nearly as bad, but I've never seen any method for that as a direct usage.Co-gen makes more use of the latent energy, but that needs particular applications. A turbine running a generator can be much more efficient than pistons going up and down, but it's a bit hot and noisy.
Ditto. I stopped taking flights 20yrs ago, I had solar and battery storage installed on my home which covers around 80% of my electric on avg all year. During May-Sept my gas & electric bills were between £14-40 a month. Reduced wasteful spending on crap I don't need, support local businesses where I can.
I don't drive an EV though, the studies I have read show that it takes up to 50k miles of driving a mid sized family EV, just to offset it's production costs. I drive less than 5k miles a year... my current car might be 16yrs old, but it's reliable and better to keep running than wasting resources on another EV right now.
I don't think 'just stop oil' are a bit extreme at all, I think the whole corporate industry has shown us all that they have no intention of doing anything to reduce the harm they have inflicted on everyone and the planet... maybe it's time to get extreme.
Absolutely none of that reduces your carbon emissions. It just offsets them and gives you a shittier quality of life in return...I suspect you aren't really an eco-warrior...you're just a cheapskate...because that is a great list if you want to live on a shoestring, but does fuck all for carbon emissions.
So if it generates more carbon emissions in a shorter time...like all the batteries you own.
Buying locally is great on paper, but there is a point where the demand for that can be more damaging and increase carbon emissions. For example, creating new farm land to cater for demand...you have to chop down local forests and decimate local wildlife...which affects your local areas ability to consume carbon as it is produced, thereby increasing over carbon emissions.
Some of the stuff you do has absolutely no impact on carbon emissions at all...like choosing not to fly...those flights you don't take, hate to break it to you, but they still fly.
Making your clothes last longer will save you a lot of money, but again won't reduce emissions because it won't lead to fewer shirts being made...it just leads to more stock being destroyed...do you know how they destroy clothes? They ship them overseas where they get burned...so you'd be emitting less carbon if you bought more clothes and just didn't wear them.
Growing your own veg is a great way to save money (that's why I do it), but again it doesn't really offset carbon all that much...you'd offset more carbon if you planted trees or created wetland because trees and wetland are more efficient at soaking up carbon from the atmosphere than your tomato plants are and if you plant enough trees they will remove more carbon from the atmosphere than you will ever produce buying imported veg...because again, not buying imported veg doesn't stop the imported veg existing, it just leads to more waste.
If you genuinely care about reducing carbon. Don't own a car...have your groceries delivered. Thousands of people sharing delivery vans rather than driving to the shops saves immense amounts of carbon and fossil fuel...most people do this now, which means carbon emissions from consumers buying groceries is already lower than it has been for a long time...moreover a lot of our imported fruit and veg comes from places like Spain, North Africa etc etc...places where there aren't many forests and they don't have to cut forests down to create farmland...this is far less damaging to the atmosphere than converting your local forests and wetlands into a giant allotment...whether the veg is shipped or not...we need forests and wetlands to soak up and store carbon...cutting them down to put farm land in is worse than importing fruit and veg because you release carbon in doing so and remove the very thing that is taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
Encourage working from home so that we can get rid of wasteful office buildings that are heated and lit 24/7.
Produce less waste, purchase efficiently so that nothing ends up going to an incinerator somewhere.
Be pro nuclear power (the greenest form of leccy), nuclear power emits orders of magnitude less carbon than fossil fuels and is less damaging to the environment than cobalt mining, battery shipping etc etc...nuclear waste output is far, far less than you think it is...there are not endless barrels of green slime coming out of nuclear power plants. Just spent fuel rods which are around 3.5 metres long and quite narrow...one fuel rod lasts about a decade...so far, to my knowledge, there has never been any nuclear waste stored outside of a nuclear power facility...look at them on Google Maps...next to most nuclear power plants, you will see a structure about the size of an olympic swimming pool, these go into the ground and are lined with feet of concrete, lead lining and steel...they are designed to cope with centuries of nuclear waste and they are designed to ensure nothing ever seeps out of them. The half life of most nuclear power fuel material is about 30 years...so the spent rods will be safe and inert long before they run out of space to store more.
"What have you done then?"
Most of the above without the political rhetoric.
I'm working on getting more of my leccy with solar (wind isn't allowed in town) but I still have to be grid connected so not have the house condemned for occupancy.
An EV is on the "nice to have list" since my current ICEV works great and there's no short term ROI on getting an EV.
I buy as much fruit and veg as I can in season and do a bunch of canning/preserving. Same when the garden is producing like made and I'm hella sick of zucchini. Cucumbers wind up as really awesome pickles along with onions and peppers. I won't introduce any more friends to them as they just start begging when they run out and I want some for me. You know you have good friends when they return the jars thoroughly washed.
I got set up for sewing mainly to make light modifiers for my photography business, but it also lets me repair and alter clothes so they last much longer or get a second life as something else. Estate sales, baby. I've got more spools of thread than I'll be able to use in my lifetime. And pins, and needles, and tons of other stuff. I turn stuff into other stuff all the time. I'm looking out for some walnut lumber to make a new light for the living room from a broken LCD TV. The LEDs work great and the diffusion material makes a very nice soft light. I'm sure I'll find the wood over the course of the next few sales I go to. There's nearly always something.
Instead of watching TV, I put on an audiobook and "make". Much more rewarding.
No you didn't give up flying. There are more planes in the air now than prior to the pandemic. Even if you really did what you're saying, you're the exception not the rule.
Buy locally produced food wherever possible
And can we assume those were grown without pesticides and fertilizers? Which means more of the crop is lost to locusts and so you have to use more land to grow that food?
Fuelled by green leccy
Sure.
Greta campaigned against wind turbines in Norway a couple of years ago. Looking at the output of that wind turbine park, it would take more than 700 turbines to match the annual output of a single reactor (Forsmark-1 is the one I calculate with). Wind isn't what it is cranked up to be.
Bottom line: Anyone who isn't campaigning for nuclear energy is just blowing wind. Nuclear is the only technology that the fossil fuel industry fear.
I think that misses the point. As You Sow are not in the same ballpark as Just Stop Oil -- whom I agree are deluded numpties who cause more harm than good to their own cause -- and it is disingenuous (or willful deflection) to tar them with that brush. As You Sow's charter is to hold corporate entities to account over (amongst other issues) environmental commitments, safety, ethics, etc. They are not in the business of haranguing individuals over lifestyle choices. Here, they are simply calling out Microsoft over greenwashing, and I think they have a fair point.
I disagree: they're both playing the same game, just different aspects of it As they are **visibly** less nutcase than the Just Stop Oil types, it adds a modicum of respectability to them. You can still find them in Cocktail, Dry-Roasted, and Mixed varieties on the shelves of your local grocer.
A **tiny** amount of research (Influencewatch,org) shows them to be Left of Center, using all the current buzzwords, and associated with the constellation of Left-wing orgs funded by George Soros.
A **tiny** amount of research (Influencewatch,org) shows them to be Left of Center, using all the current buzzwords, and associated with the constellation of Left-wing orgs funded by George Soros.
Interesting..
In 2020, As You Sow reported $12,704,370 in total revenue and $6,468,534 in total expenses. It reported having $8,775,836 in net assets at the end of the year
I'm assuming the assets might be mostly the shares in the companies they've targeted, and might have grown substantially since 2020. So might become a tempting target for sharp lawyers wanting to get their mitts on that money. Which could be fun arguing if they're really a 'charity', or an investment fund profiting off the businesses they claim to be tageting.. especially if proceeds from investment activities exceed charitable donations.
I'm guessing -- and your spelling suggests as much, but correct me if I'm wrong -- that your "Left of Center" is in the US sense. (Here in the UK, that would be slightly Right of Centre [sic].)
I'll also assume that you were not using "Soros" as a code word for anything unsavoury - just as the standard buzzword bogeyman of the US Populist Right and their fellow travellers in Europe and beyond.
Probably not entirely unconnected, but I'm not seeing anything particularly nutty about As You Sow. So they're an advocacy group whose stated purpose is to keep a beady eye on bad behaviour, social irresponsibility and general duplicity among large corporations. Big deal - it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. More to the point, I believe they have raised some reasonable concerns about greenwashing on the part of Microsoft; that there is a case to answer. But do keep firing away at the messenger.
I assume that anyone using "Soros" in a derogatory way really means..
The problem with making assumptions. In the blue corner, we have Soros, a Hungarian and now American who is well documented for interering with Americans. Over in the red corner, we have Musk, a South African and now American who is well documented for having broken a beloved echo chamber.
But two rather divisive figures that have found themselves the object of hatred from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Bring us your poor, your tired huddled masses.. Oh, and if you're a billionaire, have citizenship!
" Bring us your poor, your tired huddled masses."
There comes a time when the "no vacancy" sign needs to go up. Same as the "go forth and multiply" concept. The carrying capacity of the Earth is way overshot and is getting by through spending fossil fuels to prop it up. We are also increasingly automating the bulk of jobs that got us to the industrial civilization that we have. It's not the same as the Luddites going after the looms, it only rhymes a bit.
> There comes a time when the "no vacancy" sign needs to go up.
Yes, sure, in order to maintain the current huge differential between a resource-profligate, high-quality-of-life minority and said huddled masses.
> The carrying capacity of the Earth is way overshot ...
Well, the carrying capacity of earth is not writ in stone; having said which, as regards humanity the current scheme does seem to entail huge inequities in quality of life, as well as large-scale destruction of the global environment and ecosystems. Which is obviously not a Good Thing (for both humans or other life forms).
An issue here, is that the size of the global population has huge inertia. I'm not sure exactly what the figures are (nor even how they may be calculated), but given the time scale of human biology, and factoring in socioeconomic factors, I've seen ballpark figures in the region of half a century plus to get the global population down to anywhere near a level that would make a jot of difference to emissions and global resource usage. And that's with the best will in the world (clearly lacking) and a concerted global drive to reduce population size. As things stand, the rate of population growth is barely levelling off (i.e., the global population continues to increase, but more slowly). FWIW, I think the most effective approach to reducing population growth turns out to be education (and economic empowerment - so, e.g., you don't feel a compulsion to breed a zillion offspring to support you in old age).
In light of the above, particularly annoying is the popular response to climate issues which says "Sorry, no point in futzing about with sustainable energy, etc., because... population". Climate change will not wait that half-century plus (with the best will in the world, currently lacking, etc.) - to screw us over. But there most certainly are measures we can take in mitigation over that time scale.
Anyway, don't entirely disagree with the rest.
"FWIW, I think the most effective approach to reducing population growth turns out to be education (and economic empowerment - so, e.g., you don't feel a compulsion to breed a zillion offspring to support you in old age)."
There are all sorts of studies that support your statement. Women with education to age 18 will have a smaller family that those with very little education and even smaller families with higher education. Those stats are averaged as some cultures/communities in the first world put an emphasis on having a large number of children.
The carrying capacity of Earth isn't writ in stone, but examples of the shortcuts taken thus far to support the current population don't bode well for the future. If we continue down that road, there will be a point where the decision is taken out of our hands in the form of pandemic, war or economic realities of producing enough things for everybody (food, clothes, sanitation). It's worth reading "An Essay on the Principle of Population", by Thomas Malthus. Even in 1798, it was obvious to some the population traps we humans fall into.
In light of the above, particularly annoying is the popular response to climate issues which says "Sorry, no point in futzing about with sustainable energy, etc., because... population". Climate change will not wait that half-century plus (with the best will in the world, currently lacking, etc.) - to screw us over. But there most certainly are measures we can take in mitigation over that time scale.
This is really the problem. On the one hand, it's defining what 'climate change' really is. So there's been a lot in the news recently trying to link the floods in Spain to man-made climate change, when there isn't really any evidence for this. So as an example-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/11/01/a-history-of-catastrophic-flooding-in-spain/
The bottom panel is for Very Large events, affecting four or more basins. All told, they have identified a total of 589 catastrophic inundations, using documentary evidence, mostly since the 16thC when reliable records became generally available.
Plus some interesting science, ie whether the Hunga Tonga eruption that yeeted a lot of moisture into the atmosphere has had any short-term impact on weather/climate. Interesting because it actually allows scientists to compare predictions with reality. Building windmills won't help with floods, but urban planning and better forecasting might help reduce the impact. So a lot of the real debate is whether the actions being taken, and money being spent is the right approach. Wind is pretty useless and expensive, nuclear is more dependable. We need cheap, reliable energy, but currently the policy is wrong.
And that also leads to some other oddities like this-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnHysDMGsRg&
where a recovery company managed to capture a lithium battery unit that had overturned, overheated and caught fire.. in one of the worst possible places. Or this large fire at a battery recycling plant-
https://missouriindependent.com/briefs/epa-expands-air-sampling-around-missouri-battery-plant-fire-tells-residents-to-shelter/
In a statement Friday, the EPA said it was conducting round-the-clock air monitoring for volatile organic compounds, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, lower explosive limit and particulate matter following the fire at Critical Mineral Recovery near Fredericktown.
Particulate matter from battery fires can include toxic heavy metals. If policy states we have to drive EVs, we'll still need batteries for those, but we won't need grid-scale battery farms if we change policy to not rely on unreliable wind.
Microsoft is one step removed from the '"material financial risks" from its links with the fossil fuel industry of Big Oil. If BO has the money to pay for their products and services (and they do) then the risks to MS are minimal.
Is it anyone's business what a customer does with their product? As long as they adhere to the instructions for use and warning labels on the procuct, I'd say 'No'. Holding that nebulous accusation of "material financial risks" (I interpret the quotes in As You Sows statement as denoting opinion rather than substantiated fact) as a hammer held threateningly over ones head to elicit behavior changes as bordering on unethical. 'MS, don't you sell product to BO because we don't like what they do.' You don't like what BO does? Fine. Then go after them directly. Microsoft (and any other supplier) is not your personal army.
I'd go so far as to say that MS caving to such indirect pressures on their customers is a far greater material financial risk, as I don't know if I'd want to use a supplier that might cut me off because someone else doesn't like me.
I see many that fully understand climate change and man's position in the process, but look at the money they make and couldn't give a sh*t. I just wonder what their kids\grand kids life will be like.
Much poorer. Champagne socialists like Ed Millibrain, Ed Davey and Dale Vince will be doing just fine thanks to subsidies-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/11/01/environmental-levies-to-cost-108-billion-by-2029-30/
And between this year and 2029/30, total levies will amount to £108.4 billion.
Let that number sink in! It’s equivalent to over £4000 for every household in the country.
The planet is fc*ked.
Mostly the bits covered in windmills or solar panels. But the planet will be just fine, orbiting the Sun for a very long time. We, the people may be driven back to a far less comfortable subsistence lifestyle, but our 'leaders' will carry on eating cake. Well, unless the events of the French Revolution repeat, and ironically that was largely as a result of 'climate change'.
" The planet is fc*ked.
Mostly the bits covered in windmills or solar panels."
Near me there are fields of solar PV panels being installed. I am around 100 miles from a major city and the land being used for the solar is not useful for other things. There isn't the water, to start with, but there's enough to wash the panels with. There might be enough shade to allow plants to grow that weren't able to live there before and the Shepard that brings his fleecy mowers to the area could have even more pasture created to turn into tasty meat to keep my tatties company on the plate.
... and the e-waste that results from the said "artificial" requirements when people are "required" to upgrade their perfectly fine computers to run Windows 11...
(All the varied work-arounds that allow Win11 to run on machines that do not meet the Win11 requirements is proof enough for me that the Win11 requirements are "artificial")
So M$ "greenwashing" is not a surprise
Obviously no care for our environment - only the bottom line
Add to that the extremely poor quality of Updates that have been reported over the last year, or so, for BOTH Win10 AND Win11 and it indicates that M$ simply does not care...
"(All the varied work-arounds that allow Win11 to run on machines that do not meet the Win11 requirements is proof enough for me that the Win11 requirements are "artificial")"
The same goes for Mac. There are projects that allow installing much later MacOS versions on hardware that Apple hasn't supported in years. A few things are problems, but I expect Apple could have fixed those things and kept up support. I have a couple of perfectly good laptops that aren't very useful anymore due only to not being able to be upgraded so they run a more up to date browser and software. The laptop I do have that can be upgraded through third party patches works great (2012 MPB).
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