The Platformisation of Digital Platforms’ Climate Pledges

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures. There are also the Carbon Free Energy initiative; Frontier, an initiative of the online payment company Stripe, which provides carbon removal and sequestration credits; and some emerging approaches to make generative AI platforms more carbon-neutral.

Even before the rise of generative AI, there had been the beginnings of a techlash against both the climate impacts of large digital platform companies and their overall market power; this questioned their social licence to operate, and resulted in efforts to improve public perceptions of their activities. In order to avoid government regulation, the industry has tended to promote its own self-government initiatives – and their market power means that this also affects other stakeholders in the value chain.

Corporate public relations can also be understood as a form of governance, and play into government policy developments. Companies’ own carbon ‘pledges’ or ‘compacts’ often involve local and regional government institutions and enrol other stakeholders and intermediaries; the platforms also position themselves as carbon market intermediaries themselves (e.g. facilitating trade in carbon credits), and are increasingly involved in establishing their own climate technology divisions and exploring their own sources of renewable energy.

This points to four types of capture: brand capture, where major platforms promote their carbon pledge brands and subsidiaries; preemptive regulatory capture, where companies push their own preferred regulatory models; platform capture, where carbon accountability and trading systems themselves use their digital platforms; and future capture, where future imaginaries and possibilities are captured by these brands.

All of this has been further turbo-charged by the rise of generative AI. This has massively increased energy demands and environmental impacts, and in response platforms have claimed that the efficiency dividends from using AI will make up for this; or that future AI technologies will be more energy-efficient.

All of this could further worsen the monopolist nature of these platforms. There is also a risk of PR capture of current climate mitigation debates, and of a platformisation of carbon trade and certification processes – complexity may be the point here, as it simplifies platforms’ obfuscation efforts.