Carbon Tracking Platforms and the Problem of Net-Zero

Executive Summary

In recent years, platform companies including Google, Amazon, and Meta have announced sweeping net-zero carbon pledges and commitments to technological sustainability. In 2019, Amazon's then CEO Jeff Bezos announced a USD $10 billion Earth Fund to fund climate research and pledged to be net-zero by 2040, while Meta committed to becoming net-zero throughout its entire supply chain by 2030, with Google, Microsoft, and Twitter echoing similar promises. Despite these assurances, platform companies continue to harm the environment: they profit from climate disinformation and denialism, run on extractive energy and data practices, and disproportionately affect communities of colour, continuing legacies of environmental racism.

This brief argues that platform companies' recent interventions into climate governance, through changes to climate content and advertising policies, the data management of net-zero carbon tracking systems, and the expansion of physical infrastructures, constitute an emerging form of platform governance. A new crop of proprietary carbon tracking platforms promises what Holly Jean Buck calls decarbonization-as-a-service, offering a familiar technosolutionism that requires carbon to be made legible to platform power. Yet net-zero remains contested terrain: an evaluation by the New Climate Institute finds many businesses fall short of the Paris accord despite claiming to reach net-zero, reflecting ambiguity, greenwashing, and a lack of transparency, standardization, and independent oversight.

The brief calls for policy that bridges the artificial divide between climate policy and platform governance, urging mandatory transparency, accountability, standardization, robust verification protocols, independent audits, and public oversight of proprietary carbon accounting systems, alongside inclusion of affected communities in their design.