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How Tech Companies Are Redefining Reality: Meat's Truly Bonkers Emissions

Gone Are The Days Of Traditional Green Washing Techniques To Hide A Tech Giant's Environmental Impact. Meta Has Changed The Game.

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Ketan Joshi
Sep 29,2025

We are deep into a completely new era of greenwashing, where some clever companies and countries have finally understood it makes 
more sense to erode our shared capacity to measure the hard reality of climate-change-causing gases, rather than to bother with 
easily debunked offsets.

Big tech is living this philosophy at every conceivable level, most obviously through the invention and widespread deployment of a 
machine that fabricates text, images and videos based off the mass-theft of most of humanity's creative digital output. 

We are rapidly losing friends and family to the "let me just ask ChatGPT" infoslop curse. Increasingly fascist-friendly tech 
companies are now free to spin hidden dials and shift global perceptions of an issue even worse than they could with social media 
algorithms. But that does not make the hard physics of greenhouse gas molecules, electrons and the roiling heat of the atmosphere 
any less real.

Meta stands out as a fantastic example of a corporation with rapidly rising climate and environmental impacts that aims to deal 
with them not through traditional greenwashing, but through a subtle and complicated sabotage of how impacts are measured and 
reported; far more nefarious than anything we've seen before.

Instead of a debate about rhetoric and claims (like Apple's "carbon neutral" lawsuit), Meta has helped form a coalition of 
companies (known as the "Emissions First Partnership") that directly lobbies for the adjustment of how its worst environmental 
impacts are measured, biased obviously towards minimising the numbers spat out the other end.

The context for this push is Meta's frantic, anxious, infrastructure expansionism frenzy, and it's worth understanding this before 
we dive into what it's lobbying to change. Part one of this series will focus on the company's current presentation, and part II 
will focus on its desires and dreams. 

Meta's latest sustainability report came out only last week, oddly released with zero orchestrated media coverage (I keep a running 
compilation of big tech climate and energy data here). Like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, Meta's total electricity consumption has 
been on a massive tear for a half-decade, driven primarily by the expansion of data centres:
Source: manual compilation of company emissions data

To its credit, Meta discloses information down to the level of individual data centres. You can see from this breakdown that most 
of its energy consumption rise stems not from its own construction of new data centres, but from a massive increase in leasing, and 
the on-site expansion of facilities in Iowa and Oregon: 
Source: Meta 2025 sustainability report

This isn't surprising. A few years ago, Meta was forced to fundamentally redesign its data centre capacity, packing existing 
facilities with mountains of additional hardware and even cancelling some builds halfway through to redesign them from the ground 
up. The company clearly hit a wall, shifting towards leasing data centre space from third parties, but it can't do that forever.

This is likely all about to change: Meta is not just only building its own data centres, it is building its own fossil-fuelled 
power plants to run them. Analyst Nat Bullard recently revealed that Meta was the mystery name behind 600 megawatts of new fossil 
gas in Ohio. "Combined, there is a city's worth of behind-the-meter, data-center-only power generation being built in one corner of 
one state", he wrote. In Louisiana, Meta is partnering with Entergy to build a whopping 2,262 megawatts of new fossil gas (Entergy 
recently announced it won't be hitting its 2030 climate targets thanks to its new fossil-fuelled power stations).

Meta attributes emissions to its data centres by first taking how much was consumed, and multiplying that by the emissions 
intensity of the power grid at the time it was consumed. It's a rough estimate, but it's the least bad way to guess what the 
climate impact of power consumption is. Meta, and some various other companies I've compiled, look like this:
Source: manual compilation of company emissions data

As you expected, everyone is getting worse, fast. Meta, like others, has chosen to respond to this not by reducing its consumption, 
but by distorting the reality of how emissions are measured. 

The current technique is pretty blunt. Meta purchases what are known as "renewable energy certificates", or RECs. Every time a 
renewable energy facility generates a megawatt hour of energy, it sells a "certificate" of clean power output alongside selling the 
physical unit of electrical energy into the grid. 

Meta, in buying that certificate, claims its power consumption had zero emissions. The logic is this: the decision to purchase that 
certificate was causally necessary in the coming-into-existence of that wind farm. If Meta hadn't bought that certificate - if no-
one did - no bank would've ever leant cold, hard cash to the developers due to the lack of that additional income stream, and there 
would be no wind farm.

I know your head is spinning, but don't let yourself be dazzled. This is just the weird cousin of carbon offsetting. They call this 
adjusted figure 'market-based" emissions, and ensure that it's this number that's presented right up top in the headline figures 
(again to its credit, Meta discloses the "unadjusted" numbers clearly, where others obscure them as much as possible, such as Apple 
hiding it in auditor report footnotes).

By changing the basic reality of how it reports its power emissions, Meta's compliance with its climate goals looks like this:

Meta isn't denying climate change; nor is it being selective with its disclosures. It is taking a form of carbon offsetting and 
applying them not on top of reported emissions, but at the most basic structural level of emissions measurement. 

This technique is beginning to hit a wall. There has been rising scrutiny of dodgy claims of zero emissions through the purchase of 
certificates (sometimes relating to ancient hydro power stations on the other side of the planet). Google, for instance, consumes 
so much energy it couldn't sign enough power purchasing deals to fully zero out its power consumption emissions for its latest 
report. So where to next, now that the renewable well is running dry?

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September:

Feet Of Snow Hit The Alps
Early Snow For India
Sierra Snow Still Burying A 2022 Balloon Payload
"Warm Blob" Fading
La Niña Strengthening
Study: Models Overstate Greenland Melt By Up To 58%

Siberia Plunges To -22.6C (-8.7F)
Early Cold Signs For U.S.

First Heavy Snows Hit The Pyrenees And Alps
Historic September Cold Grips France
B.C.'s Vineyards Still Reeling From Crippling Freeze

Heavy Snow Slams Mongolia
Early Flakes Sweep Scandinavia
Colorado's First Real Snowstorm Of The Season
Trump Calls Out UN To Their Faces
China Burns Record Amount Of Coal

13 Feet Of September Snow For The Alps
Siberia's Record Early-Season Freeze
UK Shivers
Australia's Best Snow Season In Years
USHCN: Temperature Records "Adjusted"

Early Snows The Alps
Siberian Snow Cover Expands, More Incoming
U.S. Hot Days Down
Sea Ice Recovery At Both Poles
New Paper: Modern Warming Is Nothing New

Saudi Arabia Chills
Early Snow Hits Turkey
SSW And Winter 2025-26
The Sun And AMO Signal Colder Winters Ahead
Met Office Caught Fabricating Half a Century of Data

Autumn Snow Increasing
Signals Of A Cold Winter Ahead
World's Oceans Cool In September

Antarctica's Late Season Freeze
Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Higher Again In 2025
Atlantic Hurricane Season Stalls Out
NOAA Rewrites The Past - All The Time
Australia's $22.9m Climate Report Is A Joke

Concordia To -102.8F
More Polar Vortex Nonsense
New Study: Hunga Tonga Not CO2

Biting Cold In Canada's Far North
Cleveland's 22 Days Of Chill
Colorado's First Snows
La Niña Locks In, Cooling Deepens
Pole Shift Update
Auroras Reach CO

Stanley's Cold August
Snow Forecast In Utah
Britain Faces Blackouts: Net Zero Disaster
+ Sea Levels: No Runaway Rise

Nebraska's Coldest Late-Summer Stretch In Almost A Century
NSW's Cold, Wet Winter

New Zealand Resort Revived
NOAA Data: Cooler Than 1904
ASEAN Chooses Coal Over Fairy Tales

Coldest Start To September On Record
First -10Cs Of The Season In Russia And Canada
Snowy Australia
Antarctica Is Doing Just Fine
Atlantic Still Quiet Even At Hurricane Season Peak

Records Continue To Fall In U.S.
La Niña Update
European Winter Forecast Calls For Arctic Finish
Southern SSW
New Study: IPCC's Models "Significantly Overestimate" Sea Level Rise

Australya Turns Blue
September Chill In Central Canada
Records Continue To Fall In U.S., UP Sees Record-Early Snow

South America's Incoming Freeze
Record-Setting September Cold To Grip U.S.
This Year's Temps Among Coldest Since 1895
US Wildfire Burn Area At Decade Lows

Victoria's Best Snow Season In Years
Arctic Sea Ice Above 2011-2020 Average
Antarctica Has Been Cooling For 70 Years

Washington Posts Its Coolest August In 25 Years
Andes Under Feet Of Snow
Russian Ship Stuck In Arctic Sea Ice

Massive End-Of-Winter Snow Buries Australia's Resorts
Europe's "Hell Summer" Never Arrived
U.S. To Hold Cold For Weeks
Norway's Hydro Shortfall Puts Britain At Risk

Snow Piles Up In The Australian Alps, Even The Capitals
Reinforcing Cold Front To Extend U.S. Chill
Global Wildfire Area Down 30% Since 2002

More Record Lows Sweep U.S.
Canadian Arctic Slips Straight Into Winter
Summer Frosts Grip Europe's Lower Elevations
Record Cold Slovakia, Hungary's Lowest-Ever Summer Temp
Climate Central Caught Hiding Data

Perth's Coldest Day In 50 Years
Antarctica At -105.9F
Snow Closes Khardung-La
OK With Record Summer Cold
Germany Breaks Historic Cold Records As The Gas Tanks Run Dry

Early U.S. Cold To Impact 200 Million
Summer Snow In The Carpathians
Australia Forecast 3 Feet
Andes Hammered: Five Feet of Snow in Five Days at Valle Nevado