Heatmap leaps with a snarl on Microsoft, once a darling of the climate crowd for its ambitious Net-Zero-and-beyond plans and its deep green billionaire cofounder. “Microsoft’s Climate Pollution Surged 25% Last Year” Boo Microsoft! Boo “climate pollution”. We are again reminded of Edmund Burke’s jibe about factionalism in the French Revolution that “Birds of prey are not gregarious” because you’d think if both the company and Bill Gates were reconsidering some of their past positions their former fellow travellers in the media might think “Wait, since we know they’re good guys, maybe they have a point.” Nope, instead they summon the tumbrels. [Read more.]

As that article notes:

“We got a look at another major tech company’s latest energy and carbon emissions data — and it’s a doozy. On Wednesday, Microsoft released its annual sustainability report, giving us another year’s worth of energy and emissions data for a company that Heatmap’s annual insiders poll once judged to be one of the best hyperscalers for climate change.”

One of the best hyperscalers. Presumably a good thing. Though what it means isn’t entirely clear. Or what it’s meant to since evidently Microsoft isn’t one.

Part of the problem is AI. And having just been offered a summary of our credit card bill by the AI assistant to facilitate the atrophying of our brain, we’re inclined to share that hostility. We didn’t dare accept lest it said “You’re skint, mate” or some North American equivalent. Also the Bing search engine is so bad you’d think it was something a rival had somehow tricked them into using. But of course Heatmap’s objection is to energy making stuff happen, not that this particular stuff arguably shouldn’t happen:

“Electricity, which the company is buying in larger amounts than ever before to power AI data centers, is driving a good share of that increase. In 2024, carbon pollution produced by generating electricity (as well as from making chilled water and steam) was responsible for 2% of Microsoft’s total corporate carbon footprint. In 2025, that same category made up 13% of its overall emissions. The company’s power use rose by more than 24% over the same period.”

And we can also understand thinking Microsoft’s corporate PR is oily and vexatious. For instance:

“The report suggests, too, that Microsoft is increasingly wary of local fights over data center development – and how water has come to play an outsize role in those battles. The company reports that 2025 was the first year ever that it ‘replenished’ more water on global scales than it withdrew. But ‘the next phase of our work is increasingly local,’ write Brad Smith, the company’s vice chair and president, and Melanie Nakagawa, its chief sustainability officer. That line is clearly in reference to water, specifically – Smith and Nakagawa add that the company hopes to ‘restore more water to the watersheds where we operate than we withdraw’ – but it could also cover the widespread local opposition to data centers that has exploded over the same period.”

Now there’s something overly slick about an aspiration to put more water back than you took out, since Microsoft cannot manufacture the stuff. (Well, unless it starts spending power massively on hydrogen, we suppose.) And buying it from someone, trucking it in and pouring into the creek seems like ticking boxes not leaving nature be. But then, has it occurred to Heatmap that possibly all their earlier greenery was just the same trendy puffery?

If not, has it occurred to them that maybe Microsoft, which is in fact in the business of making things (if “cloud services” are a thing) really sincerely shared their objectives but has found that the practical obstacles were enormously greater than zealotry and marketing made them seem?

Quite possibly not because the omnicause mindset doesn’t work that way. It focuses on motives (think “Visualize world peace” and then try to visualize a million bucks in your bank account), and assumes that any setbacks in bringing the New Jerusalem slamming down on recalcitrant mankind are the result of active malice. For instance Canary Media just complained that:

“Happy Friday! President Donald Trump is coming up on a year and a half in office, and his administration’s impacts on the clean energy job market are becoming clear: The cancellation and downsizing of hundreds of clean manufacturing and energy projects have jeopardized nearly 500,000 jobs. Dan McCarthy charts the losses.”

Why that opening would constitute a “Happy Friday!” is unclear. But it’s also unclear, or should be, that these “clean” jobs were really clean. Or that they were really jobs. On the first point, as we noted last week, the “green” energy transition is remarkably dirty. And on the second, as Adam Smith noted before last week, along with Henry Hazlitt and many others, if someone is being paid handsomely via government subsidies it is far from clear that what they are doing is a net benefit to their fellows.

In private markets, over time we add because we know there are scam artists and also broken dreams that really seemed good at the time, the only way to make money is to take inputs, of raw materials and labour, and turn them into something more valuable than what they really cost. You then sell them, splitting the surplus with your customers, and do it again and again. But once the state gets involved, you can take inputs of raw materials and labour, turn them into something worth less than what they really cost, sell them at a loss, and pocket a surplus from politicians who are dreamers, schemers or both. Think the Soviet economy. Or, to a surprising degree, the Chinese one.

Or the fabled American “clean energy jobs” and that entire sector. Because the related article grumbles on about projects “scrapped, closed or downsized… driven in large part by the Trump administration’s hostility toward clean energy”. (And it does so based on “a new report from the business-focused advocacy group Es” that says they “resulted in the loss of nearly half a million potential jobs” and presumably we don’t have to dwell on the difference between an actual job and a “potential” one any more than on the difference between an actual winning lottery ticket and a potential one.) But while it is conceivable some people in the Trump administration really are “hostile” to wind and solar just because, the article tiptoes around the key point that their actual hostility is to subsidizing such things.

For instance, read this passage:

“Trump took office amid an unprecedented surge in the clean energy economy. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act spurred the rapid construction of both renewable power projects and domestic factories intended to build solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, and other crucial cleantech. But the boom went bust pretty much as soon as Trump won the election in late 2024. Even before Trump and congressional Republicans gutted the Inflation Reduction Act one year ago, companies began reevaluating and stepping away from investments given Trump’s favoritism for fossil fuels and opposition to renewables, particularly wind.”

You would never know that the Inflation Reduction Act dumped tens of billions in subsidies into forms of energy that just couldn’t make it on their own and was thus a massive vehicle for destroying wealth while winning votes except it didn’t even do the latter.

To be fair, the article then says:

“When it comes to jobs, most of the damage to date is in the EV sector, which in the U.S. was already plagued by high costs and weak demand prior to the Trump administration ripping away key discounts for car buyers.”

And some rustic observers might think “high costs and weak demand” were hallmarks of an industry whose products were not winners. But not these sophisticates. The Canary piece ends:

“The clean economy has had some real setbacks since Trump took office last year — but it’s still poised to grow even without support from the federal government.”

Why? Because of huge subsidies from state governments?

As with Heatmap on Microsoft, or indeed on Virginia withdrawing from the “Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative” under a Republican then electing a Democrat who rejoined and power prices surged, one thing that just doesn’t get through their mental filters is that maybe the reason this stuff doesn’t work is that it doesn’t work.