Bill Weihl has lost his voice. In the last year, the San Francisco–based founder of ClimateVoice, a non-profit that is pushing the tech industry to support stronger climate policy, has developed an irreversible throat condition that has robbed him of speech.
But far greater than the irony of Weihl’s voicelessness is the symbolism of his determination to be heard. Possessed of the urgency of the climate crisis, Weihl is using all the means at his disposal to continue to broadcast his message: that Big Tech needs to step out of the shadows, take a decisive stance on the climate crisis and put its full financial and political weight behind climate policy and action.
“Tech companies are viewed as forward looking,” Weihl types into the chat function of our Zoom conversation. “They have enormous influence. And they’re innovators. We need innovation at this point.”
Weihl knows the tech industry from the inside. He spent the first decade of his career as a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before shifting into the tech sector to land the position of “green energy czar” at Google in 2006 and later acting as director of sustainability for Facebook. He acknowledges the significant efforts these companies were making to mitigate climate change: buying billions of dollars of clean energy to power their operations, maintaining venture investment funds for cleantech start-ups, investing heavily in the research and development of decarbonization technologies. And yet, as the climate clock ticked on, Weihl could also see that the sector wasn’t doing enough.
“We were winning, but we weren’t winning fast enough, and with climate, winning slowly is the same as losing,” he said in a 2020 TED Talk. The same year, he founded ClimateVoice.
Inspiration for the project stemmed in part from what Weihl had observed in 2015/2016, as the American corporate world mobilized around LGBTQ2S+ rights. Companies like Apple, Walmart and the National Basketball Association threatened to pull out of states that were considering, or passing, regressive sexual- and gender-rights legislation. Weihl watched business affect social policy, and it got him thinking.
Most companies talk about how urgent climate is. And how committed they are to it. But when doing something on climate conflicts with or risks their core business, the profit concerns win.
He knew that the tech industry – with its forward-looking leaders, focus on innovation and massive influence on culture and politics – had a major role to play in climate action. But he also realized that despite the progress made – the innovations and cost reductions in renewable technologies and investments in green energy – the tech sector was failing to exploit its biggest lever: its potential to influence public policy.
Rather than stand up to the fossil fuel industry, as they were uniquely positioned to do, he saw tech companies playing at best a passive, and at worst an obstructive, role.
To illustrate this point, Weihl cites the fact that only one of the U.S.’s five Big Tech companies – Microsoft – was prepared to endorse last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Containing a US$369-billion investment in climate-related programs, the IRA represented the most significant single step the U.S. Congress has ever taken to tackle climate change. Only after it passed into law, in August 2022, did Google let out a quiet cheer – in a tweet from its chief sustainability officer.
“Most companies talk about how urgent climate is,” Weihl types. “And how committed they are to it. But when doing something on climate conflicts with or risks their core business, the profit concerns win.” He says that tech companies are deeply compromised by their memberships in trade associations that consistently oppose climate bills, chief among them the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which bristles at any mention of corporate tax hikes.
The tech sector’s hypocrisy on climate plays out in many ways. Earlier this year, Amazon effectively killed a bill put forward in the Oregon legislature that would have impelled large data centres and crypto miners in the state to use only clean energy by 2040. Data centres are big business in Oregon, many of them owned by Seattle-based Amazon, and they require vast amounts of power – equivalent to a small city – to cool their armies of computers. The Oregon utility that serves Amazon has long since exhausted its renewable supply and been forced to buy fossil-fuel-backed electricity; its emissions per kilowatt hour have increased 543% since 2010.
Young employees want to see climate action. And recruitment and retention are big pain points, so companies have to pay attention to employee sentiment on this.
Amazon takes every opportunity to tout its Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040; the arena it built in 2021 for Seattle’s new NHL franchise is named Climate Pledge Arena and aspires to become the first net-zero-certified arena in the world. At the same time, Amazon was willing to lobby hard – and successfully – to ensure that that clean energy bill died on the floor this spring, claiming that Oregon’s transmission lines and energy infrastructure wouldn’t support the switch.
Weihl says that this kind of duplicity doesn’t wash well with the tech sector workforce and that ClimateVoice is working hard to harness its frustration. “Young employees want to see climate action,” he types. “And recruitment and retention are big pain points, so companies have to pay attention to employee sentiment on this.”
ClimateVoice engages with tech workers, informing them of what their employers are doing on the climate front – both in and out of public view. Weihl says that when he launched his non-profit, most workers were oblivious to their companies’ lobbying activities and trade association involvement, but the more they learned, the more inclined they were to advocate. In the fall of 2021, he was pleased to see a loud chorus of tech workers speak out in support of the Build Back Better Act and again last summer in favour of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Weihl believes that this is how to foment change – from below. “In my experience, it’s very hard to persuade management on purely moral grounds, or on what’s best for society,” he types. “But if the workforce is clamouring for something, that makes it a near-term operational issue.”
In Weihl’s estimation, the tech industry has already developed some 80% of the technological solutions required to help mitigate the climate crisis. Now it has to deploy them faster, innovate further and, most importantly, speak louder and with one voice.
