Autodesk Pimps Big Tech Greenwash, Avoids Engagement, Though Its Core Clients Are Oil, Coal & Gas
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Autodesk has a simple, yet aggressive approach to the climate crisis: “Leading by example in everything we do.” The company is a signatory to the Step Up Declaration, an alliance of influential tech companies dedicated to ushering in the “fourth industrial revolution” for the climate. It has publicly called for global climate policy action at U.N. climate negotiations. And unlike its Big Tech brethren Microsoft and Amazon, Autodesk doesn’t have a corporate PAC that quietly supports politicians who undermine climate policy while claiming to publicly support it.
Autodesk is running sponsored ads on Grist about “climate resilience and equity” in construction. It also has a super impressive internal carbon reduction commitment—net zero by this fiscal year—and recently pledged to align its climate goals with the fight for a just transition.
The one thing Autodesk won’t do on climate, though, is stop doing business with fossil fuel companies. And that’s frustrating to some current and former Autodesk employees, several of whom told Stone that “the company’s leadership has no real appetite for translating [climate] statements into hard decisions that would affect its bottom line, such as ceasing to license its industry-standard software to fossil fuel companies.” “The firm’s professed wokeness,” they said, “is more about projecting an aura of social responsibility than about fundamentally changing the way it does business.”
Autodesk’s reluctance to grapple with its customers in the fossil fuel industry is not unique, Stone noted in a phone interview. “There’s this whole Silicon Valley ethos that ‘We’re just the toolmakers,’” she said. “We’re going to create innovations and we hope they are used for good, but we’re not responsible for them once they get out into the world.” “Climate change is a pretty stark example of that right now,” she continued. “All of these tech companies have a big foothold in a the fossil fuel world, whether it be Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. And this is just the latest example of Silicon Valley knowingly making money off of something that’s not doing good for the world, and when they’re called out for it, acting like it’s not their responsibility.”
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https://heated.world/p/big-techs-loudest-climate-advocate
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