Why Shopify is Bursting with enthusiasm for carbon removal

November 24, 2023 by ketanjoshi85 In Uncategorized 3 Comments

I’m walking around Oslo, and all around are ads that say BLACK WEEK. Nodding knowingly at them, I assume they mean the dark feeling this week of report after report from the world’s best climate groups reiterating that we’re still doing nowhere near enough to halt the uncontrolled destruction of our only home.

Oh, no, they don’t. They mean: it is time to spend money on things even if you don’t really need to buy them, and we’ll use some brain tricks to get you to do it. Black week, culminating in ‘Black Friday’ is an intense pulse of environmental destruction for no reason beyond the increased enrichment of the already-very-greedy. The name is a hint as to who’s benefiting here: it comes from ‘in the black’, as in, the accounts of a company are deep in profit.

One recent study puts the UK’s Black Friday delivery emissions at around 300,000 tonnes of CO2-e. That is only a small fraction of the total climate damage of Black Friday, and doesn’t even consider the environmental impacts of landfill – where 80% of Black Friday products end up after a brief life.

There is also a rising trend of greenwashing, with companies like Cathay Pacific offering the purchase of carbon offsets alongside a desperate plea for its customers to buy up tickets they never felt any organic desire to buy. Those greenwashing efforts are evolving as we move deeper into a climate-conscious space, and traditional carbon offsets are exposed as mostly fraudulent left, right and centre.

You know who really loves massive annualised orgies of trickery-induced overconsumption? Websites that help businesses sell stuff. Shopify is one of the biggest – an e-commerce platform that provides custom websites, business management and point-of-sale hardware to retailers.

They are also one of the leading purchasers of technology-based carbon removal. That is, machines that suck carbon from the air, so it can be transported back underground where we got it.

“Most recently, Shopify founded Frontier alongside Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability. Frontier is an advance market commitment (AMC) to spend a combined $925 million on carbon removal. For its customers, Shopify launched Planet to enable business owners to offer carbon-neutral shipping on their orders. And through Shop Pay, the company empowered consumers to fund carbon removal on every purchase”

Part of why Shopify are hoovering up carbon removal services is because anyone who experiences a brief flickering intrusion of environmental awareness during the frenzied spree of the upcoming ‘black friday, cyber monday’ (BFCM) sales will be soothed by the promise of the total and complete erasure of climate impacts:

Carbon removal serves roughly the same purpose here as it does for Apple, who slapped a ‘carbon neutral’ label on the latest model of their watch, something they are already facing potential of regulatory action for.

This year, they have launched a special website that shows you Black Friday sales zipping around Earth’s atmosphere in real time, alongside a measly volume of carbon removed.

The grim irony of depicting a worsening of emissions that they are helping enable in exactly the same way as NASA’s famous visualisations of carbon emissions has not occurred them. They don’t seem to feel dissonance here: of enabling a frenzy of overconsumption and transport emissions and then claiming an extremely tiny amount of carbon removal somehow reverses the harm.

Click on specific cities and you will get insights into the obscene distances that fossil-fuelled transport is being used to send products. “The furthest order Wellington made was over 16,894 km away – that’s like the distance to Singapore (because that’s literally where it’s from)”, or “Wow! Boston sent an order 18,918 km to Busselton – that’s roughly as many islands as Indonesia’s archipelago!”. Wow!

Something I see a lot of in the world of carbon removal at the moment is the oft-repeated plea: “Of course we must reduce emissions first, but carbon removal is for those hard to abate sectors”. It’s lip service.

In practice, much of what we get is the precious resource of technological carbon removal being used even its early stages to smooth the pathway for an increase in greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. It is justified on the grounds that the cash earned from these carbon credit sales seeds technological development, but the climate cost of greenwashing is excluded, ignored and denied.

Don’t worry, it gets worse: Shopify are using it to ease the consciences of anxious customers, but they are also using it to justify their own shockingly bad internal decisions.

Ready to Burst

Shopify don’t count the emissions footprint of the products sold by merchants in their actual climate data. No shipping, no manufacturing emissions, nothing (Amazon play a similar trick).

For the emissions they do count, which is their own direct office emissions, business travel and home office, they buy up carbon removal credits to claim they are “carbon neutral”.

Okay – what are their emissions like? Plug their emissions data into a chart you get a wild vision:

What the hell is going on here? Post-COVID travel emissions for Shopify employees increased five times. Is it because they hired more employees? Only partly: their ’emissions intensity’ (emissions per employee) nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022. Are they selling more services? Their emissions intensity per revenue increased 20% from 2019 to 2022. No, something else is going on here.

Well, stop worrying. I cracked it wide open (by reading the text box next to the data):

Hey, er, what? Burst program?

Yes, you read that right. Shopify’s emissions ballooned five times in the space of one year because, after COVID19, the company deliberately incentivised its staff to fly on planes.

In case this isn’t clear enough, the promotional video for ‘Bursting’ features a huge Boeing 747 model crawling diagonally up the wall behind the company’s VP for “employee experience”:

Amusingly, the aforementioned live view of Black Friday sales also gives you an ‘airplane mode’, where you can fly around the world in a Shopify-branded plane, as the purchase of products being sent around the world pop and sparkle all around you:

This Business Insider article details the fact that these Burst trips were often a mix of leisure and work. “Some were held at luxury hotels like The Ranch at Laguna Beach in California or the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge in Alberta, Canada…Other burst sites included locations in Germany and Las Vegas, and a French château, employees said. A video about bursts posted to LinkedIn by Shopify showcases ports in San Francisco, Toronto, and Berlin”.

It is specifically carbon removal credits that Shopify have bought to falsely claim no climate damage from their decision to worsen air travel climate damage by around 5 times:

Here’s another problem: from 2020 to 2022, shopify claims around 31,000 tonnes of carbon removal. But according to the CDR.FYI database, only 4,000 of the tonnes they have purchased have been actually physically removed from the atmosphere:

Shopify should definitely not be claiming un-removed credits as if they’re cancelling out the actual, physical emissions caused by their black friday sales, or their burst program. It could be a quirk of CDR.FYI’s database. It could also be that some removal companies simply haven’t declared any removals as occurring, which seems like a major transparency and accountability problem. This is really, really bad stuff.

This is obviously set to worsen. There is a huge flurry of “pre-purchasing” of carbon removal, and very little delivery. You could see this as a valuable flow of early-stage funding, but considering major companies are seemingly claiming these pre-purchases as completed removals, despite the possibility that these may never happen, it’s a growing bubble that is going to burst dramatically if nothing is done.

Shopify have been laying off staff this year, and purportedly scaling back on the ‘Burst’ program. Next year’s data will tell us how this changes their wildly expanded climate footprint. But the undeclared emissions of their BFCM frenzy along with the “carbon neutral” shipping offered by their merchants will definitely continue.

You cannot unmix the milkshake

It’s tough to explain just how bad this is. Carbon removal is a precious resource. It is energy intensive, difficult, expensive and certainly in no way ready for the prime time. It has real physical limitations, so it should be reserved for the very final few percent of greenhouse gases that we absolutely, utterly cannot avoid.

But right now, it is easy to find major instances of it being explicitly put to the task of killing dead any flashes of guilt a consumer might feel when they’re being goaded into buying high-emissions shit they do not need. Is that “hard to abate”? Is that “residual emissions”?

In a promotional video, Shopify presents carbon removal as “reversing” climate change:

A lot is frustrating here, but I think it’s this bit that I find to be the most egregious.

Because you cannot truly reverse climate change. For the amount of time that carbon lingers in the atmosphere, it causes heating, which then causes loss of life and livelihoods, the extermination of species. Even after it’s removed, there are quasi-permanent changes to the Earth’s natural physical systems, such as ice sheets and sea levels. Carbon removal does not wind back the clock – it stops the clock.

The grave permanence of loss of life, and harm to living things, has been lost in the technological carbon removal space. You don’t need to look hard to find a glib dismissiveness of concerns about carbon removal becoming a force for bad. This is despite the growing prominence of bad customers for carbon removal, such as overconsumption-focused companies like Shopify, along with the fossil fuel industry’s bank, JP Morgan Chase, or Microsoft, increasing their power demand with real abandon.

As I wrote earlier, fossil fuel companies are keen to use carbon removal as a rhetorical greenwashing tool to excuse continued fossil fuel extraction. It has been well covered in media outlets. But carbon removal as a tool to squash consumer hesitation during spending frenzies and to justify wildly ballooning corporate emissions has been overlooked.

Shopify shouldn’t be encouraging and enabling over-consumption, and it certainly shouldn’t be falsely claiming that you can engage in it with zero climate impacts. They shouldn’t be claiming to have removed carbon when they haven’t. Carbon removal advocates and the companies that sell removal credits shouldn’t be leaning on greenwashing-as-a-service for their funding model (a manifestation for their own ‘growth-at-all-costs’ tech industry mentality). And if neither group wants to do better, they should be forced to do better, because people are at real risk from the pathway they are treading.

If we fail to control it now, it’ll grow into something much, much worse. Trust me.