Fact Check: Apple's weird Octavia Spencer ad

Apple lied. But it's not all bad.

Last week, Apple dropped a splashy 5-minute video during its iPhone keynote to wag its wiener about getting closer to becoming completely carbon-neutral by 2030.

Whether the video is “good” or not is not what I want to talk about. For me, it’s bigger picture: Apple’s showcasing of its commitment to the planet is simultaneously exciting and womp-wompish.

Let’s start with the bad:

Many of Apple’s claims in the video are either not true, or have no basis without context.

Por ejemplo, Apple says it’s “operating on 100 percent clean electricity.” What does this mean to you? To me, it means that you can put “clean” in front of anything and do a little dance with a hula hoop and go to bed. Just like all the verbiage that comprises the greenwashing glossary, “clean” has no official definition and can mean whatever you think it does. If you dig deeper into Apple’s Environmental Progress Report (in which the phrase “clean energy” is printed 84 times), you will not find an expanded definition of the term. I’m sure “Clean Energy,” means something very specific to Apple and that the company is meeting the clean energy parameters it has set for itself. I imagine that it’s progress in some way, but I wish I was allowed to know how.

Apple pulls another fast one in sharing its projected carbon footprint of the new iPhone 15. In its reporting, it fails to account for the carbon footprint of data usage — and this is dishonest. Alexis Normand, the CEO and co-founder of Greenly, a carbon accounting platform that helps companies get to net zero, estimates that Apple is lowballing its report by some 80% (!!).

“The way carbon accounting works under the standard of the GHG [greenhouse gas] protocol is that you should account not just just your Scope 1 (direct emissions 1 linked to in-house fuel consumption or refrigerant gas from AC), but also your Scope 2 (indirect emissions linked to electricity consumption), and the totality of your scope 3 (other indirect emissions, typically linked to supply chain, raw materials, freight, and product usage),” Normand told me.

Your eyes might’ve just glazed over all the “scope” stuff (I blame you not), so just know that Apple is very intentionally fudging the numbers — or at least omitting them — to make their green efforts look more impressive than they are.

Normand says that Apple is “failing to report its indirect emissions linked to its digital services (24% of Apple's revenues), as if the value created from these services was less real than the physical goods they produce. It is no excuse for not reporting very real emissions linked to networks and data centers.”

Apple didn’t do anything illegal by not disclosing its scope 3 emissions. On the bright side, this kind of omission will be a lawbreaker once Senate Bill 253 (AKA the Climate Corporate Accountability Act) is passed and put into place in 2024. So, good luck next year you little sneaksters.

There’s a bunch more tomfoolery in Tim Cook’s commercial that any PR-minded hawk (like an actual bird with a communications degree) could recognize. But Apple’s sustainability efforts aren’t all rotten (🤮). “The remarkable thing is that Apple is already exemplary in many respects,” Normand says. “But since they are apparently planning to lead by example, they should go all the way and look into the real impact of digital services.”

The better:

Apple proudly shares that it’ll be eliminating all plastic from its packaging by the end of 2025 and is close to doing so. This is good and it’s nice to hear these goals aren’t set in a faraway year like 2050. The final step, it seems, is to eliminate the plastic labels on products. And wildly, nixing plastic labels will cut out a LOT of needless waste. From the 2023 progress report:

We estimate that eliminating the labels will avoid over 300 metric tons of plastic, over 150 metric tons of paper, and over 3700 metric tons of carbon emissions.

“I applaud Apple's exciting announcement that they will eliminate all plastics packaging,” Judith Enck, former EPA Regional Administrator and President of Beyond Plastics, told me in an email. “Every company should do this. Because this is voluntary, we now have to hold them to it.  This announcement illustrates that companies can phase out all plastic packaging and we look forward to Apple supporting new laws that will require the same for all packaging, not just Apple packaging.”

The bolding above (my emphasis) is key y’all. Corporations make these kinds of promises ALL. THE. TIME. and don’t end up following through. The good thing here is that there are plenty of players who will be watching very closely to ensure Apple walks its talk.

The second half of Enck’s comment is also really important. What I find most valuable from Apple’s dumb little video is its ~signaling~. When a company with such great cultural (and market-impacting) influence makes Big Shift declarations, others are bound to follow suit. I wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago around the McVegan: I predicted its announcement would have a domino effect and lead other fast food spots to introduce vegan menu items (and they did guys!!!). These types of consequential shifts really do happen: In 2015, when McDonald’s pledged to use cage-free eggs only; BK, Nestle, Subway, General Mills and Taco Bell quickly pledged the same. Now cage-free eggs are an industry standard. (Cage-free eggs have their own problems but that’s not the point and this isn’t about eggs hold me back.)

So while Apple’s announcements are far from perfect, we do need to give them credit — and positive reinforcement — so that they keep up with their green plans and other companies become motivated to catch up. OK, fine. Good job Apple.

Some details I just want to rant about:

Not so fast, Timmy C! I’m annoyed by several more elements of Apple’s eco announcement and this is my Substack and still I’m only going to talk about one of them but just KNOW there are others.

This new cheeky logo that is meant to imply a product is carbon nootch?

Doesn’t the apple alone signify it is good for the earth? Anyone? Hello? I hate it here.