Big Tech Lobbying Watered Down SBTi’s Corporate Climate Standard, Critics Say
An extensive update to the world’s leading corporate net-zero standard drew praise from carbon removal companies but fury from climate groups that say Big Tech killed one of its most important provisions.
The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), launched in 2015 to help the corporate sector curb emissions and keep global heating below 1.5°C, has validated the climate targets of more than 10,000 companies.
On June 11, it published its new Corporate Net-Zero Standard 2.0, signaling its “strategic shift as an implementation partner.” SBTi will no longer simply set and validate corporate net-zero targets, it will help companies “connect their climate ambition to the choices that actually determine emissions,” writes SBTi chair Francesco Starace in the 2.0 report.
New measures include a move to differentiate expectations from companies by their size and location, recognizing that smaller companies, especially those located in poor countries, will find it harder to decarbonize.
Carbon Removal Companies Praise the Changes
While the corporate sector in general has been slow to issue public comment on the updated standard, carbon removal technology companies were swift to offer praise.
“The new Corporate Net-Zero Standard provides important clarity for companies looking to invest in carbon removal and helps to justify both near-term corporate investments and longer-term procurement agreements,” Carbon Business Council Executive Director Ben Rubin said in a release.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is now understood to be critical to correcting the present “overshoot” trajectory of global heating, and global CDR will have to increase fourfold to have a chance of meeting the 1.5°C target by 2100, writes Carbon Brief.
The revised standard will require large companies worldwide to compensate for some of their ongoing emissions using CDR technologies by 2035. Without serious CDR investment now, they will be hard pressed to meet that deadline.
The standard’s new Ongoing Emissions Responsibility (OER) module could help catalyze such investment, deploying three “tiers of recognition” to “incentivize businesses to fund projects outside of their value chain on an ongoing basis each year, commensurate with their ongoing emissions,” writes Ecologi, a United Kingdom-based carbon management company and certified B Corp that is not a member of the Carbon Business Council.
Such projects could include purchasing carbon removal credits—for short-term as well as long-term removals.
Companies may also choose to fulfill their OER by financing low-carbon research, climate resilience, and loss and damage.
Anger After SBTi Caves to Big Tech
A public consultation draft on the new standard, circulated last November, shows SBTi ready to move forward with hourly-based green power reporting for Scope 2 emissions—a provision that would have required companies to match every hour of electricity consumption with local generation from renewable sources.
Hourly matching was to be phased in, applying first “to a limited number of companies with significant influence.”
In addition to ensuring rigorous tracking of power emissions, hourly matching also serves as an incentive for decarbonization.
“If a company wants to claim they use renewable electricity in any specific hour, it must show that an equivalent quantity of renewable electricity was generated and attributable to their load in that same hour,” explained Zero Carbon Analytics in May. Such a method of accounting “sends stronger market signals for renewable electricity, creating meaningful incentives for faster decarbonization.”
But tech companies like Meta and Amazon lobbied against this rule, writes Simon Mundy, Moral Money Editor at the Financial Times. And ultimately, hourly matching was dropped from the final version of the standard. Amazon, Apple, General Motors, Salesforce, and Schneider Electric were part of a lobbying group representing US$4.7 trillion in annual revenue aiming to make hourly matching optional, reported the Times, and Meta was involved in a similar effort. The US$1.4-trillion tech company “has also funded a number of academic papers arguing in favour of looser restrictions” on clean energy rules.
For now, the standard is sticking with annual matching, a method of tracking power consumption that is primed for greenwashing because companies can purchase enough renewable energy certificates to claim 100% renewable energy use at year’s end, even if fossil-fueled generation figured in their power mix. So, for example, Meta and Amazon will be able to claim that their gas-powered data centres are operating entirely within SBTi regulations, even as energy demand surgesdue to aggressive AI development.
Organizations like SBTi will be crucial to holding the line against further fossil fuel buildout, wrote Paul Schreiber, senior policy analyst at Reclaim Finance, in a LinkedIn post.
Reclaim Finance, together with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council, and 22 other signatories decried what they called a “behind closed doors” revision of the November, 2025 draft in a June 10 letter to SBTi CEO David Kennedy.
Retreat from the hourly-matching provision, and other forms of caving to corporate pushback against a strong, scientifically-backed decarbonization standard, “will be an irreparable self-inflicted wound to SBTi’s integrity, utility, and relevance going forward,” the organizations wrote.
SBTi is also taking flack for its decision to allow companies to present “best efforts” as evidence of sufficient progress towards net-zero goals, as well as a provision in the new standard that “allows companies to buy certificates linked to lower-carbon products they have neither purchased nor made or used,” writes the Financial Times.