- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has embraced his role as a so-called “activist CEO” and published a new book, “Trailblazer,” that encourages other leaders to do the same.
- In an interview with Business Insider, he said that internet companies like Salesforce have a definite responsibility on all sorts of issues including climate change.
- Not only should companies commit to zero net carbon emissions, but they should help with the urgent need to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, he says.
- Contrary to other tech CEOs who have said aggressive climate goals are a hard problem to solve, Benioff says they aren’t.
- “It’s not that hard. We can all do it very easy,” he tells Business Insider.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been one of the leaders in what’s been dubbed the “new CEO activism,” where executives like himself take a stand on issues ranging from LGBTQ rights to climate change policies.
He’s hoping to inspire more leaders to become activists with a book called “Trailblazer.” (The name is play on a Salesforce training program called Trailblazer.)
While the book touches on all sorts of issues, one area it doesn’t discuss much is climate change. Yet that’s an area of huge concern at other tech companies like Amazon, where employee activists have pushed their company to do more.
As the CEO of a huge internet company, Benioff says that internet companies like his definitely have a responsibility on climate change.
“Our planet needs to be net zero. Each individual needs to be net zero. Our companies need to be net zero and move to fully renewable. And Salesforce today is net net zero. We’ll be fully renewable by 2025. Our data centers are net zero,” he said — referring to the term “net zero carbon footprint” which means balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal.
The sad truth is that data centers – the backbone of the cloud computing era, powering software like Salesforce’s, Amazon’s, and Google’s — are the dirty secret of the internet era.
As our cloud apps grow more prolific and sophisticated, data centers require massive amounts of energy to run the computers and keep them cool. If fueled by traditional sources, they can output staggering amounts of carbon dioxide.
One jaw dropping paper for the AI community published last summer found that to train a computer model to understand natural language such as Alexa, can produce a similar amount of carbon dioxide as flying round trip between New York and Beijing 125 times, the Guardian’s Ben Tarnoff reported.
Benioff says he has stepped up, and wants others to do the same.
“We think every company should be focused on how to sequester the carbon that they’re creating. It’s not that hard. We can all do it very easy,” he insists.
A trillion trees
Benioff said this is an issue that he’s carefully studied and loves to talk about (and he proceeded to send me several emails filled with charts and links to research after the interview).
“You know, there’s only so much carbon on the planet,” Benioff said. “Carbon never actually goes away, it is basically recycled within our oceans. It’s in the trees. It’s in the soil. It’s in the air. We don’t want it in the air.”
Marc Benioff
To summarize what this research said: The earth currently has 407.4 parts per million of carbon dioxide globally in the atmosphere, the highest levels, in at least the past 800,000 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration September State of the Climate report.
We need to stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere. But we also need to reabsorb the excess carbon that’s there, known as carbon…
