To offer an alternative view to those bashing Apple it appears they have made solid progress on reducing emissions over the last 5 years. Some concrete stats on their emissions reductions can be found on page 84 on this report https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...
Total gross carbon footprint (without offsets)
(metric tons CO2e):
Fiscal Year 2017: 27,500,000
Fiscal Year 2021: 23,200,000
This include Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions so AFAIK includes things like transportation of goods.
"Reducing emissions" is just shifting numbers around. The same way we "recycled" for decades by selling our trash to SEA where they burn it. Now we manufacture "green technology" and mine rare metals abroad to make a KPI go up at home.
It is not even remotely similar to recycling by selling trash to SEA. Green energy reduces emissions on net, even including the rare earth mining. I suppose you could argue that the rare earth mining is also bad for some reason - but it's certainly not the case that global net carbon emissions are not being reduced by green energy.
It seems to boil down to taxes, credits, and getting things done in places with poor controls. Everything electronic requires copper, the less pure the more it needs to be refined using massive amounts of energy provided by diesel and coal. The large trucks (400 ton behemoths) burn ~92gal/hour or 350liters/hour and run 24/7. Solar panels come from China, China uses coal and questionable labor to produce the panels. Everything is shipped across the world using oil. Minerals for the batteries and minerals for the wind turbines. Turbines use about ~5tons of copper, half of which is copper wiring. The amount of refining and how dirty it is I don't think people really grasp. The refining process is really something. Here's a neat thread on it: https://twitter.com/mining_atoms/status/1584306032653717505
These sorts of Twitter threads are hilarious, because they assume first of all that renewables fans are going to aghast, just aghast, when they realize that somehow there's extractive lining to produce the raw materials! Oh no! What ever will we do, guess it's time to go back to rubbing sticks together and massive degrowth!
Which, sure, there are a few naive folks like that; but the renewables space is filled with industrialists that did the hard technology work of actually creating an entirely new energy future. Come on, random Twitter dude... these folks know their supply chains and are smart enough to know that basically all reports everywhere for the past 10 years are predicting this massive shift from fossil fuel extraction to mineral extraction. Nobody is surprised.
As for the rest of your comment, none of the rest of the energy source has to be carbon based. And by saying that they are going to decarbonize their supply chain, Apple is creating a guaranteed customer for new business to actually deliver that supply. And for a new business, that guaranteed market is by far the most important factor for getting a new business off the ground. It means that no matter their costs, as long as they are better than the other decarbonized sources, they can win the bid. And that's where subsidies/tax credits are weaker, because they have to predict the delta between the earliest decarbonized product and the traditional alternatives. A guaranteed market gets around that.
For tough-to-decarbonize sectors such as concrete, having more purchasers of the zero-carbon early products, such as city governments or state governments, is a huge boom to entrepreneurs looking to pioneer a new space.
So Apple really is doing something significant, which will actually change the economy for the better, and probably more so than a tax credit scheme.
It takes and is going to continue to take a massive amount of energy and resources to complete the energy transition.
People are working on reducing demand for electricity through efficiency, but if we electrified everything in the US today, demand for electricity would something like 9x. So, yes, we're going to need a lot more copper.
I mean not all of this is because of conscious improvements based on improving emissions. Every new generation of processor is going to take less energy to operate and every new generation of power management chip is going to be more efficient.
"we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
If apple were interested in decarbonization they would change their business strategies and put their wealthiest company in the world money to good use. So far, it's hoarded in off shore bank accounts.
Total gross carbon footprint (without offsets) (metric tons CO2e):
Fiscal Year 2017: 27,500,000
Fiscal Year 2021: 23,200,000
This include Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions so AFAIK includes things like transportation of goods.
For scope definitions see https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-a...
Edit: Corrected yearly emissions