It is positive to see stripe is voluntarily doing this.
That said, the analysis ignores net emissions (positive or negative) that may arise as a consequence of how stripe's business impacts their customers and the overall economy and environment. This impact is plausibly dramatically larger than any of the categories like servers or employee travel that were accounted for.
E.g. thought experiment: suppose your business helps other businesses lift their revenues by selling more stuff to "consumers". Suppose these other businesses have a profit margin of around 20%, and your service is priced at around 10% of the value that it provides your customers.
Then if your business has a revenue of $X, this revenue is created by generating about $10X of value for your customers, which in turn is their profit margin from your helping them increase their revenue by about $50X. So the obvious direct and indirect greenhouse emissions generated by your business with $X of revenue (including energy use, renting servers, flying employees about the place) are likely going to be insignificant compared to the change in greenhouse emissions generated by whatever change in economic activity was triggered by the $50X lift in customer revenue driven by the core purpose of your business.
This change in economic activity could be hugely negative from an environmental perspective (eg if your customers advertise and sell unnecessary physical stuff to "consumers") or perhaps positive (e.g. maybe you audit your customers and only take them on if they sell products/services that have a positive environmental impact compared to alternatives).
It's probably a bit rough to expect individuals or business to be able to assess and measure this- it'd be much easier everyone participating in these economic activities agreed to a carbon price.
No Stripe, you are not carbon neutral, because people turn their computers on and turn their routers on to connect to your service. That's like saying the natural gas headquarters is carbon neutral because the plumbing is the customer's problem. You took a great informational page on Global Climate Progression but made the headline some pompous clickbait title. Since when is Global Climate Progression a competition? We're all going to suffer greatly, so No you are not carbon neutral and I am appalled you'd be so daring to make such a sweeping claim when clearly every kiosk that runs Stripe contributes to the problem. Not as much as some things, true, but certainly not neutral.
I would still consider them carbon neutral, if the kiosks want to be carbon neutral that is their responsibility. By your logic essentially no service or company can be carbon neutral because their customers are not.
That said, the analysis ignores net emissions (positive or negative) that may arise as a consequence of how stripe's business impacts their customers and the overall economy and environment. This impact is plausibly dramatically larger than any of the categories like servers or employee travel that were accounted for.
E.g. thought experiment: suppose your business helps other businesses lift their revenues by selling more stuff to "consumers". Suppose these other businesses have a profit margin of around 20%, and your service is priced at around 10% of the value that it provides your customers.
Then if your business has a revenue of $X, this revenue is created by generating about $10X of value for your customers, which in turn is their profit margin from your helping them increase their revenue by about $50X. So the obvious direct and indirect greenhouse emissions generated by your business with $X of revenue (including energy use, renting servers, flying employees about the place) are likely going to be insignificant compared to the change in greenhouse emissions generated by whatever change in economic activity was triggered by the $50X lift in customer revenue driven by the core purpose of your business.
This change in economic activity could be hugely negative from an environmental perspective (eg if your customers advertise and sell unnecessary physical stuff to "consumers") or perhaps positive (e.g. maybe you audit your customers and only take them on if they sell products/services that have a positive environmental impact compared to alternatives).
It's probably a bit rough to expect individuals or business to be able to assess and measure this- it'd be much easier everyone participating in these economic activities agreed to a carbon price.