Focusing on The Fight Against Climate Change

AT&T also helps people live better lives by focusing on fighting climate change. Climate change is a large problem in today’s world, that many people don’t pay much attention to. One of the main problems of climate change is the emission of greenhouse gases; when excess carbon or methane, is released into the air and traps heat within earth’s atmosphere causing global temperatures to rise. There are many ways to combat these harmful gas emissions and AT&T is one of the companies in the driver’s seat when it comes to fighting this issue.

How they do so, AT&T looks to use technology to lower these greenhouse gases in agriculture and also conserve water. AT&T reports that “every year, U.S. farmers use 2.5 million acres of land to grow 6 million metric tons of…rice”. So, to understand why conserving water is a main focus, AT&T describes that rice farming is very water intensive as it uses “40% of the world’s irrigated water every year”.

Despite this large problem, the even bigger problem from farming rice is something called the flooding technique. This technique deprives the fields of oxygen and generates methane gas which is one of the greenhouse gases and thus leads to climate change which is extremely harmful to the environment. Just rice farming alone makes up about 2% of the world’s methane gas levels and AT&T is trying to eliminate it. To help the cause, AT&T has joined forces with Precision King, a software company that specializes in water management technology.

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Precision King has created sensors that they can place around the rice fields and they read water levels every hour. AT&T has made these devices a wireless connection that will send this water level data to a computer system and will automatically turn off water pumps when the proper levels are reached. This system will prevent excess use of water and possible flooding scenarios.

Not only does this save water but it reduces methane gas production because it disables the flooding technique used by farmers. The rice crops will have the exact amount of water necessary to prosper. An example of results can be seen by looking at the Whitaker Farm in Arkansas; water usage has been reduced by nearly 60% and overall energy usage of the farm by 20-30%. AT&T also has a list of goals they look to achieve by either 2020 or 2025 that are aimed at helping fight things that negatively impact our environment. There are a few that really stand out and are worth mentioning; the first, is to reduce the consumption of electricity of the company by 60%; the second, AT&T wants to reduce the emissions of their daily fleet by 30%; and thirdly, the last goal that was attention grabbing, is to expand the alternative energy capacity on site of their locations by “at least 45MW”. These goals are all goals to help improve our world.

So, how has AT&T been progressing with those goals that they created? Looking at the first goal of reducing electricity consumption by 60%, AT&T is currently producing 128MWh electricity/petabytes of network traffic, which is a 45% decrease from their levels in 2013. These measured to be 233MWh/PB, while their ultimate goal is to be producing only 93MWh/PB by 2020. Looking at the progress of the second goal, already by the end of 2017, fleet emissions have been reduced by 174,403 metric tons of carbon dioxide which is about 20% of the 2008 baseline. Not only this, but AT&T actually minimized their domestic fleet by more than 1100 vehicles, and those on the road are now 100% hybrid. With the last goal previously mentioned, AT&T as of 2017 has expanded their “natural gas fuel cells by 12MW, with 27 sites commissioned in California, New York and New Jersey”. What this means is that they have successively expanded their onsite alternative energy capacity to 50.8MW which is well above their target goal of 45MW.

Not only this, but AT&T has an agreement to buy 820MW of wind power from NextEra Energy Resources, which is the largest operator of renewable energy in the world. This will be considered one of the largest Corporate Renewable Energy sales in history.  AT&T has created these goals and so many more that we didn’t even mention. Unlike some companies, AT&T is walking the walk after they talk the talk. They are successfully able to work towards their goals and in some cases surpass them even before we have reached the 2020 year. AT&T is/has been extremely proactive in helping save the environment and I think will be a company, others will look at and want to follow. A different way that AT&T has helped people and the environment, is during times of natural disaster. AT&T has a “Network Disaster Recovery program” and has invested more than $650 million into it the past 25 years. This program is made up of managers, technicians and engineers who are specially trained. AT&T in 2017 teamed up with Team Rubicon, “an organization that pairs the skills and experience of military veterans with first responders, medical professionals, volunteers and technology solutions”.

Every person involved in this team up, volunteers time to help communities recover from events such as hurricanes, wildfires and earthquakes. Overall, AT&T employees across the world volunteered a total of 1.78million hours in 2017 alone. The most recent example where AT&T and Team Rubicon teamed up was to help rebuild and recover the community of Houston, Texas after Hurricane Harvey. Not only did AT&T provide employees to help physically, but also set up a “text-to-donate program” that matches contributions to Team Rubicon up to $1 million. This focus on climate change and disaster relief is definitely not an office described job. However, AT&T as a company, and their employees, are taking an initiative to not only combat climate change, something more people should be trying to alleviate as well, but also help communities that were completely destroyed, to becoming prominent again. They are connecting and reaching out to the surrounding community with goals of making a more environmentally friendly world. This process obviously takes time, but AT&T is committed and is so far doing a lot more than just selling phone services.