Google is no longer claiming to be carbon neutral | Hacker News Reader

Google is no longer claiming to be carbon neutral

bloomberg.com

33 pointsjanandonly8 comments

Some commenters are pointing out increased AI usage as the cause, but I think it's probably this as well:

> While those are actions that should help the world tackle climate change, experts have found that the purchase of the emissions-avoidance offsets does little to actually reduce emissions.

Basically their emissions are on the rise and instead of writing a big check to a somewhat grey to downright fraudulent industry of carbon credit they will try to reduce and invest in carbon capture which is another somewhat grey industry.

These companies do what we all knew: they continue polluting, while sending a small fraction of their profits to a so-called "green" company in exchange for a piece of paper certifying some "offset".

That seems... fine? Tech companies like google don't emit that much carbon to begin with (compared to companies that do stuff irl like making stuff), and they have high enough margins that they can afford to spend a few % of their profits on offsets. That seems better (for the environment at least), than paying out those profits to shareholders. They also can't go entirely pollution free because the supply chains and vendors that the rely on (eg. GPUs or electricity for their offices) can't be made pollution free with a flip of a switch.

Google needs 5% of my country’s total energy consumption to run a single data center.

https://archive.md/ajKnw

Related from last week:

Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859993

Is it due to GPUs for ai?

>Google has ended its mass purchase of cheap carbon offsets and thus stopped claiming that its operations are carbon neutral, according to the tech giant’s latest environmental report. The company now aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

Carbon offsets are too often questionably valid in my opinion.

There is also a huge increase in energy because of GPUs and you can find plenty of stories about tech giants experiencing that as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com