"We've set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030." and, in a table later, "Reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions by 2030. Invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions." and "Run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030."
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
Exactly the same stated goals, just written in a different place. There's more hedging around it now: they call it a "moonshot" and say that they might not manage it, but they never actually promised to do it before.
mullingitover 26 minutes ago [-]
> There's more hedging around it now
This is reasonable, it's a nearly impossible goal to achieve.
Meanwhile: "Amazon meets 100% renewable energy goal 7 years early"[1]
Amazon claimed their energy usage was "matched with 100% renewable energy" in 2023, while Google's goal is to actually "run on 24/7 carbon-free energy".
Google already claims to have matched 100% of their energy with renewables since 2017.
mullingitover 1 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile China is on track to install as much solar power in the past year as the US has in its entire history. The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels.
Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
dfxm12 1 hours ago [-]
Is there evidence that they are doing this to appease Trump? What if they wanted to do this anyway and recognize that at this time, they can use appeasement as a weaselly way to justify it.
wcunning 45 minutes ago [-]
There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company. Further, there have been some real and complicated situations where carbon credits were sold more than the actual amount of offset carbon -- meaning for example BigCorpA and BigCorpB buy the same "green energy infra" credits from projects that are in construction and then never actually meet their listed goals, but both companies claim to be carbon neutral because of the claims for several years before that comes out. Matt Levine had a very interesting column on forestry in the US Southeast talking about places getting paid to not cut down trees far in excess of the number of trees that could realistically be harvested. Google might be frontrunning some of those arguments. Or might have done the real audit of the claims and realized that they had been less carbon offset than they thought, so safer to just pull the whole pledge at least in the short term.
Filligree 49 minutes ago [-]
Who would want to? Solar power is cheaper than any alternative, so long as you’re allowed to use it.
dpkirchner 57 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure we're going to find a smoking gun here -- like an executive saying this was removed because it made MAGAs irrationally angry, say.
43 minutes ago [-]
lawlessone 52 minutes ago [-]
Probably both really.
yieldcrv 24 minutes ago [-]
> The US has maintained steep tariffs on solar panels.
Because the US should be doing it domestically, just like China is.
The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either.
mullingitover 18 minutes ago [-]
The argument for tariffs on China's panels is that they're dumping.
However, really the answer to dumping is to exploit the dumper viciously, buy as much below market rate product of theirs as you can while they bleed money (especially a capital good like solar panels).
The US could be driving down the cost of energy nationwide with the dumped power generation equipment. Lower cost energy could then be turbocharging (nearly) every other industry in the country.
The only industry this harms is fossil fuels, and solar is being hamstrung to protect this legacy industry at the cost of all potential future industries.
ajross 3 minutes ago [-]
This is absolutely true. The strategic goal of "dumping" is to drive competitors (the example here being the US solar panel industry) out of a market, with the implied goal of raising prices at the end of the process. But it almost never works that way in practice.
Pretty much by definition, products that can be dumped are ones that can be manufactured with easily scaled production equipment at low margin and high volume. If you can dump your competitors out of business, so can someone else, to you.
And that's the way it generally happens (c.f. DRAM in the 80's). The "dumping" phase of a technology curve is succeeded not by a cartel with a tight grip on the previously competitive market, but by an extremely competitive market of producers all undercutting each other. Almost everyone wins, except the original high-margin producers. But they (c.f. Intel in the 90's) tend to move on to other products anyway. No one wants to make junk for a living.
lostlogin 14 minutes ago [-]
> The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either.
Tariffs leading to expanded US solar panel production might be one of the few things that would lead Trump to cancel tariffs. Solar is somehow offensive to him.
dotnet00 11 minutes ago [-]
Just saying that the US should be doing it domestically and companies aren't interested isn't useful. It's kind of like saying "young people just don't want to work hard anymore!".
boringg 27 minutes ago [-]
I mean lets not use China as the example here - they are doing it to reduce their air pollution and use the highly subsidized solar pv arrays. They are are the dominant users of coal in concert with solar. They need to ramp up their energy production to match demand and they front-loaded their solar production with massive subsidized capital from the government.
In the case of geo-politics if the US wanted to install solar to cover its energy load it would essentially be a massive payment to China for the solar arrays since there isn't productive capacity in the US. It would also end up being a long term dependent on future purchases of solar from China when they would need to re-up every 30-40 years at end of asset life.
throw9394494i88 49 minutes ago [-]
Importing solar panels from China is a security risk. Like when Europe depended on Russian gas...
cenamus 46 minutes ago [-]
Except when the panels stop nothing happens for 20 something years?
koolala 2 minutes ago [-]
please use a /s for sarcasm like this
physhster 45 minutes ago [-]
Better than not having solar panels at all...
unethical_ban 45 minutes ago [-]
Doubt. Considering the lifespan of solar panels and the ability to manufacture panels at a later date, totally different situations.
We should look to non Chinese suppliers strategically, but they can't remote shutdown panels in an instant like Russia can stop a flow of gas.
immibis 41 minutes ago [-]
No, because you need a continual supply of gas to keep having factories, but once you have a solar field, you have it.
Ther rated lifespan for a solar panel is on the order of 20-30 years, but they're still producing 70-80% of their output after that time. They last a very long time - if not destroyed from above.
MangoToupe 32 minutes ago [-]
Right, because the rest of the supply chain passing through China is somehow different?
genter 45 minutes ago [-]
One of the fascinating things about solar panels is that they continue to produce electricity for many years. Unlike a gallon of gas, once you burn it, it's gone.
cmcconomy 43 minutes ago [-]
remarkable
barbazoo 1 hours ago [-]
> “Running the global infrastructure behind our products and services, including AI, takes considerable energy,” said Google in its Environment 2025 report, which explained that it will be almost impossible to meet its erstwhile net-zero ambitions, partly due to its expansion in AI.
Greed, greed, greed. They'd rather see the world burn than not be first in AI whatever that means. They could still achieve net zero, they have just chosen not to. Unimaginable amounts of money but it's never enough.
boringg 21 minutes ago [-]
So they don't make net zero but they still continue to improve their operations and have a lighter green footprint while maintaining themselves in the great AI race.
Can anyone shed any light on the difference between net-zero and what they will actually be able to achieve? Will be hard given that the workloads for AI have sucked up all available energy resources. I have to think at the margin it is getting very expensive to acquire those resources.
dlachausse 1 hours ago [-]
More than any other company, Google needs to succeed in AI. AI chat has already replaced search engines for many people. Nearly all of Google’s revenue comes from advertising.
watwut 46 minutes ago [-]
Funny enough, that was googles choice. And They made the search worst was consciously as a business strategy, because worst search meant more queries.
And they forced ai on top of search because they wanted to.
munk-a 37 minutes ago [-]
They're a dinosaur and have forgotten how to innovate and provide new value. This is what complacency and shifting your business to focus on regulatory capture ultimately leads to.
wnevets 1 hours ago [-]
Capitalism is the most efficient system for resource allocation or something.
dlachausse 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have an example of an alternative economic system that is more efficient at resource allocation in practice, not just theory?
abdullahkhalids 12 minutes ago [-]
There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society.
Sure, resource allocation can be a instrumental to those goals of human well being, but not the directly optimized metric. So, for example, I care very little gdp/capita when you can just as easily measure life expectancy or food stress levels.
On such counts, capitalism has a mixed record. Today, for example, a lot of countries that are "more capitalistic" than others have poorer metrics of human development than those that are "less capitalistic".
3 minutes ago [-]
throw-qqqqq 1 hours ago [-]
No alternatives have been tried on a global scale, so I don’t think anyone has the practical evidence you request.
dlachausse 57 minutes ago [-]
I think a large nation the size of the former Soviet Union or China should be enough to invalidate communism and centrally planned economies if that’s what you’re suggesting.
nathan_compton 47 seconds ago [-]
I guess ask a Chinese person? Like I'm sure many Chinese people aren't happy about the way their state functions, but the vast majority of them live their lives pretty much like we do. I don't know if I would take that as a total invalidation of whatever it is they have over there. Would I prefer a western style system? Definitely, but I'm not sure its so easy to point at China and say "this is an abject failure."
In fact, quite the opposite: most of the poverty reduction in the last 50 years has been in China, for example. Most of the cheap stuff we buy is manufactured there. Being the "factory of the world" doesn't seem like a definitive invalidation of that system.
kjkjadksj 50 minutes ago [-]
Those just invalidate totalitarianism. On the other hand, the US government uplifted itself from the great depression and won WWII thanks to a centrally planned economy. People like to forget about that fact though.
dlachausse 44 minutes ago [-]
How do you achieve nation or world scale communism without totalitarianism? I am one of many people who know the history of communism’s failures and will never accept it willingly.
frank_nitti 10 minutes ago [-]
I would be more interested to see your response to the key point of their comment - that the US exemplified this on a large scale in recent history.
That would be more compelling than to simply claim to have a lot of knowledge of history
nashashmi 21 minutes ago [-]
Resource allocation? Yes, normal socioeconomics. But did it have rapid growth trajectory? No. It lacked the ambition needed to drive humanity to maximum consumerism.
Before capitalism and communism was a thing, we had normal economics. And the worst part of this in some places was the bourgeoisie. They kept the resources in their control. And communism was supposed to be a banging of the piñata that shook the tree. Capitalism was a response to communism, yet installed a basic transition to a socialist education system and for educational wealth to be added.
I guess a good antidote to bad actors is for a wealth tax. Unused or underutilized wealth gets taxed until the net tax is reduced to whatever financial return it has.
parthdesai 1 hours ago [-]
AI is literally an existential threat to their business, what are you talking about?
yifanl 17 minutes ago [-]
If the only way to appease shareholders next quarter was to detonate an ICBM in Times Square, do you do it?
gosub100 41 minutes ago [-]
That's a strange way to spell "competition". Where is it written that environmental considerations go out the window when having to compete in business?
jm4 1 hours ago [-]
They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Bailing on AI because they can't do that and also be net-zero is a good way to get sued.
munk-a 6 minutes ago [-]
Never before have I heard of lighting a pile of cash on fire being a fiduciary duty. Post-GPT AI may eventually prove a highly profitable venture - right now the only people making money are the shovel sellers and most of the launched applications can't seem to attract users at a price point that's sustainable.
fmbb 51 minutes ago [-]
Sued for what?
AI is not making anyone money except Nvidia.
kjkjadksj 52 minutes ago [-]
Don’t the shareholders benefit from having an earth worth investing in that isn’t falling apart from climate catastrophe in a few decades?
watwut 48 minutes ago [-]
Actually, fiduciary duty is not actually a mandate to be a maximal psychopath nor a mandate to spend billions on high risk investments.
As in, fiduciary duty does not prevent companies from being net-zero nor does it mandate AI.
Simon_O_Rourke 32 minutes ago [-]
Jeez, those guys just get more evil by the day. We're not too far from them joining in the local seal clubbing expedition.
themgt 1 hours ago [-]
We made a pledge "to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change", but it turned out generating a short AI slop video uses 110kWh of energy. Anyhow, ...
some_random 1 hours ago [-]
To be somewhat pessimistic, these pledges always struck me as being fairweather, politically motivated, and deliberately gamed. That's not to say that it's meaningless there's definitely some good work being done, it's just that I don't think that work is all that connected to the pledges.
matthewdgreen 40 minutes ago [-]
Pledges are good. They give executives something to point to when they make short-term less-profitable decisions, and insulate them from shareholder lawsuits. Essentially then (and ESG) are a very lightweight opportunity to drive some long-term decision making into what is otherwise a relentlessly selfish and short term process.
And as the expression goes: who knows, perhaps the horse will learn how to sing.
gosub100 40 minutes ago [-]
Case in point: the work from home policies that have been largely rescinded since COVID.
The lesson here is clear, corporations won't do anything that's good for the ecology and survivability of our species unless forced.
kjkjadksj 49 minutes ago [-]
If only we could remind them somehow that inevitable migration, famine, and mass death is not as profitable as alternatives.
hungmung 51 minutes ago [-]
I strongly suspect that the net zero thing is at least half bullshit anyway, and probably more like 90%. We have forests on paper that have no basis in reality, either because of wildfires or because they just planted seedlings in summer and they died immediately. Those carbon credits don't get negated though. But now you get a forest of carbon in the atmo + whatever emissions those credits justified, while "conscious consumers" pat themselves on the back for choosing net zero products.
Where there is a layer of abstraction involving money, there is always bullshit.
gmuslera 58 minutes ago [-]
Don't worry, in 100 years whatever remains of human civilization will be net zero.
arm32 45 minutes ago [-]
This is what helps me sleep at night.
Rendered at 18:00:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Previously, on https://sustainability.google/operating-sustainably/:
"We've set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030." and, in a table later, "Reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions by 2030. Invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions." and "Run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030."
Now, in their 2025 Environmental Report at https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2025-environmen...:
"We aim to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030." and "We aim to reduce absolute, combined scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 emissions by 50% from a 2019 base year by 2030." (They also restate the thing about "to neutralize our remaining emissions" a bit later in the document.)
Exactly the same stated goals, just written in a different place. There's more hedging around it now: they call it a "moonshot" and say that they might not manage it, but they never actually promised to do it before.
This is reasonable, it's a nearly impossible goal to achieve.
Meanwhile: "Amazon meets 100% renewable energy goal 7 years early"[1]
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-renew...
Google already claims to have matched 100% of their energy with renewables since 2017.
Clean energy isn't even some virtuous thing, it's just no-brainer smart energy policy. The only reason for Google to be backpedaling on its pledge is political. It's in a backsliding petrostate and it has to play the political game.
Because the US should be doing it domestically, just like China is.
The incentive to do is partially based on tariffs, but the incentive hasn't spurred the private sector and supply chain maintainers into action, and a more comprehensive strategy would need to be done. There is no consensus for further subsidies from the national government to spur this production either.
However, really the answer to dumping is to exploit the dumper viciously, buy as much below market rate product of theirs as you can while they bleed money (especially a capital good like solar panels).
The US could be driving down the cost of energy nationwide with the dumped power generation equipment. Lower cost energy could then be turbocharging (nearly) every other industry in the country.
The only industry this harms is fossil fuels, and solar is being hamstrung to protect this legacy industry at the cost of all potential future industries.
Pretty much by definition, products that can be dumped are ones that can be manufactured with easily scaled production equipment at low margin and high volume. If you can dump your competitors out of business, so can someone else, to you.
And that's the way it generally happens (c.f. DRAM in the 80's). The "dumping" phase of a technology curve is succeeded not by a cartel with a tight grip on the previously competitive market, but by an extremely competitive market of producers all undercutting each other. Almost everyone wins, except the original high-margin producers. But they (c.f. Intel in the 90's) tend to move on to other products anyway. No one wants to make junk for a living.
Tariffs leading to expanded US solar panel production might be one of the few things that would lead Trump to cancel tariffs. Solar is somehow offensive to him.
In the case of geo-politics if the US wanted to install solar to cover its energy load it would essentially be a massive payment to China for the solar arrays since there isn't productive capacity in the US. It would also end up being a long term dependent on future purchases of solar from China when they would need to re-up every 30-40 years at end of asset life.
We should look to non Chinese suppliers strategically, but they can't remote shutdown panels in an instant like Russia can stop a flow of gas.
Ther rated lifespan for a solar panel is on the order of 20-30 years, but they're still producing 70-80% of their output after that time. They last a very long time - if not destroyed from above.
Greed, greed, greed. They'd rather see the world burn than not be first in AI whatever that means. They could still achieve net zero, they have just chosen not to. Unimaginable amounts of money but it's never enough.
Can anyone shed any light on the difference between net-zero and what they will actually be able to achieve? Will be hard given that the workloads for AI have sucked up all available energy resources. I have to think at the margin it is getting very expensive to acquire those resources.
And they forced ai on top of search because they wanted to.
Sure, resource allocation can be a instrumental to those goals of human well being, but not the directly optimized metric. So, for example, I care very little gdp/capita when you can just as easily measure life expectancy or food stress levels.
On such counts, capitalism has a mixed record. Today, for example, a lot of countries that are "more capitalistic" than others have poorer metrics of human development than those that are "less capitalistic".
In fact, quite the opposite: most of the poverty reduction in the last 50 years has been in China, for example. Most of the cheap stuff we buy is manufactured there. Being the "factory of the world" doesn't seem like a definitive invalidation of that system.
That would be more compelling than to simply claim to have a lot of knowledge of history
Before capitalism and communism was a thing, we had normal economics. And the worst part of this in some places was the bourgeoisie. They kept the resources in their control. And communism was supposed to be a banging of the piñata that shook the tree. Capitalism was a response to communism, yet installed a basic transition to a socialist education system and for educational wealth to be added.
I guess a good antidote to bad actors is for a wealth tax. Unused or underutilized wealth gets taxed until the net tax is reduced to whatever financial return it has.
AI is not making anyone money except Nvidia.
As in, fiduciary duty does not prevent companies from being net-zero nor does it mandate AI.
And as the expression goes: who knows, perhaps the horse will learn how to sing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_gov...
Where there is a layer of abstraction involving money, there is always bullshit.