On Thu, 20 Aug 2026 at 20:20, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
> Amin Bandali <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > | In 2025, our total ambition-based emissions were approximately
> > | 14.5 million tCO2e, representing an 18% year-on-year increase
> > | and an 81% increase compared to our 2019 base year [...]
>
> > https://sustainability.google/google-2026-environmental-report/
>
It also mentioned a reduction of 58 million tCO2e emissions in Google
supply chain partners, just in 2025. Which is more than 14.5.
And 12 GW of new clean energy supplies that Google contracted out just in
2025. Those are investments that created new, green power suppliers on the
grid that would *not* have been there without the money that Google paid.
And avoided the equivalent of 3000 tCO2e of global warming by a single
contral avoidance project.
Really. Read it. There are truly MASSIVE things being achieved with this
compute. Things whose benefits (including to the environment) exceed the
harm by at least two orders of magnitude. Doing nothing would be *more*
harmful to the environment than what Google actually does.
And "Despite this, we again matched 100% of our electricity consumption
with renewable energy purchases (on a global and annual basis) for the
ninth consecutive year.". So they still *did* buy a green GWh for every GWh
they spent, just not on a per-second basis. That is how they calculate
emissions happening - they are using a *stricter* basis for their
calculations.
> And that's even before one starts asking questions about how many industry
> environmental claims are based on green-washing scams like carbon offsets.
>
That report actually details where and how Google bought ~17.2 million
tCO2e worth of carbon offsets to cover those calculated 14.5 million tCO2e
emissions. They did not deduct the credits from emissions.
> Or about the environmental damage caused by mining and processing of rare
> earth minerals to make the disposable GPUs that are filling these new data
> centers.
Come on. Rare earth in GPUs is mostly in magnets for fans. You know - fans
that enterprise GPUs *do not have* - they are cooled by watercooling or
rack fans. Those parts do not need to be replaced with new GPU generations.
The chips are mostly silicon. Boards have a bunch of easy to recycle copper
and gold. The rest is either in miniscule quantities or in separate, easy
to recycle components (like GaN power stages).
--
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs
