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I think there's less to this than meets the eye.

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.

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.

Maybe it should be the governments responsibility to ensure clean power is available? Why do private businesses need to resort to this kind of posturing.

Our economy is energy-starved and our biosphere is in a precarious situation. Meanwhile, the current generation of AI is energy inefficient as hell, for both training and inference. They need massive datacenters to teach a model what little kids learn effortlessly. The two are neither compatible, nor sustainable. What fraction of AI training and inference is justifiable under the current circumstances? I understand that AI has some novel and urgent applications, including for tackling the crisis itself. But if the justification for AI chatbots for people too lazy to do an old-fashioned web search is corporate profits against the destruction of massive amounts of biomass, we better apply the emergency brakes on it fast. The biosphere and countless lives are vastly more important than the greed of a few rich people who don't even know what to do with the wealth they have.

> “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.

Google decision makers are obviously very smart people. Do decisions like this mean they acknowledge that net-zero is more a political ideal than an actually effective policy? After all, if they truly believed this was an existential issue they’d make every effort.

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.

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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.

Net-zero is a bad goal, it set you up for failure in other area.

EX: zero death from Covid, oh, we fck the next generation with isolation and screen.

I singular objective like that make you blind, it become a god you sacrifice everything else to.

Bring back "don't be evil".

Now that the pressure has subsided from institutional investors who used ESG as a regulatory capture mechanism, you can go ahead and 0% believe what corporations have on their website, rather than the 25% you could trust it before.

The lesson here is clear, corporations won't do anything that's good for the ecology and survivability of our species unless forced.

I mean, if there's one thing we know about Google - give it a few years and they'll ditch that thing they were _so_ into. Products, principles, whatever.

I feel like I should delete my gmail account but the way I use it is probably costing them more to maintain it than it's worth.

Don't worry, in 100 years whatever remains of human civilization will be net zero.