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Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

bbc.com

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Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#51

Post by unpolloloco »

tjpnz wrote: post #44

>"We'll do things like pairing wind and solar power sources together and increasing our use of battery storage," he said. Is Google accounting for the environmental destruction that goes into making those solar panels.

It's right in the title...CARBON footprint is 0. That said, it's becoming more and more clear that wind/solar are less damaging than coal on a non-carbon basis as well. Nothing we do has zero impact...the goal is to minimize it. The only way to have zero impact is to wipe out the human species (and even then there will be some impact!!).

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#53

Post by Closi »

ForHackernews wrote: post #25
namdnay wrote: post #14

I'm always suspicious about carbon offsets. From what I've seen buying flights for example, the price seems surprisingly low. Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. Does anyone have more expertise on this?

Because so few people are interested in offsets right now, there's a huge amount of "low-hanging fruit" options for cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions. For example, look at some of the projects here: https://www.goldstandard.org/take-action/offset-your-emissio... Many of them just involve getting very poor people access to clean water (so they don't have to burn hydrocarbons to boil the water) or…

Some of these sound like double counting too.

Like you can fund an already-built wind turbine plant - the capital is already built, so even without your funding this is going to stay open...

But even if we forget that, the people buying energy from these plants will be buying a 'green megawatt' - so surely that means each megawatt will have been both offset and sold as 'green energy'?

And then to add to that - these power plants are also claimed against national emission reduction targets (at least the one in Indonesia is) and were actually built as part of a government fund - so then it's kind of triple-counting too!

(i.e. well for every green megawatt we sell, the company we sell it to gets to say they have a green megawatt, the offset company gets to say that they offset a megawatt, and the government gets to say it's generated 1 megawatt of green energy! In reality no actual carbon was saved other than the government intervention)

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#54

Post by benwsapp »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #35
masswerk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, network traffic is about 40% (estimated) of the energy consumption of IT according to the statistics I've seen.

I could bet that this is wrong. Network taking almost equal energy as CPU does not seem correct. Any sources?

Network traffic makes sense if you consider that network traffic is active usage - and the routers, switches, infra all need power. Whereas a typical user's CPU sits idle most of the time.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#56

Post by iamgopal »

what_ever wrote: post #46
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #41

This is like rich countries moving factories to third-world countries where industry emits more CO2. They pretend to be responsible for less and less greenhouse gases even though they consume more physical goods, with larger carbon footprint. Worst, they feel fine flying and buying SUV because their not that dirty compared to people in undeveloped countries whose carbon footprint keeps increasing.

I don't get the analogy - could you explain more? Disc: Googler.

Google's energy consumption to make goods is zero. Achieving similar zero carbon foot print is next to impossible for lower profit margin fertilizer production. ( i.e. third world countries, as a whole, are working at quite less profit margins, and because of that, have trouble achieving similar zero carbon footprint. Ultimately All the profits are moving to west.

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#58

Post by toomuchtodo »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #40
extropy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not buying the access to clean water = less burning of hydrocarbon. The poor people by definition are resource strapped and will use any means of energy available, just for different purpose. On the cynical side: clean water -> less mortality -> more population -> more carbon use to sustain said population.

It's pretty well established that lower mortality leads to less reproduction and lower overall population. When mortar is high, proof reliability over correct with extra "cushion" children. Wealth is a far larger source of pollution than life.

> Wealth is a far larger source of pollution than life.

It's both. Wealth drives down the birth rate (as does empowerment and higher education of women [1]), but it also drives up the rate of pollution [2]. You need "Clean Wealth" (high quality of life with low or zero CO2 emissions, pollution, etc) if you want lower birth rates (which we do, we're on track to hit 10 billion people by the end of the century) and less pollution.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=chart&xScale=li...

Re: Google says its carbon footprint is now zero

#59

Post by perfunctory »

namdnay wrote: post #14

I'm always suspicious about carbon offsets. From what I've seen buying flights for example, the price seems surprisingly low. Either being carbon neutral is not as economy-killing as some say, or the true price is much higher. Does anyone have more expertise on this?

Yeah, it's like Shell was offering customers to pay one cent extra per liter of fuel to drive in a "CO2 neutral" way. If it really was that cheap to offset carbon emissions, we wouldn't have any climate problem by now, would we.

https://nltimes.nl/2019/04/08/shell-charge-customers-extra-c...

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