Google has claimed to be CO2 neutral since 2007, but has abandoned this claim for the time being. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as CO2 compensation is currently being revised.

Google has claimed to be carbon neutral since 2007. This does not add up if you only look at the company’s activities, and Google knows this. For this reason, the company invested in carbon offsets to offset its own emissions.

However, carbon offsets are often controversial. They allow a company not to invest in a sustainable transformation but to buy it out. In addition, the so-called compensations are all too often misleading and the compensation is sometimes less than claimed. Think of trees that are planted and then neglected, of purchased forest areas that would not disappear anyway, or of green energy projects that would have been put into action even without the compensation.

Continue to CO2 negative

Since last year, Google has stopped maintaining its carbon neutrality. Instead, the company is investing in effectively reducing its emissions. The goal is to even become carbon negative by 2030.

Unfortunately, this is also not working as well as planned. Thanks to AI, Google’s emissions will increase by 48 percent in 2023 compared to 2019. Although Google itself is developing techniques to train new models more efficiently, the question remains whether their effect will be sufficient. The expenditure in money, time, hardware, energy and thus emissions for building the latest AI models is already ten times higher than that of the current generation.