Google Is So Very Green That Their CO2 Pollution Has Risen 51% In Just 6 Years - Thanks, AI!!!

[hatrack]

Google’s carbon emissions have soared by 51% since 2019 as artificial intelligence hampers the tech company’s efforts to go green. While the corporation has invested in renewable energy and carbon removal technology, it has failed to curb its scope 3 emissions, which are those further down the supply chain, and are in large part influenced by a growth in datacentre capacity required to power artificial intelligence.

The company reported a 27% increase in year-on-year electricity consumption as it struggles to decarbonise as quickly as its energy needs increase.

Datacentres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. The International Energy Agency estimates that datacentres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by the research firm SemiAnalysis. The report also raises concerns that the rapid evolution of AI may drive “non-linear growth in energy demand”, making future energy needs and emissions trajectories more difficult to predict.

EDIT

The report said these were behind schedule: “A key challenge is the slower-than-needed deployment of carbon-free energy technologies at scale, and getting there by 2030 will be very difficult. While we continue to invest in promising technologies like advanced geothermal and SMRs, their widespread adoption hasn’t yet been achieved because they’re early-stage, relatively costly, and poorly incentivised by current regulatory structures.” It added that scope 3 remained a “challenge”, as Google’s total ambition-based emissions were 11.5m tons of CO₂-equivalent gases, representing an 11% year-over-year increase and a 51% increase compared with the 2019 base year. This was “primarily driven by increases in supply chain emissions” and scope 3 emissions increased by 22% in 2024.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-emissions-ai-electricity-demand-derail-efforts-green

[paleotn]

1. AI can't be done at the scale envisioned without frying the planet.

Not with existing or "just out of reach" silicon technology. The chips we've known for decades. For AI to reach its "promise", the scale of server farms and electricity generation needed to drive them, and more importantly, cool them, is beyond our imaginations. We're bumping up against the absolute limit of Moore's Law (reduce the size of chip components, thus cramming more on a single chip) and every new innovation designed to push that limit is harder and more expensive, and then even harder and even more expensive, and on and on. A prime example of diminishing returns.

The smaller you get, the more heat you generate from a single chip. Thus the cooling budget (keeping the components from failing, or simply melting) gets bigger and bigger and bigger. In conjunction with continued miniaturization, just "wire" together more and more and more servers, turning a significant chunk of the planet into a bunch of ginormous server farms, not to mention the footprint of the electricity generation plants necessary to power and cool all of that. And the carbon footprint simply to MAKE all of that. Not a world I want to live on. And no one wants to interrupt the drunk, AI party with practicalities. Too much money to be made and lost on this pipe dream.

https://physicsworld.com/a/moores-law-further-progress-will-push-hard-on-the-boundaries-of-physics-and-economics/

[highplainsdem]

2. The tech bros are apparently all hoping that as AI does more and more harm to the environment, it

will suddenly, magically, save us from climate change with its wisdom.

[thought crime]

3. Or we'll just hop on over to Mars. So easy to terraform.

[hatrack]

7. Oh, I think it's a joint venture by big tech and big fossil . . . .

Since we "must " have AI or we'll "lose the race" to other countries who'll then find a faster and more efficient way to eliminate human beings from the workforce, what better way to keep the old energy game alive?

After all, if the only way forward - i.e. Expand Shiny Tech That Wise People Inform Us Is Vital Too Duh Fewchure - is to build out even more natural gas and bring coal power back online, what energy company or utility is going to object?

Imagine being a utility company offered another five to seven years of operations by stock-rich tech bros. Most coal plants don't even make money for utilities until the last ten years or so of their useful lives because they're capital-intensive and take decades to pay off. What utility executive or board would pass that up?

Same for natural gas exploration and pipeline companies. Sure, they'll have to invest more in green paint but so what else is new? And bubbly stock prices all around - huzzah!!!

[Linda ladeewolf]

4. Don't forget that bit coin costs just as much.

Mining bit coin takes huge amounts of energy and should be outlawed!

[hunter]

5. I don't need AI tracking my behavior as a "consumer."

Nobody does.

I especially don't need AI tracking my political behavior or physical location. Nothing good can come of that. When I was a young activist my friends and I experienced a no-knock police raid on our motel room and it was one of the more terrifying experiences of my life.

Today it's even easier for "the authorities" to track people.

For a few days last year I was intrigued by the use of AI for photo restoration but I soon decided reality and human creativity are a much better look.

The limitations of whatever camera and medium I'm using are a good thing. If some photo I've taken in the last sixty years is totally ugly I can still turn it into art using whatever tools and materials I have at hand -- which generally includes paper, paint, paint brushes, pencils, and a Linux computer capable of running GIMP.

I don't need AI to turn everything artificially shiny.

I don't believe that AI as used by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Elon Musk, fascist government agencies, etc., is making the world a better place so I'm doing my best to avoid it.

[NNadir]

6. Servers require reliable energy, continuous energy. For this reason any reference to so called "renewable energy..."

...was doomed to failure.

If any company says it's going to address its climate impact using so called "renewable energy," it's full of shit.

If any country says it's going to address its climate impact using so called "renewable energy," it's full of shit.

So called "renewable energy" is dependent on fossil fuels. It's a grotesque failure at everything it's about except attacking nuclear energy, which was, in any case, it's sole raison d'être. So called "renewable energy" has never been, is not, and never will be about sustainability. We're not going to tear the shit out of the Earth's mountains, valleys, and sea floor to call ourselves "green."

Chat GPT is one thing, but AI for things like protein conformation, epitope binding, solutions to the Bateman equation and many other uses out of the purview of the general public is quite another.

I rely on Google scholar quite a bit, and it's powered by servers, and in fact so is this website is reliant on servers.

Innocence and guilt are not clearly defined, and can't be clearly defined. If we want to know the cause of this tragic collapse of the atmosphere, a mirror would be a useful tool for finding it.