In a climate of protests due to the neglect of large companies for the environment, both Amazon and Google have announced measures against climate change. Google has decided to go through adopting renewable energy as a flag, but in a much more aggressive way.
Last Thursday Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google announced that he would make “the largest corporate renewable energy investment in history”. This announcement is made only one day before the protests of the company’s workers take place to demand stronger measures against climate change.
Google already has an important “order history” regarding climate change. Last year, for example, he announced the investment of more renewable energy than he consumed as a company. This does not only apply to renewable energy; Google also announced that its entire range of Made by Google products will be made from recycled materials by 2022.
Google gets “the largest corporate renewable energy investment in history”
This investment includes a package of 1,600 megawatts of wind and solar agreements along with 18 new energy offers. According to The Verge, Google will invest more than 2 billion dollars to create infrastructure for renewable energy in Europe, the United States and China. According to Pichai himself, this investment amounts to “the capacity of one million solar roofs.”
Pichai continues: “In total, our renewable energy fleet now has 52 projects, generating more than $ 7 billion in new construction and thousands of related jobs”. Thus, Google expects to increase its renewable energy portfolio by 40 percent with these measures.
Is it enough?
However, employees do not seem so clear that this measure will be sufficient. Today, Google employees will organize to participate in the Global Climate Strike, led by students from all over the world before the United Nations climate summit on September 23. Not only from Google; Microsoft and Amazon employees have also assured that they will go.
In a Medium post, Google workers said “technology is not green. Google Cloud creates an important infrastructure for revenue licensing, machine learning and engineering talent for fossil fuel companies, and promises to help them extract fuel reserves faster”.
The demands of the workers are clear: they require 0 emissions by 2030 by Google, 0 contracts for fossil fuel companies “aimed at accelerating the extraction of oil and gas”, eliminating funds for politicians and businessmen who deny climate change and not harm climate refugees, or individuals who may be displaced as a result of climate change.
Amazon also announced climate promises
He announced “The Climate Pliedge”, consisting of meeting the most ambitious emission reduction targets of the Paris climate agreement about 10 years earlier. Thus, the company will be carbon neutral in 2040. In addition, he said that Amazon would use only renewable energy in 2024, and that the company would also work only with these energies in 2030.
Also published on Medium.