there's some pretty shady reporting on the summary page: <a href="https://environment.google/projects/environmental-report-2016/" rel="nofollow">https://environment.google/projects/environmental-report-201...</a><p>9.2M sqft LEED certified - they display percentages for most stats, but only an absolute for this one? going to make me dig to find their total office square footage to find out what this means?<p>Then the next stat, 31% LEED Platinum. oh good, a percentage. except it's not, it's a <i>percentage of their LEED certified buildings</i>.<p>or "100% landfill diversion, in 6 of our data centres". surely google has more than 6 data centres, but let's only look at the environmental stats of the ones that are doing a good job. [The stat is 84% across all their datacentres.]<p>"100% renewable energy". sounds good, except oh no, it's "we will achieve". What's the percentage right now? [it was 44% in 2015, the last year they report.]<p>[edit - skimmed the report, added in some numbers to my comment]
The report itself appears to be mostly the same marketing fluff, until you get down to the "environmental data" appendix on page 66, which actually looks like a pretty solid report of their environmental footprint. And it looks like they're doing a decent job, so i'm not sure why the real numbers are buried so deeply.
Big respect for Google!<p>Creating that site is a really cool move, and it will encourage other people to do the same.<p>I especially like the fact that they'll mount sensors for air quality on Street View cars. And the fact that they're using almost 100% renewable energy.<p>This is what I call leading by example.
There is a great need to hurry up with enthusing and glamorising the most sustainable human consumables and activities and interests, by the truly effective means of our Age (mass commercial and public advertising) This also means stigmatising and depreciating many kinds of commerce and spending which have to date been marketed and defended as rightful livelihoods.<p>It is past time to be just tending our own very fine gardens. We need to make it difficult for each other to pollute and mis-consume, like we did with smoking.
The office component is such b.s. that it throws the rest of the report into doubt. While solar panels and shuttles are small gestures in the right direction, Google continues to make the wrong large decisions by putting their offices in the middle of nowhere, miles from any real place, surrounded by acres of parking. The sustainable thing would be to put their buildings in cities and adjacent to mass transit so employees can walk and ride to work from their nearby homes.
How does a data center run fully renewable, do they have huge battery installations or is it one of those "credits" things where, their consumption is compensated by production equal amount of solar and wind contracts they signed up to?
Does the fact that they released this on WWDC day, a high traffic tech news day, suggest there may be something in here that they're hoping gets overlooked?
Hey everyone!<p>I'm a developer at Aclima. We are working with Google on the mobile sensing tech talked about here: <a href="https://environment.google/projects/airview/" rel="nofollow">https://environment.google/projects/airview/</a><p>Honestly I'm really excited about it, but of course I'm just a tiny bit biased :)<p>If anyone has any questions I would love to do the best I can to answer them. Cheers!
How did Google get a TLD? I read <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/google_turns_on_google_internet_extension/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/google_turns_on_goo...</a>
Can anyone do this with enough $?
When they talk about refurbished components, are they really refurbished or just "overstock" sold as refurbished? It just seems odd that there would be that many refurbished components... or maybe they don't do that many server upgrades and just replace the whole things.
There's something funny about them reporting market-based emissions in the appendix. Mostly, that they're reporting them all the way back to 2011 when this was only approved by 2015. It's not really a big deal, but it's a bit unusual.<p>You can read a bit about the market-based scope 2 method here:<p><a href="http://www.wri.org/blog/2015/01/scope-2-changing-way-companies-think-about-electricity-emissions" rel="nofollow">http://www.wri.org/blog/2015/01/scope-2-changing-way-compani...</a><p>Let me explain a bit: market-based emissions are electricity power grid emissions computed the market-based method. The method measures your emissions differently depending on whether or not you bought a green instrument. Roughly speaking, green instruments are money you pay the power company that they will invest into green sources of energy, like wind and solar.<p>Under the market-based method, if you bought a green instrument, you can then report lower emissions, as if all of your electricity only came from the green energy you purchased. Conversely, if an instrument was available for purchase but you didn't buy one, your emissions will look like they all came from non-green sources of energy, like coal (these are called residual emissions). Of course, this is all a bit of an accounting lie: when you use the power grid, you can't tell the power company to not send you electricity from their coal power plant. Therefore, you also have to report your location-based emissions, which is the "normal" reporting that has been used in all previous years and is still being used. Roughly speaking, the location-based method is, take the total emissions of the entire power grid you're using, and multiply that by your fractional of the power usage of the grid over all other customers. Your emissions are then computed as your proportion of all green and non-green emissions that the entire power grid produces.<p>The market-based method is supposed to incentivise companies to buy green instruments because they can then report lower emissions under one method. The purchase of green instruments in turn is supposed to incentivise power companies to invest in green energy. The whole thing, however, is kind of based on an accounting "trick". This is why the greenhouse gas analysts at my job aren't huge fans of the market-based method.<p>WRI was pressured by many industry leaders to adopt the market-based method as part of the reporting protocol. If Google is reporting market-based emissions all the way back to 2011, way before it was approved last year, I wouldn't be surprised if they were one of the companies that lobbied WRI to include the market-based method. They are also mentioned as a motivating example in that link above.