Climate Change is here and catastrophic events are seen all around the world from bushfires in Australia, floods in Asia, soaring temperatures in Europe, wildfires in California, and the rise in sea temperature leading to more cyclones formations in the oceans.
In a big step to curb the use of energy production from fossil fuels, Google has announced on Monday that it will work to run all its operations on renewable energy by 2030, the company has also announced that as of today it has purchased enough carbon offsets to essentially cancel out all the planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions the company has released since it was founded in 1998.
Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 which means the company offsets the emission it generates from burning fossil fuels by investing in renewable energy projects and other initiatives that draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in storage.
But as the environmentalists say that relying on offsets doesn’t mean that the company is not using energy produced from fossil fuels that generate carbon dioxide. As per the report published by Google the company released 4.8 million metric tons of greenhouse games in 2018 that is more than the greenhouse gases emitted by 1 million passenger vehicles in the US per year.
Google’s new announcement comes in when almost all the California state where the headquarters of the company located is choked in the smoke from the wildfires in California.
“We have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a video released today. “We are already feeling those impacts today from historic wildfires in the US to devastating flooding in many parts of the world.”
Once Google’s data centers are powered completely by renewable energy, “this will mean every email you send through Gmail, every question you ask Google Search, every YouTube video you watch, and every route you take using Google Maps, is supplied by clean energy every hour of every day,” Pichai wrote in a blog post today.
Last September, Google announced what it said was “the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history,” which increased the company’s wind and solar agreements by 40 percent. The company said it became the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world in 2016.
Google also says that in its commitment to end its reliance on fossil fuels based energy production it will also create about 12,000 jobs by 2025.
Earlier this year Microsoft announced that it would work to scrape out all the carbon pollution the company has ever released from the atmosphere by 2050 that is more challenging than the commitment made by Google in today’s announcement.
