A zero carbon future - Google's moonshot

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Sundar Pichai's words could not ring truer: "The world must act now if we’re going to avert the worst consequences of climate change."

While many companies and politicians talk about taking action to push the energy transition and mitigate climate change, I am so happy to see Google taking actual action. You can think whatever you like about Google, but these commitments from the company will have measurable impact and hopefully will drive change across sectors and importantly, could create peer pressure with a leadership model for others to adapt and apply.

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Google has pledged action in 4 main areas:

Eliminating their carbon legacy

Committing to operating carbon-free by 2030

Investing in technologies to achieve a carbon-free future

Boldly putting the low carbon future at the center of their sustainability efforts

What does eliminating a carbon legacy mean? It means offsetting the carbon that you have caused throughout a cycle of something, be it business operations, manufacturing processes, or even just living your life. How can you or I do that? First you need to calculate your emissions, you can do that at Carbon Footprint for example. Average carbon footprints per individual in industrialized countries can range from 6.5-11 tons per person. Once you know the amount, you then need to offset it.

Carbon offsetting can be a science in itself (pun intended). Carbon credits can be purchased and then retired, meaning you do not allow anyone to use that credit to produce the carbon. As with many things, you need to make sure your credit is reputable. There are standards and certifications to be on the lookout for, such as Green-e or The Gold Standard.

You can also do something more interesting to offset carbon when you support emission reduction projects. These can impact many different sectors and are found across the globe - often in the developing world. Projects could be in renewable energy, forestry and conservation, or community projects. The Carbon Footprint website highlights some potential projects.

Becoming carbon free by 2030. This is more than slapping a few solar arrays around various Google campuses and calling it a day. Becoming carbon free will be a huge technological undertaking. Solar, wind, green hydrogen, hydropower, wave power, or whatever mixture of renewables that Google will ultimately put together will at the least rely on infrastructure to support it and batteries that can store it. In many, if not all locations, neither of those are a given currently. If it were so easy to become carbon-free right now, more people would probably be doing it. This is where Google can become a beacon and provide a practical roadmap for how others can do the same. We need someone to step up and make difficult decisions that will help us plot the way forward.

If you want to read more on this specifically, have a look at their white paper.

Obviously there is a great need for new technologies to meet current and future energy demand. Investments in this space will have benefits way beyond the commercial sector. The UN predicts that 68% of the population will live in cities by 2050. According to C40 Cities, cities produce 70% of global CO2 emissions. They also will be able to take up renewable energy technologies quickly. But cities are an amorphous group - there is no one number to dial for the person in charge of energy for cities. Investing in the clean tech that will be able to decarbonize urbanization is a key step towards a carbon-free future.

Becoming a leader for a carbon-free future capitalizes on the strength of the Google brand and will drive change. The focus on collective action and enabling changemakers by driving the creation of the tools is so important to creating real impact. We need the policies to help frame our route to a carbon-free future, but we also desperately need the doers to start inventing, investing and forging the actual paths to get there. Google is stepping up and rolling up their proverbial sleeves - let's hope other companies start to do the same.

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