Big tech and carbon
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Google pledges to be carbon free by 2030. Ahead of next month's UN Climate Summit, the company has come out with new targets to become greener than ever. But what does that mean? Is Google supporting the energy transition away from fossil fuels or just fuelling ever greater consumption? Ed Butler speaks to the company's Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt, about how this is just the latest step in her company's aim to be a world leader in sustainability. Ian Bitterlin, a Consulting Engineer & Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds in the UK tries to quantify the amount of carbon pollution that could reasonably be attributed to data centers worldwide. And Sonya Bhonsle, the Global Head of Value Chains at CDP, the world's leading climate NGO that helps companies and cities disclose their environmental impact, tells Ed that Google scores very highly in their ratings and that the company is sending out good messages to others in the industry.
(Photo: Google's logo adorns their office in New York, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there. I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, Google's head of |
| 0:06.7 | sustainability tells us her firm is leading the way in the green energy transition. |
| 0:12.8 | We aim to be the first company to operate on carbon-free energy by 2030, 24 hours a day, |
| 0:17.9 | seven days a week. And that enables new wind, new solar, new advanced geothermal |
| 0:23.6 | to come onto the grid. So just how green is Google and our use of streaming search and the |
| 0:29.5 | rest of it, are we properly pricing the internet's carbon footprint? The bridge between where we are |
| 0:35.6 | now and where we need to be, which is treating all the power |
| 0:40.1 | as a valuable resource and minimising its consumption is a big gap. The price of our lives online, |
| 0:48.7 | business daily from the BBC. So ahead of this year's all-important UN climate summit, the tech giant Google has been setting out its targets and initiatives around the issue of climate change. |
| 1:04.0 | Most significantly, it's aimed to operate on carbon-free energy everywhere at all times by the end of the decade. |
| 1:11.9 | Kate Brand is Google's chief sustainability officer. |
| 1:15.2 | She's been telling me how this is just the latest step in her company's aim to be a world |
| 1:20.0 | leader in this area. |
| 1:21.6 | Our first decade in 2007, we were the first major company to be carbon neutral in our |
| 1:27.1 | operations. Then in our second decade, we became the largest major company to be carbon neutral in our operations. Then in our second |
| 1:28.7 | decade, we became the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world. |
| 1:33.1 | And now we're onto a moonshot goal, which is that we aim to be the first company to operate on |
| 1:38.4 | carbon-free energy by 2030, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Right. To jump from offsetting carbon emissions to literally |
| 1:47.2 | becoming a firm that uses energy only from renewable sources. How big a challenge has that been? |
| 1:54.8 | This is hard, but that's why we set this goal because we think it is challenging. And we don't |
| 1:59.5 | just want to reach an end |
| 2:00.8 | state where we're driving towards carbon-free for Google. We want to enable this for everyone. |
... |
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