Key details from this reporting:
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the IT behemoth was entering the “most ambitious decade yet” in its climate action.
“Today, I’m proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said, in a video announcement.
Pichai added that he knew the “road ahead would not be easy,” but Google “aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change.”
Five years on, just how hard Google’s “energy journey” would become is clear. In June, Google’s Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed.
An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has found that Google’s net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company’s sustainability report.
Genna Schnurback, an external spokesperson for Google, referring to the report, told us: “As you can see from the document, Google is still committed to their ambition of net zero by 2030.”
By tracing back through the history of Google’s Sustainability website, we found that the company edited it in late June, removing almost all mention of its lauded net-zero goals. (A separate website referring to data centres specifically has maintained its existing language around net-zero commitments.)
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“Running the global infrastructure behind our products and services, including AI, takes considerable energy,” said Google in its Environment 2025 report, which explained that it will be almost impossible to meet its erstwhile net-zero ambitions, partly due to its expansion in AI.
These significant removals come as Big Tech is racing to build new, power-devouring, hyperscale data centres to capitalize on the global boom in artificial intelligence. They are also coming at a time when the Trump administration has targeted institutions that have environmental ambitions.
“While we remain committed to our climate moonshots, it’s become clear that achieving them is now more complex and challenging across every level — from local to global,” the Google report authors state. In the same report last year, Net Zero Carbon was a key priority.
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In other sectors, Lang said corporations are now recalibrating their early sustainability goals to be more realistic and reduce reliance on carbon credits. This, he added, is “a really, really good thing.”
Google, whose parent company Alphabet has a market cap of US$2.79 trillion, has taken a more ambiguous approach. Despite removing its net-zero headline from its Sustainability website, the company insists that it remains committed to its 2030 goal — which relies heavily on carbon offsetting. An external PR representative for Google declined to reply to Canada’s National Observer’s challenge of her claim that it was “still committed” to net zero by 2030, despite the pledge being demoted to an appendix.
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Lang is more sympathetic to “stretch goals,” like Google’s climate moonshots, as long as the deadlines are set close in the future, as they can motivate urgency.
“It still needs to be realistic. You still need to be able to deliver it,” he added. He praised Google’s decision to invest $200 million in durable carbon removals as setting a positive precedent for other companies.
It is unclear whether Google’s decision to delete its net-zero pledges from its Sustainability website sets a more worrying precedent.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/google-net-zero-sustainability
We’ve already seen, both at Google/Alphabet and at other companies, that all these social commitments are at the end of the day commitments of convenience. No matter how earnest they might be when they make these commitments (like the now-infamous “don’t be evil”), over time these commitments are seen as too much of a hindrance to business operations and are quietly dropped. The lesson from this should be to never trust the commitments from these companies, unless they’re backed by something substantial with specific programs, actions, and stable budgets.
h/t Hrmbee