Google has hit back at a report picking holes in its carbon emission reduction claims, saying the analysis carried out by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship “distorts the facts” contained in its annual environmental sustainability reports.
The group claims in its 53-page Google’s eco-failures report that the internet search giant is using its annual environmental sustainability reports to mislead the public about the progress it is making with reducing its carbon emissions.
During a press briefing to announce the launch of Google’s eco-failures, Nicole Sugerman, senior campaign manager at the Kairos Fellowship and the report’s co-author, said it is part of a two-and-a-half-year piece of work by the group to highlight big tech’s contribution to the climate crisis.
This work has involved trawling through all of Google’s previously published environmental reports, and running detailed calculations on all of its environmental data, the group said.
And, in its opinion, the progress Google is claiming to have made on reducing its emissions in its most recent environmental sustainability report, which covers the 2024 calendar year, does not quite add up.
“This report … investigates Google’s claims, and a lot of what we found is that they are coming up short,” said Sugerman.
“We deserve transparency about Google’s impact on our Earth and our lives … and the company and Google’s leadership is not giving them to us. And so they need a push from us.”
What Google says
Google published its 10th annual environmental sustainability report at the end of June 2025, which saw the company report a 12% reduction in datacentre energy emissions, despite a 27% increase in the electricity demands of its server farms.
The company also reported that its total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – spanning Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 – increased year-on-year by 6.2%. This marks the third consecutive year in a row that Google’s GHG emissions have risen.
“Overall, total emissions have grown in recent years alongside the growth of our business and growing product adoption by users around the world,” the company conceded in its report. “The majority of these emissions are indirect, coming from our supply chain. We’re actively working to bend our emissions curve towards our net-zero ambition.”
The latter are classified as Scope 3 emissions, with Google stating elsewhere in its report that the company made “meaningful progress in 2024” in cutting its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 8% and 11% year-on-year, respectively.
Meanwhile, the company’s Scope 3 emissions increased by 22%, year-on-year, with the company citing the growing demand for datacentre capacity to stand-up artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
“Our total Scope 3 emissions increased … primarily due to increases in datacentre capacity delivery,” the report continued.
These Scope 3 emissions will be generated from the process of manufacturing and assembling the technical infrastructure needed for AI and their logistics, the report added, as well as from the process of constructing the datacentre itself.
Net-zero goal
Despite the increase in total GHG, Google reiterated its commitment to hitting its goal of achieving net-zero across its operations by 2030, and said it plans to reach it by investing in “carbon removal solutions” to neutralise its remaining emissions.
However, the report also saw Google acknowledge that the technology industry is at an “extraordinary inflection point” due to the rapid growth in AI adoption, and that this landscape “introduces significant uncertainties that may impact our future trajectories”.
Chief among these uncertainties is the potential for AI to experience non-linear growth patterns driven by its “unprecedented pace of development”.
“The uncertain scale of clean energy and infrastructure needed to meet this growth makes it harder to predict our future emissions and could impact our ability to reduce them,” the report added.
According to Franz Ressel, lead researcher at the Kairos Fellowship, it is not just the past three years where Google’s GHG emissions have increased – it is a trend the group claims has been playing out for nearly 15 years. “Google is misleading the public about its supposed reduction in emissions,” he said. “Specifically, when we did our research, we found that the company has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 1,515% between 2010 and 2024.
“In real terms, this means Google released 21.9 million metric tons more emissions in 2024 than it did 14 years ago,” said Ressel. “It’s like adding 4.7 million cars to the US roads in one year. For context, San Diego County, the fifth-largest county in the US by population, has 2.2 million registered cars.”
The true amount of emissions Google is generating is “enormous”, he added. “While Google reports a 12% decrease in emissions from datacentre energy use, it’s doing so by only reporting market-based emissions, which use carbon-free energy purchased elsewhere to obscure real emissions,” said Ressel.
AI at the heart of Google’s emissions growth
Where the Kairos Fellowship’s findings do align with Google’s report is in its conclusion that AI lies at the heart of the tech giant’s emissions growth.
“We found Google’s aggressive investment in generative AI and its infrastructure is a major factor behind its climate failings,” he said. “Google Scope 2 emissions, which measure the emissions from energy that Google purchases to power its datacentres, have increased by 820% since 2010.
“Not only that, but the only emissions Google has decreased since its 2019 base year are its Scope 1 emissions, which account for a mere 0.31% of Google’s total emissions for 2025. So, [that’s] absolutely tiny.”
Google has previously said in its financial reports that it will take remedial action, where its rising GHG emissions are concerned, to ensure its 2030 net-zero carbon reduction commitments remain on track.
As reported by Computer Weekly in July 2024, the company acknowledged that its emissions are likely to continue to rise in the near-term as it builds out the infrastructure needed to underpin its AI ambitions.
And while it has been upfront about that, Ressel said the problem with Google is that it presents itself as a “good actor” on climate issues, while disguising the uptick in emissions and details of its water use by using jargon and other methods.
“Google hides this data in the appendices of all of its environmental reports,” he continued. “Coupled with difficult-to-understand jargon and Google’s cherry-picking of data, the result is that much of this has gone unnoticed.
“To continue plowing through land, water and energy with impunity, the corporation must project an image as a responsible climate actor, and that’s why it cherry-picks data and selectively reports numbers that appear to show Google is improving, when it’s actually quickly worsening in its emissions and other environmental impacts,” said Ressel.
Computer Weekly contacted Google for a response to the contents of the Kairos Fellowship report, and received the following statement from a company spokesperson, who has taken issue with the group’s take on the company’s emissions.
“The analysis by the Kairos Fellowship distorts the facts,” they said. “Our carbon emissions are calculated according to the widely used Greenhouse Gas Protocol and assured by a third-party.
“Our carbon reduction ambition has been validated by the leading industry body, the Science Based Targets initiative. This year, we are pleased to report that our datacentre emissions are down by 12% and we brought more than 25 clean energy projects online.”
