Although the number of companies filing sustainability reports and claiming to be “climate-neutral” has rocketed in the last decades, carbon emissions have continued to rise.
In these reports, we're told that offsetting will compensate for environmental harm and help us get to “net-zero” in time.
Although carbon offsetting can be a useful tool to compensate for historic emissions, presenting it as the best solution to the climate crisis is misleading us. It allows businesses to reach "carbon neutrality" by paying a small fee without changing their environmental practices, and that just isn’t going to cut it. The only real way to offset the emissions released from using fossil fuels is… well, by avoiding them in the first place.
In order to really contribute to the solutions to the climate crisis, progressive companies need to move beyond carbon-neutral to carbon-negative, and become part of the solution in transitioning away from the systems that are destroying our planet.
Regenerative Report 2021
Rather than waxing poetic about our commitment to act on the climate crisis, we’ve just published our second, no-frills Regenerative Report outlining how in 2021 we used 100% of our profits to contribute to the solution to two of humanity’s greatest problems: climate breakdown and the 6th mass extinction.
As a tech company, we’re reliant on electricity to power our searches, but energy production is currently the second largest driver of climate change. In 2021, our solar panels produced enough electricity to power your searches with renewables nearly five times over. This means that with every search, we’re feeding renewable electricity back into the grid and contributing to the decarbonization of the energy system.
We planted 40 million trees in biodiversity hotspots across 30 countries.
That’s 700 species of trees, in an area the size of Vienna and Paris combined. Not only does this help our planet to breathe by capturing carbon from the atmosphere, but it helps preserve habitats for thousands of species of plants, animals and insects.
In this report, we’ve also calculated what the results would be if Google did what we do, or if Ecosia replaced Google as the default search engine in browsers and operating systems, and we enjoyed their market share.
We found that if Google invested an equivalent amount into renewables, enough renewable energy would be created to replace all EU coal power in two years and fossil gas power in an additional three years.
Not only that, but replanting all three trillion trees ever deforested would take a mere ten years!
We are not a charity. We are a profitable business. By publishing this report, we hope to inspire other companies to step away from the infrastructures that are harming our future, and remind you about the failure of Big Tech to put its astronomical wealth and power to good use.
Read more about how we’re investing 100% of our profits into finding regenerative solutions to the climate crisis here.