An article by Ketan Joshi published on July 1 is currently circulating on Lobsters AI and beginning to gain traction in broader tech circles. Joshi, who writes about energy and climate, holds Google's own environmental reports up against each other — and the picture that emerges is not a pretty one.

The core argument is straightforward: Google is exceptionally good at presenting efficiency improvements in isolation. A Gemini text request uses 33 times less energy than it did a year ago. Impressive! Yet total power draw keeps growing with the pulse of a running engine — 37% in one year, 250% since 2019. When you buy more and more of something that gets cheaper per unit, you don't necessarily use less in total. That's Jevons paradox, and it's hardly new material — but it's rare for anyone to point it so directly at Google's own reported figures.

Google itself admits that AI infrastructure "is currently growing faster than the grid is being decarbonized."

What makes the discussion on Lobsters interesting is not just the article itself, but what the comments reveal about the mood in the tech community right now. People are tired of greenwashing arithmetic: the idea that you can purchase enough wind power on paper to match your consumption globally and then call yourself "100% renewable." That's bookkeeping, not physics. Scope 3 emissions — which account for 73% of Google's carbon footprint and include the supply chain — rose 22% in 2024 alone.

Google is burning the planet faster than ever — and calling it progress - Bilde 1

This is an early signal from community sources, not a peer-reviewed analysis. But the signal is clear: trust in companies' own climate narratives is low, and it is falling.

Why should you care about this now? Because regulatory pressure on AI companies' energy use is beginning to emerge from the EU, and Norwegian players considering building or using AI infrastructure will soon face requirements to document actual emissions — not marketing-friendly proxy figures. At the same time, it is worth noting that Google did reduce datacenter emissions by 12% in 2024 through hardware improvements alone. That is not nothing. But it is also not enough when the absolute curve is pointing straight up.

Watch to see whether this gains more traction in mainstream tech media over the coming weeks. Joshi has previously been early on climate coverage that was subsequently picked up widely.