The Global Climate Strike begins today and will see protests lodged in more than 150 countries over the course of next week. Tech companies are seemingly showing full support towards the cause, with Amazon making significant investments and now Google announcing “the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history.”
Google’s purchase includes a 1,600-megawatt package of wind and solar agreements and 18 new energy deals, increasing the company’s agreements by 40 percent, according to Google. More than $2 billion will go to building out new infrastructure across the United States, Europe, and Chile as well. This purchase is “equivalent to the capacity of a million solar rooftops,” Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post Thursday.
He continued, “In all, our renewable energy fleet now stands at 52 projects, driving more than $7 billion in new construction and thousands of related jobs.”
Many Google employees feel the company can still do more to reduce its environmental footprint. On Friday, hundreds of Google employees are staged to participate in the Global Climate Strike, led by students around the world in advance of the United Nation’s climate summit on September 23rd. A host of other tech employees from companies like Amazon and Microsoft have also pledged to participate.
“Tech is not ‘green,’” some Google employees wrote in a Medium post published earlier this week. “Google Cloud makes significant revenue licensing infrastructure, machine learning, and engineering talent to fossil fuel companies, promising to help them extract fuel reserves faster.”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also made new climate promises on Thursday morning. Amazon’s plan to fight climate change, called “The Climate Pledge,” promises to reach the Paris climate agreement’s most ambitious emissions-cutting targets ten years early, setting the company up to be carbon-neutral by 2040. Bezos also laid out other goals, like for Amazon to use 80 percent renewable energy by 2024 and to run on renewables alone by 2030.
