Re: Environmental impact of Debian's AI usage

On Thu, 20 Aug 2026 at 21:40, Aigars Mahinovs <[email protected]> wrote:

> And "Despite this, we again matched 100% of our electricity consumption
> with renewable energy purchases (on a global and annual basis) for the
> ninth consecutive year.". So they still *did* buy a green GWh for every GWh
> they spent, just not on a per-second basis. That is how they calculate
> emissions happening - they are using a *stricter* basis for their
> calculations.
>

Sorry, I was wrong here. Page 69 actually details where the emission figure
comes from. It is not from data center energy at all. They count *all*
emissions from all sources connected to the company, including employees
*commuting to work* and employee business travel.  Just 1% of that came
from Google operations. 19% are from secondary sources (like emissions
caused by drawing electricity from grid at the time when not enough green
energy is there). 80% of that number is from emissions by third-party
suppliers. And Google still counts that as *their* emissions.

I am not a fanboy for Google and not saying they are perfect, but one
should also not pick out the numbers to present them worse than they
actually are.

-- 
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs