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Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat

Ketan Joshi · 1 Jul 2026 · ketanjoshi.co ↗

3 korrents from this piece

Ketan Joshi did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Efficiency gains in a growth-driven industry tend to be absorbed into even greater expansion rather than reducing net resource use.

    Their wordsIt is actually pretty likely that it was Google's efficiency actions that enabled their total energy consumption to increase.

  2. Our reading

    Generative AI's climate harm comes mainly from wasteful system design and forced-on features, not from the computational cost of individual queries.

    Their wordsWhat is happening is that GenAI's climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google's AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not, in addition to significantly worse digital bloat tools dominating overconsumption.

  3. Our reading

    Google is knowingly choosing the more climate-damaging path while using narrow efficiency metrics to obscure that choice.

    Their wordsBoth hide the fact the company is simply choosing the climate-wrecking road, consciously.