Last week, Google signed two agreements: one involving steel, the other methane and carbon removal. Both were described as record-breaking in the respective press releases.
You might ask: what does Google need steel for, anyway, and where does methane come into the picture? It’s simple. The company is currently building AI data centers on an industrial scale, which means construction, energy consumption, and emissions that somehow need to be accounted for in its reports.
Here’s how the steel deal works: data center structures require tons of metal and concrete, while steelmaking is itself one of the dirtiest sectors of the economy. Google has struck a deal with Swedish startup Stegra for “green steel” — but it hasn’t actually bought the steel itself. Instead, it has purchased environmental attribute certificates (EACs) linked to a portion of the 91,000 tonnes the plant is expected to produce in its first year.
The actual steel will go to whoever else buys it. Google, meanwhile, gets paperwork certifying that a certain amount of low-carbon steel has been produced somewhere in the world, allowing the company to claim the environmental benefits for itself. The steel used in its own construction projects can be whatever it wants.
Maybe this is some kind of professional deformation, but it’s hard to read this particular story about “record-breaking offsets” any other way than: “We’re planning to pollute everything on a record-breaking scale.”
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