How Ditching Google Can Help Fight Climate Change

Or, “How I Plant 100 Trees Every Week.”

Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

Internet use is responsible for the release of more than 830 million tons of carbon dioxide each year into the atmosphere, or around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. For context, this makes the internet’s carbon footprint greater than that of air travel.

This is because data stored in the ‘cloud’ isn’t in the cloud at all, of course, but in massive physical data centres.

Running these data centres requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from burning fossil fuels. Google alone accounts for about 40% of internet-related emissions, with each search generating approximately 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions.

Given the billions of searches Google processes each year, it’s not difficult to imagine how this can add up. You can find an estimate of just how rapidly Google emits CO2 with this data visualisation.

A screenshot after about 30 seconds — CO2GLE by Joana Moll

But there is an easy way to search online without contributing to global emissions. It’s called Ecosia and it’s a search-engine that, like Google, makes most of its revenue from advertising but, unlike Google, uses its profits to plant trees.

Each search completed with Ecosia generates around 0.005 € in revenue. So, at a cost of roughly 0.25 € per tree planted, Ecosia can plant one tree for every 50 searches. On average, each tree can be expected to remove 50 kg of CO2 across a 15 year lifetime.

How Ecosia works — Ecosia.com

As of February 2020, Ecosia has planted more than 85 million trees* across 9,000 separate planting sites. And, unlike many large-scale tree planting efforts, the company makes sure to carefully select the location, species and spacing of these trees.

Photo by Kasturi Laxmi Mohit on Unsplash

Why plant trees?

Ecosia cites a responsibility to the planet, to communities and to animals as the primary motivators behind their tree planting efforts.

For the planet, besides helping to mitigate climate change as the most effective absorbers of CO2 we know of, trees sustain the water cycle, prevent desertification, encourage biodiversity and improve the fertility of farmland.

By regenerating depleted soils, Ecosia claims that planting trees within a system of agroforestry (the farming of crops or livestock amongst trees and shrubs) can improve the provision of food and income for local communities.

In turn, people can make better use of their own land, instead of being forced to migrate in search of more fertile land — promoting political and economic stability in those countries that need it most.

Planting trees also helps to create and preserve the habitats that many endangered animal species call home. As well as encouraging biodiversity, trees stabilise shorelines (as explored in this article of mine) and mountain sides, further protecting at-risk wildlife.

Simply by planting a tree, you can fight climate change, restore landscapes, protect wildlife, provide nutrition, employment, education, medical assistance and economic stability.

— Ecosia.org

But Ecosia does more than plant trees. By constructing its own solar plant, Ecosia is able to run its servers without burning any fossil fuels and is now carbon negative. This means that every search with Ecosia removes about a kilogram of CO2 from the atmosphere.

It is estimated that, if Ecosia were the size of Google, it could absorb upwards of 15% of the world’s CO2 emissions — enough to entirely offset worldwide vehicle emissions.

Photo by Josh Felise on Unsplash

How can you use Ecosia?

As Ecosia is a free search engine that operates just like Google or Bing, all you have to do to use it on your smartphone is install the Ecosia app or, to use it on a laptop, install the Ecosia extension.

To do this, simply search for Ecosia.org on your current browser or find your browser’s extensions library (e.g. Chrome web store) and install the Ecosia web extension.

Now that you’ve finished installing Ecosia, you’re ready to search just as you would with any other search engine while planting trees. To give you an idea, my searches add up to an average of almost one hundred trees each week, and all for doing nothing more than switching the search engine you use.

In case you need any more reasons to switch to Ecosia, the company refuses to sell your data to advertisers, anonymises all searches within a week and publishes monthly financial reports on its website (such as this one for December 2019).

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