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Talking to Google Geo’s vice president of sustainability, Yael Maguire.
While browsing Google Flights for an escape from the winter doldrums, I recently encountered a notification I hadn’t seen before. One particular return flight from Phoenix to New York was highlighted in light green as avoiding “as much CO2 as 1,400 trees absorb a day.”
I’d seen Google Flights’ emissions estimates before, of course — they’ve been around since 2021 — but this was the first time I’d seen it translate a number like “265 kg CO2e” into something I could actually understand. Suddenly, not picking the flight felt like it would have made me, well, kind of bad.
Yael Maguire, the vice president and general manager of the sustainability team at Google Geo — which includes Maps, Earth, and Project Sunroof, the company’s solar calculator — stressed that Google isn’t trying to take people’s agency away with these kinds of light-green guilt trips. “We want to make the sustainable choice the easy choice,” he told me, in reference to a slew of new tools the company has been rolling out, from fuel-efficient routing in Maps (which Google estimates has eliminated the emissions equivalent of 500,000 internal combustion cars from the road since 2021), to suggesting train routes to flight-shoppers, to nudging Europeans to ditch their cars when public transportation could get them to their destinations in a comparable amount of time.
Last week, I spoke to Maguire about the sustainability projects at Google Geo, including the team’s Solar API, which provides solar-planning data for millions of buildings worldwide. Our conversation has been lightly condensed for clarity and brevity.
Do you see your job at Google Geo as passively presenting sustainability information to users, or do you see it as actively nudging people toward making better choices for the planet?
We’re not trying to take agency away from anybody. We want to make sure — whether you’re a consumer choosing an eco-friendly route, or you’re a developer who’s thinking about trying to build more sustainably, or you’re a solar developer who wants to help with that — we want the choices to be in their hands. But we want to make it the easiest choice possible because, while it’s ultimately their decision, it will lead to carbon reductions over time.
That’s the idea behind fuel efficiency suggestions in Google Maps, where a route is prominently displayed with the little leaf, right?
Exactly. We launched a capability in Google Earth last year to help real estate developers do high-level planning and building development to make the sustainable choice the easy choice. As they’re saying, “We’re trying to get this many units with these kinds of amenities, etc., etc.,” we give them the tools to optimize for all the things they want to optimize for. But we can also say, “Hey, if you also care about sustainability, you can use different materials, we can get more sunlight in the area, and you have this much potential for solar.” And that just comes bundled with the tool itself.
We always try to find the co-benefits. I know for me personally, I always try to make the sustainable choice as much as I can. But I know that other people may not be as motivated by that, and having those co-benefits — like, it saves money, or it saves time, or it saves fuel, whatever it might be. We want to try to bring those together as much as possible.
When I was in Tbilisi, Georgia, a few months ago, I was using the ride-share app Bolt, and at the time it had a feature where if you tried to book a car to a location less than a 15-minute walk away, it would suggest you walk instead. I saw in a video from Google’s sustainability summit last fall that you’re rolling out something similar in some locations in Europe — France was one. Do you find these sorts of rollouts in the U.S. are stymied at all by how un-walkable most American cities are?
We are trying to make the most of cities as they are. They’re hard to change. But one of the things I find really encouraging is there’s definitely a long timeframe for this. Mayors and the folks in their departments of transportation recognize that they have to make more options available for people to commute and move around. They’re not necessarily going to be able to change things overnight. But there are major changes that are happening — for example, in the city of London, we were able to announce hundreds of miles of new bike lanes. So a lot of changes are happening over a relatively short amount of time, too.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what is going to be the impact of those decisions, though. And so, again, with these tools, city planners have the opportunity to scenario plan and say, “Okay, we’re thinking of trying to put bike lanes in this corridor in the city, what is going to be the impact on carbon?”
I wanted to ask a similar question in the context of a new feature that suggests train routes to Europeans looking for short-haul flights. How is Google thinking about promoting low-emissions transportation options like trains to Americans, eventually, when our infrastructure often isn’t there yet? Is this a challenge you talk about internally?
It is definitely something that is top of mind. But I do think even in the U.S., there are times when taking a train is actually faster. There are actually a lot of instances where walking, cycling, and public transportation are the most effective ways to get somewhere — and that’s not even considering the cost side of it, which is also something people might want to consider. I’m actually fairly optimistic — when I worked in San Francisco, I took public transportation, and I tried to walk as much as I can in all the cities that I’ve lived in, so I feel like I have lived experience in what the reality [in the U.S.] is. And some of these alternative options can be very effective. There’s more work to do, though, to make sure that we’re doing this globally.
Arguably, Google Maps could have a significant role to play in the success of the larger EV transition in terms of making charging stations and trip planning easy and handy for drivers. I’ve been working on planning my first EV road trip this summer and have been pretty intimidated, to be honest. Can you tell me what is in Google’s pipeline to help make this process easier for drivers?
I can’t talk about things that haven’t been announced yet, but I will say that, just as an overarching goal, we want to make that as easy as possible. I’m an EV owner, I have been for a number of years, and I know sometimes it can be a cognitive task to think about, “How am I going to charge and what is that experience going to be like?” So I would just say that we are really aware and trying to deeply understand the problem as much as possible, and our goal is to really address it.
Even when someone is thinking about purchasing a car, oftentimes people go to Google Search to look for vehicles, and we can help people understand what the potential is of a particular vehicle they’re considering. What typically concerns people is a long-distance trip. So we’ve made a tool where you can plug in a familiar destination — like for me, I live in San Francisco, it might be going to Tahoe— and for a given car you can see how many charges would you have to do on the way. Being able to make that info a little bit easier for people to see before they even buy the car is a thing that we’ve tried to do.
We’re also trying to make charging experiences as positive as possible. The first thing is, honestly, just getting as many chargers on the map as possible. There are a number of different providers who have charging infrastructure and sometimes all the data isn’t widely available so we’ve tried really, really hard to work with those partners. We have information on, I believe, 360,000 chargers worldwide and we’re constantly trying to grow that. On top of that — and I hope you don’t experience this — but not all the chargers work. You’ve probably seen on Google Maps, there are reviews, right? So there’s all kinds of work happening there.
My EV doesn’t have Google Maps integrated, unfortunately, but I’m really looking forward to one day having this feature where I can search for a charger along the route. We’d like to get to that point where you don’t actually have to do all this planning in advance and you can just get in your car and plan along the way like you would if it was another type of vehicle.
It’s one thing to have a tool like the Google Tree Canopy available for cities and organizers, and it’s another thing for people to actually use that tool and act on the information. How are you measuring your success?
We measure our success ultimately by what people do with our tools. So it’s not just about putting the tool out there. We actually try to understand what people are doing. In the case of what we did with eco-friendly routing, we worked with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the U.S., for example, to help validate our carbon emissions model. We’re going through that process for everything we do, whether it’s Project Sunroof or the Solar API, or other things like that.
You preempted my next question, but maybe you can talk about it in a more macro sense — Google has the goal of “collectively reducing 1 gigaton of carbon equivalent emissions annually by 2030” with tools like Solar API. Can you give me any sort of progress update?
This is a project that’s been going on for some time. We’ve been working with solar developers for a while, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised not only by the solar developer community engagement, but there’s actually other industries that have shown interest. So MyHEAT — they’re not a typical solar installer, but they’re finding this data really useful to go to cities and help them with the plans that they have.
So the gigaton goal itself, there is nothing to share now other than the progress on eco-friendly routing, but it is something that we hope we’ll be able to share progress on over time. But so far, we’re quite happy.
At a time when there’s a lot of nervousness around AI — and often for good reason — you’ve been pretty vocal in your excitement about how such tools can be used for the positive purposes of sustainability. Tell me why you’re an optimist.
Here’s why I’m an optimist: Because it’s where I put all of Google’s public goals in context. We talked about the gigaton goal, we talked about the Solar API — but I think this is also a question about energy usage and carbon intensity. We will continue to invest in the infrastructure that we need — and we need that infrastructure to be able to actually help solve some of these problems, by providing information to people — but at the same time, the company has been really focused on trying to minimize the carbon intensity of the energy we produce. So, since 2017, we’ve been operating off of 100% renewable energy; this is on an annualized basis. We also have an initiative to use carbon-free energy — so the source of the energy that ultimately goes where electrons are going to our data centers, we’re actively measuring what percentage of that is carbon-free on a 24/7 basis.
With our net-zero commitments, to be on a net basis by 2030, that includes all of our AI infrastructure. That’s where I would try to separate the energy use that’s required to operate AI from the carbon intensity, which I think is very different. Our data centers, we estimate, are one-and-a-half times more efficient than your average data center. And with AI workloads themselves, in some instances, we’ve been able to get the energy usage down by 100x, and the corresponding amount of carbon intensity down by 1,000x.
But to your point, at the same time, it is very much on our minds that the carbon intensity to run all of these AI workloads — how does that compare to the benefits that they’re able to provide? I think that’s where I am. I do have a lot of optimism about the efficiency work, about the trajectory of carbon-free energy and net zero. The upsides in terms of what it does for solar, what it does for transportation — yeah, I am a big believer.
The big reason why I’m so excited about this opportunity in the Maps and Geo space is I just think there’s so much opportunity for all kinds of organizations, including individual citizens, to make these choices and changes to their environment. And I think the role that AI has is enormous — obviously not the whole thing, because it doesn’t build cycling lanes. People have to go do that. People have to change policies around how buildings are going to have less carbon intensity when they’re built. There’s tons and tons of other work that is required to actually build the future that we want, that is lower carbon intensity — ideally zero. But I do think that AI plays an enormous role as decision support for all those choices that are needed in the future.
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On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.
From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.