Google, and most of today’s tech bros designed their infrastructure to be wasteful and cloud-based. They very well could have designed it with a focus on decentralized equipment that does not need to be running all the time.

Beyond Google searches, just think how much power is wasted in the entire cloud compute pipeline these days, using a mobile device as an example:

• Power to run cell towers, that today consume thousands of watts of power even when idle, and in countries like the US where carriers do not colocate on the same physical hardware, 3x to 6x that.
• Power to run the data link to the cell towers,
• Power to run the infrastructure on the Internet to link that connection to whatever cloud service you use.
• Power to run the datacenter servers and cooling systems that handle your request.
• All of the above is turned on whether you are using it or not.
• Going on, power consumed on your consumption device.
• All the advertising, tracking, and telemetry-gathering that every program on your device, web browser, web sites, services, and operating system perform, eating your battery faster and causing you to have to use more power to recharge more frequently, which also limits the life of your non-removable battery in your compute device.
• All the bandwidth and power consumed with apps being set to auto update, and developers following CI/CD models “because it’s hip” but really because it’s a great way to reset and manipulate reviews on app stores, so apps are pointlessly updated almost daily despite having no significant changes, and your flash is worn, your battery is consumed, more power is consumed across the entire stack, every time this happens.
• In the reverse, apps don’t take advantage of I’ll call it “predatory” caching (even though this would also lead to flash wear) to do something like, “they’re watching episode 1 of a show, whenever I use Internet bandwidth, I’ll also download the next three episodes at the same time to minimize collective power use.” Doing so will use *some *more power, but overall if designed “smart” enough, it would effectively reduce power and bandwidth consumption at inopportune times.
• Oh, and for all this infrastructure, the energy consumed maintaining, repairing, and upgrading this entire stack by humans, electricity, water, and fuel.
• Probably other stuff I forgot.

Totally, individuals contribute to the problem, no disagreement there. I’ve tried to limit how much I use google (mostly for other reasons, but climate impact is one), but I’ve also repeatedly called my congresspeople and asked them to proactively regulate the tech industry and to divest from fossil fuel companies and to stop all drilling domestically. The corporations will never do the right thing on their own, which is kind of the point. Since the systems are set up to excuse bad behavior from the biggest polluters, who do disproportionately more damage than any single person or group of people, blaming individuals is usually a red herring to offset the real responsible parties.

I stopped using google years ago, but my adblock shows that google servers get pinged when browsing the web. Same for AWS, there is no way to avoid it without completely going offline.