CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Climate change is an ongoing global issue. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), issued their fifth climate report online in October 2018. In their report, IPCC stated that “limiting global warming to 1.5oC would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (IPCC, 2018, para. 1). The 91 authors on this report concluded our “next few years are probably the most important in our history” (IPCC, 2018, para. 14). With the dire urgency to cut greenhouse carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030, the dangers of not doing so are threatening rising sea levels, elimination of ice caps and coral reef extinction (IPCC, 2018). The IPCC will issue their sixth report by 2022, and currently provides some updates related to land mass and rising temperatures on their website.

One of the most common ways climate change reports, campaigns, and updates are propagated is through various Internet platforms. The Internet exists because of a plethora of physical materials. These materials include media infrastructures such as undersea fiber optic cables, wires, satellites, and data centers that work together to consume finite resources to power the Internet. Each data center contains numerous servers that work together to enable Internet functionalities. Data centers are therefore necessary media infrastructures, but they are also unsustainable; the cost of powering these centers has recently gained more attention as part of the climate change issue. Data centers are connected to local power grids around the globe and water supply to cool the servers as they constantly function. Despite the mounting concerns about their energy use, data centers have also contributed to the sense of progress the Internet affords. This is similar to what scholar Raymond Williams (1959) argued about the benefits of the industrial revolution for the working people, “never in a million years would you make us give up this power” (1959, p. 97). Users often rely on the Internet, and much of their lives are interwoven with the power of the Internet. Technological advances have enabled advancements and innovation, especially related to communication through media. In his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble, Pariser recorded Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman and CEO of Google stating that, “if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days” (Pariser, 2011, p.11). Emails, text messages, tweets, direct messages and posts via social media platforms, apps, search queries, streaming services, online gaming, cloud storage, and all the ways the Internet and technology are used increase the never-ending production of data. Companies rely on data centers that require massive amounts of infrastructure and energy to keep up with these exponentially exploding demands. Facebook, Google, and Amazon Web Services have invested in hundreds of warehouses around the globe to generate and meet these demands. In return, the natural and financial resource demands of these centers, are also enormous.

In 2009, Environmental Communication researcher Øyvind Ihlen studied the business responses to climate change. This study analyzed the “world’s 30 largest corporations” (p. 244) and found that companies most often published materials related to the situation’s “gravity” (p. 253), referenced the reports of the IPCC and other “experts” (p. 250), and even saw intervention in the climate crisis as a “business opportunity” (Ihlen, 2009, p. 256). This study demonstrated that corporations disclose their relationships to resources and climate change discursively to the public through their materials. Ihlen (2009) also urged researchers to study how corporations position themselves in the climate crisis because “their vast resources and political clout directly and indirectly make them a particularly important object of study” (p. 257). Over a decade later, this thesis advances such conversations about businesses and the climate crisis, now with heightened urgency as the ongoing crisis worsens.

This thesis goes beyond arguing that data centers are unsustainable essential media infrastructures. Rather, this thesis analyzes the public-facing documents of Google, one of the leading technology companies who owns and relies on data centers. Because they are the material, physical embodiment of the ethereal cloud, these sites demand the continued attention of Communication scholars who emphasize digital technologies. The discourse analysis in this thesis was guided by three related research questions:

RQ1: How does Google describe their role in the climate crisis?

RQ2: How does Google describe their renewable energy and sustainability initiatives?

RQ3: Relatedly, how does Google define ‘renewable energy,’ specifically related to their data centers?

To answer these questions, critical discourse analysis was conducted on Google’s public facing materials, relevant government documents from the EPA, and other joint publications between Google and research agencies. After analyzing these materials, this thesis ultimately argues that Google masks retroactivity under the guise of activism as they position economic and environmental rewards occurring simultaneously, and unfairly purports corporate benevolence as they tout being an industry leader in sustainable practices. Google also exemplifies common “soft law” (Nwete, 2007) practices that are not novel in industry. Alongside their materials, outside news agencies report instances of Google firing activist employees, fossil fuel companies as part of Google’s clientele, and financial contributions to anti-climate change groups (Lutz, Dec. 2019; Newcomb, 2018; Lutz, 2019; Lutz, Dec. 2019). Scholars and consumers should be informed about such discourse, as it can reduce activism and lead to faulty assumptions that the corporation is doing enough in the ongoing climate crisis they have contributed to since their beginning.