Ecosia’s “Green AI”: false hope for corrosive tech
Spend enough time in the world of corporate sustainability, and you’ll hear a reproachful complaint: it’s unfair to criticise companies that are saying the right things on climate. If you let the perfect be the enemy of the good and punish the few trying to make a difference they’ll get spooked and not bother at all.
I don’t really buy that. Faking climate action can often be more harmful than doing nothing. For-profit companies gain financially by lying about the harm they’re doing. But even beyond that, fabricated cleanliness instils complacency and dissuades us from asking deeper systemic questions. The integrity of claiming to be doing good should be protected, and doing that involves critiquing those making the loudest, most strident claims of goodness.
I wrote about Microsoft as a key recent example: a company with rapidly growing emissions but a persistent claim to climate hero status. I found that the harm they do far outweighs the good. And I think even non-profit organisations create permission space for the broader trend of generative digital bloat currently burning through my digital world like a raging bushfire. I want to tell you about a recent example of this problem.
Why do you need to kill your search engine
Ecosia is an alternative sustainability-themed search engine that operates as a not-for-profit. The idea is that for every search you perform, the company plants a tree (it has planted millions). It has been around for a while, and always felt pretty harmless. There is nothing at all to dislike about a search engine that effectively functions as a fundraising tool for tree-planting and clean energy projects, and it seems to have actively funded a pretty stunning number of good, environmentally and socially-aware climate projects.
Their latest change is a step away from that good track record. That is because they’ve followed the big-tech trend by installing a layer of automatic plagiarised text generation on top of search results.
Instead of providing a link to a blog post Ketan has written, Ecosia will call on a software service that has ingested all of my written work, and that service will re-word and re-publish my work , often botching and mutating it thanks to its clumsy probabilistic word-guessing design. This isn’t “search” anymore: it’s a roadblock that stops you searching and funnels you away from engaging with human-created content.
As a person-who-writes-internet-content, you can guess how deep this burns. It isn’t just traditional plagiarism: it is unfeeling, automated, non-consensual and, worst of all, wrong enough to matter but right-sounding enough to be convincing. This isn’t an evolution of search: it is the active murder of search.
To demonstrate this point, I entered a question a normal human could easily answer with traditional methods: which books has the climate writer Ketan Joshi written? Ecosia immediately blended me with another brown guy with the same name:
Even if you use ‘traditional’ search, you still get an AI overview that blends me with travel-writer Ketan Joshi at the top of the page that you can turn off, but will always appear by default. A query I tried last week was worse: it got the title of my book right but manufactured the exact opposite meaning with the subtitle (in addition to attributing a bunch of books I didn’t write to me):
And when you ask it for quotes from the climate analyst Ketan Joshi, it either fabricates sentences and puts them in quotation marks, or pulls real quotes written as comments, or it even attributes lines I was criticising to me:
I mention this because it’s the important half of the sustainability question: why do it in the first place? “Everyone else is doing it” is not only not a justification, it should in fact be the thing that triggers more hesitation and scrutiny of what’s being implemented.
I assume the actual reason is the same as most other search engines: users acquire the empty calories false satisfaction of a more-easily-obtained answer. By definition, people searching for an answer don’t know the answer. That means they don’t detect how egregious and false the result is (particularly when the text engine is tuned to sound plausible and authoritative, and never output “I don’t know”).
It’s worth mentioning here that iFixit, an organisation that has been fighting against device waste through advocating for repair rights, also recently implemented a “chatbot” function on top of their many user-created repair guides. The verdict: “Having tried it, I would definitely not trust iFixit’s FixBot to guide amateurs like me through a pricey or dangerous repair”. On top of that: they too do not disclose any information about energy use compared to the old way of doing things. What is the point?
Although Ecosia is a not-for-profit, they seem to be re-enacting the for-profit erosion of human knowledge and the active murder of the open web currently being orchestrated by Google and the other tech giants. But, it’s green, right?
Green slop > Grey slop
As an extension of their green image, they’ve also presented this text-generating tool as the “world’s greenest AI“:
As I bet you already know, the mass-generation of text, images and videos using machine learning tools trained on repositories of all human-created digital information consume a lot of energy, and in doing so, materially boosts the burning of fossil fuels, doing damage to our atmospheric safety.
Ecosia isn’t doing this for profit, but the underlying idea of their claim – that “AI” can be green – is important for the profit-seeking tech industry, striking at a fast-growing tension between the goals of companies and the biophysical vulnerabilities of living things.
So, let’s check some of their claims.
"Reducing AI’s footprint isn’t enough — we’re here to make a positive impact. That’s why we generate more renewable energy than our AI features use, from 100% clean sources like solar and wind"You need two numbers to check this: how much renewable energy they generate, and how much energy their “AI” features use. I asked Ecosia CEO Christian Kroll about both, and he referred me to this post, which very much does not contain either.
Honestly, this claim doesn’t even sound that implausible, which makes it even more odd that the numbers aren’t being shared. Sharing these types of figures openly would actually be a genuinely useful exercise, and give us an open, transparent insight into their energy consumption both pre and post text-generation. Despite that: nothing.
More problematic is the idea that Ecosia is “carbon negative“1 thanks to both causing emissions but also funding renewable energy. This is the logic of carbon offsetting and it fundamentally doesn’t make real, physical sense: no matter how much more renewable energy you fund, emissions are emissions and they still cause climate change. We solve this problem when we stop emitting.
"We use OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 mini for the best balance of performance and efficiency. It uses far less energy than larger models, while still delivering the answers you’re looking for"Not entirely sure this needs saying but OpenAI is comfortably an industry leader in both lacking transparency and actively, directly incentivising the burning of fossil fuels to power their energy-hungry data centres. I cannot think of a worse choice, when it comes to trying to make a chatbot “green”.
Notably, they also seem to exclude the training costs, or any analysis of which servers are doing the training or results (“inference”) (and what grids they’re operating on).
"We use tools like the AI Energy Score and Ecologits to select efficient models and track their energy use — keeping our process transparent, and ourselves accountable""As a not-for-profit company, we can afford to do things differently. AI Search uses smaller, more efficient models"As I mentioned, Ecosia don’t disclose energy use: not for a single query, and not for their entire organisation (particularly before and after the implementation of incorrect text generation replacing links to the open web). It would be exceedingly easy for them to implement a live energy usage and estimated emissions score for interactions with text generation and compare them to estimates of traditional search. A not-for-profit is better-placed than most to do something like that. But it really seems like they want the accolades of “green AI” without having to disclose a single actual number.
"Prefer the classic experience? You can turn Overviews off with a single click""We avoid energy-heavy features like video generation altogether"9 months ago, Ecosia posted a clip of prominent AI and sustainability expert Dr Sasha Luccioni highlighting that one of the reasons she uses Ecosia is thanks to them not forcing the use of generative systems on search users. Unlike Google and Microsoft, Ecosia does allow users to ‘turn off’ generative summaries.
But I think this is important: while they do offer the option to ‘turn off’ the activation of text generation, it is on by default. The site’s design uses ‘dark patterns’ to usher you into replacing web search with inaccurate text plagiarism by default – hitting ‘enter’ takes you to a search, but the only button on the bar is to activate the chatbot, resulting in a confusing interface at best:
As I wrote in my post about Google, there has been a very noticeable trend towards actively pressuring and mandating chatbot use. Ecosia seem to sit in the middle: even offering an option to turn it off is radical, but having it on and prominent by default will do plenty of harm that could be avoided through much more honest communication.
Hedonistic sustainability
A few months ago, I visited my brother in Denmark. He works in an oddly tall office building in Copenhagen, and from it, you can see the gorgeous near-shore collectively-owned wind turbines. Directly in the foreground, obscuring the view of at least one of them, was this thing:
That is a giant facility that generates electricity by burning household waste.
When you burn a plant that sucked carbon from the air as it grew you’re hypothetically just returning that carbon to the atmosphere: ‘carbon neutral’. But when you burn the plastic packaging it came in, that plastic is made from carbon extracted from deep underground, which you’re then transferring to the sky. That is carbon pollution, and ‘waste to energy’ (WTE) plants burning plastic are becoming a shocking contributor to rising global temperatures.
“Copenhill” was meant to be different. It was meant to puff out its smoke in ‘smoke rings’ that would remind Copenhagen residents to reduce waste (“those released at night will be illuminated by lasers connected to a heat-sensitive tracking system”). That never happened, and importantly, neither did the planned carbon capture and storage project. That failure in particular directly contributed to Copenhagen missing its 2025 net zero pledges, despite the city making massive progress thanks to wind power, reduced consumption and electrification.
The rate at which locals recycled plastic instead of discarding it was underestimated: meaning the oversized plant now has to import waste from other regions to burn to make financial sense. That imported waste has a higher share of plastic and therefore higher emissions2.
You can still ski down Copenhill on a plastic surface. When I visited, the elevator still told me of the impending CCS facility. The bar at the top is sponsored by Coca-Cola, one of the world’s worst sources of plastic pollution.
Copenhill was developed by Bjarke Ingels, of architecture firm BIG. Ingels coined the phrase “hedonistic sustainability”, “to demonstrate how the ‘seemingly contradictory’ ideas of sustainable development and the pursuit of pleasure can, and indeed should, co-exist”. In one 2016 video, Ingels specifically cites the Tesla Model S as an example of where the clean alternative can be better, thanks specifically to its greater acceleration.
"It would be great for the owner of the power plant because he wouldn't have to or she wouldn't have to make expensive ad campaigns or print pamphlets where people could read that her technology was clean because when you go and see it it's like 'wow what is this? This is like a completely different kind of power plant'"Honestly: this isn’t ‘hedonistic sustainability’. It’s not even really hedonism: the ski slope is pretty mid. I didn’t get the impression from my conversations with locals that it’s much loved or heavily-used feature of Copenhagen’s cityscape. The guy working in the bar at the top looked beyond bored.
Being able to hop on a freely available share e-bike outside my brother’s office and cycle on absurdly safe roads en-route to Copenhill? That really was ‘pure pleasure’. The city-choking and pedestrian-killing over-acceleration of heavy Tesla EVs gets cited as the prime case of ‘hedonistic sustainability’ because I think these folks don’t have a good idea of what either word really means.
Ecosia is embarking on a similar process: offering up a vision of unethical, bloated, oversized and financially unstable overconsumption as compatible with sustainability. If they had simply said “we’re not replacing search with an interface that spits out inaccurate estimations of human content because it’s not worth the climate cost”, and instead invested more time and money into making search as useful and effective as it used to be, it would’ve been genuinely worth celebrating. And outside the capitalist corporate sustainability world, there is a huge, hungry audience for acts of resistance against the corrosive, life-worsening trends being enforced by big tech without any of us asking for it.
You can’t be ‘sustainable’ without asking whether something even needs to be done. This is true for replacing search gateways to the human-created internet with energy-hogging content plagiarism roadblocks. It’s true for massive waste burning facilities, or oversized road tank electric vehicles. These things are not really “hedonistic” or “pleasurable”. They’re anti-social, soul-crushing and demoralising, and they can only be presented as “green” through the lack of any real disclosures.
- Ecosia also claims that their actions are ‘removing’ carbon from the air, which is not the case. Their impact is an addition of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, no matter how much renewable projects they fund. You cannot undo the damage of pollution. ↩︎
- Go read this thesis by Ulrik Kohl for much more on this. ↩︎
Ketan Joshi 
@ketanjoshi.co Please check out https://stopgenai.com
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https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-read-on-b-zTFqgpFQT5GJPWPzttWU2w
Core argument and framingKetan Joshi’s piece is a sharp, morally grounded critique of Ecosia’s recent pivot toward generative AI in search, framed as a betrayal of its original promise as a genuinely useful, low-impact alternative to Google. His central claim is that Ecosia is now:Actively undermining the open web by replacing links to human-created content with AI-generated summaries that plagiarize, distort, and fabricate.Greenwashing a high-energy, fossil-fueled tech trend by calling its AI “green†while refusing to disclose real energy/emissions data.Repeating the same corporate logic (“everyone else is doing itâ€) that he criticizes in Microsoft and Google, despite being a not-for-profit with a supposedly higher ethical bar.He ties this to a broader theme: that “sustainable†tech is often just hedonistic sustainability — flashy, feel-good solutions that distract from the deeper question of whether the thing should exist at all, and that ultimately increase energy demand and ecological harm.Strengths of the critiqueClear, concrete harm to creators and knowledge Joshi shows, with screenshots and tweets, that Ecosia’s AI:Blends him with another writer (Ketan Joshi the travel writer).Attributes books and quotes to him that he didn’t write.Fabricates “quotes†from his work that are actually headlines, comments, or other people’s words.This isn’t just “AI is sometimes wrong.†It’s a systemic erosion of attribution, accuracy, and trust in search as a gateway to human knowledge. That’s a real, tangible harm to writers, researchers, and the public.Effective exposure of greenwashing Ecosia’s “world’s greenest AI†claim rests on:Using “smaller, more efficient†models (GPT-4.1 mini).Generating more renewable energy than the AI uses.Being “carbon negative†via offsets.Joshi rightly points out that:No actual numbers are provided (energy per query, total AI energy, grid mix).Training energy and upstream emissions (chips, data centers) are ignored.Offsetting doesn’t erase emissions; it just shifts the burden.His demand for transparency — a live energy/emissions dashboard for AI queries vs. classic search — is both reasonable and technically feasible, especially for a not-for-profit.Good critique of “AI as default†design The observation that Ecosia’s AI is on by default, with a prominent button that pushes users toward the chatbot, is spot-on. Even if there’s an “off†switch, the default state:Normalizes AI-generated content over links.Encourages passive consumption of plausible-sounding but often wrong summaries.Reinforces the big-tech trend of making search a walled garden of AI slop.Strong analogy to Copenhill / “hedonistic sustainability†The Copenhill example is powerful: a waste-to-energy plant wrapped in a ski slope and laser smoke rings, sold as “sustainable hedonism,†but in reality:Burning plastic is net carbon pollution.The plant is oversized and imports waste.Carbon capture failed, undermining Copenhagen’s climate goals.This mirrors Ecosia’s move: a feel-good, “green†veneer over a system that increases energy demand, distorts information, and distracts from simpler, lower-impact alternatives (like just improving classic search).Valid concerns and limitationsEcosia’s not-for-profit status changes the incentives Unlike Google or Microsoft, Ecosia:Doesn’t have shareholders demanding growth at all costs.Actually funds reforestation and renewable projects (millions of trees, solar/wind investments).Has a long track record of transparency on tree planting and revenue.That doesn’t excuse the AI move, but it does mean the motivation is likely more about:Staying relevant as users expect AI summaries.Avoiding being seen as “obsolete†compared to Google/Sydney/Bing.Possibly increasing engagement (more time on site → more ad revenue → more trees).A more nuanced take might ask: Could Ecosia have built a genuinely low-impact, opt-in, transparent AI layer that aligns with its mission? Or is any generative AI in search inherently incompatible with that mission?The “AI is always bad†risk Joshi’s framing leans heavily toward “AI in search is the active murder of search.†That’s rhetorically powerful, but it risks:Overgeneralizing: not all AI summaries are equally harmful.Underplaying potential benefits: for some queries (e.g., “summarize this IPCC reportâ€), a well-sourced, clearly attributed AI summary could be useful, especially if it links back to the original.A stronger critique might distinguish between:AI as a supplement (opt-in, clearly labeled, with links and attribution).AI as a replacement (default, opaque, displacing links and distorting content).Energy numbers are missing from both sides Joshi is right to demand Ecosia’s energy data, but he also doesn’t provide:A rough estimate of how much more energy an AI search uses vs. a classic search.How that compares to Ecosia’s renewable generation and offsetting.Without those numbers, it’s hard to judge whether this is:A marginal increase in emissions (still ethically problematic, but small in absolute terms).Or a major new emissions stream that undermines Ecosia’s climate claims.That’s not a flaw in the argument per se, but it leaves room for Ecosia to say: “Our AI uses X kWh/year; we generate Y kWh from renewables; the net impact is still positive.â€Where the critique landsJoshi’s core point is solid: you can’t claim to be “green†while normalizing a high-energy, high-distortion, high-plagiarism tech trend without full transparency and a clear justification.His strongest arguments are:Ecosia is failing its own ethical bar by adopting the same extractive, opaque AI model as Google, despite its not-for-profit status and environmental mission.The “green AI†claim is marketing, not science, because it lacks real energy/emissions data and ignores upstream impacts.The default-on, AI-first design actively degrades search and the open web, which is especially corrosive coming from a company that once positioned itself as a better alternative.What’s missing or could be deepenedA concrete alternative vision for Ecosia Instead of just saying “don’t do this,†it would strengthen the piece to outline what a truly sustainable, low-impact search engine could look like:Classic search, optimized for speed and relevance.Optional, clearly labeled AI summaries that link back to sources and show attribution.A live dashboard showing energy use per query and emissions, with a commitment to minimize both.More on the systemic drivers Why are even “green†companies like Ecosia feeling pressured to add AI? That’s partly:User expectations shaped by Google/Bing.Investor and board pressure to “innovate†and grow.The broader tech-industry narrative that AI is inevitable.A deeper critique could ask: How do we resist that pressure without just abandoning the platforms we’ve built?Nuance on “carbon negative†Ecosia’s offsetting model is indeed problematic, but it’s worth distinguishing:Avoided emissions (funding renewables that displace fossil generation).Removals (tree planting, which is slow, uncertain, and reversible).A more precise critique would say: “Ecosia’s offsetting is mostly avoided emissions, not removals, and it doesn’t cancel out the emissions from running AI data centers.â€Overall assessmentThis is a strong, necessary critique of a trend that’s too often accepted uncritically: the idea that slapping generative AI onto search is progress, even when it’s energy-intensive, inaccurate, and undermines human knowledge.Joshi’s moral clarity — that sustainability isn’t just about offsets and green branding, but about asking whether something should exist at all — is exactly what’s missing from most corporate “green AI†claims.Where the piece could be sharper is in:Providing or demanding concrete energy/emissions numbers.Offering a more detailed alternative vision for what a truly sustainable search engine could be.Distinguishing between different types of AI use (opt-in vs. default, summary vs. replacement).But as a polemic against greenwashed, extractive tech, it’s effective and timely.
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Thanks for the comment buddy, I’m going to reply with the same amount of effort you put in to your comment:
njlfsafjn8349fj43w8f-j4w98fj4w90fu4i3wf90u4r90guresgjrfdgz9frjsg9orie394ewjg9regsjfdksngfkjdbnfdkjbgngfdjisgbnjgnfd4389q5tu74398257432905849q0reRTEWTR$%@#^$%@^%$#^%GDSFHDFY%$@^%$^%$@^%GRTedesgfdsgnrdug9rdsrgds
Cheers,
Ketan
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I’m sure you put in considerably more effort than I did in simply copy-pasting your words and requesting a critique.
Your childish retort appears driven by a combination of insecurity, petulance, and non-comprehension…
You know that any un-refuted un-repudiated critique remains standing.
Crossing them out with crayons doesn’t eliminate them
Perplexity critique of your nugget of whizzdumb:
Ketan Joshi posted that exact gibberish response as a sarcastic dismissal on his blog’s comment section. He directly quotes the prior detailed analysis—likely the one from this conversation—and matches its “effort” with deliberate nonsense to mock perceived low-quality feedback.​Sarcasm signals frustration
The reply targets verbose but critical comments, signaling Joshi views the analysis as unhelpful nitpicking rather than constructive dialogue. By signing “Cheers, Ketan,” he mimics politeness while underscoring irritation with critics who dissect his work without, in his eyes, grasping its core moral urgency.​Ties to his style
Joshi consistently uses sharp, polemical tone across platforms, from Twitter threads on AI hallucinations to critiques of greenwashing. This fits his pattern: prioritize punchy calls to action over nuanced debate, especially when defending critiques of “hedonistic sustainability” like Ecosia’s AI pivot.​Implications for discourse
Such responses risk alienating thoughtful critics, including those raising valid points like Ecosia’s not-for-profit incentives or potential for opt-in AI. Yet they reinforce his brand as an unapologetic watchdog, prioritizing systemic critique over polite engagement on tech-climate tensions.​
Now I am curious whether you actually contacted ecosia with a rational emphatic well-crafted, or are content with cringe-whingeing into the ether
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lol I’ve never done a twitter thread on AI hallucinations. Your shitty text-vomit program made that up because it’s just a random word generator you’re using as a replacement for what used to be your actual brain.
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I completely understand the premise of this and the broader application to pretty much anything claiming to be “green.†I’ve struggled with it myself locally where my own city cites green initiatives on one hand while doing the complete opposite with the other.
Then I wonder do we even have the capability to do what someone may consider as a fundamental element analysis given so much foundation is built on essentially unsustainable capitalist systems? Will any effort to green a flawed foundation ultimately struggle with this question? Will human beings in their increasing removal from their environment ever embrace what may be against our own nature by design?
We absolutely should not be fooling ourselves by efforts where PR overrules reality. It’s just not clear the world is ready to actually do that, or knows how.
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@ketanjoshi.co now i need to find a better alternative…again. any recommendations?
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