Google “airbrushes” out emissions from flying, BBC reveals

This was already an incredibly stupid concept pushed by large megacorp polluters to make individuals feel bad about their miniscule contributions. The term "carbon footprint" was literally invented by marketing/lobby firms to make a person using a straw feel worse than oil spills. I couldn't name a single person who cares about that random number.

I can see Google's side of this I think.

The 'multiply by 1.9' thing is a rule of thumb, but they're trying to provide information that will let people choose the lowest carbon option.

So if one company does innovation X (flies 10% faster/slower/higher/lower/earlier/later) and that impacts the non-carbon elements, then they'd probably like to reward them by lowering the number below the rule-of-thumb. But currently they're not very solid on that number and could well be misleading.

https://github.com/google/travel-impact-model/commit/b2225d8...

From reading the changed code, seems like the Google rule of thumb was 1.61 rather than 1.9, and that's the average for all flights thought not all flights have these emissions.