Yesterday, Google Cloud announced a new feature that provides its users with custom carbon footprint tracking, to track the emissions their cloud usage generates. This is the first step towards being carbon-free, a goal that Google Cloud has set to achieve in the next decade.
Microsoft already has a similar tracker showing the emissions associated with the electricity used to store and process customer data. The fun bit about these trackers is that they warn customers when they're wasting energy on inactivity.
This tool could be used across industries to ensure that there is no inefficient use of electricity in farming, manufacturing, distribution centres and more. This is not a new invention from Google as the Google Earth Engine has been around since 2009, and has been used for a while by used by researchers and other specialist groups.