Google accused of airbrushing carbon emissions in flight search results

Google has been accused of airbrushing aviation emissions, after the company changed its flight search engine to halve the CO2 emissions attributed to any given trip.

The change, first noted by the BBC, affects a feature on Google Flights that shows the estimated carbon emissions of each route. The company flags routes with higher or lower than typical emissions, and also reports the total CO2 emitted per passenger on any given journey.

After the change, Google began reporting just the CO2 emitted on each journey, effectively halving the stated environmental impact of any given flight.

The company argues that it is impossible to precisely estimate CO2e for a given flight, since the effect of water vapour on warming differs depending on time of day and location of emissions, and that until its models improve, it would be more accurate to simply report CO2.

But when the change was pushed through, Google made no public acknowledgement of its new figures, save for a single note published to a developer account on codesharing site Github.