What's stopping you from using Ecosia? Your searches could plant trees!

nadram@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – -51 points –
ecosia.org

Ecosia is a search engine that aggregates search results from multiple other search engines. The ad revenue from our searches funds the planting of trees worldwide. With over 200 million trees planted so far, Ecosia have learned to be fully transparent about their projects, and financials which are available right on that website. Set it as your default search engine, and start planting trees. They also recently released a Chromium based browser if that's your thing - TechCrunch article for reference.

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they've added an LLM chatbot recently, so I'm sure the energy required to run the queries will offset all the trees they've planted so far in about 4 days.

There are many legitimate reasons to not use ecosia, and yes, from the ecological perspective.

Planting trees has shown to be not as effective at curbing the effects of climate change as previously thought. Contrary to popular belief, the oceans have a much larger effect on our climate than our forests, and we aren't doing nearly enough to clean those up because the task would require us to fundamentally change the way we farm, fish, and obtain oil (i.e. pretty much stop everything we're currently doing).

This isn't to say planting trees doesn't have some benefit, but there are much better ways to curb your CO² emissions which you can see at the end of this rant/post.

Sneak peak though, if you eat meat, and actually give a fuck about the forests, perhaps you should stop consuming animals. Eating meat in particular is directly related to deforestation, as often deforestation is done to make room for massive CAFOs, which even if the deforestation didn't occur, would still significantly contribute to climate change.

Ecosia's funding comes from advertisements, which incentivizes consumption, which itself contributes to climate change innately. Every purchase you make, every meal you eat, every time you travel by automobile, airplane, or petroleum powered boat, contributes to the ever growing mass of CO2.

Advertisements and marketing exacerbate climate change by cultivating a never ending consumerist desire for products that are almost entirely produced using a petroleum derived process and/or packaged in petroleum derived plastic, resulting in the consumerist behavior being inherently responsible for climate change.

Ecosia is a moldy old band aid on a gushing neck wound that honestly is causing more harm than good by distracting people from the real source of the climate crisis, which is modern capitalism and the resulting consumerism.

Actually fighting climate change requires more of you than some passive empty gesture. Here's a bullet point list of things you can do today to make a real difference:

  • Stop eating and utilizing animal based products.
  • Stop eating foods that were grown using petroleum derived fertilizers (i.e. eat Organic).
  • Stop eating foods that had to be trucked in from over 100 miles away (i.e. eat local).
  • Stop buying plastic packaged goods.
  • Stop traveling by any means that require oil.
  • Stop living in or working in places which utilize electricity from the standard fossil fueled grid.
  • Abandon the fast fashion industry.
  • Only buy local goods and services.
  • Stop buying new electronic devices unless absolutely necessary.
  • Stop buying things you don't absolutely 100% need to survive.
  • Don't use AI as it utilizes an insane amount of fossil fuel generated electricity and consumes an exorbitant amount of water.
  • Same goes for playing AAA video games on high end GPUs.
  • Same goes for participating in Cryptocurrency mining/trading.
  • Protest the continuation of the exploration of space until Earth's climate has stabilized, as the utilization of resources required for space exploration greatly contribute to climate change and encourages a techno futurism that "solves" the climate crisis by abandoning Earth, rather than actually creating a future where humans are the stewards of the Earth, not its masters.
  • Get politically involved to pressure your local governments to implement safer spaces for pedestrians and cyclists and generally improve public transportation infrastructure like railways and metros.
  • Spend all your spare time fighting the fossil fuel, plastic, and privatized water industries, because all of the above only makes a difference if those industries are GONE FOR GOOD.
  • Don't have children (biggest contributor to climate change is more consumerist humans).
  • Don't leave this problem to the next generation to solve. The moment is now or never. You either care about the future of humanity and their place on Earth, or you don't.

There is a reason climate scientists are increasingly becoming climate activists. This is not something you can buy, recycle, or search engine your way out of.

As I've pointed out, there simply are far more impactful ways you can make a difference today than using a search engine that gets in bed with marketers and advertisers all in order to make relatively empty gestures while playing nice with corporations that, I guarantee you, are far more interested in pursuing business as usual than preserving the planet for their own children, let alone you and me.

I think you completely missed the point. The relevant question is not if there are better ways to reduce one's negative impact (because obviously there are) and also not if Ecosia is perfect (because obviously it is not). The relevant question is how much environmental damage using Ecosia does compared to using other search engines and how good the search results are.

Don't have children

A+ my friend. Solve this one, and you solve most of the others.

However, eating animals isn't inherently bad on its own. It's the SCALE at which we do it. Animals have been eating animals since there were animals, and as long as there is a natural balance, this can be a good thing. Factory-farming for billions of humans is where it all falls apart (much earlier than that, actually)

You either care about the future of humanity and their place on Earth, or you don't.

I couldn't give less of a fuck of humans make it or not, but the Earth and its other inhabitants don't need to go down with the shitty ship humans built.

I agree with your overall point, though, but I think the main solution to the problem is simply to use a condom. Most of the rest will sort itself out or be much easier to solve after there are less of us.

What's stopping me? The fact that they need me to generate ad revenue to fund those trees, and I'd rather not be advertised to.

Fair enough. I was using Google + uBlock Origin. I tolerate the ads now on Ecosia and I actually click them when it's what I was searching for.

They make less money, if more people use it with ad blocker, since they have to pay Microsoft for search results but in turn get most of ad revenue (ads need to be clicked)

I guess most people here use ad blocker

They partner with multiple search providers, not just MS. And yes ad-blockers, but I've disabled it for ecosia.org

I used them for years.

Kagi search results have been much better for me so I recently switched.

Ecosia is just another way to greenwashing a bussiness

They're a non-profit, they plant trees, and they're carbon negative. So what are they green-washing?

The ad revenue from our searches funds the planting of trees worldwide.

I call that BS. As Mr Oliver once explained, if all companies were to plant the trees they promise, this planet wouldn't be enough for so many trees.

You should probably not call all reforestation as bullshit projects just based on a John Oliver video.

There is this interesting blog post on Ecosia :

https://cariki.co.uk/blogs/the-green-road/is-ecosia-legit-or-fake#:~:text=Ecosia%20donates%20roughly%2059%25%20of,using%20their%20transparent%20financial%20reporting.

I understand this is just a blog but there is good sources in there. Ecosia looks like a serious initiative and the fact that they got a B corp rating in Germany is impressive.

I was really skeptical at first, but they're legit. It's a non-profit that's been around since 2009, based in Berlin. Have a look at their blog, you'll find project updates, the financials are broken down by expenditure and much more. Finally they're getting some spotlight with this recent TechCrunch article and their big efforts on Social. What really hooked me in is that they signed a legal contract binding them to the not-for-profit purpose forever - more on this. Edit: about Mr. Oliver (love this guy) he is absolutely correct, but he is referring to for-profit companies that pollute and then plant some trees to pretend like they give a damn. Ecosia is a not-for-profit whose purpose is to plant with a purpose, meaning they reconnect forest patches that have been split, they return livelihood and wildlife to areas that have gone through droughts and seen increased poverty etc...

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

explained

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

That assumes all the trees survive. A lot of them apparently don't.

No such assumption is made. Ecosia is clear when an entire project fails, and takes into account tree survival rates when they claim to have planted over 200 million trees. It's all clarified on their website. Regardless of all of that, they take all ad-revenue to reforest and I'd say that's a better deal than Google or MS.

OK posting here to address the skepticism, which I completely understand and have been through. Here are some articles that came up when simply searching "is ecosia legit": Utopia "Ecosia is certainly legit. It’s above board", Snopes "Ecosia makes money through advertisements on its search engine. While a portion of that money is used to fund the operational costs of the business, about 80% of its surplus revenue is donated to environmental organizations and tree-planting projects around the world.", GoodGoodGood, TechJunkie and there's plenty more

I cannot speak to this search provider however we know that tree planting alone isn't all it's cracked up to be. Especially huge projects.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/podcasts/the-daily/the-sunday-read-can-planting-a-trillion-new-trees-save-the-world.html

I've read the US has more trees today than 200 years ago.

Sorry, no source, it's been probably 20 years since I read it in a science mag.

Just looking at pics from the US west back then vs today is pretty staggering.

And the forest service has prevented fires from containing forests for going on 100 years... A problem in its own right (is a major cause of the larger wildfires we see today, which they we warned about in the 80's by one of their lead researchers).

After switching to Kagi, I see no reason to return to an ad-supported search engine.

Fair words make me look to my purse (English proverb).

Didn't they get found out for being a bunch of frauds?

Any source for that or is it just preemptive cynicism?

Huh? Not that I know of. They're going strong, taking on more projects around the world and are pretty transparent about what they do - they had an article about how / why one of their projects failed which i read but can't find right now.