Facebook says its Menlo Park headquarters is 100 percent supported by renewable energy, and it diverts 90 percent of its waste away from landfills through recycling and composting. Four of Facebook’s US data center buildings earned LEED Gold certification, and one building in Sweden earned LEED Platinum certification, the highest rating possible.

In the sustainability report, Facebook claims it’s committed to giving back to the communities where its facilities are located. For instance, it plans to recover heat generated by its servers in Odense, Denmark, and donate it to a local district heating company. Facebook hopes to provide 100,000 MWh of energy annually. That’s enough to warm 6,900 homes in the nearby city, and it will help Odense phase out of coal by mid-2022.

Facebook is trying to improve its water usage, too. In 2019, the company saved over three billion gallons of water, and it invested in watershed restoration projects in Oregon and New Mexico. A pilot project at a data center in New Mexico reduced the water used for cooling by about 40 percent. This year, Facebook plans to expand that tech to other data centers. Facebook expects its water projects to restore about 206,000 cubic meters of water annually.

“All that said, we know there is more work to be done. Now more than ever, businesses need to think not only about managing their operational impact but about working with others to leverage their technical strengths and address sustainability challenges,” Rachel Peterson, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, wrote in the report.

While these figures represent a very marginal difference, additional findings from FERC suggest that the gap is likely to widen in the coming months. The report notes that the US has been adding, on average, one percentage point to its renewable energy capacity every year, and predicts that by 2022 the technology will account for nearly a quarter of America’s total available installed generating capacity. Meanwhile, the nation’s appetite for coal continues to decline, with consumption dropping 39 percent from its peak in 2008, to its lowest level in 40 years.

According to IRENA, 171GW of renewable energy was added to the global mix in 2018, marking an annual increase of 7.9 percent, and accounting for two-thirds of new power generation capacity altogether. Hydropower takes the largest share with 1,172GW worldwide, followed by wind at 564GW and solar with 480GW, although solar saw the largest growth in 2018.

However, despite this growth — which IRENA says “continues the remarkable trend of the last five years” — it appears that our appetite for fossil fuels hasn’t subsided. In fact, it’s increased. As the IEA report demonstrates, natural gas emerged as the planet’s fuel of choice in 2018, posting the biggest gains and accounting for 45 percent of the rise in overall energy consumption. Add coal to the mix, and fossil fuels accounted for nearly 70 percent of the additional growth for the second year running. This all adds up to a 1.7 percent rise in CO2 emissions, which reached 33 Gigatonnes in 2018.

The IEA’s executive director, Dr Fatih Birol, noted that 2018 marked another “golden year” for gas, and said that action is desperately needed to mitigate devastating climate damage. “Despite major growth in renewables, global emissions are still rising, demonstrating once again that more urgent action is needed on all fronts — developing all clean energy solutions, curbing emissions, improving efficiency, and spurring investments and innovation, including in carbon capture, utilization and storage,” she said.