They’re the biggest thing on the Internet, with annual profits of around 13 billion dollars, and some of that money is going to help save the planet. “When google went public at its IPO the founders wrote a letter kind of addressing the principles of the company,” explained Google’s Jamie Yood, “and they said, we’re going to tell you this up front that 1% of equity and profit goes to something called google.org which is going to be the philanthropic arm of the company. If you don’t like this, that’s fine, don’t buy our stock.”

Google.org is trying to tackle climate change in two ways: by focusing on vehicles and coal-fired power plants. To help change the way we get around they’ve launched RechargeIT to push for the commercialization of plug-in vehicles.

To find an alternative to coal, they’re going after an equation: RE

In this video, we talk to Google’s Jamie Yood about google.org, RE<C, geothermal, plug-ins, Climate Savers Computing, their open-sourced practices and the real carbon footprint of a google search.