Microsoft boasts of its environmental progress

artificial intelligence to fossil fuel companies.

 

 

Microsoft boasts of its environmental progress while covertly selling artificial intelligence to fossil fuel companies. The corporation says it will become “carbon negative” by 2030.

Microsoft has been quietly selling customized AI services to fossil fuel firms and stating that this will enable them generate even more money while destroying the climate, all the while presenting an image of sustainability.

According to whistleblowers, the internet giant has been making outrageous promises to oil firms like ExxonMobil and Chevron, as reported by Karen Hao of The Atlantic. However, the company has been trying to conceal this information from the public.
After going through mountains of paperwork and interviewing numerous past and present Microsoft workers, Hao discovered that the company is giving oil corporations AI algorithms that are meant to help them “maximise” their potential by predicting where best to drill.

For example, Microsoft stated in a 2022 presentation deck that the reporter obtained that ExxonMobil could boost its yearly revenue by $1.4 billion with the aid of its AI systems. Of that amount, $600 million would be derived from “sustainable production,” which allegedly permits less energy-intensive fossil fuel drilling.
In addition to making these grandiose claims, the AI-bullish tech behemoth boldly promised in 2020 to become “carbon negative” by 2030 and has since promoted its AI as a catalyst for sustainability. Since then, announcements about Microsoft’s collaborations with oil and gas firms have omitted the fact that the IT behemoth is assisting some of these polluters in streamlining their drilling operations.

Microsoft has consistently maintained that its objective of becoming a carbon neutral company does not conflict with the work that its oil and gas clients perform because its algorithms are meant to make drilling more efficient. According to Hao, the assertion that artificial intelligence (AI) from Microsoft can boost output while cutting emissions has become a catchphrase in corporate collateral and client and tech company interviews.
That reasoning is obviously incorrect: regardless of the greenwashing talking points Microsoft‘s salespeople make, one cannot support oil firms in their efforts to drill for finite combustible resources that are blatantly harming the globe and simultaneously claim to be a climate champion.

Indeed, some employees, including an environmentalist ex-Microsofter who now lobbies against her former employer, suggested to Hao that the idea was preposterous.
“All of Microsoft’s public statements and publications paint a beautiful picture of the uses of AI for sustainability,” Holly Alpine, a former Microsoft sustainability program manager who left the company earlier this year after nearly a decade, told The Atlantic. “But this focus on the positives is hiding the whole story, which is much darker.”

After pushing back against the company’s tacit support for fossil fuel extraction for years, Alpine eventually became disillusioned enough to leave the software giant.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has “not committed to a timeline” to cutting ties with its oil clients, according to a spokesperson who spoke with The Atlantic.