Holly Alpine knew it was time to quit her dream job on Microsoft's sustainability team the day she realized her paycheque was "dripping in oil money."
For roughly a decade, she worked her way up the corporate ladder, carving out a niche by helping the tech giant improve its environmental record and meet its climate and environmental commitments. At first, the work felt meaningful: she was assisting the company to make data centres more sustainable and co-founded a group of employees pushing internally to improve environmental practices.
But a tip from higher-up shattered her faith in those efforts when she learned that Microsoft had "dozens" of cloud computing and AI contracts with fossil fuel companies. Many of the projects were helping oil and gas companies extract fossil fuels more cheaply by making their operations more efficient, or by accessing previously inaccessible deposits — what Alpine calls "enabled emissions."
For instance, in 2019, Microsoft’s Canadian branch announced a "multi-year partnership" with Suncor to "further accelerate" digitization of the oilsands giant's work. An industry source told Canada's National Observer that major oil companies, like Suncor, are developing proprietary AI systems, trained on company data, to find and exploit new or previously hard-to-access deposits — and these partnerships are widespread.
Alpine and the employee group she co-founded dug into the contracts, estimating they generate up to $75 billion annually for Microsoft....
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