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.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\u00a0extract fossil fuels more cheaply<\/a> by making their operations more efficient, or by accessing previously inaccessible deposits \u2014 what Alpine calls “enabled emissions.”\u00a0<\/p>\n For instance, in 2019, Microsoft\u2019s Canadian branch announced a “multi-year partnership” with Suncor to “further accelerate” digitization of the oilsands giant’s work. An industry source told\u00a0Canada’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 \u2014 and these partnerships are widespread.<\/p>\n Alpine and the employee group she co-founded dug into the contracts, estimating they generate up to $75 billion annually for Microsoft. That’s roughly half of the company’s revenue for cloud computing services, which includes products like Azure and Microsoft 365.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We realized we were basically working for an oil company,” she said. “There’s this part of [Microsoft] that is raking in billions of dollars by explicitly helping all of the oil majors \u2026 extend the age of fossil fuels and make fossil fuel projects cheaper and faster.”\u00a0<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the company told\u00a0Canada’s National Observer\u00a0that Microsoft “believe[s] that technology has an important role to play in helping the industry decarbonize” and pointed to the company’s\u00a0so-called “energy principles.”\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n “We realized we were basically working for an oil company,” said Holly Alpine, a former Microsoft employee who quit her dream jobwhen she realized the company, like most tech companies, is helping fossil fuel companies increase production. <\/p>\n These principles, published in 2022, guide the company’s business decisions, the spokesperson said. They state that Microsoft will sell commercially available software technology and cloud services to all customers, and provide fossil fuel companies with “technical and engineering resources” to help explore for new deposits and improve their drilling technology, provided they have a\u00a0net-zero plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those net-zero plans only need to cover emissions generated by the oil and gas producers’ operations or energy purchases, not the emissions generated by burning the fuels they extract. Since 2022, most of the largest fossil fuel companies operating in Canada have walked back, weakened or fallen silent on their net-zero pledges.<\/p>\n There is widespread scientific consensus that we must stop exploiting new fossil fuel deposits and rapidly phase out existing ones to prevent catastrophic climate change.\u00a0<\/p>\n Microsoft is not the only tech company to cultivate close ties with fossil fuel producers. Those partnerships are becoming increasingly common, most visibly in recent headlines about the Trump administration’s efforts to support both.\u00a0<\/p>\n US President Donald Trump has gutted climate rules in an effort to boost fossil fuel production and is implementing a\u00a0sweeping AI policy<\/a> to “maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” Those links were on display in a high-profile\u00a0July summit<\/a> between US fossil fuel firms and tech giants.\u00a0<\/p>\n Canada’s role<\/p>\n Similar dynamics have been playing out in Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2019,\u00a0Suncor announced<\/a> a “multi-year partnership” with Microsoft for cloud computing. The company’s\u00a02020<\/a> and\u00a02024<\/a> shareholder reports noted that its\u00a0adoption of autonomous haulage systems\u00a0<\/a>at some of its oil sands facilities will “increas[e] production, reliability and efficiency.” Its 2024 annual information form stated that the technology is lowering costs and increasing productivity.\u00a0<\/p>\n The same year,\u00a0Cenovus joined forces with IBM<\/a> to implement a company-wide tech platform designed to improve its efficiency and ensure the company could adopt more complex AI systems in the future. The gas company Canadian Natural Resources’ 2019 annual report also noted that “leveraging technology, innovation and continuous improvement \u2026 drove significant value growth.”\u00a0<\/p>\n In September 2019,\u00a0Imperial Oil announced a two-year partnership<\/a> with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), an AI research institute partially funded by the federal and Alberta governments, to help the oil major develop in-house machine learning capabilities that can support\u00a0“more effective ways to recover oil and gas resources.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Two years later, Alberta oil producer MEG Energy\u00a0announced<\/a> that it had “successfully deployed” an AI system designed by Baker Hughes that maximizes oil and gas production and recovery. TC Energy also uses AI to maximize how much natural gas its pipelines can carry, according to a\u00a0case study<\/a> by its cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services.\u00a0<\/p>\n The\u00a0Clean Resource Innovation Network<\/a> (CRIN), an oil and gas industry group that says it “driv[es] Canadian energy competitiveness and improv[es] the environmental performance of hard-to-abate industries,” has also supported research projects and industry efforts to use digital technologies like AI in their operations.\u00a0CRIN has received $110 million<\/a> \u2014 about half the total costs for the project, according to Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada \u2014 in the form of federal funding between 2020 and 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Alpine, months of unsuccessfully lobbying higher-ups at Microsoft\u00a0to help ditch \u2014 or at least make public \u2014 its contracts helping oil and gas companies extract more fossil fuels, left her exhausted. The “cognitive dissonance” between her job and her environmental values became unbearable.\u00a0<\/p>\n So she quit, as did her husband Will, who also worked at Microsoft. The couple have since started campaigning against the tech industry’s role in enabling increased fossil fuel extraction. They want stricter regulations or shareholder pressure to prevent tech companies from helping fossil fuel producers extract more oil and gas, but even greater transparency about those deals would be a win.\u00a0<\/p>\n The transition from employee to advocate has been frightening and intense for the Alpines: “It is one of the greatest horrors of my life that Will and I are leading this campaign against some of the biggest forces on our planet: Big Tech and Big Oil,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Holly Alpine knew it was time to quit her dream job on Microsoft’s sustainability team the day she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-129737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}