Microsoft won’t save the planet: “Finding and extracting more oil is one of the biggest use cases of AI today”

Ex-employees are highlighting how Microsoft’s work for the fossil fuel industry is exacerbating the climate crisis.

Will Alpine joined Microsoft in 2020, a few months after Microsoft announced that it would remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits by 2030. The company also promised that by the year 2050, it would remove all the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere that it had ever emitted since 1975.

“Will Alpine had every reason to believe he was about to help save the planet,” Emily Atkin writes, in a recent article for Heated.

Alpine worked as a product manager working on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence platform. “AI is an essential tool for accelerating sustainability,” states a Microsoft report, co-written by Alpine and published in November 2023.

Alpine told Heated that at first, “we were heads down doing good sustainability work”. But after about 18 months, he started to realise “who was really using the AI that I was helping to build”.

Will Alpine met his wife Holly while they both worked at Microsoft. Holly had joined the company in 2014. In January 2024, she resigned from Microsoft and in her resignation email she wrote that,

This work to maximize oil production with our technology is negating all of our good work, extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions.

Microsoft’s climate bullshit

In March 2020, I wrote about Microsoft’s climate targets under the headline “Microsoft’s climate bullshit”.¹

There are two obvious problems with Microsoft’s climate goals. The first is that the company is relying on carbon removal and tree planting on a massive scale. Both are a dangerous distraction from the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

Microsoft has bought a huge number of carbon credits in recent years. Allied Offsets reports that in 2024, Microsoft was the second largest buyer of carbon credits — behind Shell.

The second problem with Microsoft’s climate goals is that the company works very closely with the oil industry.

The day before Microsoft made its “carbon negative” announcement, the 12th International Conference on Petroleum Technology closed in Saudi Arabia. Microsoft was the event’s “digital transformation partner”.

Microsoft works with a series of oil corporations, including Chevron, Shell, Equinor, BP, Schlumberger, and ExxonMobil.

Holly and Will tried to change Microsoft from the inside

Heated reports that in September 2019, Microsoft employees asked the company’s CEO Satya Nadella about Microsoft’s contracts with the oil industry. Nadella argued that working with oil companies would help them transition to clean energy. “Give them that productivity boost so they can help themselves and help the world,” Nadella said.

A month later, Nadella once again defended working with Big Polluters:

“If we stop engagement, what’s the benefit? Who benefits? Nobody benefits. It’s not as if you can stop producing oil tomorrow, because the world would stop. The question is, how can we contribute to an energy transition plan?”

But increasing the productivity of oil companies inevitably increases greenhouse gas emissions. It also increases oil companies’ profits. Which they reinvest in extracting more oil.

In 2021, Holly and Will Alpine wrote an 8-page memo to Microsoft’s leadership. They pointed out that none of the 50 oil and gas companies that Microsoft was working with claimed to be using Microsoft’s cloud computing or AI technology to transition away from fossil fuels.

“In fact, it was just the opposite,” Heated writes.

BP was using Microsoft AI technology to “invest in more oil and gas;” Chevron was using it for “new unconventional [fracking] wells,” and Exxon was using it to “improve exploration success.”

In December 2021, Will and Holly had a meeting to present their recommendations to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President, and Lucas Joppa, then-chief environmental officer at Microsoft.

They didn’t recommend that Microsoft should stop working with the fossil fuel industry. Instead, they recommended a “principled approach” and accounting for the carbon impacts of using Microsoft’s technology. They also said the company’s Responsible AI Principles should include environmental impact.

Microsoft did not adopt Will and Holly’s recommendations. “Four years later,” Heated writes, “Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles still don’t include environmental impact.”

“From what I saw, I believe that finding and extracting more oil is one of the biggest use cases of AI today,” Will told Heated.

He found it very difficult to find companies that were actually using the “climate-friendly AI tools” that he was working on. He concluded that Microsoft was using his work to distract from the company’s destructive work with the oil industry.

Microsoft’s moonshot

Climate writer Ketan Joshi wrote a great piece in May 2025 about the life and death of Microsoft’s climate goals.

Back in 2020, at the launch of Microsoft’s climate goals, Brad Smith described the goals as a “moonshot”:

Reducing carbon is where the world needs to go, and we recognize that it’s what our customers and employees are asking us to pursue. This is a bold bet — a moonshot — for Microsoft. And it will need to become a moonshot for the world.

In 2024, Smith was still using the moonshot metaphor, but he told Bloomberg that the moon was getting further away:

“In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence. So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.”

By May 2025, Smith had binned the moonshot metaphor:

As we remain focused on sustained progress towards our 2030 goals, it has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon, not a sprint.

“Okay, it’s a marathon now,” Joshi comments.

But the same problem exists: on a journey towards a goal, you should be heading towards the goal, not away from it (whether that’s the moon, or a finish line). This is really the absolute basics of running a marathon.

For every step the company takes towards the end, they take another 500 backwards. Microsoft is rocketing / marathon-running / whatever-ing in the wrong direction.

Joshi takes a detailed look at how Microsoft’s and other Big Tech companies’ electricity consumption is accelerating as its use of AI is increasing. He concludes that the increase in Microsoft’s emissions since 2020 is more like 55.4%, rather than the 23% increase that Microsoft claims.

Enabled Emissions

When they left Microsoft, Will and Holly Alpine set up an organisation called Enabled Emissions.

Holly told Heated that she sees Enabled Emissions as complementary to No Tech for Apartheid — a group of Google and Amazon workers protesting against the companies’ US$1 billion Project Nimbus cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military.

Microsoft is also complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Microsoft is a major provider of cloud services and AI to the Israeli military. And Israel’s use of Microsoft technology has increased during its brutal war in Gaza.

No Azure for Apartheid is part of the No Tech for Apartheid network, and is a group of Microsoft workers demanding that Microsoft terminate all Azure contracts and partnerships with the Israeli military and government.

Holly told Heated that,

“You don't get to call yourself the company of peace if you’re the number one cloud provider for Lockheed Martin. And you don’t get to call yourself the company of climate action if you’re the number one cloud provider for the fossil fuel industry.”

In a letter to the Financial Times last week, Holly and Will highlighted the disastrous climate impact of Big Tech’s fossil fuel deals:

To illustrate the scale, we and organisations like Global Witness, Greenpeace and the Green Web Foundation have sought to quantify the real climate impact of Big Tech’s fossil fuel contracts. Using publicly available data, we calculated emissions from just two Microsoft contracts with Exxon and Chevron. We estimated an increase equivalent to 300 per cent of Microsoft’s annual emissions — including data centres.

1. Before I wrote the “Microsoft’s climate bullshit” post, I sent some questions to Microsoft. My email was passed around Microsoft and on to the company’s PR firm who (eventually) told me that the Microsoft team would “like to politely decline to respond on this one”.
Emily Atkin contacted Microsoft and asked for the company’s comments on what Will and Holly had told her. She also sent some of her own questions, including “Does Microsoft have any evidence that its work with fossil fuel companies is helping the industry decarbonize?” The response? “Microsoft has nothing to share.”