Jeremy Gilbertson (00:09)
Disruptors and curious minds. Welcome to another episode of thinking on paper. My name is Jeremy. This is Mark. And I tell you what, we are about to have one of the most important conversations that we've ever had on this show related to AI's impact on the environment. And pop quiz, guys, this is not what you think.
This is different than what you think. A lot of people think the environmental impact is with these big gigantic data centers consuming electricity, power, water, all that stuff. We're gonna get into something different. We're gonna be getting something even more impactful that you need to know about. Mark, what are your thoughts to kick this thing
Mark Fielding (00:45)
The evidence of a climate crisis is obvious to everyone, but the most ridiculous. It's more drilling for oil is taking place. More gas is being discovered and the big tech giants are using AI to make the process more efficient. It doesn't make any sense, Jeremy. Make it make sense to me because I can't. So hopefully our guests will help us make sense today. Our guests are Holly and Will Alpine.
Jeremy Gilbertson (01:04)
I wish I could.
Mark Fielding (01:10)
They are founders of Enabled Emissions. They are leaders in responsible AI and sustainability with 14 years of combined experience at Microsoft, which is important. Stick with us, that will become apparent. Holly launched Microsoft's community environmental sustainability program, as well as the company's first employee engagement program for sustainability.
growing that team to over 10,000 employees globally. Will is a recognized expert in green AI and green software engineering and was a product manager on Microsoft's AI platform team. Welcome to the show, Holly and Will.
planetary scale harm, please, can you, for our listeners, paint us a picture of how bad it is right now?
Will Alpine (01:49)
It's not dramatic to call the impacts of AI right now an existential threat, specifically referring to the impact that AI can do to exacerbate climate change. A UN court issued a landmark opinion deeming climate change an existential threat and that the way that AI is being used today to
prop up the fossil fuel industry far beyond when it should be, that is causing untold damage to the climate. So I see that and those harms as being existential to all of our lived futures.
Mark Fielding (02:20)
Anything to add to that, Holly?
Holly Alpine (02:22)
I think Will summed it up. is...
very alarming to us that in the narrative around AI and climate, it seems the dominant narrative is this comparison of the net impacts of AI being the positive use cases. So how AI can be used for sustainability and reducing emissions compared to the emissions from the operations of advanced tech like data centers and completely leaving out how AI is being applied to extractive industries
to dramatically increase oil and gas production, leading to dramatic increases in our global emissions. It is a major part of that equation, yet in the entire dominant narrative, it is left out. So that's what we're trying to do is raise awareness of this issue and try to put guardrails, reasonable guardrails in place.
Will Alpine (03:17)
And one last thing to add actually, I just wanted to mention that the harms that are happening right now by use of AI by the fossil fuel industry, they're happening today. They're not a hypothetical threat the way that AGI is being presented. These are real harms happening with demonstrable impacts right now.
Mark Fielding (03:34)
before we get into the story of Enabled Emissions, could you give us some stats, some data on...
how it's changed in the past 10 years and how it is exacerbating the extraction of fossil fuels?
Holly Alpine (03:45)
So.
These technologies are core to how the fossil fuel industry operates across shale and offshore and deep water assets. They can cut production costs by 10 % while boosting reserves by 5 % and increasing yields 15%. One example is in the Permian Basin, daily output has tripled in the past decade, even as the rig counts have dropped by 46%. And these timelines for these projects have gone from 18
months to just a matter of about two weeks. And AI has really transformed operations for oil fields that really should be aging out or aging out or being deprecated because of inflation. These companies, fossil fuel companies are able to maintain these very low extraction costs over decades.
We've seen really horrifying statistics around US oil production surging from 5.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 13 and a half million today. I mean, the US is the largest producer and that is largely, we believe, to these advanced technologies. I mean, it is dramatically reshaping our future of the energy transition and really bending the curve back in the
wrong direction in this era of increasingly cheapening renewables where fossil fuels should be phased out, it is keeping them alive.
Mark Fielding (05:13)
That's a 3x
increase again, the story that we're told is that numbers should be coming down, are coming down.
Holly Alpine (05:20)
Correct.
Mark Fielding (05:21)
They're not.
Will Alpine (05:22)
It's deeply, deeply troubling. I just want to mention, to set the stage, many of the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, of oil reserves have been plucked. So oil companies are increasingly resorting to things like fracking and offshoring to stay competitive, especially in the era of cheap and abundant renewable energy.
These operations are risky and complex and they require lots of data. So as Holly mentioned earlier, it's a suite of technology. First you have sensors and internet of things that would collect the data. Then you have high performance computing to process, let's say large amounts, vast amounts, some of the biggest amounts ever of seismic and geophysical data. And then artificial intelligence can come in and provide insights on how to, for example, determine where and how to drill.
It's applied at every single stage of the fossil fuel life cycle. And to put all of this into perspective, fossil fuels account for 90 % of global emissions. And so the operations of AI have a relatively small percentage impact of that. I think it's a fraction of a percent. But if the use of that tool can reshape that 90 % of global emissions, then we're heading in the wrong direction.
Mark Fielding (06:30)
AI is maturing as well so it's only going to get better.
Holly Alpine (06:34)
Right.
worry a bit here of just essentially repeating the talking points and giving them free PR. But I think it's important to be understood. And also a lot of these oil companies, already know this. At CERAweek this past March, in 2025, the largest oil conference in the world, it was centered around AI and how it's leading to faster and cheaper oil production and making projects that would
otherwise not be viable, now viable.
Mark Fielding (07:04)
People aren't going to put up a fight. People aren't going to say anything. People aren't going to protest. Governments and politicians aren't going to bring it up with their superiors because nobody knows about it. So perhaps you can explain how Enabled Admissions came about and
how your roles, respective roles at Microsoft forced you to change your hand.
Holly Alpine (07:22)
Yeah, absolutely.
completely agree with you that awareness is the first step. It also just needs to be the option that is cheapest and most convenient and not burdens people. We can't rely on people's conscience to do the right thing. It needs to just be easy for folks. And that's what's most equitable as well. And not burdening folks who are already burdened in so many other ways. So to back up a bit of our storyline, I started at Microsoft in 2014. I was a technical account manager.
manager,
so not in sustainability, but I grew into sustainability roles as Microsoft was really growing into this global sustainability leader. I worked in the data center space, so I was on Microsoft's cloud operations and innovation team. I was on the energy team first, so powering those data centers as they were, the energy use was hockey-sticking. And then I moved into, I started a program called Community Environmental Sustainability,
where I was funding local sustainability projects in those communities that hosted our data centers. As you mentioned in the beginning, also co-founded Microsoft's employee engagement team, grew that to 10,000 passionate, intelligent folks across the company who were working on sustainability and really cared and were doing amazing things. And we were really excited for progress. In January of 2020 was when Microsoft had their
big climate pledges. I don't know if you remember that, but around carbon water, waste and ecosystems that were really groundbreaking commitments for a public company to make, around having net negative emissions. That was incredible. And that was about the same time as Will started at the company around March 2020.
he and I started working on some things together and he joined that sustainability community. I mean, I stood on stages around the world promulgating the virtues of my company and how we were leading the world to a net zero future. I mean, the thing is, Microsoft is doing fantastic things. There are so many people.
at
Microsoft who I still love and think are doing fantastic work. We just started becoming aware of these contracts with these oil companies and contracts specifically to drill more oil. mean, it was very explicit what we saw and we thought, you know, this must be a one off. This must be something that's being phased out. But as we dug, we saw just how much of Microsoft's business was in fossil fuels.
So we organized colleagues, we convened forums, we wrote a memo really outlining our concerns and with practical recommendations and met with the senior leadership of Microsoft who was really sympathetic to our concerns. They seemed actually very concerned as well and really agreed with all of our recommendations. But to sum things up, over the next couple of years, we did not see the change.
that we believe is necessary and didn't think that internal pressure alone was going to be enough. So we decided to leave the company and start this campaign.
Jeremy Gilbertson (10:37)
hit on what you were saying from a percentage of revenue, I'm looking at some notes here. Up to 55 % of fiscal year 24 cloud revenue is oil, are these oil and gas contracts for Microsoft specifically or is that industry wide?
Holly Alpine (10:52)
That would be if Microsoft were to seize all the opportunities that are available to them. So that's the market potential exactly. It could be up to half of their cloud revenue. We don't have specific numbers, but we know it is one of Microsoft's top three verticals. So it is a very large portion. This is not a side project.
Jeremy Gilbertson (11:00)
That's the market potential. Got it, got it.
Will Alpine (11:14)
So when I joined Microsoft in 2020, it was right at the time of Microsoft's groundbreaking sustainability commitments. And I was really, really excited about using new advanced technology like AI to help solve the climate crisis. And at the time it was more humble machine learning. It was called Azure Machine Learning. And I was a product manager on that team. So I built the tools and tech that power all things Microsoft AI, which came to include the infrastructure that powers OpenAI and ChatGPT
And the first issue that I actually chose to tackle was the energy consumption of AI. I was one of the first people within the company shouting from the rooftops that, hey, the energy consumption of AI is going to become a huge issue. We need to act now. And so I founded a group, a community of practice called Green AI at Microsoft. And we did so many good things regarding the AI operations. We really found ways to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of AI. But.
I was also building the tools and platform that were essentially a Swiss army knife for AI. So businesses would take their problems, come to us and we would provide them with the different tools to use their data and solve that business problem. And it could be used for anything. And while I was very optimistic in the positive use cases, I even co-authored Microsoft's white paper, Accelerating Sustainability with AI. I realized that from what I've seen, one of the...
biggest use cases of AI today is to find and extract more oil and gas, more efficiently and more profitably, which really just undermines all of the good work that we or anyone at the company or even anyone in the clean energy is doing. It's like the sustainability movement is running on a treadmill right now and there's a malevolent force that is just turning that knob faster the harder we run.
Jeremy Gilbertson (12:56)
Let's break barrel of oil and What that translates into carbon emissions? I saw a stat that 81 % of a barrel of oil Actually gets burned right, Could you walk us through maybe some of the math?
of this so can maybe project impact.
Will Alpine (13:11)
the CEO of Saudi Aramco went on an interview with Bloomberg and he was stating that AI has been essential for them to maintain their cost of oil production at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and aging reserves.
So it has
allowed fossil fuels to stay competitive and undermine the economic case for the transition to clean energy.
Holly Alpine (13:34)
So back in 2019 was when Microsoft released a press release along with Exxon that very explicitly quantified the barrels per oil per day increase due to Microsoft's technology. They probably regret doing that because we have used it against them. Well, really just not really even against them, but just to quantify what is the scale that we're talking about here. How important is this?
So as you mentioned, 81 % of each barrel is burned and burning one barrel of oil releases 433 kilograms of CO2. That's according to the EPA. That 81 % is according to Petroleum Services Company. 50,000 oil equivalent barrels per day. That's 18 million barrels per year. So that's a pretty simple multiplication. 18 million, 43 kilograms, 81 % is 6.4 billion kilograms. That's 6.4
million metric tons of CO2 per year. That was for one deal with one company. If we add to that the 400,000 barrels per day for a deal with Chevron, that's 51 million metric tons. So just those two together is over 300 % of Microsoft's FY23 emissions. Those are at 17 million metric tons. That includes data centers.
So that is showing you the scale of the relative scale of these deals compared to Microsoft's entire company emissions for the entire year. And now if you compare that to Microsoft's contracted carbon removal, which are great projects, but that's five million metric tons over 15 years, that means these two deals are releasing more carbon equivalent over
thousand percent of what Microsoft is contracting to remove over 15 years.
I want to be clear here that and maybe we'll get to this, but we have never asked Microsoft to cut ties with these companies to break contracts. We have never and will never ask for that. We are asking for very reasonable guardrails on how this tech is used. We're not asking for blanket AI bands, anything like that. We just think that especially as
a who markets themselves as a sustainability leader of the world, cannot be a sustainability leader of the world when you are helping the largest oil companies on the planet dramatically increase emissions that are hundreds to thousands of times the emissions that you as a company are stating are making you a leader. mean, just like you can't call yourself a company of peace because you have cookies in the office when you're making bombs.
we think that analogy rings true here as well for sustainability.
Mark Fielding (16:14)
what do those guardrails look like?
Will Alpine (16:17)
you can think of guardrails as any sort of voluntary measure of policy, or even involuntary measure, that would ensure that technology delivers on its promise and is not weaponized. companies themselves have a tremendous lever to influence how these companies operate. So they can implement principles that would determine
what customers they work for and what scenarios they serve and what their investment strategy would be. And so we can go into Microsoft's voluntary guardrails in a second. after years of doing all we could internally, we realized that voluntary corporate behavior change will never be enough to truly mitigate the harms from the short-term profit motive that these companies are facing. What we really need is a form of international policy that would dictate how these
technologies are really being deployed in the world. And so there's a lot of precedent for that already. For example, in the EU AI Act, they have a high risk classification system for systems that may cause human harm. And it's not a far leap to connect that to human harms impacted by climate change. So if I were to wave a magic wand and design international policy that could change the direction of this technology, it would be
at the level of say the EU or the US implementing a policy that would review or require transparency and review of projects in the energy sector that would change the economics of how these technologies are being applied.
Holly Alpine (17:39)
Yeah, and.
We have a whole suite of recommendations. Back when we were meeting with Microsoft leaders, had ⁓ our recommendations were around advocate, govern, plan and transition. So advocating is trying to use, have Microsoft use their voice and market power to change market dynamics. So that's things like advocating for regulatory frameworks or sustainability assessments or political support. And also trying to scale with the competitors publicly challenged
competitors to join the considerable influence on consumers and partners in governments or around governing, putting principles in place. Microsoft has responsible AI principles. They're a prerequisite and how their technology will be used. Right now though, it does not include environment. It's around human harms, which we believe is not at stretch at all. We actually think it's a glaring omission to not have, you know, our planetary health and
in
the world that we live on as a part of what we evaluate for responsible AI. And then a plan would just be making a plan. Like, let's come up with a principled approach and framework for how we will align all of our business activities with a 1.5 degree C future that Microsoft supports very publicly. And then the last is transition. So how can the company optimize their principles and embody their values?
and really enable the transition. So aligning, engaging customer development for sustainability scenarios like methane leak detection. Great example of how advanced tech can be used with customers and partners to help a sustainable future, but not continue custom software development partnerships with companies that don't have targets, that are using it to increase upstream extraction applications and really prolong
this energy transition by making oil and gas more profitable.
we met with Microsoft leadership with these recommendations and they largely agreed with all of them. They made a lot of commitments that ultimately were kicked down the line or completely reneged. But one of the things that Microsoft did do was in March of 2022, they published energy principles titled Working Toward a Net Zero Future, evolving our work with energy companies.
And this was really in no small part in response to our pressure. We don't believe they would have published without our internal pressure. And at first, we were really excited and hopeful for the impacts of these principles. They were really saying that they will only build custom extraction tools for companies that have promised a net zero target by 2050. So that sounded great at first. And we were really proud that we had changed the policy of one of the most valuable companies
the world. As we dug in further though, we saw that these these net zero
commitments that the fossil fuel companies had to make, there was no standard that they had to follow. And meta-analysis is really report is showing that they're really largely meaningless, largely because of the fatal flaw that they only cover for the large part. These companies, fossil fuel companies, scope one and two emissions. So those are really their operations. So the emissions for, you know, running their office buildings, they completely ignore scope three, which is the fuels that they are
producing and burning. So that is the vast majority of harms. And as written, the principles, Microsoft's principles, lack any requirement for accountability for the fuels themselves. So they really are irrelevant to our concerns. And that's something that's been really disappointing is that Microsoft continues to point to those principles as a response to our concerns, even though they are irrelevant.
do not address our concerns. And even we filed a shareholder resolution last year, Will was the main filer and got to speak at the annual general meeting asking Microsoft to report on the risks of providing this tech to the fossil fuel industry. And their response was almost 100 % well, we have these energy principles, so we're good. We don't need to do anything else. And we find that just to be pretty disingenuous when they
Jeremy Gilbertson (21:44)
checked, right? Yeah, yeah.
Holly Alpine (21:50)
do not even begin to address.
Mark Fielding (21:52)
people like checking boxes.
Jeremy Gilbertson (21:54)
Holly, can we cover really quickly what scope one, scope two, and scope three is just to make it clear for the listeners?
Holly Alpine (21:58)
Sure.
Mark Fielding (21:59)
That
Holly Alpine (21:59)
scope one is someone's direct emission. So when you drive your car around, the emissions coming from the tailpipe of your car very directly, that is scope one. Scope two is around the electricity, mostly around the electricity that you use. So if you are at home and you are using your laptop and it's using electricity, you're not burning fuel at your home, but it's burning somewhere on your behalf. So where you are in the
really also determines what your scope 2 emissions are largely if you're in a place with a lot of hydro or in a place with a lot of coal etc. Or a company ⁓ who's having a data center. It really matters where that is because it matters what the grid is run on. And then scope 3 is your entire supply chain and also your sold product. say you sell for Microsoft scope 3 an example is say they sell an Xbox the folks who are using the Xbox at home
And their electricity usage, that'd be their scope two, would be Microsoft scope three, because they created the Xbox, they sold the Xbox, scope three. most carbon commitments for companies do not include scope three. They really just look at scope one and two. Once it is sold, leaves their facility, they're not worried about it. It's also everything that you're buying. for, say, on a human example, if I buy a t-shirt, a brand new t-shirt,
the emissions associated with creating that t-shirt would be my Scope3. Does that make sense? And I'll note here that, so when Microsoft sells these tools, that's not included in any of the scopes.
Jeremy Gilbertson (23:21)
that was great.
Holly Alpine (23:29)
That's one thing that has floated around as a potential option. Should we create this, say, scope four so you quantify the emissions from when you sell the tools and how the tools are used? We have never advocated for that either. We think that is just a quagmire that will take years to even come up with the methodology and align on a methodology. We've never advocated for that. We are more advocating for a principled approach rather than this quantitative because we think it'll get us where we need to go.
without this years long, I mean it's hard enough to wrap our arms around scope three. mean people's entire jobs at companies are just figuring out scope three. So that's why we're going for more of the principled approach.
Will Alpine (24:09)
And this would fall under an oil and gas company's scope three, and their net zero commitments need to include the burning of the fossil fuels themselves. And we need to phase that out. It's as simple as that.
Mark Fielding (24:20)
The reality is stark.
Do you have any friends in high places helping you? And what can our listeners do to accelerate this awareness?
Will Alpine (24:26)
Thanks for asking. It is indeed terrifying that just a few of us are fighting the intersection of the two largest forces that are impacting our planet today, tech and oil. And we are building relationships with those in power and we're building a movement to really advocate for change. And it does start small and it...
grows outwards as Holly and I have demonstrated even within a corporation, we've scaled to 10,000 employees with the sustainability work we're doing. We can get there. We just need to first off, change the narrative, start talking about what really matters, the real threats that are here and then put guardrails on things. And so we have been building relationships with US lawmakers. We're also targeting the EU as a potential first place for a policy win. And so...
If there's any listener out there that has any connections to policymakers in the EU space, please reach out to us. We would love to talk. And we're potentially planning on visiting Europe soon to have those discussions.
Jeremy Gilbertson (25:19)
If we fix the value equation, meaning that if this carbon emission has a value and this dollar taken in as profit has a value,
that's where the disconnect for me is coming about, is that the two things aren't valued equally at the corporate level.
Will Alpine (25:35)
It's indeed a very tricky question that many business leaders wrestle with. You're in essence balancing profit and planet. And unfortunately, the short-term profit motive is driving these decisions that aren't looking out for the long-term health of our planet, which will in the long-term impact shareholder returns. So think any business leader that's thinking about this needs to start to take a long-term view and change how they're engaging with their stakeholders.
I wish I could fix capitalism in a sense, but that's...
Jeremy Gilbertson (26:05)
my gosh, yeah.
Mark Fielding (26:05)
Besides that, that's
Holly Alpine (26:06)
Yeah.
Mark Fielding (26:06)
Jeremy's
question, isn't it really? how do you fix capitalism? do you think people like Bill Gates, Sam Altman, the top, the top, top founders of these companies.
Do they know that this is happening? Are they signing off on these contracts or is it people further down the food chain who are signing off on these contracts?
Will Alpine (26:25)
I do believe that those in power who design the direction of this technology are aware of the impacts that the use of this technology is having on the planet. It would be dangerous not to have a full grasp of that. Unfortunately, the...
The tools themselves are reflection of the values and power structures of those who build and wield them. And so until we can really democratize the creation of these tools, then we're going to just continue repeating these cycles of colonialism, as Karen Hao's book has pointed it.
Mark Fielding (26:57)
Thank you.
Holly Alpine (26:57)
Yeah, and I'll say that the...
corporate vice president for energy and industry at Microsoft. So he was really leading this whole space and he was leading our supposed transition to, for energy transition came from 20 years at BP and was responsible for some of the largest increases in oil production in the company's history. Also say when you were saying earlier how it's against capitalism,
I mean there is money in these low carbon projects too. mean it's just that this AI has essentially been a subsidy for fossil fuels but if we can shift towards these low carbon projects it's not like it's a full charity case to work on them. There's great value in those projects.
One other thing, Will had touched on short-term kind of shareholder value, and there is a movement around the scope of shareholder value expanding to include long-term planet sustainability. And that can fundamentally shift a corporate strategy from the short-term profits that I well mention to this longer-term value creation.
Will Alpine (28:01)
And I will add that we are in the middle of filing our next round of shareholder resolution and some of, we're building a coalition of investors who care about this. And the most engaged investors that we have are pension fund managers because they are required to take a 30 year outlook on their returns.
Jeremy Gilbertson (28:16)
interesting. So I've been known to throw out thought experiments. I'm going to throw one out real quick.
Here's an RFP. Mark is my competitor. Mark gets the RFP as well. Both of our companies look at it. My approach is I believe in what you guys are doing and I'm going to say, Will, you know what? $35 billion would be great for my bottom line.
but I'm gonna pass and Mark's gonna grab it, run with it, be like, yes, I'm in. We might know what happens to me versus what happens to Mark, but how can you help the me's of the world survive a decision like that?
Mark Fielding (28:43)
I'm not the bad guy.
Will Alpine (28:51)
That's a really good thought exercise and one that we've wrestled with in many different ways. think at the root of it is if we don't do the work, someone else will eagerly take that contract. And this is where we've come to the conclusion firmly that international policy is the only thing that will truly save us unless we have all of the different tech providers who join forces unequivocally aligned to not serve
the fossil fuel industry, which I think is unrealistic. The incentives simply aren't there. What we need is people to pressure their legislators to put in place regulation that determines how that work is done. And this ideally would be cross jurisdiction, not just the EU, but also the US, also the Saudis, I think it is.
possibly one of the hardest problems we will be facing as humans and it touches on are we truly willing to do what it takes to quit fossil fuels as a society and I wrestle with that on ongoing basis. I a swing between optimism and fear.
Mark Fielding (29:48)
Gonna take a radical breakthrough elsewhere really shift the balance, isn't it? Fusion, whatever it might be,
Will Alpine (29:55)
I want to think that, but over the past 100 years, the global mix of fossil energy has remained at 80%. So the past 20 years, there's been record progress on renewable energy installation, but I think it's more accurate to call it the renewable energy addition, not the renewable energy transition. We can only, and truly only,
get to the outcomes we need if we agree to phase out fossil fuels.
Jeremy Gilbertson (30:23)
Holly, any thoughts on the thought experiment? Mark's company, Jeremy's company?
Holly Alpine (30:27)
Yeah,
having guardrails, not blanket bans as Will said, put guardrails in place. put having policies that are putting exploration and production optimization and enhanced recovery on this kind of restricted list for custom AI, but still allowing safety or methane reduction or flaring control, things like that grid integration. Those are a great use.
of AI leak detection ⁓ that as a policy. I will also flag here though
we are raising the alarm on this issue because we think that it deserves more attention and we are not saying that we have all of the answers and know exactly how it's gonna work. And I don't think we should be required to either. It's like the folks who are lobbying Microsoft on No Tech for Apartheid saying we should not be providing the tools and the weapons that are being used to commit genocide.
We're not asking those folks, well, where else are they going to get their weapons? What if they go to other companies? It's just something that we know we need to sound the alarm on, even if we don't have the exact answers right now. But we believe we do have a lot of recommendations that if they were to be put in place, we'd be going in a lot better direction.
There are some amazing sustainability initiatives out there The issue is that we have to stop the bad at the same time as we ramp up the good. this technology is weakening that economic case for clean energy and directly undermining
all global decarbonization efforts. mean, anybody who works in sustainability or lives on this planet should care about this and should be mad. We should be angry that this is happening and for the benefit of a few. And I have to be fair too. Low oil costs is helping people in a lot of the world that needs energy. I mean, that is true. It's just, we need to have, that's why we say,
have reasonable guardrails. can't just have a, we don't want blanket bans but we also can't have just no guardrails at all. And this just going rampant, we need to think about this strategically.
Will Alpine (32:39)
Yeah, and to add on to what Holly was saying, I think one of the challenges we've seen in sustainability movement or the climate tech movement writ large is the overwhelming desire to only focus on the positive use cases. And as Holly is saying, that will never be enough until we all find a path forward to phase out the harmful uses, then we're never going to achieve the goals that we want.
Mark Fielding (32:39)
great.
Holly Alpine (32:50)
Yes.
And that's what's been frustrating working with Microsoft is the leadership that we've spoken with continues to point to the positive applications of advanced tech and AI.
Mark Fielding (33:00)
Yep.
Holly Alpine (33:12)
in response to our concerns, which they're not mutually exclusive. just because you are applying it to good things does not mean that you are stopping the bad and they are not. mean, we heard.
pretty horrifying quotes from Microsoft employees talking about how this technology is the key to keeping the industry competitive and is really the game changer, which is not what we want to be hearing.
Mark Fielding (33:37)
Before we get into our closer, where can people find out more about you and your work? Where should they go?
Will Alpine (33:44)
You can visit www.enabledemissions.com. Almost everything that we've shared is already on our website there, and we would love for people to reach out. And also, if you can connect us to any philanthropists who want to challenge the status quo and truly drive the systems change we need to survive, then please reach out.
Mark Fielding (34:00)
Jeremy, I don't think the closing question has ever been so pertinent to our guests. The question that Kevin Kelly left us, which we ask every guest at the end of thinking on paper, what should humans be? And if necessary, how does technology help us get there?
Will Alpine (34:15)
humans should be conscious of their true impacts. This could be at a company level, it could be at a personal level. And we need to be mindful of our impacts on each other and the entire planet on which we inhabit. And I see the relationship that tech playing is that tech is a mirror. And as we mentioned earlier, it's a reflection of the values and power structures of those who wield it. And so for tech to get us...
To become more conscious, we need to find ways to reclaim public power and design this tech equitably, transparently, and in a participatory fashion. I think that's really the most important way that we can change tech to give us the outcomes that we want.
And I think you had also a request if we could leave a question for our next guest.
Jeremy Gilbertson (34:55)
love it.
Will Alpine (34:56)
I'd love to know what our next guest thinks about what does it take to put guardrails in place that will ensure that tech delivers on its promise and is not captured and distorted by bad actors.
Mark Fielding (35:06)
Great question. Thank you. We will ask.
Jeremy Gilbertson (35:08)
Good stuff. Holly, anything to
add? Are you in lockstep? Love it.
Holly Alpine (35:12)
my word was conscientious
but that's pretty well aligned with Will. That's why we're married.
Jeremy Gilbertson (35:16)
Perfect. Seems like a good fit.
are I'm inspired by the work that you're doing. We need more people like you looking out for the rest of us and convincing the rest of us to help you look out for everybody. Mark, closing thoughts on your side?
Mark Fielding (35:30)
You've opened my eyes and I can't really say more than that. So I'll do my best as well to learn more about this. I wanna know why they're burning 80 % of every barrel of oil for starters. Education, it all starts there.
Jeremy Gilbertson (35:42)
Guys, thanks for listening. Hope we opened your eyes, your ears and your hearts today. Be curious, stay disruptive.
Mark Fielding (35:47)
Keep thinking on paper.
Disruptors and curious minds. Welcome to another episode of thinking on paper. My name is Jeremy. This is Mark. And I tell you what, we are about to have one of the most important conversations that we've ever had on this show related to AI's impact on the environment. And pop quiz, guys, this is not what you think.
This is different than what you think. A lot of people think the environmental impact is with these big gigantic data centers consuming electricity, power, water, all that stuff. We're gonna get into something different. We're gonna be getting something even more impactful that you need to know about. Mark, what are your thoughts to kick this thing
Mark Fielding (00:45)
The evidence of a climate crisis is obvious to everyone, but the most ridiculous. It's more drilling for oil is taking place. More gas is being discovered and the big tech giants are using AI to make the process more efficient. It doesn't make any sense, Jeremy. Make it make sense to me because I can't. So hopefully our guests will help us make sense today. Our guests are Holly and Will Alpine.
Jeremy Gilbertson (01:04)
I wish I could.
Mark Fielding (01:10)
They are founders of Enabled Emissions. They are leaders in responsible AI and sustainability with 14 years of combined experience at Microsoft, which is important. Stick with us, that will become apparent. Holly launched Microsoft's community environmental sustainability program, as well as the company's first employee engagement program for sustainability.
growing that team to over 10,000 employees globally. Will is a recognized expert in green AI and green software engineering and was a product manager on Microsoft's AI platform team. Welcome to the show, Holly and Will.
planetary scale harm, please, can you, for our listeners, paint us a picture of how bad it is right now?
Will Alpine (01:49)
It's not dramatic to call the impacts of AI right now an existential threat, specifically referring to the impact that AI can do to exacerbate climate change. A UN court issued a landmark opinion deeming climate change an existential threat and that the way that AI is being used today to
prop up the fossil fuel industry far beyond when it should be, that is causing untold damage to the climate. So I see that and those harms as being existential to all of our lived futures.
Mark Fielding (02:20)
Anything to add to that, Holly?
Holly Alpine (02:22)
I think Will summed it up. is...
very alarming to us that in the narrative around AI and climate, it seems the dominant narrative is this comparison of the net impacts of AI being the positive use cases. So how AI can be used for sustainability and reducing emissions compared to the emissions from the operations of advanced tech like data centers and completely leaving out how AI is being applied to extractive industries
to dramatically increase oil and gas production, leading to dramatic increases in our global emissions. It is a major part of that equation, yet in the entire dominant narrative, it is left out. So that's what we're trying to do is raise awareness of this issue and try to put guardrails, reasonable guardrails in place.
Will Alpine (03:17)
And one last thing to add actually, I just wanted to mention that the harms that are happening right now by use of AI by the fossil fuel industry, they're happening today. They're not a hypothetical threat the way that AGI is being presented. These are real harms happening with demonstrable impacts right now.
Mark Fielding (03:34)
before we get into the story of Enabled Emissions, could you give us some stats, some data on...
how it's changed in the past 10 years and how it is exacerbating the extraction of fossil fuels?
Holly Alpine (03:45)
So.
These technologies are core to how the fossil fuel industry operates across shale and offshore and deep water assets. They can cut production costs by 10 % while boosting reserves by 5 % and increasing yields 15%. One example is in the Permian Basin, daily output has tripled in the past decade, even as the rig counts have dropped by 46%. And these timelines for these projects have gone from 18
months to just a matter of about two weeks. And AI has really transformed operations for oil fields that really should be aging out or aging out or being deprecated because of inflation. These companies, fossil fuel companies are able to maintain these very low extraction costs over decades.
We've seen really horrifying statistics around US oil production surging from 5.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 13 and a half million today. I mean, the US is the largest producer and that is largely, we believe, to these advanced technologies. I mean, it is dramatically reshaping our future of the energy transition and really bending the curve back in the
wrong direction in this era of increasingly cheapening renewables where fossil fuels should be phased out, it is keeping them alive.
Mark Fielding (05:13)
That's a 3x
increase again, the story that we're told is that numbers should be coming down, are coming down.
Holly Alpine (05:20)
Correct.
Mark Fielding (05:21)
They're not.
Will Alpine (05:22)
It's deeply, deeply troubling. I just want to mention, to set the stage, many of the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, of oil reserves have been plucked. So oil companies are increasingly resorting to things like fracking and offshoring to stay competitive, especially in the era of cheap and abundant renewable energy.
These operations are risky and complex and they require lots of data. So as Holly mentioned earlier, it's a suite of technology. First you have sensors and internet of things that would collect the data. Then you have high performance computing to process, let's say large amounts, vast amounts, some of the biggest amounts ever of seismic and geophysical data. And then artificial intelligence can come in and provide insights on how to, for example, determine where and how to drill.
It's applied at every single stage of the fossil fuel life cycle. And to put all of this into perspective, fossil fuels account for 90 % of global emissions. And so the operations of AI have a relatively small percentage impact of that. I think it's a fraction of a percent. But if the use of that tool can reshape that 90 % of global emissions, then we're heading in the wrong direction.
Mark Fielding (06:30)
AI is maturing as well so it's only going to get better.
Holly Alpine (06:34)
Right.
worry a bit here of just essentially repeating the talking points and giving them free PR. But I think it's important to be understood. And also a lot of these oil companies, already know this. At CERAweek this past March, in 2025, the largest oil conference in the world, it was centered around AI and how it's leading to faster and cheaper oil production and making projects that would
otherwise not be viable, now viable.
Mark Fielding (07:04)
People aren't going to put up a fight. People aren't going to say anything. People aren't going to protest. Governments and politicians aren't going to bring it up with their superiors because nobody knows about it. So perhaps you can explain how Enabled Admissions came about and
how your roles, respective roles at Microsoft forced you to change your hand.
Holly Alpine (07:22)
Yeah, absolutely.
completely agree with you that awareness is the first step. It also just needs to be the option that is cheapest and most convenient and not burdens people. We can't rely on people's conscience to do the right thing. It needs to just be easy for folks. And that's what's most equitable as well. And not burdening folks who are already burdened in so many other ways. So to back up a bit of our storyline, I started at Microsoft in 2014. I was a technical account manager.
manager,
so not in sustainability, but I grew into sustainability roles as Microsoft was really growing into this global sustainability leader. I worked in the data center space, so I was on Microsoft's cloud operations and innovation team. I was on the energy team first, so powering those data centers as they were, the energy use was hockey-sticking. And then I moved into, I started a program called Community Environmental Sustainability,
where I was funding local sustainability projects in those communities that hosted our data centers. As you mentioned in the beginning, also co-founded Microsoft's employee engagement team, grew that to 10,000 passionate, intelligent folks across the company who were working on sustainability and really cared and were doing amazing things. And we were really excited for progress. In January of 2020 was when Microsoft had their
big climate pledges. I don't know if you remember that, but around carbon water, waste and ecosystems that were really groundbreaking commitments for a public company to make, around having net negative emissions. That was incredible. And that was about the same time as Will started at the company around March 2020.
he and I started working on some things together and he joined that sustainability community. I mean, I stood on stages around the world promulgating the virtues of my company and how we were leading the world to a net zero future. I mean, the thing is, Microsoft is doing fantastic things. There are so many people.
at
Microsoft who I still love and think are doing fantastic work. We just started becoming aware of these contracts with these oil companies and contracts specifically to drill more oil. mean, it was very explicit what we saw and we thought, you know, this must be a one off. This must be something that's being phased out. But as we dug, we saw just how much of Microsoft's business was in fossil fuels.
So we organized colleagues, we convened forums, we wrote a memo really outlining our concerns and with practical recommendations and met with the senior leadership of Microsoft who was really sympathetic to our concerns. They seemed actually very concerned as well and really agreed with all of our recommendations. But to sum things up, over the next couple of years, we did not see the change.
that we believe is necessary and didn't think that internal pressure alone was going to be enough. So we decided to leave the company and start this campaign.
Jeremy Gilbertson (10:37)
hit on what you were saying from a percentage of revenue, I'm looking at some notes here. Up to 55 % of fiscal year 24 cloud revenue is oil, are these oil and gas contracts for Microsoft specifically or is that industry wide?
Holly Alpine (10:52)
That would be if Microsoft were to seize all the opportunities that are available to them. So that's the market potential exactly. It could be up to half of their cloud revenue. We don't have specific numbers, but we know it is one of Microsoft's top three verticals. So it is a very large portion. This is not a side project.
Jeremy Gilbertson (11:00)
That's the market potential. Got it, got it.
Will Alpine (11:14)
So when I joined Microsoft in 2020, it was right at the time of Microsoft's groundbreaking sustainability commitments. And I was really, really excited about using new advanced technology like AI to help solve the climate crisis. And at the time it was more humble machine learning. It was called Azure Machine Learning. And I was a product manager on that team. So I built the tools and tech that power all things Microsoft AI, which came to include the infrastructure that powers OpenAI and ChatGPT
And the first issue that I actually chose to tackle was the energy consumption of AI. I was one of the first people within the company shouting from the rooftops that, hey, the energy consumption of AI is going to become a huge issue. We need to act now. And so I founded a group, a community of practice called Green AI at Microsoft. And we did so many good things regarding the AI operations. We really found ways to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of AI. But.
I was also building the tools and platform that were essentially a Swiss army knife for AI. So businesses would take their problems, come to us and we would provide them with the different tools to use their data and solve that business problem. And it could be used for anything. And while I was very optimistic in the positive use cases, I even co-authored Microsoft's white paper, Accelerating Sustainability with AI. I realized that from what I've seen, one of the...
biggest use cases of AI today is to find and extract more oil and gas, more efficiently and more profitably, which really just undermines all of the good work that we or anyone at the company or even anyone in the clean energy is doing. It's like the sustainability movement is running on a treadmill right now and there's a malevolent force that is just turning that knob faster the harder we run.
Jeremy Gilbertson (12:56)
Let's break barrel of oil and What that translates into carbon emissions? I saw a stat that 81 % of a barrel of oil Actually gets burned right, Could you walk us through maybe some of the math?
of this so can maybe project impact.
Will Alpine (13:11)
the CEO of Saudi Aramco went on an interview with Bloomberg and he was stating that AI has been essential for them to maintain their cost of oil production at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and aging reserves.
So it has
allowed fossil fuels to stay competitive and undermine the economic case for the transition to clean energy.
Holly Alpine (13:34)
So back in 2019 was when Microsoft released a press release along with Exxon that very explicitly quantified the barrels per oil per day increase due to Microsoft's technology. They probably regret doing that because we have used it against them. Well, really just not really even against them, but just to quantify what is the scale that we're talking about here. How important is this?
So as you mentioned, 81 % of each barrel is burned and burning one barrel of oil releases 433 kilograms of CO2. That's according to the EPA. That 81 % is according to Petroleum Services Company. 50,000 oil equivalent barrels per day. That's 18 million barrels per year. So that's a pretty simple multiplication. 18 million, 43 kilograms, 81 % is 6.4 billion kilograms. That's 6.4
million metric tons of CO2 per year. That was for one deal with one company. If we add to that the 400,000 barrels per day for a deal with Chevron, that's 51 million metric tons. So just those two together is over 300 % of Microsoft's FY23 emissions. Those are at 17 million metric tons. That includes data centers.
So that is showing you the scale of the relative scale of these deals compared to Microsoft's entire company emissions for the entire year. And now if you compare that to Microsoft's contracted carbon removal, which are great projects, but that's five million metric tons over 15 years, that means these two deals are releasing more carbon equivalent over
thousand percent of what Microsoft is contracting to remove over 15 years.
I want to be clear here that and maybe we'll get to this, but we have never asked Microsoft to cut ties with these companies to break contracts. We have never and will never ask for that. We are asking for very reasonable guardrails on how this tech is used. We're not asking for blanket AI bands, anything like that. We just think that especially as
a who markets themselves as a sustainability leader of the world, cannot be a sustainability leader of the world when you are helping the largest oil companies on the planet dramatically increase emissions that are hundreds to thousands of times the emissions that you as a company are stating are making you a leader. mean, just like you can't call yourself a company of peace because you have cookies in the office when you're making bombs.
we think that analogy rings true here as well for sustainability.
Mark Fielding (16:14)
what do those guardrails look like?
Will Alpine (16:17)
you can think of guardrails as any sort of voluntary measure of policy, or even involuntary measure, that would ensure that technology delivers on its promise and is not weaponized. companies themselves have a tremendous lever to influence how these companies operate. So they can implement principles that would determine
what customers they work for and what scenarios they serve and what their investment strategy would be. And so we can go into Microsoft's voluntary guardrails in a second. after years of doing all we could internally, we realized that voluntary corporate behavior change will never be enough to truly mitigate the harms from the short-term profit motive that these companies are facing. What we really need is a form of international policy that would dictate how these
technologies are really being deployed in the world. And so there's a lot of precedent for that already. For example, in the EU AI Act, they have a high risk classification system for systems that may cause human harm. And it's not a far leap to connect that to human harms impacted by climate change. So if I were to wave a magic wand and design international policy that could change the direction of this technology, it would be
at the level of say the EU or the US implementing a policy that would review or require transparency and review of projects in the energy sector that would change the economics of how these technologies are being applied.
Holly Alpine (17:39)
Yeah, and.
We have a whole suite of recommendations. Back when we were meeting with Microsoft leaders, had ⁓ our recommendations were around advocate, govern, plan and transition. So advocating is trying to use, have Microsoft use their voice and market power to change market dynamics. So that's things like advocating for regulatory frameworks or sustainability assessments or political support. And also trying to scale with the competitors publicly challenged
competitors to join the considerable influence on consumers and partners in governments or around governing, putting principles in place. Microsoft has responsible AI principles. They're a prerequisite and how their technology will be used. Right now though, it does not include environment. It's around human harms, which we believe is not at stretch at all. We actually think it's a glaring omission to not have, you know, our planetary health and
in
the world that we live on as a part of what we evaluate for responsible AI. And then a plan would just be making a plan. Like, let's come up with a principled approach and framework for how we will align all of our business activities with a 1.5 degree C future that Microsoft supports very publicly. And then the last is transition. So how can the company optimize their principles and embody their values?
and really enable the transition. So aligning, engaging customer development for sustainability scenarios like methane leak detection. Great example of how advanced tech can be used with customers and partners to help a sustainable future, but not continue custom software development partnerships with companies that don't have targets, that are using it to increase upstream extraction applications and really prolong
this energy transition by making oil and gas more profitable.
we met with Microsoft leadership with these recommendations and they largely agreed with all of them. They made a lot of commitments that ultimately were kicked down the line or completely reneged. But one of the things that Microsoft did do was in March of 2022, they published energy principles titled Working Toward a Net Zero Future, evolving our work with energy companies.
And this was really in no small part in response to our pressure. We don't believe they would have published without our internal pressure. And at first, we were really excited and hopeful for the impacts of these principles. They were really saying that they will only build custom extraction tools for companies that have promised a net zero target by 2050. So that sounded great at first. And we were really proud that we had changed the policy of one of the most valuable companies
the world. As we dug in further though, we saw that these these net zero
commitments that the fossil fuel companies had to make, there was no standard that they had to follow. And meta-analysis is really report is showing that they're really largely meaningless, largely because of the fatal flaw that they only cover for the large part. These companies, fossil fuel companies, scope one and two emissions. So those are really their operations. So the emissions for, you know, running their office buildings, they completely ignore scope three, which is the fuels that they are
producing and burning. So that is the vast majority of harms. And as written, the principles, Microsoft's principles, lack any requirement for accountability for the fuels themselves. So they really are irrelevant to our concerns. And that's something that's been really disappointing is that Microsoft continues to point to those principles as a response to our concerns, even though they are irrelevant.
do not address our concerns. And even we filed a shareholder resolution last year, Will was the main filer and got to speak at the annual general meeting asking Microsoft to report on the risks of providing this tech to the fossil fuel industry. And their response was almost 100 % well, we have these energy principles, so we're good. We don't need to do anything else. And we find that just to be pretty disingenuous when they
Jeremy Gilbertson (21:44)
checked, right? Yeah, yeah.
Holly Alpine (21:50)
do not even begin to address.
Mark Fielding (21:52)
people like checking boxes.
Jeremy Gilbertson (21:54)
Holly, can we cover really quickly what scope one, scope two, and scope three is just to make it clear for the listeners?
Holly Alpine (21:58)
Sure.
Mark Fielding (21:59)
That
Holly Alpine (21:59)
scope one is someone's direct emission. So when you drive your car around, the emissions coming from the tailpipe of your car very directly, that is scope one. Scope two is around the electricity, mostly around the electricity that you use. So if you are at home and you are using your laptop and it's using electricity, you're not burning fuel at your home, but it's burning somewhere on your behalf. So where you are in the
really also determines what your scope 2 emissions are largely if you're in a place with a lot of hydro or in a place with a lot of coal etc. Or a company ⁓ who's having a data center. It really matters where that is because it matters what the grid is run on. And then scope 3 is your entire supply chain and also your sold product. say you sell for Microsoft scope 3 an example is say they sell an Xbox the folks who are using the Xbox at home
And their electricity usage, that'd be their scope two, would be Microsoft scope three, because they created the Xbox, they sold the Xbox, scope three. most carbon commitments for companies do not include scope three. They really just look at scope one and two. Once it is sold, leaves their facility, they're not worried about it. It's also everything that you're buying. for, say, on a human example, if I buy a t-shirt, a brand new t-shirt,
the emissions associated with creating that t-shirt would be my Scope3. Does that make sense? And I'll note here that, so when Microsoft sells these tools, that's not included in any of the scopes.
Jeremy Gilbertson (23:21)
that was great.
Holly Alpine (23:29)
That's one thing that has floated around as a potential option. Should we create this, say, scope four so you quantify the emissions from when you sell the tools and how the tools are used? We have never advocated for that either. We think that is just a quagmire that will take years to even come up with the methodology and align on a methodology. We've never advocated for that. We are more advocating for a principled approach rather than this quantitative because we think it'll get us where we need to go.
without this years long, I mean it's hard enough to wrap our arms around scope three. mean people's entire jobs at companies are just figuring out scope three. So that's why we're going for more of the principled approach.
Will Alpine (24:09)
And this would fall under an oil and gas company's scope three, and their net zero commitments need to include the burning of the fossil fuels themselves. And we need to phase that out. It's as simple as that.
Mark Fielding (24:20)
The reality is stark.
Do you have any friends in high places helping you? And what can our listeners do to accelerate this awareness?
Will Alpine (24:26)
Thanks for asking. It is indeed terrifying that just a few of us are fighting the intersection of the two largest forces that are impacting our planet today, tech and oil. And we are building relationships with those in power and we're building a movement to really advocate for change. And it does start small and it...
grows outwards as Holly and I have demonstrated even within a corporation, we've scaled to 10,000 employees with the sustainability work we're doing. We can get there. We just need to first off, change the narrative, start talking about what really matters, the real threats that are here and then put guardrails on things. And so we have been building relationships with US lawmakers. We're also targeting the EU as a potential first place for a policy win. And so...
If there's any listener out there that has any connections to policymakers in the EU space, please reach out to us. We would love to talk. And we're potentially planning on visiting Europe soon to have those discussions.
Jeremy Gilbertson (25:19)
If we fix the value equation, meaning that if this carbon emission has a value and this dollar taken in as profit has a value,
that's where the disconnect for me is coming about, is that the two things aren't valued equally at the corporate level.
Will Alpine (25:35)
It's indeed a very tricky question that many business leaders wrestle with. You're in essence balancing profit and planet. And unfortunately, the short-term profit motive is driving these decisions that aren't looking out for the long-term health of our planet, which will in the long-term impact shareholder returns. So think any business leader that's thinking about this needs to start to take a long-term view and change how they're engaging with their stakeholders.
I wish I could fix capitalism in a sense, but that's...
Jeremy Gilbertson (26:05)
my gosh, yeah.
Mark Fielding (26:05)
Besides that, that's
Holly Alpine (26:06)
Yeah.
Mark Fielding (26:06)
Jeremy's
question, isn't it really? how do you fix capitalism? do you think people like Bill Gates, Sam Altman, the top, the top, top founders of these companies.
Do they know that this is happening? Are they signing off on these contracts or is it people further down the food chain who are signing off on these contracts?
Will Alpine (26:25)
I do believe that those in power who design the direction of this technology are aware of the impacts that the use of this technology is having on the planet. It would be dangerous not to have a full grasp of that. Unfortunately, the...
The tools themselves are reflection of the values and power structures of those who build and wield them. And so until we can really democratize the creation of these tools, then we're going to just continue repeating these cycles of colonialism, as Karen Hao's book has pointed it.
Mark Fielding (26:57)
Thank you.
Holly Alpine (26:57)
Yeah, and I'll say that the...
corporate vice president for energy and industry at Microsoft. So he was really leading this whole space and he was leading our supposed transition to, for energy transition came from 20 years at BP and was responsible for some of the largest increases in oil production in the company's history. Also say when you were saying earlier how it's against capitalism,
I mean there is money in these low carbon projects too. mean it's just that this AI has essentially been a subsidy for fossil fuels but if we can shift towards these low carbon projects it's not like it's a full charity case to work on them. There's great value in those projects.
One other thing, Will had touched on short-term kind of shareholder value, and there is a movement around the scope of shareholder value expanding to include long-term planet sustainability. And that can fundamentally shift a corporate strategy from the short-term profits that I well mention to this longer-term value creation.
Will Alpine (28:01)
And I will add that we are in the middle of filing our next round of shareholder resolution and some of, we're building a coalition of investors who care about this. And the most engaged investors that we have are pension fund managers because they are required to take a 30 year outlook on their returns.
Jeremy Gilbertson (28:16)
interesting. So I've been known to throw out thought experiments. I'm going to throw one out real quick.
Here's an RFP. Mark is my competitor. Mark gets the RFP as well. Both of our companies look at it. My approach is I believe in what you guys are doing and I'm going to say, Will, you know what? $35 billion would be great for my bottom line.
but I'm gonna pass and Mark's gonna grab it, run with it, be like, yes, I'm in. We might know what happens to me versus what happens to Mark, but how can you help the me's of the world survive a decision like that?
Mark Fielding (28:43)
I'm not the bad guy.
Will Alpine (28:51)
That's a really good thought exercise and one that we've wrestled with in many different ways. think at the root of it is if we don't do the work, someone else will eagerly take that contract. And this is where we've come to the conclusion firmly that international policy is the only thing that will truly save us unless we have all of the different tech providers who join forces unequivocally aligned to not serve
the fossil fuel industry, which I think is unrealistic. The incentives simply aren't there. What we need is people to pressure their legislators to put in place regulation that determines how that work is done. And this ideally would be cross jurisdiction, not just the EU, but also the US, also the Saudis, I think it is.
possibly one of the hardest problems we will be facing as humans and it touches on are we truly willing to do what it takes to quit fossil fuels as a society and I wrestle with that on ongoing basis. I a swing between optimism and fear.
Mark Fielding (29:48)
Gonna take a radical breakthrough elsewhere really shift the balance, isn't it? Fusion, whatever it might be,
Will Alpine (29:55)
I want to think that, but over the past 100 years, the global mix of fossil energy has remained at 80%. So the past 20 years, there's been record progress on renewable energy installation, but I think it's more accurate to call it the renewable energy addition, not the renewable energy transition. We can only, and truly only,
get to the outcomes we need if we agree to phase out fossil fuels.
Jeremy Gilbertson (30:23)
Holly, any thoughts on the thought experiment? Mark's company, Jeremy's company?
Holly Alpine (30:27)
Yeah,
having guardrails, not blanket bans as Will said, put guardrails in place. put having policies that are putting exploration and production optimization and enhanced recovery on this kind of restricted list for custom AI, but still allowing safety or methane reduction or flaring control, things like that grid integration. Those are a great use.
of AI leak detection ⁓ that as a policy. I will also flag here though
we are raising the alarm on this issue because we think that it deserves more attention and we are not saying that we have all of the answers and know exactly how it's gonna work. And I don't think we should be required to either. It's like the folks who are lobbying Microsoft on No Tech for Apartheid saying we should not be providing the tools and the weapons that are being used to commit genocide.
We're not asking those folks, well, where else are they going to get their weapons? What if they go to other companies? It's just something that we know we need to sound the alarm on, even if we don't have the exact answers right now. But we believe we do have a lot of recommendations that if they were to be put in place, we'd be going in a lot better direction.
There are some amazing sustainability initiatives out there The issue is that we have to stop the bad at the same time as we ramp up the good. this technology is weakening that economic case for clean energy and directly undermining
all global decarbonization efforts. mean, anybody who works in sustainability or lives on this planet should care about this and should be mad. We should be angry that this is happening and for the benefit of a few. And I have to be fair too. Low oil costs is helping people in a lot of the world that needs energy. I mean, that is true. It's just, we need to have, that's why we say,
have reasonable guardrails. can't just have a, we don't want blanket bans but we also can't have just no guardrails at all. And this just going rampant, we need to think about this strategically.
Will Alpine (32:39)
Yeah, and to add on to what Holly was saying, I think one of the challenges we've seen in sustainability movement or the climate tech movement writ large is the overwhelming desire to only focus on the positive use cases. And as Holly is saying, that will never be enough until we all find a path forward to phase out the harmful uses, then we're never going to achieve the goals that we want.
Mark Fielding (32:39)
great.
Holly Alpine (32:50)
Yes.
And that's what's been frustrating working with Microsoft is the leadership that we've spoken with continues to point to the positive applications of advanced tech and AI.
Mark Fielding (33:00)
Yep.
Holly Alpine (33:12)
in response to our concerns, which they're not mutually exclusive. just because you are applying it to good things does not mean that you are stopping the bad and they are not. mean, we heard.
pretty horrifying quotes from Microsoft employees talking about how this technology is the key to keeping the industry competitive and is really the game changer, which is not what we want to be hearing.
Mark Fielding (33:37)
Before we get into our closer, where can people find out more about you and your work? Where should they go?
Will Alpine (33:44)
You can visit www.enabledemissions.com. Almost everything that we've shared is already on our website there, and we would love for people to reach out. And also, if you can connect us to any philanthropists who want to challenge the status quo and truly drive the systems change we need to survive, then please reach out.
Mark Fielding (34:00)
Jeremy, I don't think the closing question has ever been so pertinent to our guests. The question that Kevin Kelly left us, which we ask every guest at the end of thinking on paper, what should humans be? And if necessary, how does technology help us get there?
Will Alpine (34:15)
humans should be conscious of their true impacts. This could be at a company level, it could be at a personal level. And we need to be mindful of our impacts on each other and the entire planet on which we inhabit. And I see the relationship that tech playing is that tech is a mirror. And as we mentioned earlier, it's a reflection of the values and power structures of those who wield it. And so for tech to get us...
To become more conscious, we need to find ways to reclaim public power and design this tech equitably, transparently, and in a participatory fashion. I think that's really the most important way that we can change tech to give us the outcomes that we want.
And I think you had also a request if we could leave a question for our next guest.
Jeremy Gilbertson (34:55)
love it.
Will Alpine (34:56)
I'd love to know what our next guest thinks about what does it take to put guardrails in place that will ensure that tech delivers on its promise and is not captured and distorted by bad actors.
Mark Fielding (35:06)
Great question. Thank you. We will ask.
Jeremy Gilbertson (35:08)
Good stuff. Holly, anything to
add? Are you in lockstep? Love it.
Holly Alpine (35:12)
my word was conscientious
but that's pretty well aligned with Will. That's why we're married.
Jeremy Gilbertson (35:16)
Perfect. Seems like a good fit.
are I'm inspired by the work that you're doing. We need more people like you looking out for the rest of us and convincing the rest of us to help you look out for everybody. Mark, closing thoughts on your side?
Mark Fielding (35:30)
You've opened my eyes and I can't really say more than that. So I'll do my best as well to learn more about this. I wanna know why they're burning 80 % of every barrel of oil for starters. Education, it all starts there.
Jeremy Gilbertson (35:42)
Guys, thanks for listening. Hope we opened your eyes, your ears and your hearts today. Be curious, stay disruptive.
Mark Fielding (35:47)
Keep thinking on paper.
