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The world’s biggest, most functional city might also be the most pedestrian-friendly. That’s not a coincidence.
For cities that want to reduce the number of cars, bike lanes are a good place to start. They are cheap, usually city-level authorities can introduce them, and they do not require you to raise taxes on people who own cars. What if you want to do something more radical though? What would a city that genuinely wanted to get the car out of its citizens’ lives in a much bigger way do? A city that wanted to make it possible for most people to live decent lives and be able to get around without needing a car, even without needing to get on a bicycle?
There is only one city on Earth I have ever visited that has truly managed this. But it happens to be the biggest city on the planet: Tokyo, the capital of Japan.
In popular imagination, at least in the West, Tokyo is both incredibly futuristic, and also rather foreign and confusing. Before I first visited, in 2017, I imagined it to be an incredibly hectic place, a noisy, bustling megacity. I was on holiday and trying to escape Nairobi, the rather sprawling, low-height, and green city I was living in at the time, and I picked Tokyo largely because I wanted to get as far away from Africa as I could. I needed a break from the traffic jams, the power cuts, the constant negotiation to achieve anything, and the heat. I was looking for an escape somewhere as different as I could think of, and I wanted to ride trains around and look at high-tech skyscrapers and not worry about getting splattered by mud walking in the street. I was expecting to feel bowled over by the height of the buildings, the sheer crush of people, and the noise.
Yet when I emerged from the train station in Shibuya, blinking jetlagged in the morning light after a night flight from Amsterdam, what actually caught me off guard was not the bustle but rather how quiet the city is. When you see cliched images of Tokyo, what invariably is shown are the enormous crowds of pedestrians crossing the roads, or Mount Fuji in the background of the futuristic skyline. I expected something like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, I suppose — futuristic and overwhelming. From photos, Tokyo can look almost unplanned, with neon signs everywhere and a huge variety of forms of architecture. You expect it to feel messy. What I experienced, however, was a city that felt almost like being in a futuristic village. It is utterly calm, in a way that is actually rather strange.
And it took me a little while to realize why. There is simply no traffic noise. No hooting, no engine noise, not even much of the noise of cars accelerating on tarmac. Because there are so few of them. Most of the time you can walk in the middle of the street, so rare is the traffic. There are not even cars parked at the side of the road. That is not true of all of Tokyo, of course. The expressways are often packed. Occasionally, I was told, particularly when it snows, or during holidays when large numbers of people try to drive out to the countryside, jams form that can trap drivers for whole days. But on most residential streets, traffic is almost nonexistent. Even the relatively few cars that you do see are invariably tiny, quiet vehicles.
Among rich cities, Tokyo has the lowest car use in the world. According to Deloitte, a management consultancy, just 12 percent of journeys are completed by private car. It might surprise you to hear that cycling is actually more popular than driving in Tokyo — it accounts for 17 percent of journeys, though the Japanese do not make as much of a big deal out of it as the Dutch do. But walking and public transport dwarf both sorts of vehicles. Tokyo has the most-used public transport system in the world, with 30 million people commuting by train each day. This may sound rather unpleasant. You have probably seen footage of the most crowded routes at rush hour, when staff literally push people onto the carriages to make space, or read about young women being groped in the crush. It happens, but it is not typical. Most of the trains I rode were busy but comfortable, and I was able to get a seat.
And what makes Tokyo remarkable is that the city was almost entirely built after the original city was mostly flattened by American bombers in the Second World War. Elsewhere in the world, cities built after the war are almost invariably car-dependent. Think of Houston, Texas, which has grown from 300,000 people in the 1950s to 10 times that now. Or England’s tiny version, Milton Keynes, which is the fastest-growing city in the country. Or almost any developing world city. Since the advent of the automobile, architects and urban planners worldwide have found it almost impossible to resist building cities around roads and an assumption that most people will drive. Tokyo somehow managed not to. It rebuilt in a much more human-centric way.
It may come as a surprise that Japan is home to the world’s biggest relatively car-free city. After all, Japan is the country that gave the world Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Nissan, and exports vehicles all over the world. And in fairness, a lot of Japanese people do own cars. Overall car ownership in Japan is about 590 vehicles per 1,000 people, which is less than America’s rate of about 800 per 1,000, but comparable to a lot of European countries. On average, there are 1.06 cars per household. But Tokyo is a big exception. In Tokyo, there are only 0.32 cars per household. Most Japanese car owners live in smaller towns and cities than the capital. The highest rate of car ownership, for example, is in Fukui Prefecture, on the western coast of Honshu, one of Japan’s least densely populated areas.
And car ownership in Japan is falling, unlike almost everywhere else on Earth. Part of the reason is just that the country is getting older and the population is falling. But it is also that more and more people live in Tokyo. Annually, Japan is losing about 0.3 percent of its population, or about half a million people a year. Greater Tokyo, however, with its population of 37 million, is shrinking by less than that, or about 0.1 percent a year. And the prefecture of Tokyo proper, with a population of 14 million, is still growing. The reason is that Tokyo generates the best jobs in Japan, and it is also an increasingly pleasant place to live. You may think of Tokyoites as being crammed into tiny apartments, but in fact, the average home in Tokyo has 65.9 square meters of livable floor space (709 square feet). That is still very small—indeed, it is less than the size of the average home in London, where the figure is 80 square meters. But the typical household in London has 2.7 people living in it. In Tokyo, it is 1.95. So per capita, people in Tokyo actually have more space than Londoners.
Overall in fact, people in Tokyo have one of the highest qualities of life in the world. A 2015 survey by Monocle magazine came to the conclusion that Tokyo is the best city on Earth in which to live, “due to its defining paradox of heart-stopping size and concurrent feeling of peace and quiet.” In 2021 The Economist ranked it fourth, after Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand, and another Japanese city, Osaka. Life expectancy overall is 84 years old, one of the highest levels of any city on the planet. A good part of this has to do with the lack of cars. Air pollution is considerably lower than in any other city of equivalent size anywhere in the world. Typical commutes are, admittedly, often fairly long, at 40 minutes each way. But they are not in awful smoggy car traffic.
This article was excerpted from Daniel Knowles' book "Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It"Abrams Press ©2023
So how has Tokyo managed it? Andre Sorensen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, who published a history of urban planning in Japan, told me that Japan’s history has a lot to do with it. Japan’s urbanization happened a little more like some poorer countries — quickly. At the start of the 20th century, just 15 percent of Japanese people lived in cities. Now 91 percent do, one of the highest rates of urbanization in the entire world. That rapid growth meant that Tokyo’s postwar growth was relatively chaotic. Buildings sprawled out into rice paddies, with sewage connections and power often only coming later. Electricity is still often delivered by overhead wires, not underground cables. And yet somehow this haphazard system manages to produce a relatively coherent city, and one that is much easier to get around on foot or by public transport than by car.
Part of the reason, Sorensen explained to me, is just historical chance. Japanese street layouts traditionally were narrow, much like medieval alleys in Europe. Land ownership was often very fragmented, meaning that house builders had to learn to use small plots in a way that almost never happened in Europe or America. And unlike the governments there, the government in postwar Japan was much more concerned with boosting economic growth by creating power plants and industrial yards than it was with creating huge new boulevards through neighborhoods. So the layouts never changed. According to Sorensen’s research, 35 percent of Japanese streets are not actually wide enough for a car to travel down them. More remarkably still, 86 percent are not wide enough for a car to be able to stop without blocking the traffic behind it.
Yet the much bigger reason for Tokyo’s high quality of life is that Japan does not subsidize car ownership in the way other countries do. In fact, owning a car in Tokyo is rather difficult. For one thing, cars are far more enthusiastically inspected than in America or most of Europe. Cars must be checked by officials every two years to ensure that they are still compliant, and have not been modified. That is true in Britain too, but the cost is higher than what a Ministry of Transport test costs. Even a well-maintained car can cost 100,000 yen to inspect (or around $850). On cars that are older than 10 years, the fees escalate dramatically, which helps to explain why so many Japanese sell their cars relatively quickly, and so many of them end up in East Africa or Southeast Asia. On top of that there is an annual automobile tax of up to 50,000 yen, as well as a 5 percent tax on the purchase. And then gasoline is taxed too, meaning it costs around 160 yen per liter, or about $6 a gallon, less than in much of Europe, but more than Americans accept.
And even if you are willing to pay all of the taxes, you cannot simply go and buy a car in the way that you might in most countries. To be allowed to purchase a car, you have to be able to prove that you have somewhere to park it. This approval is issued by the local police, and is known as a shako shomeisho, or “garage certificate.” Without one, you cannot buy a car. This helps to explain why the Japanese buy so many tiny cars, like the so-called Kei cars. It means they can have smaller garages. Even if the law didn’t exist though, owning a car in Japan without having a dedicated parking space for it would be a nightmare. Under a nationwide law passed in 1957, overnight street parking of any sort is completely illegal. So if you were to somehow buy a car with no place to store it, you could not simply park it on the street, because it would get towed the next morning, and you would get fined 200,000 yen (around $1,700). In fact, most street parking of any sort is illegal. There are a few exceptions, but more than 95 percent of Japanese streets have no street parking at all, even during the day.
This, rather than any beautiful architecture, explains why Tokyo’s streets feel so pleasant to walk down, or indeed to look at. There are no cars filling them up. It also means that land is actually valued properly. If you want to own a car, it means that you also have to own (or at least rent) the requisite land to keep it. In rural areas or smaller towns, this is not a huge deal, because land is relatively cheap, and so a permit might only cost 8,000 to 9,000 yen, or about $75 a month. But in Tokyo, the cost will be at least four times that. Garages in American cities can cost that much too, but in Japan there is no cheap street parking option, as in much of New York or Chicago. Most apartment buildings are constructed without any parking at all, because the developers can use the space more efficiently for housing. Only around 42 percent of condominium buildings have parking spaces for residents. Similarly, even if you own a parking space, it is almost never free to park anywhere you might take your car. Parking in Tokyo typically costs 1,000 yen an hour, or around $8.50.
This is a big disincentive to driving. Sorensen told me that when he lived in Tokyo, some wealthy friends of his owned a top-end BMW, which they replaced every few years, because they were car nuts. But because they did not have anywhere to park it near their home, if they wanted to use it, they had to take public transport (or a taxi) to get to it at its garage. As a result, they simply did not use their car very much. In their day-to- day life, they used the trains, the same as everybody else, or took taxis, because that was cheaper than picking up the car. This sort of thing probably helps to explain why the Japanese, despite relatively high levels of car ownership, do not actually drive very far. Car owners in Japan typically drive around 6,000 kilometers per year. That is about half what the average British car owner drives, and less than a third of what the average American does.
Parking rules are not, however, the limit of what keeps cars out of Tokyo. Arguably, an even bigger reason is how infrastructure has been funded in Japan. That is, by the market, rather than directly by taxes. In the 1950s and ’60s, much like Europe and the United States, Japan began building expressways. But unlike in Europe and America, it was starting from a considerably more difficult place. In 1957, Ralph J. Watkins, an American economist who had been invited to advise the Japanese government, reported that “the roads of Japan are incredibly bad. No other industrial nation has so completely neglected its highway system.” Just 23 percent of roads were paved, including just two-thirds of the only highway linking Osaka, Japan’s historical economic hub, to Tokyo.
But unlike America, the idea of making them free never seemed to cross politicians’ minds, probably because Japan in the postwar era was not the world’s richest country. Capital was not freely available. To build the roads, the national government formed corporations such as the Shuto Kōsoku-dōro Kabushiki-gaisha, or Metropolitan Expressway Company, which was formed in greater Tokyo in 1959. These corporations took out vast amounts of debt, which they had to repay, so that the Japanese taxpayer would not be burdened. That meant that tolls were imposed from the very beginning. The tolls had to cover not just the construction cost, but also maintenance and interest on the loans. Today, to drive on the Shuto Expressway costs from 300 to 1,320 yen, or $2.50 to $11 for a “standard-size” automobile. Overall, tolls in Japan are the most expensive in the world — around three times higher than the level charged on the private autoroutes in France, or on average, about 3,000 yen per 100 kilometers ($22 to drive 62 miles).
What that meant was that, from the beginning, roads did not have an unfair advantage in their competition with other forms of transport. And so in Japan, unlike in almost the entire rest of the rich world, the postwar era saw the construction of enormous amounts of rail infrastructure. Indeed, at a time when America and Britain were nationalizing and cutting their railways to cope with falling demand for train travel, in Japan, the national railway company was pouring investment into the system. The world’s first high-speed railway, the Tokaido Shinkansen, was opened in 1964 to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics, with a top speed of 210 kilometers per hour. That was almost double what trains elsewhere mostly managed. From 1964 to 1999, the number of passengers using the Shinkansen grew from 11 million annually to more than 300 million.
Sorensen told me about how in the 1950s and ’60s, the trains were a huge point of national pride for the Japanese government, a bit like car industries were elsewhere. “And justifiably! It was a fantastic invention. To say we can make electric rail go twice as fast. What an achievement.” Thanks to that, the railways ministry became a huge power center in government, rather than a neglected backwater as it often had become elsewhere. In rail, the Japanese “built up expertise in engineering, in bureaucratic resources and capacities, and political clout that just lasted,” he told me. “Whereas the road-building sector was weak.” Elsewhere, building roads became a self-reinforcing process, because as more was poured into constructing them, more people bought cars and demanded more roads. That did not happen in Japan. Instead, the growth in railway infrastructure led to growth in, well, more railway infrastructure.
If you visit Tokyo now, what you will find is that the most hectic, crowded places in the city are all around the train and subway stations. The reason is that Japan’s railway companies (the national firm was privatized in the 1980s) do not only provide railways. They are also big real estate investors. A bit like the firm that built the Metropolitan Railway in the 1930s in Britain, when Japan’s railway firms expanded service, they paid for it by building on the land around the stations. In practice, what that means is that they built lots of apartments, department stores, and supermarkets near (and directly above) railway stations, so that people can get straight off the train and get home quickly. That makes the trains more efficient, because people can get where they need to go without having to walk or travel to and from stations especially far. But it also means that the railways are incredibly profitable, because unlike in the West, they are able to profit from the improvement in land value that they create.
What this adds up to is that Tokyo is one of very few cities on Earth where travel by car is not actively subsidized, and funnily neither is public transport, and yet both work well, when appropriate. However, Tokyo is not completely alone. Several big cities across Asia have managed to avoid the catastrophe (cartastrophe?) that befell much of the western world. Hong Kong manages it nearly as well as Tokyo; there are just 76 cars per 1,000 people in the city state. So too does Singapore, with around 120 per 1,000 people. What those cities have in common, which makes them rather different from Japan, is a shortage of land and a relentless, centralized leadership that recognized early on that cars were a waste of space.
Unfortunately, replicating the Asian model in countries in Europe, America, or Australia from scratch will not be easy. We are starting with so many cars on our roads to begin with, that imposing the sorts of curbs on car ownership that I listed above is almost certainly a political nonstarter. Just look at what happens when politicians in America or Britain try to take away even a modest amount of street parking, or increase the tax on gasoline. People are already invested in cars, sadly. And thanks to that, there is also a chicken-and-egg problem. Because people are invested in cars, they live in places where the sort of public transport that makes life possible for the majority of people in Tokyo is simply not realistic. As it is, constructing rail infrastructure like Japan’s is an extraordinarily difficult task. Look at the difficulties encountered in things like building Britain’s new high-speed train link, or California’s, for example.
And yet it is worth paying attention to Tokyo precisely because it shows that vast numbers of cars are not necessary to daily life. What Tokyo shows is that it is possible for enormous cities to work rather well without being overloaded by traffic congestion. Actually, Tokyo works better than big cities anywhere else. That is why it has managed to grow so large. The trend all over the world for decades now has been toward greater wealth concentrating in the biggest metropolises. The cost of living in somewhere like New York, London, or Paris used to be marginally higher than living in a more modest city. That is no longer the case. And it reflects the fact that the benefits of living in big cities are enormous. The jobs are better, but so too are the restaurants, the cultural activities, the dating opportunities, and almost anything else you can think of. People are willing to pay for it. The high cost of living is a price signal — that is, the fact that people are willing to pay it is an indicator of the value they put on it.
Especially in this post-pandemic era where many jobs can be done from anywhere, lots of New Yorkers could easily decamp to, say, a pretty village upstate, and save a fortune in rent, or cash in on their property values. Actually, hundreds of thousands do every year (well, not only to upstate). But they are replaced by newcomers for the simple reason that New York City is, if you set aside the cost, a pretty great place to live. And yet, if everyone who would like to live in a big city is to be able to, those cities need to be able to grow more. But if they continue to grow with the assumption that the car will be the default way of getting around for a significant proportion of residents, then they will be strangled by congestion long before they ever reach anything like Tokyo’s success. People often say that London or New York are too crowded, but they are wrong. They are only too crowded if you think that it is normal for people to need space not just for them but also for the two tons of metal that they use to get around.
The sheer anger of motorists might mean that banning overnight parking on residential streets proves difficult. But if we want to be bold, some of Tokyo’s other measures are more realistic. We could, for example, do a lot more to build more housing around public transport, and use the money generated to help contribute to the network. According to the Centre for Cities, a British think tank, there are 47,000 hectares of undeveloped land (mostly farmland) within a 10-minute walk of a railway station close to London or another big city. That is enough space to build two million homes, more than half of which would be within a 45-minute commute to or from London. The reason we do not develop the land at the moment is because it is mostly Metropolitan Green Belt, a zoning restriction created in the late 1940s by the Town and Country Planning Act intended to contain cities and stop them sprawling outward. But the problem with it as it works in Britain at the moment is that it does not stop sprawl — it just pushes it further away from cities, into places where there really is no hope of not using a car.
Developing the green belt too would not be popular. People have an affection for fields near their homes, and they do not necessarily want the trains they use to be even more crowded. But there are projects that show it is possible to overcome NIMBYism. In Los Angeles in 2016, voters approved the Transit Oriented Communities Incentive Program, which creates special zoning laws in areas half a mile from a major transit stop (typically, in L.A., a light rail station). This being Los Angeles, it is fairly modest. One of the rules is that the mandatory parking minimums applied are restricted to a maximum of 0.5 car parking spaces per bedroom, and total parking is not meant to exceed more than one space per apartment, which is still rather a lot of parking. But nonetheless, it does allow developers to increase the density of homes near public transport, and it has encouraged developers to build around 20,000 new homes near public transport that probably would not have been constructed otherwise. These are small but real improvements.
Ultimately, no city will be transformed into Tokyo overnight, nor should any be, at least unless a majority of the population decides that they would like it. I am trying to persuade them; for now, not everyone is as enamored with the Japanese capital as I am. But NIMBYism and other political problems can be gradually overturned, if the arguments are made in the right way, even in the most automotive cities.
This article was excerpted from Daniel Knowles’ book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, published by Abrams Press ©2023.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.