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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.”
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.”
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The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.
Without the federal tax credit and until battery prices come down, automakers will have to argue that pricey EVs are worth it.
America’s federal tax credit for buying an electric car was supposed to be the great equalizer, an incentive meant to solve for the fact that EVs have long been more expensive than the polluting fossil fuel vehicles they must replace.
That tax credit is now dead. Thanks to the Republican budget reconciliation bill pushed through Congress this summer, the incentive will die after September 30 of this year.
Its demise comes at a particularly inopportune time. For a long time, even a $7,500 benefit wasn’t enough to make many of the best electric cars cost-competitive with their gasoline-powered rivals. Slowly, that had begun to change: More EVs with a starting MSRP in the $30,000 range, such as the base-level Chevy Equinox EV, could compete directly on price with internal combustion once the tax credit (along with any state and local incentives) was taken into consideration.
Without the tax credit, most EVs can’t compete on price alone. Battery production costs are falling, but not fast enough for a new EV in America to cost the same as a comparable gas car. With electricity prices seemingly set to rise, the appeal of never again buying gasoline isn’t as strong. At the same time, the federal government has been trying to add new, nonsensical taxes on EV ownership. Cars.com says the tax credit was a major reason half of EV owners cited for choosing their vehicle, and that it’s driving the decision for about half of curious buyers.
Add it all up and a big group of American shoppers who might have considered buying an EV if the dollars and cents added up probably won’t, at least for now. The mess leaves electric vehicle makers in a precarious position. They must convince American drivers that EVs are simply superior — more capable, more dependable, and more fun. As longtime Rivian executive Jiten Behl told InsideEVs’ Patrick George last week: “Forget they’re electric for a moment. They’re just better cars. And a better product will always win.”
That argument is an existential one for Rivian, which Behl departed last year. Deliveries of its long-awaited R1S SUV started in 2022, and since then the vehicle has become a Range Rover-replacing status symbol in my part of Los Angeles. But after three years, most people with the means and desire to buy a $70,000 to $80,000 EV have done so, yet the company’s more affordable R2 and R3 vehicles remain at least a year away.
Rivian’s solution for the meantime is to push the limit of electric vehicle performance, dollars be damned. This summer, I’ve driven triple-motor Tri Max versions of both the R1S and the R1T pickup trucks. Zooming from a stop, its 800-plus horsepower and instantaneous torque is whiplash-inducing. Put in Conserve mode and the vehicles approach 400 miles of range, enough to obliterate range anxiety. There’s plenty of power for towing and off-roading, plus all the other functionalities that make EVs better than combustion cars: using the vehicle battery to power one’s home or other uses, Dog Mode, or tapping into battery power to pre-condition the cabin on a scorching or frigid day.
Gas vehicles have modes, of course. Over the past decade or two, drivers have gotten used to the way that “sport” or “eco” modes subtly change the character of a car. In a super-EV like the Rivian, having so much capability at your fingertip feels like the EV could become a totally different car at the push of a button. For the Tri Max models, this level of muscular competence costs north of $100,000. But such prowess speaks to someone out there. Rivian has been developing the more-ultimate-than-ultimate electric vehicle, a quad-motor version with horsepower in the four digits, for those in the “money is no object” tax bracket who’ve been convinced that electric is better (or at least that electric is the future, and they want to own it).
A more telling case will be next year’s arrival of the R2, a two-row electric SUV meant to cost in the neighborhood of $45,000. Without the tax credit, prospective buyers can’t tell themselves that it’s really in the $30,000s. On price, then, it’s competing with BMW SUVs, not Chevys.
This is nothing new for the EV market. Selling electrics as luxury cars with a high price tag helps to mask the cost of the battery, and it brings in more revenue for a startup company like Rivian that desperately needs it. Tesla sold a lot of cars this way even though its refinements, build quality, and creature comforts weren’t quite up to par compared to a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW. Part of the luxury people paid for was the feeling of owning the cool new thing, at least back before Tesla’s brand was tainted.
It’s a bit trickier for legacy car companies, who are struggling to navigate shifting attitudes and incentives in America and to compete against cheap, Chinese-made EVs abroad. Take the Hyundai Ioniq 9 that arrived this summer. Hyundai and Kia are the farthest along of the traditional brands in selling great EVs to Americans, and the Ioniq 9 may be the best electric offering for families that need a three-row vehicle to accommodate their tribe. Thanks in part to the hulking 110-kilowatt hour battery needed for this boat to have 300 miles of EPA-rated range, however, the Ioniq 9 starts at $59,000 — more than $20,000 higher than Hyundai’s similarly sized, gas-powered Palisade.
Even a $7,500 benefit wouldn’t bridge such a divide between electric and gas. So, Hyundai bet all along that, incentives or not, buyers would find the Ioniq 9 to be the premium product that it proved to be during my road trip test drive in one this past weekend. Where the Palisade comes with 291 horsepower from its gas engine, Ioniq 9’s 422 electric horsepower allowed the big vehicle to accelerate effortlessly onto the highway and zoom up the Grapevine mountain pass that leads into Los Angeles, dusting plenty of combustion-powered cars huffing and puffing to get uphill. It is remarkably spacious and startlingly quiet, even when putting out lots of power.
My top-of-the-line Ioniq 9 had numerous tech features meant to make it feel special, like the enormous curved touchscreen that spanned from dashboard to center console and the heads-up display — specs that feel futuristic and attempt to justify the extra cost. But let’s be real. For anyone who’d choose a $60,000 EV over the same company’s $40,000 gas-guzzling SUV, it comes down to the simple, everyday advantages of an electric car: Your home is your gas station and you begin every day with a full tank. You’re sitting on a big battery full of electricity that can be used for more than driving, whether that’s backing up your home appliances during a blackout or just air-conditioning your dog while you run into the drugstore. No oil changes. No belts, sparks plugs, or antifreeze to worry about. No tailpipe emissions poisoning your city’s air or filling your garage with carbon monoxide. Immediate power at your feet. And, of course, the possibility of one day running the family car entirely on clean energy.
None of those reasons will change the financial calculation and make the EV less expensive in the long run. For now, the argument for EVs is that you get what you pay for. When more Americans experience a premium EV, that might be enough to convince them that electric is worth the extra cash, tax credit or not.
On residential solar dims, New Jersey makes history, and Brazil’s challenge
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Dexter has formed in the Atlantic, sending rough surf and rip currents to beaches along the U.S. East Coast • Heavy rainfall threatens flooding in southern Taiwan and northern Vietnam • Storm Floris is battering Scotland with winds of up to 80 miles per hour.
Two top GOP senators are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at severely restricting access to tax credits for renewables before a phaseout begins next year. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley and Utah Senator John Curtis placed holds on three Trump nominees to the Treasury Department, the agency in charge of writing the rules and guidance for the tax provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Grassley had negotiated a “glidepath for an orderly phaseout” of tax credits for wind and solar, he said in placing the hold, giving developers until next July to start construction on projects. But in an apparent concession to hard-line Republicans in the House of Representatives, Trump signed an executive order days after the bill became law calling for a new guidance to restrict what it means to start construction. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote yesterday, the executive order “has generated understandable concern within the renewables industry” ahead of the deadline in two weeks for the Internal Revenue Service to issue its new guidance. A more restrictive interpretation of what “begin construction” means “could turn the tax credit language into a dead letter,” Matthew reported. Grassley warned that, “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent, I intend to continue to object to the consideration of these Treasury nominees.”
Chemicals giants Chemours, DuPont, and Corteva agreed Monday to pay out $875 million over the next 25 years to support communities affected by pollution from “forever chemicals,” The New York Times reported. New Jersey officials called this the biggest environmental settlement ever achieved by a single state. As part of the deal, the companies are required to fund the cleanup of four former industrial sites, create a remediation fund of up to $1.2 billion, and put $475 million aside to guarantee the remediation goes forward even if any of the companies go bankrupt. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, typically shortened to PFAS, are called “forever chemicals” because they accumulate in water and in human bodies and never leave. They are linked to all kinds of kidneys and testicular cancer, high cholesterol, and liver damage. “PFAS are particularly insidious,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in a statement. “These dangerous chemicals build up and accumulate everywhere, and New Jersey has some of the highest levels of PFAS in the country.”
As my colleague Jeva Lange has written, “The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 20% of Americans drink, bathe, and brush their teeth with PFAS-contaminated water.” During his first administration, Trump promised to crack down on PFAS. But in May, his Environmental Protection Agency delayed enforcement of federal drinking water limits until 2031, and said it would reconsider rules completed under the Biden administration.
Just 7.5% of suitable owner-occupied residential homes in the United States had installed rooftop solar panels as of the end of 2024. With tax credits and support from the Biden administration’s policies, that segment would have grown by 9% per year over the next five years to reach an adoption rate of 13% nationwide by 2030. But of course, Trump won the election and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie show that residential solar capacity could fall by 46% below those previous projections. That’s due in part to the new federal policies directly, but it also takes into account the potential for no interest rate cuts over the next five years thanks to Trump’s larger economic agenda.
For years, Tesla has cultivated a fandom akin to the cultish following around Apple products in the early 2010s. But since CEO Elon Musk entered the political sphere as a top surrogate for Trump last summer, brand loyalty for the electric automaker has plunged, according to new data the research firm S&P Global Mobility shared with Reuters. Using data gleaned from vehicle registrations in all 50 states, the report shows that Tesla’s customer loyalty peaked in June 2024, the month before Musk endorsed Trump. At that point, 73% of Tesla-owning households in the market for a new car bought another Tesla. By March, the rate had nosedived to 49.9%, just below the automotive industry average.
Dead trees in the Brazilian Amazon. Mario Tama/Getty Images
During his first stretch in office in the early 2000s, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva oversaw a miracle few developing countries had ever accomplished: He slashed deforestation while riding the global commodities boom to grow South America’s largest economy and lift millions out of poverty. Since returning to office in 2022, the left-wing leader better known as Lula sought once again to crack down on the destruction of the Amazon while expanding Brazil’s oil and gas production.
His government now faces an uncomfortable pivot point. His environment minister, Marina Silva, is battling legislation that would gut conservation rules in what the Financial Times called “the biggest potential setback to environmental protection in Brazil in four decades.” At the same time, British oil giant BP announced Monday its biggest oil and gas discovery in 25 years off the coast of Brazil. Striking the right balance is more important than ever as the 79-year-old Lula prepares for a tough reelection campaign next amid ratcheting tensions with Trump. Brazil is also the site of the next United Nations climate conference, COP30, which will take place in Belém in November.
The global economic losses associated with the health costs of plastics pollution now top $1.5 trillion annually, according to a new paper in The Lancet. But the esteemed medical journal notes that the “continued worsening of plastics’ harms is not inevitable. Similar to air pollution and lead, plastics’ harms can be mitigated cost-effectively by evidence-based, transparently tracked, effectively implemented, and adequately financed laws and policies.”