Technology, Connected - MICROSOFT Is Using AI To Kill The Planet (And This Is The Proof) | Enabled Emissions

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Artificial intelligence was supposed to accelerate the transition to clean energy. Instead, it’s being used to keep fossil fuels alive. Inside Microsoft, two engineers began asking questions no one wanted to answer. Holly and Will Alpine had joined the company believing AI could help solve the climate crisis. What they found instead was code trained to keep oil flowing.Through internal documents and contracts, they traced how Microsoft’s cloud tools — Azure, Cognitive Services, machine learning models — were being deployed across the oil and gas sector. Predicting drill sites. Extending refinery life cycles. Cutting extraction costs. The same AI designed for sustainability was fueling expansion.This isn’t a story about a single company. It’s about the moral architecture of the tech industry — how systems built for optimization erase responsibility. Holly and Will’s decision to speak out exposes a simple, devastating truth: the future isn’t being delayed by ignorance, but by intelligence used in service of the past.Please enjoy the show. --LINKS & RESOURCES- Enabled Emissions- Microsoft's Commitment to Sustainability - Exxon & Microsoft partnership press release- Microsoft Net Zero--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--Timestamps(00:00)  The Hidden Climate Cost of AI(01:44) Why Experts Call AI an Existential Threat(03:34) How Big Oil Uses AI to Pump More Fossil Fuels(07:46) Why Two Microsoft Insiders Started Enabled Emissions(11:14) Inside AI’s Growing Role in the Energy Sector(13:08) How much CO₂ comes from burning oil, and what does AI add?(16:17) The Guardrails Needed to Stop AI From Fueling Emissions(19:34) Microsoft’s Energy Principles: Policy or PR?(21:58) What are Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions — and why do they matter?(24:26) How does Big Tech’s AI partnership with Big Oil affect Net Zero?(29:55) Why do we need international policy to regulate AI in energy?(32:39) AI for Good vs. AI for Fossil Fuels(34:14) What should humans be?--If you would like to sponsor Thinking On Paper, please contact us. Together, we can take the show to the next level.We love you all.We love the planet.Stay curious.Keep Thinking On Paper.

Disruptors and Curious Minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper. My name's 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. A lot of people think the environmental impact is with these big gigantic data centers, consuming electricity, power, water, all that stuff. We're going to get into something different. We're getting something even more impactful that you need to know about.

Mark. What are your thoughts to kick this thing off? The evidence of a climate crisis is obvious to everyone but the most ridiculous. 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, Jerry. 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. They are founders of enabled emissions. They are leaders in responsible air. on sustainability with 14 years of combined experience at Microsoft, which is important. Stick with us. That will become apparent. Holly launched Microsoft's first data center community environmental sustainability program, as well as the company's first employee engagement program for sustainability. Will is a recognized expert in green AI and green software engineering and as 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? 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 in existential threat and 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.

And so I see that in those harms as being existential to all of our lived features. Anything to add to that, Holly? I think we'll sum it up. It's 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 tag-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 guard rails in place. 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 impact right now. Before we get into the story, Van Nukewarm missions, could you give us some stats, some data on how it's changed in the past 10 years and how it's

exacerbating the extraction of fossil fuels? 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 as triples in the past decade, even as the rig counts have dropped by 46%. And these timelines for these projects have gone from eight months to just a matter 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 U.S. oil production. surging from 5.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 13 and a half million today. I mean, US is the largest producer and that is largely, we believe, due 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. That's a 3x increase.

And again, the story that we're told is that these numbers should be coming down, are coming down. Correct. They're not. It's deeply, deeply troubling. I just want to mention to set the stage, the 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. AI is maturing as well, so it's already going to get better. Right. And at risk, I 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 Sarah Week, this past March, 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. People aren't going to put up a fight. People aren't going to say anything. People aren't going to protest. Governments and policies aren't going to bring it up with their superiors because nobody knows about it. So perhaps you can explain how enabled emissions came about and how your roles, respected roles at Microsoft forced you to change your hand. 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. To back up a bit of our storyline, I started at Microsoft in 2014. I was a technical account 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 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, I also co-founded Microsoft's

employee engagement team through that to 10,000 passionate, intelligent folks across a company who were working on sustainability and really cared. And we're doing amazing things. And we are 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. And 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. I mean, it was very explicit. it what we saw. And we thought, you know, oh, 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 agree. agreed with all of our recommendations. But to sum things up over the next couple 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. Just a 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 or is that industry-wide? That would be if Microsoft were to seize all the opportunities that are available to them.

So that's the market potential. That's the market potential, exactly. Got it. It could be 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 force. And this is not a side project. 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 open AI and chat GBT. 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 for,

from the rooftops that, hey, the energy consumption of AI is going to become a huge issue. We need to act now. 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. 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.

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. Mark, if you'll entertain me here for a second. So we're talking about impact to the environment in relation to carbon emissions, right? So I saw some math in some of your research, some of your, some of your papers, some of your talking points.

Let's break down a barrel of oil and what that translates into carbon emission. And 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 we can maybe project impact? The CEO 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 is allowed fossil fuels to stay competitive and undermine the air. economic case for the transition to clean energy. So back in 2019 was when Microsoft released a press release along with Exxon that very explicitly quantified the barrels per oil per day increased due to Microsoft's technology. They probably regret doing that

because we've used it against it. Well, really just not really even against them, just to quantify what is the scale that we're talking about here. How important is this? 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 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 5 million metric tons over 15 years, that means these two deals are releasing more carbon equivalent over 1,000% of what Microsoft is contracting to remove over 15 years. Let me just... 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 bans, anything like that. We just think that especially as a company who markets themselves as a sustainability leader of the world, you 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. I mean, just like you can't call yourself a company of peace because you have cookies in the office when you're making bombs. If you're a bomb company providing bombs, even if you yourself are not setting off those bombs, if you are giving those bombs to others, you cannot call yourself

a company of peace. And we think that analogy brings true here as well for sustainability. What do those guardrails look like? You can think of guard. rail as any sort of voluntary measure of policy or even involuntary measure that would ensure the 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. But after years of doing all we could internally, we realize 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 U.S. 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 is being applied. Yeah. And we have a whole suite of recommendations. Back when we were meeting with Microsoft leaders, we 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 challenge 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 a stretch at all. We actually think it's a glaring omission to not have our planetary health and 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 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 loss 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 customer.

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 publish 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 a policy of one of the most valuable companies the world. As we dug in further, though, we saw that these net zero commitments that the fossil field companies had to make, there was no standard that they had to follow. And a meta-analysis is really, report is showing that they're really largely meaningless, but largely because of the fatal flaw that they only cover for the large part, these companies, fossil fuel companies,

is 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 disappointed. 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 percent, well, we have these energy principles, so we're good. We don't need to do anything else. Box check, right, yeah. We find that just to be pretty disingenuous when they do not even begin to. People like checking boxes. Holly, can we cover really quickly what scope one, scope two and scope three is just to make it clear for the listeners? 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're using your laptop and it's using electricity, you're not burning fuel at your home, but is burning somewhere on your behalf. So where you are in the world really also determines what your scope two 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 our companies who's having a data center, it really matters where that is because it matters what the grid is run on.

And then scope three is your entire supply chain and also your sold, So say you sell for Microsoft scope three, an example is say they sell an Xbox, the folks who are using the Xbox at home and their electricity usage, it'll be their scope two, would be Microsoft Scope 3 because they created the Xbox, they sold the Xbox. Scope 3, so most carbon commitments for companies do not include scope 3. They really just look at scope one and two. Once it, you know, it's sold, leaves their facility, they're not worried about it. It's also everything that you're buying.

So 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 scope three. 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. 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 a methodology and align on a methodology. We've never advocated for that. We are more advocating for a principled approach rather than as quantitative because we think it'll get us where we need to go without this year's long. I mean, it's hard enough to wrap our arms around scope three. I 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. 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 up. It's as simple as that. The enabled emissions campaign is the only known effort confronting this blind spot and ensuring technology advances climate progress rather than accelerating its collapse.

Do you have any friends in high places helping you? And what can our listeners do to accelerate this awareness? 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 outward. 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 U.S. 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 actually potentially planning on visiting Europe soon to have those discussions. 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. 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 a planet, which will and the long-term impact shareholder returns. So I 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. And I wish I could fix capitalism in a sense, but... My gosh, that's Jeremy's question, isn't it really? How do you fix capitalism?

Do you think people like Bill Gates, Sam Altman, 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 train who are signing off on these contracts? I do believe that those... and 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 the full grasp of that.

Unfortunately, the tools themselves are a 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 Howe's book has pointed it. Thank you. 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 it 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. I also say when you're saying earlier how it's against capitalism, I mean, there is money in these low carbon

projects too. I 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. That's 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 will mention to this longer-term value creation. And I will add that we are in the middle of filing our next round of shareholder resolution. And 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're required to take a 30-year outlook on their returns. 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 million, $35 billion would be great for my bottom line. But I'm going to pass and Mark's going to grab it, run with it. Be like, yes, I'm in. I might know what happens to me versus what happens to Mark. But how can you help the mees of the world survive a decision like that? That's a really good thought exercise in one that we've wrestled with in many different. ways. I 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 very 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 an ongoing basis. I have a swing between optimism and fear. You're going to take a radical breakthrough elsewhere to to really shift the balance, isn't it? Fusion, whatever it might be. 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. Holly, any thoughts on the thought experiment? Mark's company, Jeremy's company?

Yeah, having guardrails not blanket bans, as we'll said, put guardrails in place. Like having policies that are putting exploration and production optimization, enhanced recovery on this kind of restricted list for custom AI, but still allowing safety or methane reduction or flaring control, things like that. Great 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 going to work. And I don't think we should be required to either. It's like the folks who are lobbying Microsoft on NoTech for apartheid saying we should not be providing the tools and the weapons that are being. being used to commit genocide. We're not asking those folks, well, where else are, you know, they're going to get their weapons? You know, what if they go to other companies? You know, 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, you know, 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. I 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 are, 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 we need to have reasonable guardrails. It 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. Yeah, I mean, 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. Yes. 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. Well, Will, like you said earlier, the positive use cases are maybes are maybe we get there with this hack. And the negative use cases are actually happening because of it today. So I think that's really important thing to hit on again. And that's what's been frustrating working with Microsoft is it the leadership that we've spoken with continues to point to the positive.

applications of advanced tech and AI in response to our concerns, which they're not usually exclusive. Just because you are applying it to good things does not mean that you are stopping the bad and they are not. I mean, we heard pretty horrifying quotes from Microsoft's 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. Before we get into our closer, where can people find out more about you and your work?

Where should they go? 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. 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?

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. I think you had also a request if we could leave a question for our next guest. Love it.

I'd love to know what our next guest thinks about what does it take to put guardrails in place that will ensure the tech delivers on its promise and is not captured and distorted by bad actors. Great question. Thank you. Good stuff. Yeah, Holly, anything to add? Are you in lockstep? My word was conscientious, but that's pretty well aligned with Will. That's why we're married. Seems like a good fit. You guys are amazing. 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. 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 want to know why they're burning 80% of every barrel oil, for starters. Education, it all starts there. Guys, thanks for listening. Hope we opened your eyes, your ears and your hearts today. Be curious. Stay disruptive. Keep thinking on paper.