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Big Tech's Eco-pledges Aren't Slowing its Pursuit of Big Oil

Associated Press

   Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies
   like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon
   emissions. But there's another thing these tech giants aren't cutting:
   Their growing business ties to the oil and gas industry.

   When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee
   asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling
   its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two
   other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they
   not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were
   accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions.

   Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to
   strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and
   other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote
   data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing
   better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production.

   The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on
   cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market,
   according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's
   energy consultancy. It's not yet clear whether the extraction industry
   is getting its money's worth, although experts remain bullish about the
   application of advanced technology to oil and gas exploration.

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