AI’s climate problem is worse than we thought

Until this point, the public conversation about AI and climate change has been laser-focused on the vast amount of electricity used to power the technology.

For good reason. Over the last few years, the AI boom has rapidly increased society’s appetite for fossil fuels via the electricity consumption of data centers. Data center electricity consumption has sent tech companies’ emissions soaring, knocked their climate plans wildly off course, and pulled them directly into the fossil fuel business.

(Some mind-bending recent examples: Microsoft just signed a deal with Chevron to develop a massive gas plant in Texas explicitly for data centers. And Amazon is planning to build the largest fossil fuel power plant ever to exist in the United States to power its AI.)

And yet, this is only the tip of the AI climate iceberg. Because AI is not only consuming fossil fuels to generate electricity—it is also helping the world’s biggest oil companies produce more fossil fuels quicker, cheaper, and for greater profit.

Over the last few years, AI has become a powerful tool for oil and gas companies, helping them locate new deposits, drill wells faster, and extract more from existing fields.

These aren’t just generic AI tools, either. “There are teams of engineers and salespeople at these tech companies that are explicitly for the fossil fuel industry,” Holly Alpine, a former senior manager at Microsoft, told HEATED. “They are engineers writing code explicitly in partnerships with oil majors to expand production.”

Until now, we haven’t known the broad climate impact of these custom-made AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. But a new peer reviewed study published in the journal npj Climate Action is shedding some alarming light.

That paper—co-authored by Holly and her husband Will Alpine, also a former Microsoft employee—shows that the emissions enabled by the fossil fuel industry’s use of AI are likely far greater than the emissions of powering AI as a whole.

Specifically, they found that Big Oil’s use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI’s data centers.

On the low end, these tools could enable additional yearly carbon emissions equal to Mexico’s, according to the research. On the high end, they could enable yearly climate pollution equal to Russia’s—the world’s fourth-largest emitting country.

“It is difficult and frustrating for us to see the conversation around ‘the true climate impacts of AI’ just stop at operational emissions,” Holly told HEATED. “We cannot get across enough how important it is to include what [AI] is used for.”

The importance of “enabled emissions”

In 2024, Holly and Will Alpine resigned from high-level positions at Microsoft to draw attention to what they believed was a vast, overlooked source of climate pollution. They now lead Enabled Emissions, a campaign seeking accountability for AI-enabled fossil fuel expansion. (HEATED covered their story last summer).

“Enabled emissions” refers to the pollution a technology helps make possible. For example: In 2019, Microsoft and ExxonMobil announced an AI partnership they said could help Exxon increase production by as much as 50,000 barrels a day. The pollution generated by producing and burning that additional oil and gas would be considered “enabled” emissions: not released by Microsoft’s technology directly, but made possible because of it.

As the Alpines tried to draw attention to enabled emissions, however, they ran into a basic problem: They didn’t know how large the issue actually was.