Microsoft employees spent years fighting the tech giant's oil ties
grist.org
grist.org
In other words, some low-level engineer at BP signed up for Azure and provisioned a few VMs with GPUs. Let's say MS did ban an entire industry from using their products... wouldn't that engineer just switch to AWS and use EC2 instances instead? Or is the argument that every cloud company should independently decide not to serve this particular industry? If that's true, why are we pressuring private companies at all? Wouldn't it be more effective for the government to sanction these forbidden companies, instead of relying on so many independent profit-motivated companies to voluntarily lower their profits?
Yes, it would be more effective but in the absence of any adults in the rooms of government, I don’t blame regular folk from using whatever little power they might have to try to effect change, albeit however futilely. Our world is a dumpster fire and the ruling class seems fine with fanning the flames, so it is incumbent upon everyone else to fight in whatever ways available to them.
- Individual action is acceptable (vote with your wallet)
- Government action is totally unacceptable (interference with the holy free market!)
- But, coordinated, collective individual action is also unacceptable (unions bad! organized boycotts bad!)
Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals. You can imagine how often that's successful. The only time it actually has a chance of working is when it's secretly organized (astroturfing). So, we Americans continue to run around individually complaining about bad corporate behavior, but are powerless to do anything about it because we've made all the effective mitigations taboo!
And don't forget the caveat that if it's the wrong grassroots unorganized action, it's clearly a product of George Soro's money paying people to do things, and not their actual action.
I doubt this is a case of some random engineer at an oil company buying a few VMs on a website.
These are not "low level engineers", these companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars with Azure.
And all the other clouds. And Wal-Mart and AT&T and ... big companies spend big bucks.
I was at Microsoft as a blue badge when they intro'd the carbon neutral by 2030 initiative and the first employee to ask about how this was possible was politely swatted down by Nadella in a live company meeting.
"why are we pressuring private companies at all?"
Because what Microsoft is doing is unsustainable but Nadella and the c-suite are too busy buying back stock to care. Microsoft doesn't actually make anything anymore - they just acquire technologies and extract the value and move on.
The OpenAI acquisition will take down Microsoft because to stay on the trajectory Nadella has bet the farm on would require Moore's Law to still be increasing compute mips/watt but that ended a while ago.
By the time these companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta) realize that AI will require geometrically more compute when only a linear increase in MIPS/watt is all we are going to get out of silicon.
That none of these firms are building silicon photonics labs to be the first to make this incremental leap away from CMOS shows that they're only vaguely aware that AGI isn't anywhere close to being a reality with any silicon based technologies.
Using bullshit technology, aka AI, to look for unknown amounts of oil while telling the press the date you will be carbon neutral is just unethical garbage like so much else Microsoft does.
At one company I worked for someone suggested that we should all stop using metaphors linked to cars and internal combustion engines, to stop normalizing these things and help fight climate change. And look, I don't like this car-centric design; I don't even have a driving license. But how does this stop climate change? "I'm helping!"
This was shot down pretty hard by the CEO and pretty much everyone else by the way.
We should be pointing out the car centric transportation systems we have and work to fix them. We shouldn’t be encouraging things like suburban sprawl that increases car dependence. Reduce car usage, and you will reduce oil consumption.
But consumer vehicles are a tiny percentage of our actual overall consumption
Yes we can and should reduce our usage here, but it needs to be in addition to other much bigger and important changes (which don't get talked about enough)
Climate change isn't limited to one country.
Additionally, you're also mis-quoting your source. According to your link, only "about 28% of total U.S. energy consumption in 2021 was for transporting people and goods from one place to another". The 54.2% you're citing is the percentage of light-duty vehicles that make up that 28% of energy use. In other words, only ~15% of energy usage in the US is from light-duty vehicles.
Globally it's estimated to be a smaller percentage overall, although it does seem that it still is closer to 10% according to this: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/cars-and-vans
So yes, maybe it's not "tiny".
My point still stands, I think. We are focusing much more than 10-15% of our overall efforts on optimizing a slice that doesn't seem like it will contribute improvements relative to our efforts
No, because it's not about passenger cars. How do you think the supermarket gets stocked? And how do you think the food gets grown? And how did that laptop you're using go from raw materials to the laptop?
Whether you like it or not, oil is needed for damn near everything. "Oil companies" really aren't the problem here; they're not forcing anyone to buy oil. The problem is the entire modern economy runs on oil in all sorts of ways, and actually changing that requires a much more wholistic solution than "zomg Microsoft does business with Big Oil!"
You logic is self defeating. Restricting supply of oil is exactly the right approach and will cause economy to move to alternatives
I never said that. I said the efforts were misdirected.
The feds should get ahead of it and declare a rail electrification standard so that as it builds out it's all compatible.
Electrifying a thousand miles of track in the middle of nowhere that sees one train a day is nowhere near as worthwhile as electrifying busy corridors.
Electric trains powered by solar and wind? Sure, saves 90% fuel compared to planes (the trains still have support, lubricant, etc that will use some fuel, but sure, assume 100%).
But globally it can't be more than about 12% of the total CO2 (see https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport ) - and that is GLOBAL, trains across the Atlantic are harder to build.
And that's only 12% of total CO2 from transportation - which itself is less than half of the world-wide emissions.
6% of world-wide would be noticeable, but that is only if every plane is replaced by an electric train. The trillions that even attempting some of that would cost could be better spent elsewhere, likely.
>It’s true that Microsoft is taking numerous steps to address the sustainability of its own operations. But for years, the company has also furnished fossil fuel giants with cloud computing services and specialized software tools powered by machine learning and AI in order to streamline and automate their operations.
Let's make the extraction of the life blood of all industry on the planet less efficient, less streamlined, less clean. And do let us all know how you plan to build the next Azure data center without using fossil fuels dug out of the ground and processed plastics.
You need fossil fuels to get off of fossil fuels, you need regulation, the entire planet working on this, etc. Making the process LESS efficient is not going to help at any point. Let's start blowing up the equipment used to dig coal out of the ground so we can go back to doing it by hand like in the early 1900s, and let's start unscrewing the bolts in the machines at the factories, let's all quit at CAT and never build another digger...
"Buying" some small amount of barrels during a rare market anomaly, then burying them in the ground is supposed to accomplish what exactly?
Great, you buried 50,000 barrels of crude - congratulations. Now what are you going to do about the 20,000,000 barrels[1] the US will consume tomorrow? Look, oh no, your buried oil leaked into the water table!
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pipelin....
An option was due, and the holder of the option needed to accept delivery. Because most people who trade in options don't actually want the underlying asset, it was just some trader with no interest in actually owning "oil". It's like if you had barrels of crude oil in your basement; you'd probably let someone pick it up for free too.
But likewise, if you had barrels of crude oil in your basement, then yes you could just let it sit there and never burn it. The trouble is that most people with the ability to accept delivery of industrial quantities of crude oil also want to use it. Also the price rarely dips that low, because the people extracting it do so in order to make money.
Bingo, except government and industry are so closely related now they resemble a circular human centipede, so we can’t rely on that.
Obviously you disagree with them taking action ("the average American" has to spontaneously demand 3x prices for resistance to be legitimate), but that has nothing to do with a lack of critical thinking ability in your political foes.
The argument “we’re just doing the dirty work to give you what you want” is horse shit. They actively hid information about climate change for decades, they work to ensure continued subsidies to avoid actual competition, they work to add regulations to competing technologies and run disinformation campaigns. They work to entrench themselves so that “giving you what you want” is really “you’ll take what we give since we’ve undermined the alternatives”.
Same with factory farming. The only reason people think chicken and burgers should be 1/3 the true cost is because the four big ag companies have worked the government into subsidizing things and reducing labour laws, etc etc etc.
Honestly, when your argument starts with being an apologist for big corporations with a profit rather than social motive, I think you should check what first principles you are working with. Our society is a hunger games hellscape and it is because of whatever first principles you are using.
> Saudi Arabia and Russia will never stop
You are contradicting yourself - either the global economy won’t grind to a halt, because activist is ineffective, or activism is too effective?
The west should be cleaning up its own house and leading by example - instead it has spent decades pointing fingers at China and other countries shouting ‘you first’. Well, guess what, China is now worlds leading user and producer of eclectic cars, has electric busses and most of USA doesn’t. We are the ones behind now, and in fact neither you nor the media have realised it yet.
In the next 2 years it will become clear that the king is banked, and that the leadership is no longer with the west, and I am afraid the consequences for us will be significant. The Sputnik moment has already happened, you just aren’t watching.
The media has realized, unfortunately, hence the latest barrage of complaints about overproduction/dumping. Blinken and Yellen's speeches about that were pathetic.
Its only been a decade or so since China had all of those things. You would see multiple obviously imported Tesla Model S's in Beijing way before you saw even one BYD EV taxi. Then China invested in a short period of time and now they have much more than the US. But the time period was so short that China hardly has a moat in these areas.
> In the next 2 years it will become clear that the king is banked, and that the leadership is no longer with the west, and I am afraid the consequences for us will be significant.
We heard this before in the 1980s and that didn't pan out at all. This is just the 1980s again with China in place of Japan; China even has a much bigger real estate bubble than Japan ever did, the consequences will be similar if not worse. The same demographic crash is also coming to China, history is just a broken record.
This is inaccurate. The west has been cleaning up its own house and leading by example. While they could and should have done much more, western countries implemented emissions reductions measures long before demanding anyone else do it, and in fact for decades explicitly excluded China as a developing country from having to comply with these agreements.
As a result, western emissions have been declining for decades and, most importantly, became decoupled from GDP growth for the first time in history.
In the meantime China has dramatically surged its emissions, becoming the biggest emitter by far. India and Russia have also increased emissions substantially, becoming the third and fourth highest emitters. In fact, the entire EU now produces fewer carbon emissions than India, and only a little more than Russia.
If current trends continue, before long the top three emitters will be China, India, and Russia, and their trajectories remain worrying.
So any solution that doesn’t encourage those countries to also reduce their emissions is going to doom us all to accelerating climate change.
As for the moral argument, it’s no more moral for China, India, and Russia to emit all the pollution they can than it was when western countries did it. If anything, it’s even more immoral given that better technologies exist and we understand the problem much better.
Most of our emission reduction was achieved by outsourcing manufacturing to China. We don’t get an award for that:
> Eu now produces fewer emission than India
Comparison of emissions should be done per capita - India is expected to emit more that EU, it has almost 3x as he population. The he idea that US should be top emitter forever when it’s only 300k people is absurd. Also EU has invested way more into cleantech than US has and has many times more production of these technologies than US does
Lastly - don’t lump Russia together with China and India - China and India are actively developing countries with active leadership. Russia is stagnant and a bit of a failed state. So there is no point of comparing with failed states.
Immorality is irrelevant - we will get rekt economically: EU is, right now, asking China to reduce production of electric cars and complaining that they are unfairly flooding the market
That's a common fallacy and overly simplistic. EU reductions in emissions from power generation, transportation, agriculture, construction, and similar have all been reduced by similar proportions as those from industry.
> Comparison of emissions should be done per capita - India is expected to emit more that EU, it has almost 3x as he population. The he idea that US should be top emitter forever when it’s only 300k people is absurd. Also EU has invested way more into cleantech than US has and has many times more production of these technologies than US does
Even on a per capita level, China emits more per capita than the EU does, and not that much less than the US which is still reducing its per capita emissions, so it will likely surpass it soon. India, for now, emits less, but under current trends will surpass the EU on a per capita basis before long too.
Fact is, both the EU's and US's annual carbon emissions have been trending down for years now, whereas those of China and India continue to point sharply upward. It makes zero sense to focus all the attention and anger on the US and the EU while ignoring what will soon become the world's top emitters.
> Lastly - don’t lump Russia together with China and India - China and India are actively developing countries with active leadership. Russia is stagnant and a bit of a failed state. So there is no point of comparing with failed states.
Russia is one of the world's top five emitters of greenhouse gases, of course it matters.
> Immorality is irrelevant - we will get rekt economically: EU is, right now, asking China to reduce production of electric cars and complaining that they are unfairly flooding the market
I didn't say we should base this on immorality, I'm saying your argument is implicitly based on it and incorrect as a result. What matters is the volume of emissions, and unless we slow down the level of emissions from China, India, Russia, and others forming the top tier of emitters we're not going to be able to meet any good climate targets.
I agree, however we aren’t seeing this in any meaningful fashion, let alone the amount we need to be seeing it to stave off catastrophe. So given this context, I am all for citizen/employee protest in whatever way required to get things to change course.
> It's likely that we would agree on quite a bit. Where we disagree is on the solution to the problems society faces.
I agree with this. Sorry if my last post was a bit aggressive.
> The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil.
I agree with this, but the longer we kick the can down the road, the more urgent the situation becomes and the more drastic the medicine we’ll need to take. So while right now we can possibly get by with a phase out so long as we start getting much more aggressive on renewables, in 20 years we’ll likely be in a “we have to turn off the oil taps immediately” situation. Would’ve been nice if Exxon hadn’t hidden their climate change data in the 60s and given everyone a chance for a peaceful transition. But they didn’t, and so I support everyone refusing to work on energy projects.
I don't think anyone involved lacks the critical thinking skills to understand what you laid out - that our society encourages and depends oil extraction. So what's next? How do you move society to discourage and depend less on oil extraction?
Driving down the costs of fossil fuels hinders the adoption of alternatives.
China will make the process as efficient as it wants. Remember, we live in a global economy with other players who don’t play by our rules, sanctions or not. And I assure you developing countries are onboard with the idea of oil extraction.
A lot of progressive agendas have ultimately been to China's benefit at the cost of everyone else and especially Pax Americana.
Hell, speaking as a Japanese-American (aka a racial minority), conservative people by far have treated me the fairest because they truly don't care about someone's race.
I mean actual conservatism, of course. Not "conservatism" often thrown around in these conversations to label out groups.
Like good Lord, we're not at war with China. they're one of our biggest trading partners. The idea that we should be doing everything in our power to economically fuck them over isn't the argument you think it is.
"Oh no, we have to supply services to oil companies because if not, a business in China might make a sale?"
The other players in the game only benefit from their opponents' state citizens increasingly expressing sentiments of concession.
This is one of the few issues with widespread bipartisan consensus (Biden has chosen to keep the China Tariffs that Trump enacted). And yes, China would be glad to take business away from Google. They don’t care about your ethics.
Apple releases M4 and tsmc rips it off tomorrow. All done on the their (americas) dime because we outsourced the means of production.
As far as this… you got morons quitting their jobs over crap like omg the oil industry is using our cloud. Meanwhile the biggest death machine on the planet e.g. the US government literally has two private azure offerings fully services by Microsoft with dedicated staff, but that’s not sexy, I can’t quit over that and post it in my socials, because that would be unpatriotic. But Microsoft not being green enough for me to work there is a stand that I can brag about.
I try to avoid buying plastic. Does that mean I don't buy anything made with plastic? No, of course not. That's ridiculous I couldn't buy 90% of products from the grocery store. But when given the opportunity will I pay for an option that doesn't use plastic, yes. It's not the 1800s you don't have to be pure of heart to want to affect positive change.
I'd like to debate a few of your other points: "Let's make the extraction of the life blood of all industry on the planet less efficient, less streamlined, less clean." - People often make this argument and I agree: oil is the _current_ life blood of all industry. The oil companies would like to keep it that way and have for years fought a very effective campaign to avoid responsibility for the externalities of oil production and consumption. They have slowed or blocked progress towards a _future_ where oil is not the lifeblood of industry. That is what we really need to get to as a species, don't you agree? There are no physics-based reason why some other technology couldn't power our lives. There are cost-based reasons why oil is currently the winning solution. This only works because we don't price the externalities, the _future_, yet to be paid cost of oil consumption. Fossil fuel companies have stood in the way of progress on renewables and exterality pricing for decades now.
Good on these employees for sticking by their ethos, but I feel in terms of problems in the world right now, there are much bigger fish to fry that Microsoft is in a position to correct. This seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees.
The best course of action to reduce fossil fuel usage is to see which processes on earth use that fossil fuel, and see if that can be transformed to use renewable energy. A combination of scientific research, regulation, awareness, education and trying to change human behaviour is probably the best way forward.
Blaming specific companies, for helping solving an energy need, seems not helpfull in that way.
Group for responsible solar is a fake charity funded by the oil sector that files planning objection to every solar farm in Britain, including noise complaints and ‘they should be on the roofs’ and then objects to the solar panels being on the roofs too, because they ‘ruin the view’.
They’ve made it illegal to build wind turbines on land on UK
They objected to an underground electricity cable to France because it would ‘ruin the landscape’
Oil companies are players, they protect their profits and you are getting played
Is Microsoft a player, like that? I don't think so that much, they only have an active control on there own energy/oil usage.
The only thing that will happen if Microsoft is giving in to these demands of employees, it will be perceived as morally good, and then in reality the oil companies still have a need and switch supplier. All because energy demand didn't change, only morals.
It is like the Maslows hierarchy of needs, but then applied at a world scale, we need to take into account everybody's (humans, animals, nature, companies and other societal structures) needs, and address the problems from the ground up. Otherwise the world will end up in a fighting mess, like what you describe in the UK, fighting solar and wind energy, or those employees of Microsoft, all never actualizing the energy transition.
One would think that if these employees really cared about protecting the environment, they'd be arguing about things like that, which are much more directly tied to them than this indirect and weak argument against providing cloud services to oil companies.
I disagree. The improper use of political power is generally bad, even if it achieves good outcomes.
For example, if US threatened to sanction any country where tobacco could be sold to under 18s it might reduce the global cancer rate by some amount - but the damage to the global system of governance would outweigh any realistic benefit.
Similarly big tech companies have immense de facto power, but they should use it sparingly. Otherwise they undermine the parliaments, courts any other forums where energy regulation should legitimately be made.
This also gets at the issue of whether or not cloud providers are common carriers. Or even Spotify and Joe Rogan. As a business, I don't want to be in the game of policing which customers or vendors I want on ideological grounds because it opens the floodgates to more complaints like this. The bar for not doing business with someone acting legally needs to be very high.
I want Google employees to fight the dark side of the ad business.
You know what’s not going to happen? Them being successful in cutting off their own legs.
Giants? MSFT is at 3 trillion dollars while XOM is at 529 billion. And we already have alternatives to Microsoft...
If you are against climate change, the effective policy to pursue is a carbon tax. Trying to shadowban computational geology is counterproductive.
Where are the Microsoft employees protesting ties to authoritarian regimes, invasions of privacy, censorship, and other actually worthwhile causes? Nowhere to be fucking seen. This "protest" of fossil fuels is not a protest but a psyop pushed from the top by the authoritarians in the West who want to destroy it and set up a world government. I'm not buying it.
Why do Microsoft employees feel good about a cause that will cause misery and poverty to Millions
If they want to make the world a better place, make windows crush less.