> 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.
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?
Dont know BP specifically, but in no normal big corporation can 'some low level engineer' just go and create accounts at will unless said provider is already used quite a bit. There are approved providers, getting stuff from them goes through responsible team which should ask many relevant questions.
The thing people have a problem with is that Microsoft is claiming that it will be carbon neutral by 2030 but it can't be true so they're just bullshitting.
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.
> 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.
Americans have a very weird individualistic idea of what's acceptable when it comes to reining in Companies Behaving Badly:
- 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!
Every, and I mean every aspect of the economy has "ties to oil". Oil companies sell to willing buyers, many of whom turn around and point the finger at the oil company. It's an extreme level of cognitive dissonance that never stops surprising me. I believe in climate change for the record, and do believe we need to switch to sustainable energy, but the attitude of a lot of climate activists really rubs me the wrong way sometimes.
There needs to be a comic for dorks who hate oil just because, despite the fact that we desperately need it for modern life. By all means develop new energy if you can. But antagonizing oil companies for serving society the stuff they need is fucking stupid.
Lol I've seen that before. Actually the iPhone example is a very clear case of hypocrisy. My only point is that I'm sure Microsoft has plenty of other clients whose profits are only 1 or 2 degrees removed from oil extraction. Any level of participation in capitalism is likely increasing oil extraction indirectly. It is the primary energy source of economic activity. Shutting down the oil companies will not speed up development of alternative energy sources (which we already have tech for, like nuclear, but the general public never got over their fear of it).
A lot of this seems to be like that Ralph kid from The Simpsons; "I'm helping!" Well-intentioned? Absolutely. Actually helpful? Meh.
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.
Cars and the transportation sector are the primary consumers of oil. I think GP was saying, stop pointing at the oil company while you’re driving around in your car.
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.
>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.
Why do you think that cloud computing would lend to the cleanliness or efficiency of their operations in a way that reduces the environmental burden? What stops them from using such services to extract oil more efficiently in the sense that they just produce more externalities faster?
>extract oil more efficiently in the sense that they just produce more externalities faster
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...
That is not a good faith argument. People who support sustainability want less extraction, not no extraction. Sustainability means extracting less so it is doable over a long period of time.
I mean, I think there is a reasonable argument here: Microsoft has corporate environmental goals and then as a matter of profit takes money from interests working in direct opposition to those goals. It does smack of hypocrisy, no?
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.
This has big, "you want to criticize capitalism while you buy things with money" energy. Consumers are by in large product takers who have to choose between the products that are on offer. There's no market segment for "same product but without fossil fuels."
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.
It's a clear case of all-or-nothing thinking. Calling a CEO's statement "gaslighting" because it implied something does not do anything help their credibility.
Yep. It's genuinely shocking to me that people lack the critical thinking ability to recognize that oil extraction is a function of society as a whole. Oil companies are the ones who get their hands dirty, but society as a whole benefits and encourages the oil extraction. Take factory farming as another example - you can blame the factory farms, but good luck telling the average American they'll have to pay 3x as much for chicken and hamburgers because the animals were treated well.
Isn't this, then, an example of taking responsibility for the harm caused by fossil fuels? Microsoft benefits from them, in this case, very directly by selling their services for a profit. Wouldn't Microsoft denying fossil fuel companies services be a way to deny benefits (profit) in order to discourage oil extraction?
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?
These are people in said society operating on another part of the whole. They are not idly "blaming", they are attempting to directly increase the cost function to reduce the extraction.
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.
> Oil companies are the ones who get their hands dirty, but society as a whole benefits and encourages the oil extraction. Take factory farming as another example - you can blame the factory farms, but good luck telling the average American they'll have to pay 3x as much for chicken and hamburgers because the animals were treated well.
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.
Microsoft should respond by closing their parking lots to all but EVs. I'm SURE that none of the green activist would ever drive an ICE vehicle while protesting big oil...riiight?
So then, the oil companies around the world will be able to trivially use Chinese services like Alibaba, further strengthening the Chinese economy at the expense of our own?
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.
I wonder sometimes to what extent progressives (aka the left, "liberals", leftists, woke, etc.) and their agenda are just paid Chinese operatives and operations or the results of such.
A lot of progressive agendas have ultimately been to China's benefit at the cost of everyone else and especially Pax Americana.
I upvoted this article, not because of its significance or because I think it's valuable (in truth, I think it contains a fair amount of slant), but because I'd love to hear some critical discourse on its contents.
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.
> Good on these employees for sticking by their ethos
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.
Well, in the context of a tech giant like MS, there are the bigger fish of privacy, security and e-waste. Eg how many otherwise perfectly good computers are about to be thrown out as junk in the next few years because MS refuses to loosen Win11 system requirements?
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.
The energy hunger of the people of the world (you and me).
Stopping Microsoft supporting oil companies won't fix reducing fossil fuel usage, we have to look at cause and effect.
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.
If oil beats out renewables because they're using the cloud rather than several colocated racks, renewables have bigger viability problems. Not saying they do, but the cloud won't be what changes energy policy.
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.
Ironically, this article highlights multiple times how successful Microsoft has been at boosting efficiency within the oil and gas industry that it's nearly an advertisement for Microsoft.
>> “My resignation was driven in part by the realization that the tech industry, including Microsoft, is increasing the profitability and competitiveness of these fossil fuel giants..."
Giants? MSFT is at 3 trillion dollars while XOM is at 529 billion. And we already have alternatives to Microsoft...
Readit News
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?
I doubt this is a case of some random engineer at an oil company buying a few VMs on a website.
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.
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.
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!
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.
>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...
Driving down the costs of fossil fuels hinders the adoption of alternatives.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Giants? MSFT is at 3 trillion dollars while XOM is at 529 billion. And we already have alternatives to Microsoft...