Will and Holly Alpine loved their jobs at Microsoft, which made quitting to protest the company’s work with the oil and gas industry a terrifying experience.
The Seattle-based couple worked in the company’s responsible AI and sustainability divisions, respectively, and were heavily involved in internal groups pushing the company to become greener. He had worked at Microsoft since 2020, and she had been there since 2014.
During their final few years at Microsoft, the couple said they raised concerns with internal memos about how the company’s tech was helping the oil and gas industry expand fossil fuel production.
“I had concerns that the tools I was helping build were being weaponized by bad actors, and I was concerned about the lack of accountability,” Will, 36, told Business Insider.
Eventually, they realized they could create more change if they left the company. “We had reached a conclusion that, within reason, we did everything we could from the inside constructively — and there was no one else pushing from the outside,” Holly, 33, said.
Microsoft declined to comment. The company has committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030.
Leaving Microsoft
In early 2024, the couple left their jobs and launched the Enabled Emissions Campaign to raise awareness of Microsoft’s work with the fossil-fuel industry and put pressure on the Big Tech giant from the outside.
Leaving their stable tech jobs has been the “most ambitious and challenging period of our lives,” Will said.
The decision also came with some serious lifestyle changes.
The couple has had to “cut their cost of living dramatically,” Holly said, although being vegan meant they were “already used to living affordably” by eating “lots of rice and beans.”
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The couple also takes part in the sharing economy “wherever possible,” participates in their local “Buy Nothing” group, and buys most goods secondhand. Will said that, as an engineer, he embraces DIY.
They also decided to be child-free, which helped them avoid the “major expense of child-rearing,” Holly told Business Insider.
“We are privileged tech workers, we had stable finances, no kids; we just decided, you know, if not us, who? We should take the leap and just kind of trust in the universe that it’s going to work out,” she said.
Microsoft’s oil and gas ties
Microsoft’s overall carbon emissions increased by 23.4% between 2020 and 2024, according to the company’s most recently published figures.
These numbers do not include emissions from increased fossil fuel production linked to efficiency gains from Microsoft’s technology, the Alpines told Business Insider.
According to a 2019 Microsoft press release, the application of its cloud, Internet of Things, and machine learning technology by a subsidiary of oil and gas giant ExxonMobil was anticipated to “expand production by as much as 50,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day by 2025.”
Microsoft declined to provide a more up-to-date estimate.
That is the equivalent of 6,356,475 metric tonnes of CO2 being emitted in one year, according to modelling from the Green Web Foundation, a non-profit. It’s also more than half of the entire carbon footprint that Microsoft reported in 2019, on one contract.
“We’re talking about Microsoft providing the technology to oil companies to dramatically increase fossil fuel production,” Holly said. “Those increases in emissions are not counted in any of Microsoft’s reporting.”
Microsoft’s work with the oil and gas industry preceded the generative AI boom, and the Alpines say AI is helping to ramp up fossil fuel production. AI could already help increase fossil fuel production by up to 10-15%, cutting oil recovery rates while increasing recovery rates of oil and gas, per a 2020 Barclays report.
“It has fundamentally reshaped the economics of fossil fuel extraction, and generative AI is a layer of innovation on that that’s really increased the scale,” Holly said.
Microsoft isn’t the only Big Tech giant with ties to the oil and gas industry. Amazon has also worked with drillers to help simulate their oil production in a bid to maximize their output. While Google once had connections to the industry, it pledged to stop selling its machine learning platform for oil exploration use cases in 2020, following employee backlash.
Launching the Enabled Emissions Campaign
The Enabled Emission Campaign’s primary goals are to highlight how companies use technology to increase the production of fossil fuels and call for guardrails for this use.
“We think Big Tech companies should stop enabling the problem that they claim to be solving, and Big Tech must account for and disclose the full climate impact of the contracts they sign, especially with fossil fuel clients,” Will said. “So that means measuring these enabled emissions, and not just their own operational footprints. They also need to draw clear lines in the sand, such as no AI or cloud deals to explicitly expand fossil fuel production.”
The couple spends their days focusing on policy advocacy, deep research, fundraising, and coalition-building.
Fundraising for the campaign has been tricky. “A lot of folks are not actually even aware of this work happening, so it’s kind of an awareness-raising first before we can even get to that fundraising,” Holly said.
The EEC has raised a pre-seed round from an anonymous individual donor who is known to the couple. The funding has allowed them to sustain themselves financially for the time being, but Holly said the couple had “traded short-term stability for the opportunity to address a long-term crisis.”
An added difficulty has been the US’s policy landscape during Donald Trump’s second term, with the administration rolling back tax credits that benefited the clean energy sector.
“We haven’t been inside Microsoft since Trump 2.0, but we’ve witnessed a shift of backsliding in climate commitments as partially driven by the race for AI supremacy,” Will said, adding that there was no response from Microsoft when Trump pulled the US from the Paris climate accord for the second time.
Microsoft can’t feasibly claim to want to be carbon negative while helping oil majors increase their output, Holly added. She hopes the EEC will help move the needle and push the company to break these ties.
