Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit by Assaad Razzouk

Author:Assaad Razzouk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

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The Social Media Axis of Evil

You may have heard, seen or read that Big Tech – companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft – have all decided they want eventually to be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy. We the customers want it, and therefore they have been working on green-upstaging each other for a few years now, with Google most recently taking the lead by pledging that it will run its operations purely on carbon-free energy by 2030 (Amazon promises to do the same thing, but by 2040). To sell this and improve its environmental credentials, Google is assuring us that every email we send through Gmail, every question we ask it, every YouTube video we watch and every route we take using Google Maps is a service powered by renewable energy.

In some ways, these green pledges are great, because every step large corporations take to clean up their act helps create new norms. But while it’s nice to know that every search powered by Google is delivered to us using green electrons, it also matters what the company (and the others) are using their tremendous artificial intelligence, big data and emerging robotics skills for.

While advertising green credentials, Big Tech is also, covertly for the most part, forging lucrative global partnerships with oil, gas and coal companies, with the sole purpose of increasing fossil fuel production. That act alone places them squarely in the Axis of Evil category. We already know that despite the global climate emergency we’re in, Big Oil is doubling down on fossil fuels. Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies and Saudi Aramco are scrambling to produce more of them than ever before. They’re getting plenty of help from banks, and from governments around the world too.

What we don’t pay much attention to is the fact that Big Tech is building a new and overwhelmingly harmful carbon cloud, by placing their computer power at the service of oil companies so that the latter can use their cutting-edge technologies to produce even more oil, faster and cheaper.

You would think that technology companies are leaders in corporate sustainability, given how public they are with their save-the-world rhetoric. However, in 2019, an article penned by an anonymous Microsoft software engineer was among the first to contribute to exploding that narrative. He was sent to Kazakhstan to work with Chevron, the US oil corporation, and the Kazakh state oil company to improve their extraction output with machine-learning techniques, big data and artificial intelligence – basically all the computer power Microsoft could muster. Chevron had signed a seven-year deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars to establish Microsoft as its primary cloud provider.

We need to digress for a moment to talk about cloud computing. It’s basically a way for companies to rent computer servers instead of buying them. A few years ago, a company would have run its website from a server that it paid for and maintained itself. Today, the same company can outsource its infrastructure needs to a cloud provider such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

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