Google says it will no longer build custom artificial intelligence tools for speeding up oil and gas extraction, separating itself from cloud computing rivals Microsoft and Amazon.
A statement from the company Tuesday followed a Greenpeace report that documents how the three tech giants are using AI and computing power to help oil companies find and access oil and gas deposits in the U.S. and around the world.
The environmentalist group says Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been undermining their own climate change pledges by partnering with major oil companies including Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil that have looked for new technology to get more oil and gas out of the ground.
But the group applauded Google on Tuesday for taking a step away from those deals.
“While Google still has a few legacy contracts with oil and gas firms, we welcome this indication from Google that it will no longer build custom solutions for upstream oil and gas extraction,” said Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner for Greenpeace USA.
Google said it will honor all existing contracts with its customers, but didn’t specify what companies. A Google cloud executive had earlier in May revealed the new policy during a video interview.
Greenpeace’s report says Microsoft appears to be leading the way with the most oil and contracts, “offering AI capabilities in all phases of oil production.”
Amazon’s contracts are more focused on pipelines, shipping, and fuel storage, according to the report. Their tools have been deployed to speed up shale extraction, especially from the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico.
Some of the contracts have led to internal protests by employees who are pushing their companies to do more to combat climate change.
Amazon declined to comment on the Greenpeace report, but pointed to the wording on its website that said: “the energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries.”
Microsoft published a blog statement Tuesday that didn’t address Greenpeace’s claims but emphasized the company’s commitment to remove from the air all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050.
Read more at NY Post
Never fear! Sanctimonious Google doesn’t have the corner on AI. Legions of others will be happy to fill their slot.
Time for the actvists to get a taste of what its like to live without a Home powered with electricity and no heat either
“The environmentalist group says Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been undermining their own climate change pledges by partnering with major oil companies…”
“…partnering…”? No, A, M, and G are “selling a product” to paying customers, and making a profit on the deal – otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it the first place.
So, the oil companies will find another supplier – who doesn’t have a political agenda – and Google’s profit/loss bottom line will suffer a bit. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving outfit. (Full disclosure: I don’t own any shares in Google.)
Greenpeace co-founder and former president of Greenpeace Canada Patrick Moore described the cynical and corrupt machinations fueling the narrative of anthropocentric global warming and “climate change” in a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Moore explained how fear and guilt are leveraged by proponents of climate change:
Fear has been used all through history to gain control of people’s minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign — well, fear and guilt — you’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.
Scientists are co-opted and corrupted by politicians and bureaucracies invested in advancing the narrative of “climate change” in order to further centralize political power and control, explained Moore.
Moore noted how “green” companies parasitize taxpayers via favorable regulations and subsidies ostensibly justified by the aforementioned narrative’s claimed threats, all while enjoying propagandistic protection across news media”
And so you’ve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You’ve got the media echo chamber — fake news — repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they’re killing their children. And then you’ve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials. And then you’ve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers, and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this. And then, of course, you’ve got the scientists who are willingly, they’re basically hooked on government grants.
When they talk about the 99 percent consensus [among scientists] on climate change, that’s a completely ridiculous and false number. But most of the scientists — put it in quotes, scientists — who are pushing this catastrophic theory are getting paid by public money, they are not being paid by General Electric or Dupont or 3M to do this research, where private companies expect to get something useful from their research that might produce a better product and make them a profit in the end because people want it — build a better mousetrap type of idea. But most of what these so-called scientists are doing is simply producing more fear so that politicians can use it to control people’s minds and get their votes because some of the people are convinced, ‘Oh, this politician can save my kid from certain doom.’
The narrative of anthropogenic global warming or “climate change” is an existential threat to reason, warned Moore:
It is the biggest lie since people thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. This is Galileo-type stuff. If you remember, Galileo discovered that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. He was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church, and only because he recanted was he allowed to live in house arrest for the rest of his life.
So this was around the beginning of what we call the Enlightenment, when science became the way in which we gained knowledge instead of using superstition and instead of using invisible demons and whatever else, we started to understand that you have to have observation of actual events and then you have to repeat those observations over and over again, and that is basically the scientific method.
“But this abomination that is occurring today in the climate issue is the biggest threat to the Enlightenment that has occurred since Galileo,” declared Moore. “Nothing else comes close to it. This is as bad a thing that has happened o science in the history of science.”
Moore concluded, “It’s taking over science with superstition and a kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology. There is no truth to this. It is a complete hoax and scam.”
But it’s ok for Google’s suckers to cooperate with the murderous red Chinese regime by helping them to track down dissidents, so commie could imprison and kill their political opponents much more efficiently.