Google pledges not to make custom software for oil and gas extraction

Google says that it will not "build custom AI/ML algorithms to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry," the company announced on Tuesday. This represents a small but significant win for climate activists. Google's comment coincided with the release of a new Greenpeace report highlighting the role of the three leading cloud-computing services--Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure--in helping companies find and extract oil and gas. Greenpeace notes that extracting known fossil fuel reserves would already be sufficient to push the world over 2 degrees of warming. Uncovering additional reserves will ultimately lead to even more warming.