The world's addiction to fossil fuels is a "Frankenstein's monster sparing nothing and no one", the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. "Our fossil fuel addiction is a Frankenstein's monster, sparing nothing and no one. All around us, we see clear signs that the monster has become master," Guterres said in a speech days after 2024 was revealed to have been the hottest year on record and Donald Trump began his second term as US president by pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement and pledging to "drill, baby, drill" for more oil and gas. The fossil fuel industry gave 75m ( 60m) to Trump's campaign. Guterres said: "What we are seeing today – sea-level rise, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires – are just a preview of the horror movie to come."

Google has pledged to no longer build AIs for the fossil fuel industry as it further distances itself from controversial developments. A report from Greenpeace earlier this month exposed Google as being one of the top three developers of AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. Greenpeace found AI technologies boost production levels by as much as five percent. In an interview with CUBE's John Furrier, the leader of Google's CTO office, Will Grannis, said that Google will "no longer develop artificial intelligence (AI) software and tools for oil and gas drilling operations." The pledge from Google Cloud is welcome, but it must be taken in a wider context.

Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's energy consultancy.

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND – Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google to make promises to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10 percent of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's energy consultancy.

In this May 6, 2019 file photo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the keynote address at Build, the company's annual conference for software developers in Seattle. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms. One employee stood up to ask Microsoft CEO Nadella about the ethics of the company's oil and gas contracts at an all-staff meeting in Sept. 2019, and Nadella defended the partnerships. Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google promising to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named.