AI Could Help Fossil Fuel Companies Create More Emissions
It also significantly outpaces projections of emissions from the global data center buildout.The relationship between technology companies and fossil fuels is “a self-reinforcing effect between supply and demand,” says Will Alpine, one of the authors of the research. “One of the key insights of our paper is that you cannot treat them independently. They are two sides of the same coin.”Alpine and his wife and coauthor, Holly, are former Microsoft sustainability workers with years of experience between them at the company.
- ▪It also significantly outpaces projections of emissions from the global data center buildout.The relationship between technology companies and fossil fuels is “a self-reinforcing effect between supply and demand,” says Will Alpine, one of t
- ▪“One of the key insights of our paper is that you cannot treat them independently.
- ▪They are two sides of the same coin.”Alpine and his wife and coauthor, Holly, are former Microsoft sustainability workers with years of experience between them at the company.
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| Original publisher | WIRED — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/ai-could-help-fossil-fuel-companies-create-more-emissions/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:45:02 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T13:45:43.143Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T13:45:43.143Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Lj_3340IRLx- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Molly TaftScienceAug 11, 2026 9:45 AMAI Could Help Fossil Fuel Companies Create More EmissionsNew research finds that by making the fossil fuel industry more productive, AI could help increase carbon emissions by up to nearly 5 percent—vastly outpacing the impact of data centers.Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThe emissions from powering data centers rightly get a lot of attention. But new research from former Microsoft sustainability workers cautions that the way artificial intelligence enhances productivity in the oil and gas industry could be much more damaging to the planet.Published last week in the journal npj Climate Action, the research finds that AI use could significantly increase global…
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