The Missing Variable in AI & Climate: Enabled Emissions

​AI is hailed as a climate solution and criticized for its energy use. But what happens when it’s also used—deliberately—to deepen the climate crisis?

​While Big Tech touts AI as a sustainability solution, it is simultaneously enabling the fossil fuel industry with powerful digital tools—boosting extraction, extending oil and gas operations, and locking in decades of future emissions. These “enabled emissions” far exceed the footprint of AI infrastructure itself, yet remain absent from most climate policy and discourse.

​In this talk, two former Responsible AI and sustainability leads at Microsoft share their insider story: a years-long internal campaign for accountability, and why they ultimately left. Now, they’re building a movement to expose this critical blind spot—and push for governance that aligns digital infrastructure with climate science and justice.