Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion campaign for a breakup between big tech and big oil
Employing disparate tactics, the activist organizations want Amazon, Google and Microsoft to stop helping the fossil fuel industry extract more oil and gas.
By Ilana Cohen Inside Climate News
When Sam Kern started working at Google four years ago, she believed she could drive change as an insider. If she could just “get the ear” of the right executives, Kern thought, she could convince them to move the company in a new direction on climate and sustainability.
But over time, Kern said she realized, powerful moneyed interests made that impossible.
Kern, a user experience engineer, described company leaders as “putting up a wall between the business interests and human interests,” even as they seemed to recognize the severity of the climate crisis, which made conversations with them feel emotionally disconnected.
So Kern turned to more direct activism. After becoming involved with the employee group Googlers for Climate Action, Kern joined thousands of tech workers who walked out of their offices during last September’s global climate strike to demand bold climate commitments from their employers. And she didn’t stop there.
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Kern left Google in May and joined the radical climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, which earlier this month launched a digital campaign, bigtechlovesbigoil.com, targeting tech majors Google, Microsoft and Amazon for providing oil and gas companies with cloud computing services, custom artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.
By then, Greenpeace had also launched an effort to stop Amazon, Google and Microsoft from working with Big Oil in ways that help oil and gas companies extract fossil fuels and cause further global warming.
In May, Greenpeace published “Oil in the Cloud,” a report that said the three tech giants had spent years pursuing lucrative deals to supply Chevron, Shell, BP and ExxonMobil with technology to enhance fossil fuel extraction and production. As the paper highlighted, all three tech majors have bold public-facing sustainability commitments, centered around reducing their companies’ carbon footprint and investing in renewable energy.
Elizabeth Jardim, a senior corporate campaigner for Greenpeace USA and the report’s co-author, said she worries that the tech companies could offer the oil and gas industry a lifeline at a time when oil prices have fallen amid the coronavirus pandemic and a growing divestment movement.
“I don’t think these solutions will totally save the oil and gas industry, but they’re certainly helping an industry that should be on the way out to hold on,” said Jardim, who sees the Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion campaigns as complimentary.
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