Kemi Badenoch’s flagship party conference policy document overestimated the cost of net zero by nearly £500bn, seemingly after someone accidentally double-counted figures on a spreadsheet.
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Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/09/tories-overstate-net-zero-cost-500bn-spreadsheet-error
Article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Just over a week after a leading US Senate Democrat described President Donald Trump’s relationship with fossil fuel giants as “old-fashioned corruption, by a thuggish government and a desperate industry,” his administration on Thursday announced yet another giveaway to climate polluters who want to exploit the Arctic.
The US Department of the Interior is moving forward with a plan to allow oil and gas companies to conduct certain wintertime activities at the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska without reviews generally required by the National Environmental Policy Act—a landmark law long targeted by Trump’s Republican Party.
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“In issuing this categorical exclusion, this administration is seeking to fast-track large-scale oil drilling and seismic exploration without any further environmental analysis or public input,” warned Earthjustice attorney Janet Bering. “It is cutting the public out of this decision and future decisions.”
“The administration finalized this new approach with zero public input,” Bering noted. “Combined with a similar proposal that rubber-stamps new oil production, this is a one-two punch. It’s bad policy, and it is unlawful.”
The 60-day public comment period is ongoing for the earlier proposal she cited, which is designed to streamline decision-making for construction and operation of oil and gas production sites in the same 23-million-acre Alaska reserve.
When the Interior Department unveiled that policy in early September, Earthjustice Attorney Erik Grafe declared that “what we’re seeing here is a concerted attack by the Trump administration to greenlight oil and gas drilling in the Western Arctic while ignoring the harm it will cause to these irreplaceable public lands and also the government’s obligation to protect these lands for wildlife and future generations.”
“These are large-scale, industrial activities that cause permanent damage to sensitive Arctic ecosystems, nearby communities, and the climate,” Grafe stressed. “The administration’s proposal flaunts basic environmental laws meant to protect land, wildlife, and people and allow for fully informed decision-making.”
Earthjustice is far from alone in blasting Trump’s recent attacks on the Arctic. Dan Ritzman, director of Sierra Club’s conservation campaign, condemned last month’s proposal as “another piece of the administration’s relentless effort to expand drilling across Alaska’s public lands.”
“The Western Arctic is home to caribou, migratory birds, and countless other wildlife, and decisions about its future deserve careful scrutiny—not a permitting process designed around the demands of the oil and gas industry,” Ritzman said at the time.
His colleague Mike Scott, Sierra Club’s national oil and gas campaign manager, was similarly critical of Thursday’s announcement.
“The Trump administration is handing Big Oil another free pass to exploit America’s public lands, this time by gutting environmental oversight in one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet,” said Scott. “Oil companies have already shown the risks they pose to the Western Arctic, and now this administration wants to make it even easier for them to drill without scrutiny.”
“This isn’t about lowering energy costs or helping Alaskans,” he continued—as the president drives up fuel costs with an illegal war on Iran. “It’s about doing the fossil fuel industry’s bidding at the expense of wildlife, Alaska Native communities, and our public lands. The Trump administration is putting corporate profits ahead of people and the planet, and the Western Arctic will pay the price.”
Trump campaigned for a second term on a pledge to serve fossil fuel interests—even telling industry executives that he’d roll back climate policies if they poured $1 billion into his campaign. Last week, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Committee on Environment and Public Works Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released a report detailing how the president has delivered on that promise since returning to power last year.
“The fossil fuel industry and their allies bought their way into the Trump White House with hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations, after Trump promised fossil fuel bigwigs at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that he’d do anything and everything they wanted, for the right price,” Whitehouse said. “Now, their minions run the government from the inside, driving up energy bills to deliver payouts to the donors that put Trump back in office.”
Article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Article by Sarah Hofmann republished from DeSmog.
When United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned world leaders last week in his UN address about the unchecked power of both Big Oil and artificial intelligence, he treated them as two of the defining challenges facing governments.
The fossil fuel industry is turning to AI to map seabeds, identify new oil reservoirs, assess oil wells’ “abandonment risks”, inspect facilities, and streamline regulatory processes, potentially adding to the emissions of an industry that Guterres said governments must move away from.
At the same time, the technology companies providing these AI tools are not generally held accountable for the additional fossil fuel production and emissions their products may enable.
“The danger is not technology,” Guterres told the UN General Assembly. “The danger is technology without accountability.”
A DeSmog review of company announcements, industry presentations, and other publicly available information found that, across major fossil fuel companies — Aramco, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies and others — AI is increasingly being integrated into fossil fuel operations, from seismic exploration and drilling to equipment monitoring and field development.
The examples provide a real-world look at the mechanism behind a recent study published in Nature: that AI can increase emissions not only because of the electricity required to run data centers, but because it can make fossil fuel production more productive and profitable.
The study found that AI-driven productivity gains in fossil fuel production accounted for most of the modeled increase in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. It estimated that AI could increase global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by between 1.2 and 4.8 percent, with productivity gains in fossil fuel production accounting for most of that increase.
In one example of AI gains, Norwegian energy company Equinor re-scanned the Norwegian continental shelf with “new seismic technology and AI,” resulting in 27 new discoveries of oil, Hege Skryseth, the company’s executive vice president, chief technology officer, said during a June presentation for Equinor’s Capital Market Day.
“By reprocessing the data, the seismic image became much sharper, leading to the discoveries,” Skryseth said. “AI was key here, from automated data interpretation to efficient well planning.”
AI saved Equinor $130 million last year, according to a January 2026 press release.
Chevron is also using AI to produce oil that was “previously considered unreachable.”
In the oil company’s recently launched podcast — in which racing driver Tanner Foust and Chevron Chief Technology and Engineering Officer Ryder Booth chat from a pickup truck tailgate — Booth said that breakthroughs at Anchor, an oil and gas development, represented the “first time unlocking kind of a new horizon around the world.”
“AI, it’s attracted to big data and big opportunities, and the oil and gas industry has big data,” Booth said. Last year, Chevron said it had improved drilling and fracking efficiency in the Permian Basin by over 30 percent.
The value of these productivity gains is significant. A recent McKinsey & Co. report estimated that, for the upstream oil and gas sector, AI can generate $65 billion in profits annually in the short term, which could increase to $230 billion when the technology is deployed at its “full potential.”
AI-driven efficiency gains have already reduced operational costs by up to 18 percent; and industry executives attribute about 5 percent of their current revenue to “AI-driven initiatives,” according to a 2025 report from IBM, which has multiple partnerships with oil and gas companies.
At Equinor’s enormous Johan Sverdrup oil field in the North Sea, “data flows up from the ground faster than the oil,” the company’s site states, at the rate of “10,000 Netflix movies a second.”
The company is also using AI to optimize the placement of subsea equipment and wells.
“What used to take 2-3 weeks and involved flying hard disks to shore with helicopter for analysis can now be done in seconds and live-streamed,” Equinor said.
ExxonMobil is also embracing enormous datasets. In 2019, ExxonMobil partnered with Microsoft to use AI in its Permian Basin operations, a move Exxon said would “generate billions of dollars in value” and produce up to an additional “50,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day by 2025.”
The oil giant also said that gains in efficiency from advanced technologies, including AI, “is a first step” towards letting systems respond to events without human intervention.
Holly Alpine, a coauthor of the Nature study, said the significance of such partnerships is easy to miss when attention focuses on the emissions produced by powering AI systems.
“For some reason, tech companies are exempt from accountability for the tech they are creating,” she told DeSmog.
Alpine and her husband, Will Alpine, another author of the Nature study, previously worked for Microsoft, but left after coming to the conclusion that the company hid how its products were harming the climate. The couple then founded the Enabled Emissions Campaign, a nonprofit that calls attention to tech’s role in fossil fuel production and advocates for better regulations.
She said that now, oil companies like Exxon pumping 50,000 barrels a day is “actually quite a small deal.”
“The deals have only grown in size, and we realized that that was not part of Microsoft’s accountability whatsoever, even though they are the company creating the technology that is making this happen.”
A recent Reuters article about Exxon’s use of automated drilling in the Permian Basin, which said the company plans to increase production in the region to 2.5 million barrels a day, didn’t mention if Microsoft was still involved with the project; on Exxon’s website, references to Microsoft partnerships still link to the announcement from 2019.
Microsoft did not confirm whether it’s still partnering with Exxon on those operations, but the tech company is the leading cloud provider for the oil and gas industry, according to Kimberlite Research, followed by Amazon and Google.
Just two years ago, fossil fuels’ share of the world’s energy supply was projected to decline in coming years. Then, AI data centers began expanding rapidly, and with them, the argument that fossil fuels must scale up, too, for the U.S. to win the “AI arms race.”
At the same time, the fossil fuel and technology industries are becoming increasingly intertwined. AI data centers require enormous amounts of electricity, and natural gas supplies more than 40 percent of the power used by U.S. data centers, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“AI’s advance will depend not only on the design labs of Silicon Valley, but also on the gas fields of the Permian Basin,” Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chairman and CEO, said in 2024.
In the face of power grid constraints, some data centers are turning to natural-gas power plants built onsite, a setup known as “behind-the-meter” generation, like Chevron’s Kilby project with Microsoft. U.S. data centers’ investments in new gas turbines recently surpassed the total investments of every country except the U.S., according to an IEA report.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas companies are benefiting both from using AI to increase efficiency, and from supplying the additional energy that its data centers demand.
Online, Microsoft promotes AI tools as a way to “accelerate the energy transition,” “reduce emissions,” and “accelerate climate innovation.”
Instead, AI may be having the opposite effect, prolonging our reliance on fossil fuels and delaying a broader transition to cleaner energy.
“In the absence of continuous reinvestment, oil and gas production would fall by approximately 8 percent annually,” the Nature paper says, quoting IEA reports, and “technological progress has repeatedly delayed ‘peak oil’ forecasts by unlocking resources previously considered un-viable.”
Equinor’s website recognizes the growing scarcity of oil reserves, noting that undersea oil and gas discoveries have dramatically declined in recent decades. “Even with planned projects, the (production) trend is downward,” it states. “Gently at first, but more noticeably if we don’t act fast to create new resource opportunities. This will affect value creation across Norway.”
Chevron’s Booth, meanwhile, says there’s still enough oil, “and technology and innovation will unlock that,” though he also admitted we would need all forms of energy to meet the world’s demand.
In spite of concerns about future scarcity, wartime windfalls and beneficial policies have recently brought record profits for major oil and gas companies, news reports show.
After the August Nature article showing that AI helps the fossil fuel industry create more pollution, Johanna Fornberg, a Greenpeace senior research specialist, said in a statement that, while Big Tech continues to promise that AI technologies will benefit humanity and offer climate solutions, “what is hidden from that story is the aggressive support tech companies provide to fossil fuel companies to continue producing oil and gas that harms communities and the climate.”
Microsoft says it plans to “become carbon negative by 2030,” though the company’s emissions increased by 25 percent last year, driven in part by expanding data centers, according to its 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report.
Microsoft’s 2025 Responsible AI Transparency Report also said that its enterprise contracts “incorporate our AI Services Code of Conduct, which requires our customers to implement responsible practices (such as human oversight and access controls) and prohibits using our AI services in ways that inflict harm on individuals, organizations, or society, or affects individuals in any way that is otherwise prohibited by law.”
Alpine said very little action is being taken to regulate the use of AI’s climate impacts. Microsoft announced in 2022 that it would only work in certain capacities with companies with net zero targets, she said, but “they don’t follow any standards for net zero.”
That principle, which is listed on Microsoft’s website, says the company may provide “technical or engineering resources to develop or co-develop specialized subsurface exploration and extraction services” or provide products at no cost to energy customers with goals to reach net zero Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 2050.
Exxon and Chevron have both walked back their plans to reach net zero by 2050, saying that necessary advancements in technology and policy that are beyond their control haven’t materialized. Exxon now says it’s on track to achieve net zero across its Permian Basin operations by 2035, while Chevron “continues to have the aspiration” to achieve net zero, but without a timeline.
Microsoft did not respond to a question about whether the changes to Exxon’s and Chevron’s net zero goals has affected the companies’ agreements. Chevron, Equinor, and Exxon also did not respond to requests for comment.
Equinor says it intends to become net zero by 2050 “as part of its commitment to do zero harm to people, the environment, and material assets.”
Article by Sarah Hofmann republished from DeSmog.
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Article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The 10th annual Copernicus Ocean State Report, released Wednesday by a team of more than 100 international scientists, provided the latest reminder that, as one United Nations official said, “the ocean is one of the clearest indicators of the profound shifts” that the climate crisis is causing.
Data gathered by Mercator Ocean International, the nonprofit that produced the report, revealed “an ocean warming at an alarming pace, with far-reaching consequences for marine life, coastlines, and communities worldwide,” said the group.
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The study delivers ocean scientists’ “starkest warning yet of the profound changes sweeping across the ocean, as a likely unprecedented El Niño takes shape in the Pacific,” said Mercator, referring to the natural warming trend that is expected to be made more intense this year by planetary heating.
Drawing on four decades of data from satellites, buoys, sensors, and modeling, the scientists found that 2024 was marked by record-breaking marine heatwaves as well as an unprecedented extreme low sea level event, causing levels in the Bothnian Bay between Sweden and Finland to plunge 60 inches, bringing ferries to a halt for 18 hours.
Heatwaves in the Mediterranean and Black seas lasted more than 30 days and raised water temperatures by more than 8.3°F (4.6°C) above average.
“These are not isolated hot spells; they are occurring against a backdrop of sustained ocean warming that is changing the conditions marine ecosystems experience,” Blanca Fernández-Álvarez, a report author and a conresearcher at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, told CNN.
But along with extreme events documented in the report, the scientists found unmistakable trends showing no sign of letting up, including persistent damage to marine life due to ocean heating fueled by continued oil and gas extraction.
Small island states—some of the countries least responsible for carbon emissions that are leading to record heat absorption by the oceans—face worsening, “overlapping pressures” including sea-level rise that could wipe out coastal and island communities and the growing threat of more intense tropical cyclones.
Over the last three decades, reads the report, “ongoing reorganization of marine ecosystems around the world” hasr been made clear by persistent changes in growth patterns of phytoplankton, which support food webs and carbon flows, in nearly 5% of the ocean.
Heat stress also contributed to coral bleaching in 84% of the world’s reefs, threatening marine ecosystems as well as coastal communities that rely on reefs for protection and tourism.
“The ocean is transforming before our eyes: Warming, rising seas, and ecosystem degradation are interconnected signs of significant and long-term change,” said Pierre Bahurel, director general of Mercator Ocean International.
As humans have continued to emit carbon and other greenhouse gases despite warnings from energy experts and scientists, the rate of ocean heating has doubled over the past two decades, causing sea surface temperatures to skyrocket to record highs in 2023, 2024, and this year.
In 2025, the report says, the ocean absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules—about 40 times the energy consumed by the entire world last year. The energy absorption is equivalent to 12 atomic bombs going off every second for one year.
The global mean sea level rose by 3.8 ± 0.3 millimeters each year between 1999-2025, and the ocean has become about 17% more acidic over the last four decades, wreaking havoc on crucial underwater ecosystems.
Peter Thomson, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for the ocean, emphasized that the dangers posed to the world’s oceans by continued fossil fuel extraction have been made clear over 10 years of reports by Mercator, as well as other warnings from scientists.
“What it tells us is unmistakable: The ocean is changing, and those changes are reaching into the lives, livelihoods, and security of people everywhere,” said Thomson. “We have the knowledge. We have the evidence. Now we need the political will to act.”
Article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
