“Every Last Drop” of Oil? Let’s Go!

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 22, 2025

“In plain language: fossil fuels were becoming too difficult and expensive to produce – until AI came along to make them profitable again. That isn’t ‘innovation’ – it’s acceleration toward climate collapse.” – Holly Alpine, climate activist (below)

And so the litany and narrative goes on. Oil was supposed to run out a half-century ago. Then horizontal drilling and fractionation came along (bad luck!). Now AI has come to the rescue to, again, postpone the inevitable–more bad luck! (Never mind that thing called resourceship, explaining how the improvement process is open-ended.)

What is good is bad to the nature-is-optimal-and-fragile Deep Ecologists. More people. Growing resource usage. Higher living standards. All bad. Remember these quotation by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and two-term Obama science advisor John Holdren?

A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. . . . Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political. [1]

Holly Alpine

Holly Alpine, “climate strategist & campaign leader; co-founder, Enabled Emissions Campaign; Ex-Microsoft Sustainability board member; plant-based athlete,” [2] recently posted on LinkedIn:

“Every Last Drop”… they’re not even trying to hide it at this point. You may have seen this new Wood Mackenzie report shared by Ketan Joshi or Pete Bronski, but I need to weigh in too, because… I hope now you see why Will and I quit our jobs to start our campaign on the topic.

Just two quotes:
• “Using our data on reservoir geology, hydrocarbon quality, in-place resources, operator access to finance and technology, costs and fiscal terms, we estimate upside oil recovery factors for every significant field in the world.”
• “The results of our new AI-powered analysis, therefore, are encouraging. Better recovery from existing fields could yield an additional 470 billion to over 1,000 billion barrels of oil”

She complained:

That’s a TRILLION ADDITIONAL barrels of oil [that] would not otherwise be possible. 🤯

Our math (thanks Chris Adams!) shows that could be 400 *gigatons* of emissions – using up the entire remaining 1.5 °C carbon budget, erasing decades of global climate progress, and gravely threatening a livable future on this planet. Is there any other issue on Earth that comes anywhere close to that scale of impact?

In plain language: fossil fuels were becoming too difficult and expensive to produce – until AI came along to make them profitable again. That isn’t “innovation” – it’s acceleration toward climate collapse.

She explained:

I’m NOT talking here about the energy use of AI or datacenters – those issues are critical fights in their own right and are deeply connected within the same system. But this post is focused on a different systemic dimension: how AI is directly enabling expanded fossil fuel production on a global scale.

The framing of “AI for sustainability vs. datacenter energy use” is completely missing a huge factor in the equation. How are we comparing infrastructure impacts to hypothetic, potential emissions reductions use cases, while ignoring the entire other side of the equation – the technology’s role in driving more fossil fuel production itself (and incredible resulting emissions)? We’re comparing apples to oranges and ignoring the other VERY big orange.

She then touches on the futility problem.

If you work in climate (or live on Earth), your efforts and future are being undermined in real time. You’re running on a treadmill on a train going backward. Pick your analogy – AI is being used today to erase climate progress.

And the audacity of Wood Mackenzie, writing their tagline: “the leading global data and analytics solutions provider for the energy transition.”

Please, join us at the Enabled Emissions Campaign (www.enabledemissions.com) to envision a world where digital technologies help secure a livable future – not drive rising emissions.
https://lnkd.in/gVjbyR_d And thanks to Amory Lovins for first sharing the report with us. 

COMMENT

Check your premises, Holly Alpine! Don’t quit your day job. Don’t further tie your emotions and being to a futile, wasteful crusade against the gas of life–carbon dioxide (CO2). Fossil fuels are not the problem but part of the solution for human betterment in a free society. It is industrial wind and solar, from production to decommissioning, that are the problem: dilute, intermittent, fragile, and resource-intensive (including land and transmission).

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[1] John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco; W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973), p. 279.

[2] Holly Alpine described herself as follows:

Organizer and climate strategist confronting power with truth and action. I build movements that push institutions toward real environmental accountability – from inside the system and out.

After a decade leading global sustainability work at Microsoft, I co-founded the Enabled Emissions campaign – holding Big Tech accountable for how its technologies accelerate fossil fuel production. Our work exposes these hidden links, drives policy reform, and builds coalitions for systemic change.

At Microsoft, I launched the company’s first Community Environmental Sustainability program, scaling nature-based investments across 45+ global communities, as well as co-founded the company’s Employee Engagement program, mobilizing a 10,000-member climate movement in 37 countries.

Today I serve on the boards of American Forests and Zero Waste Washington, where I continue advancing equity-centered, science-based environmental policy.