Tech companies invest four dollars into the oil and gas industry for every single dollar they spend on green energy.
Information and communication technology companies remain deeply tethered to the fossil fuel sector despite their public focus on sustainability. The general public often views the tech industry as a clean alternative to old-world heavy manufacturing. Financial records reveal a massive dependency where tech investments actively prop up oil and gas production. This relationship means that many digital advancements are currently being funded by the very industries they claim to be replacing. True decarbonization of the tech sector will require a total decoupling from these traditional energy investments.
Counting own goals: High-level assessment of the economic relationship between the ICT and the Oil and Gas sectors and its environmental implications
arXiv · 2604.26539
The ICT sector has been one of the most successful and fastest-growing industry in history. While the environmental issue in this sector has mainly been addressed by assessing its footprint and, to a lesser extent, its avoided emissions or net impacts, the additional emissions from the digitalization of carbon-intensive activities, such as the Oil and Gas (O&G) sector, have rarely been discussed. By doing so, we have forgotten to count the own goals conceded over more than 20 years in the troubl