Episode #6
VC in the Green Transition: Holly Alpine, Enabled Emissions Campaign
So excited to welcome Holly Alpine, a climate strategist and organizer working to push institutions towards real environmental accountability. She had a decade-long career at Microsoft where she worked on renewable energy strategy and later spearheaded global sustainability programs across datacenter communities. After leaving Microsoft two years ago, she co-founded the Enabled Emissions Campaign, which aims to confront the role of advanced technologies in driving increased fossil fuel production. She recently co-authored a paper published in npj Climate Action, a Nature Portfolio journal, in which they modeled AI as a productivity amplifier that can accelerate both fossil fuel and renewable energy production simultaneously. They found that AI-driven productivity gains significantly increase net global CO2 emissions, even when AI is adopted at similar rates across both pathways. Read here: AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model. We talk about her career at Microsoft, enabled emissions, the findings of her recent paper, and avenues for more responsibly and accuractely factoring AI in to the climate conversation and corporate reporting. For more on enabled emissions (the concept and campaign): Enabled Emissions .
