Also it might be worth mentioning that we are instantiating the provider:

snowflake_provider = snowflake.Provider(
    "snowflake_provider",
    account=settings.SNOWFLAKE_ACCOUNT,    
    role=settings.SNOWFLAKE_ROLE,
    username=settings.SNOWFLAKE_USER,
    password=settings.SNOWFLAKE_PASSWORD,
    region="",
)

snowflake.Database(
    "database",
    name="RAW",
    opts=pulumi.ResourceOptions(protect=True, provider=snowflake_provider),
)

The solution is to pass the config option you want to define using an environment variable as a Pulumi output:

snowflake_provider = snowflake.Provider(
    "snowflake_provider",
    account=pulumi.Output.from_input(None), # this will force the provider to look for this value in the environment   
    role=settings.SNOWFLAKE_ROLE,
    username=settings.SNOWFLAKE_USER,
    password=settings.SNOWFLAKE_PASSWORD,
    region="",
)