The Climate-Fear Industry Turns to Data Centers

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Last December, Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025.

[00:00:06]And it was this time, it was the architects of artificial intelligence.

[00:00:11]Interesting.

[00:00:12]>> [cheering] >> When Eric Schmidt delivered the commencement address at the University of Arizona and began rhapsodizing about the coming AI revolution, some in the crowd jeered.

[00:00:22]There is a fear in your generation if that the future has already been written.

[00:00:29]That the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create. Mr. Schmidt went on to urge graduates not to let fear rob them of personal agency, a fine saccharine message. But where does he think young people got the idea that the climate is breaking? I cannot imagine a better use of everybody's time than getting the energy infrastructure of America rebuilt.

[00:01:02]We don't have 10 years, guys.

[00:01:04]Look at the math of climate change. They got the idea in part from the scores of climate panic organizations to which [music] the Schmidt Family Foundation's 11th Hour Project has granted hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 20 years. If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years, and the hottest of all was 2005.

[00:01:27]That included in 2006 funding screenings of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary designed to terrorize viewers about climate change. Our ability to live is what is at stake.

[00:01:44]Today, Mr. Schmidt's outfit, like so many others funded by progressive billionaires, spends its resources opposing fossil-based energy and trumpeting the dangers of a warming world. Almost every way we make electricity today, uh except uh for the emerging renewables and nuclear, uh puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles. 15 years after his Innovating to Zero TED Talk, Bill Gates posted an essay on his website titled Three Tough Truths About Climate, purporting to scold alarmists and propose his own moderate view of climate change, for which truth one is that climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.

[00:02:33]And so, you have to wonder why Mr. Gates has sent so much of his own money to Arabella Advisors, now called Sunflower Services, which funds a huge number of groups that exist to alarm the public over an imminent climate apocalypse, and to portray carbon-emitting energy as a threat to democracy. We do not know >> [cheering] >> we do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like.

[00:03:00]But what we do know is it will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot yet anticipate. Having taught a generation of liberal-minded Americans to live in fear of global ruin, the tech industry's big shots now feel exasperation that those same Americans think artificial intelligence is a menace to their families and their livelihoods. Hence the panic over data centers. I'm concerned that people in positions of power are going to want to integrate these technologies before we really understand what they are and what they're capable of.

[00:03:36]A recent Gallup poll concluded that seven in 10 Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. Leave out AI and the results may run in the opposite direction. Explain further that data centers enable cloud computing and attitudes begin to soften. You're sitting right now in probably what is the second biggest internet and digital hub anywhere in the world. This particular data center is rated at about 13 megawatts. So anytime you're doing digital payments or you're doing online streaming or you have maybe a video call with a GP, all of that traffic is being processed through these types of data centers.

[00:04:15]The rise of AI technology, which requires far more energy than ordinary computing, has led to a dramatic increase in the number of data centers globally. But those protesting their construction didn't, for the most part, come by their convictions the old-fashioned way, by independent reading and reason. No, many activists, some attached to 501c3 organizations, got their talking points from national nonprofits supported by some of the same moneyed outfits Mr. Schmidt's and Gates foundations spent the last two decades bankrolling. These companies are now so desperate to profit off of the AI boom that they are racing to construct thousands of giant AI data centers >> [music] >> and jacking up the utility costs of everyday Americans to pay for it. That these same lefty nonprofits whose climate crusade has been funded by tech billionaires now call for a moratorium on data center construction, Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, Bernie Sanders group Our Revolution, among others, should surprise no one. Today we're announcing legislation to impose a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until [music] strong national safeguards are in place.

[00:05:30]It's hard to imagine that the tech industry's billionaires, Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve and Connie Balmer come to mind, believed the network of climate groups on which they lavished their millions would eventually turn on their industry, a truth too inconvenient to foresee.

[00:05:47]>> [music]