Tech Won't Save Us - Government is Putting AI Before People and the Planet w/ Matt Haugen

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Governments are prioritizing data centers at the expense of communities and the planet, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Matt Haugen joins Paris Marx to discuss how national strategies are dismantling environmental protections while enriching a handful of megacorporations, and what an alternative agenda could look like.Matt Haugen is Research and Editorial Manager at the Climate and Community Institute.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.Also mentioned in this episode:Check out the new report Matt co-wrote AI First.If you missed it, Molly White recently broke down how the tech industry is spending big on elections.Big tech’s emissions are continuing to rise.Colossus is still being powered by unpermitted gas turbines.Support the show

You can imagine what inside of an AI first agenda, we had like a people and planet first agenda. And so think about that from like the highest level where like, okay, how are we approaching the planning of our economy, the planning of our electricity grid, the planning of our the design of our cities and our land use that's actually benefiting well-being of ecosystems, well-being of people first and foremost and not Sam Altman or Elon Musk or whoever else, right? Hello and welcome to TechWLW and Save Us made in partnership with the Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Matt Hogan. Matt is Research and Editorial Manager at the Climate and Community Institute.

And I wanted to have him on the show because he recently co-authored a report that looked into how the U.S. government is really helping to support these major AI companies and what the implications of that are for us. In particular, whether we can look at what the U.S. government is doing with the AI companies, in order to see an opportunity to use that same degree of state capacity, state power, to do something very different. In our conversation, we dig into all of the kind of subsidies and regulations that the U.S. government has created in order to support companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, but also, you know, just the major players, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, meta, the like, right? How those companies are supported in pursuing this AI agenda, this vision of

the future that we're supposed to all be engaged in and how the U.S. government also benefits from that, right, in many different ways, in ways that we have talked about on the podcast in the past. There's explicit support for these companies, for these technologies, but there's also the kind of deregulation and allowing companies to ensure that other people, that other parts of society are picking up the cost for the expansion of AI, for the build out of data centers, that they are all engaging in at the moment. I think it's pretty clear that this is a problem, right? And of course, since Matt works at the Climate and Community Institute,

I also wanted to ask him about the climate impact of all of this. Because we see these companies basically throwing away their climate commitments, just wanting to pursue generative AI and data centers at all costs, regardless of what that means for not just the community, but for the climate as well, right, for a fight against the climate crisis and our ability to live on a planet that isn't like scorching hot and having wildfires and terrible natural disasters all the time. And so, you know, I think that's an important part of this conversation, but it also leads us into that bigger piece of like, what would the vision be?

Like, how would we use this state power in a different way? And that's very much around, you know, not just creating better technology that isn't this kind of technology that the tech industry is pushing, but also, you know, addressing climate change and creating a better life for so many people, not just in the United States, but around the world and how that is possible. And this buildout shows us that the state can do things, can support, you know, major initiatives. Unfortunately, it just happens to be the wrong ones and ones that are oriented toward, you know, basically increasing the power and profits of the tech industry and of these tech billionaires rather than actually helping the wider public. And so I think that this is a really interesting

conversation to, you know, get a bigger picture of the way that the state is supporting this project to push AI on all of us, but also how we should not just, you know, give up on the ability of government to do any good thing, but to recognize that there is power there, that that power should be seized, that it can be seized, and that we can do better things if we put our mind and our efforts to doing so. So if you do like this conversation, make sure leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week. So we can keep digging

into what the AI industry is doing to our societies, but also the wider impacts of the tech industry. You can join supporters like Olivia in the Bay Area by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Matt, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Glad to be here. A long time listener. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be on. I appreciate that. And, you know, obviously I've been following you on social media for like ages. So I'm very familiar with you and your work. And it's a bit surprising to me that this is the first time that we're even like on a video call as far as I can remember.

But, you know, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad we finally had a chance, had an opportunity and excuse to do it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, you know, you work at the Climate and Community Institute and you guys have a great new report looking into kind of the AI boom that we're still experiencing. You know, unfortunately, it hasn't crashed yet. But, you know, maybe soon, maybe soon.

But also, like, you know, what it reveals, you know, the ways that the state is pushing this and how this power could be used in a different way. And, of course, we'll get to that later in the episode. But I wanted to start a bit more broadly. You know, we've been watching this AI boom now for going on four years, right? You know, it's three in a bit. There'll be four come November, which is the anniversary of when Chachybt was released. As you have been watching this and certainly, you know, the more recent kind of instantiation of it,

what goes through your mind as you see how this is all playing out? Yeah, it's, it's hard to keep up with sometimes, right? It feels like it's so big and it's happening so at such a large scale and so quickly. It really feels just unprecedented in many ways. But there's also some precedents and some important history and needs to be situated in context, right? As I'm sure we'll get into, you know, I'm really approaching it from the climate, from the environmental angle first and foremost, right? So as you've discussed often, and I'm sure your listeners are aware of, you know, the data center buildout is just enormous in the United States especially.

You know, the energy usage, the greenhouse gas emissions, the localized environmental costs have have been really quite significant with this data center buildout. And it's projected or planned to be even higher in the future. there's a recent Bloomberg report that estimated data center usage in the U.S. will be 20% of U.S. electricity usage by 2035, right? And that's just hard to wrap your head around that kind of scale. Like there's nothing else like this. You know, we'll see if that actually happens, right? But even the existing AI and data centers we see is very significant. So the other thing I think, and your, you're, you're, you're, you're, show and others have been helpful is it's often really hard to separate the hype and the promises from what is actually happening, right? So we have all these projections for what's going to happen with AI data centers, but what actually exists right now and what can we actually project in the near term future? With the architects of the AI boom, the biggest beneficiaries are saying and what they're doing even is a world-making project to me is how I think about it. Right.

reshaping a lot of the physical terrain of the world, both from the build out of data centers, the physical footprint of that, and then also the future of the planet and the biosphere from the emissions. But also reshaping the world of our information environment, our education systems, our governments, our institutions. They're trying to do those things at least. So we have to think about it on that scale and think about alternatives on that scale. That's how I'm thinking about it right now. I think you've put that into great context for us, right? To give us the different aspects of what we're seeing from this AI moment, what these tech companies are trying to do with it.

And the very real problems that come with it. And just sticking with the climate point for a minute, you know, it's kind of wild to think that just a few years ago, these companies were trying to present themselves as, you know, green companies, as climate leaders, as all these sorts of things. And there were just reports recently that Google's emissions just last year were up, I think it was 18%. Microsofts were up 25% or somewhere around there. Just in the single year, right?

These are just massive increases. And paired with that, you know, as you discussed in the report, we're seeing increasingly these data centers being co-located with gas-powered generation in order to, you know, kind of power the computers and the cooling. I wonder for you, as someone who has been working on climate issues for so long, what you make of just how much the, tech industry has gotten into bed with the fossil fuel industry and how just like out in the open that that is now. It has like you've been talking about it has been quite jarring to see how seemingly how quickly a lot of these companies have jettisoned. They often made a big show of we're committing to net zero and carbon neutrality or renewable energy and all these sorts of things. And it feels like they just overnight toss them aside because well, AI is more important.

And it seems like a big potential, you know, a big potential source of profit. And I think that just highlights a lot of people, you know, probably myself and probably you and many others thought, you know, corporate, okay, corporate commitments, promises are, we don't know how much that's worth, you know, when they happen, right? Okay, well, let's see you actually follow through on it. Right. So, and I think this just shows that. And, you know, I think not just tech companies,

I think we're seeing this with a lot of other companies that are also seem to be going in on all in on AI and trying to incorporate AI and throwing aside environmental and climate pledges. And I think it's really, you know, it's just very concerning. And I think that highlights why we need regulation and why we can't depend on voluntary commitments. You know, that's what we need the government for and that's what we need the regulation for to make sure these things actually happen and happen in a way that. that benefits

people on the planet as much as possible. Yeah, I completely agree. It's just when I think about it, right, I feel like a bit before the pandemic, like mid, late 2010s, we were hearing these stories about how Google, Amazon, Microsoft,

were selling their cloud services to the fossil fuel companies to help them better extract fossil fuels and people are like, this doesn't seem great, you know, this seems very counter to what they're suggesting, right? And then, you know,

we get the big pledges after their employees are pushing back, right, in the kind of 2020, 2019 era. And then we move forward into like the generative AI moment. And it's kind of like, wow, it seems like these data centers are, you know, demanding a lot of electricity. And they're trying to present it as though, like, don't worry, we're going to have renewables for this.

We're going to have nuclear energy that is going to help power these data centers. So like, don't worry about the emissions part. We'll have it sorted. And now it feels like the past like six to eight months. It's just become, yeah, we need the fossil fuels. Like, you know, we're going to need a lot more of them. And this is just the way it is, you know? Yeah, it really is shocking with, you know, I guess it goes along with what's happening with AI and data center build out just how fast.

All this was seemingly tossed aside. Like, I thought you said you cared about the climate crisis. Why are you building a whole bunch of gas plants? That's just completely goes against that. Totally, totally. But, you know, if you look at their sustainability reports, they'll make it look totally acceptable, right? You know, obviously this report looks a lot at the way that the tech industry has been really supported by the U.S. government and the federal government in particular in terms of kind of building out this AI infrastructure, you know, making this technology something that is going to be widely adopted, you know, that sort of a thing. Obviously, we know that the U.S. government has been very involved in supporting the fossil fuel industry for a very long time for a century, you know, however long, right? But I feel like when we think about technology, it's often presented as though, you know, okay, if AI is rolling

out now, it's just because of some new innovations that the tech companies have thought up. How is it that the U.S. government is actually supporting what we're seeing in this moment? I think the way people talk about, I think about the quote-unquote free market is a little bit misleading because the way I think about it is that there's not really such a thing as a free market as how people conceive of it as the sort of terrain of, the economy is fundamentally shaped by the government, by the state, that these, you know, all these corporations and our economy and our society exist in, right? And I think that's especially true with tech. The tech industry seems to like to really pretend like they're

libertarians or we don't need government and we're just, we're just innovating out here in our garages, right? So you can go all the way back for decades as you know of how, you know, whether it's the internet, whether it's the microwave and all these different technologies that have come out of, in a very direct way, public research. So you have that with AI. But then more recently, you know, I think we've seen with the Trump administration especially has just come out with a flurry of executive orders. They have this, what we call an AI first agenda. So they're, they seemingly all in on AI in many ways. ways. And they're saying this is a strategic priority for the United States and we need to do

everything we can to facilitate this buildup. And that looks like, you know, saying AI as a national security priority, that looks like government contracting, trying to put AI into all sorts of, in the government all sorts of ways. You know, we saw it with Doge kind of in some ways. AI investors all throughout the federal government shaping the government's AI policy, which is a very clear conflict of interest. Building off that, there's all sorts of regulations and non-enforcement of regulations and deregulation that they're doing with these data centers and with AI,

not enforcing Clean Air Act, facilitating faster permitting. You have to think about also a little bit more broadly than just specific AI things like that. So there's like what we talk about on the report, there's federal tax policy, which with the one big beautiful bill act, I cringe a little every time I have to say,

say that. But it's so beautiful. How could you cringe? It's kind of embarrassing to be in the U.S. right now with this happening. You know, the slashing of corporate tax rates, you know, we calculate just three of the hypers alone, you know, avoided 50 billion in taxes last year. And that allows them to accumulate so much cash that they can use for AI and for data center buildout and to use that as leverage, right? So you have to think even bigger than than things that say this is for AI, right? Because so much of federal policy is shaping what's happening. And, you know, there's other things that we talk about that's like they're taking stakes in companies, you know, to secure access to minerals, to secure access to chips.

and shaping the terrain of GPUs and CPUs. And there's, you know, back to climate and environment, there's, they're ordering fossil fuel plants to keep open, to keep running, they were supposed to be closed, right? And they're saying this is because we need power for AI. Now, I think it's important to also look at that in the context of they're doing everything they can to try and slow down renewable energy and stop renewable energy development.

So it's a little bit, jarring or wild to see that to them see how flimsy of an excuse that is but you know and and that could keeping if if you extend that excuse of keeping these fossil fuel plants they're supposed to close keeping them running to all the ones that are supposed to be closed i think it's um 54 that could cause billions of dollars and increased cost for ratepayers because renewables are are cheaper than fossil fuels right now and also cause just enormous harm from from future climate damage and from localized air pollution. And, you know, I think there's a few more specifics we can get into with how the government's

facilitating this. But yeah, those are the highlights. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's a great overview, right, of the things that are in the report. And I want to dig into several different aspects of it, but I want to start with that big number that you gave us, right? Like three companies avoiding $50 billion in tax in just a single year, like, it's such a big number that it's hard to even, like, imagine how much money that is, you know, just because it's so enormous. Those kinds of numbers are just not numbers that you're dealing with unless you're like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or something. And even then, they probably are like, this is just so much money. I don't know what I would even do. I guess I'm

going to send rockets in the space or something, you know? But like, how does this actually happen, right? How do these companies avoid that much in tax? And what is the effect of allowing them then to get away with not paying all of that money. So they just reduced the corporate tax rate, right? And I think the companies have all kinds of strategies to avoid taxes. So I'm not like a tax policy expert, like getting into the weeds of how they do that. You know, I know there's like with the data centers they're using, often using like starting using like third party companies, stuff like that. I'm not sure if that pays in the tax avoidance or not.

But, and you know, they're headquartered in different places. So what we did was look at like what the actual rate is and then what and look at their and look at how much they actually pay. So I think it's a combination of of a lowered rate and then, you know, strategies that can allow them to pay less, which again goes back to like we can't depend on companies to do things voluntarily. You know, they have so much money like to spend on data centers and to spend on AI infrastructure.

A lot of these data centers seem to be. being financed with debt. And so the more assets you have, the more debt you're able to take on as well. And, you know, I think if you look even beyond companies to individuals as well, I think it's important to think about the tax policy implications where we're seeing AI now becoming a major player in elections and spending enormous amounts of money. You know, Elon Musk, the most notably in 2024, right? And really trying to stifle. any policy that could slow down their build-out or to lower their profits. Yeah, I think that's really well said, right?

And I was even talking to Molly White a few weeks ago about how so many of these AI companies and, you know, people involved with AI companies are spending big in the midterms to come, right, to try to shape the AI policies that they're seeing there. And of course, I know your report looks, you know, primarily at what's happening on the federal government level, but we're seeing, you know, on the state level, on the local level, that these companies and these data center projects are getting big tax breaks there, as well, right, to kind of, you know, allow them to get away with not paying more tax. And to me, when I think about all this money being avoided, right, when I think about the

$50 billion just for three of these big tech companies, let alone, you know, what Apple is saving and all this kind of stuff, you were talking earlier about the world making part of this, right? The way that they're kind of shaping the world that we live in. And if they have so much capital to deploy and so much additional capital, I feel like that gives them even more power to do that, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think we need to think about money as power, right? And that's, it's just like, it allows you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do, especially when it's unequal to the staggering levels that we're seeing. It's really shocking, like, but it's also not surprising, right? You know, I'm wondering you

were talking a lot about, you know, the different regulations, the different actions, the procurement that the federal government is doing in the United States in order to support the AI industry. Why is it that the U.S. government is so invested in this particular project, right, in kind of ensuring adoption of AI and building out all these data centers. What does the U.S. government actually get out of that? Well, that's a great question. I think, you know, I think we can look at what is actually being said. And I think we can also maybe speculate a little bit on some of the motives behind that it's maybe being unsaid. You know, a lot of justification seems like, well, this is the

technology of the future, this is going to, and I think a lot of it is something I've been thinking about a lot lately is a lot of it is based in science fiction, imaginations, imaginaries, right? Not necessarily things that might be actually possible. You know, I know you've covered Elon Musk extensive. We all, I think we all know, Y'A. Moss makes a lot of promises, you know, whether it's going to Mars or, you know, the autonomous robots, all these things. And we're seeing that with AI, with AGI, with super intelligence. There was, he did this interview with the economist recently, like, as we speak. And I don't know if you watch the whole thing, but people will probably be familiar.

He made this tweet, like, a couple months ago that there was going to be civil war in Britain. And he was kind of, like, pressed on this point. And he was like, you know, I think civil war in Britain is going to happen, but it's 20 years away. But the good news is that the AI and robot singularity is 10 years away. And that will, like, negate the need for his war. I was like, dude, why are you talking about? about. Oh my God. I didn't, yeah, I didn't see that part. I didn't watch the whole thing. I saw some clips. It's better for your mental health, I think, that you didn't know. That's such a good

example, because like, what, what is that? Number one, that's probably not possible. Number two, what does that mean make sense? You know, it feels like a lot of this promises of AI in the future is like, it's very vague. Like, okay, we're going to have super intelligence in AI, but how does that, how does that actually work and how does that improve people's lives? It's not really clear. But again, I think it's important to question, you know, whether or not something like that is possible, especially extrapolating from the technologies we have now.

You know, I think that's a state of reasons. Like, this is the technology of the future. We have to invest in this. And we have to, we also have to beat China, right? That's another key part of the AI first, of the AI strategic priority, is that we're in this existential race with China to who builds AGI, who builds super intelligence first and then i don't know again it's very vague like i don't know what happens if you get the aGI i first like you win the world like what does that even mean this escalating

tension with china or using china as a bogeyman for whatever you want to do is a very concerned because to me that's just that's a warlike posture that's a militaristic posture and that ties into another reason that they seem to be so interested in AI is its applications for military usage, which we've seen in Gaza, which we've seen in the Iran War, participating in death and destruction and participating in the murder of all sorts of people. And that seems to be a big part of the use case, right? And I think we're seeing AI companies, which we write about a little bit in the report, are, you know, again, similar to the climate pledges, a lot of companies had these pledges about we're not going to use our tools for military we're not going to use them for

you know certain things related to that and a lot of them have dropped those pledges because there's so much money you know famously the united states military budget is enormous it's around a trillion dollars right now there's a lot of money up for grabs and with military and other government contract more broadly you can get what's called lock in where vendor lock in where you're just kind of if you're so integrated into the system it's very hard to dislodge you like well, we have to keep using this company's tool because we depend on it. And I think there's a lot of groupthink and a lot of people buying the hype, it seems like to me, especially the richer you are and the more divorce from the concerns of working

people you are. Like I think with AI more than a lot of other technologies we see it, that seems to be the case to me. You know, I think there's been some interesting data showing that like, the higher you are in the corporate in the corporate structure the more you use AI you know CEOs the C-suite versus workers and I think that that promise of like I can do we can do more work and have more output with fewer workers is just like something that's designed to be enticing to to a capitalist to a CEO right I think another thing that's happening is this is like the next big

thing you know with the hype it's like we we can't we can't miss out on this there's potentially a of money to be made to me the how that works doesn't really make a lot of sense like if you put everyone out of a job how are they going to buy your goods there's a lot of like contradictory visions of the future going on here and and i think there's just a lot of people like i was talking about earlier with with the revolving door with the vc's of all the government there's a lot of people who just straight up stand to benefit a lot if from increasing the value of AI from funneling money to AI through contracts and subsidies and things like that. Just the sort of very direct corruption and conflicts of interest that we're seeing in the Trump

administration on a like staggering level. Yeah, I think staggering is exactly right, you know, with everything that we're seeing. I don't know. In some ways, I'm surprised to see how much has gone into it. But then on the other hand, I'm like, not. But it brings to mind to me there was this interview that I think it was Sundar Pichai gave like a couple years ago, and they were asking why he was putting so much money into AI and into AI infrastructure. And his answer was basically like, well, it's better for us to put the money in

and, you know, basically to make sure that we don't miss out in case it is something than like us not putting the money in. And then there's these other companies that are beating us now. So it's like maybe we're burning a bunch of money, but it's worthwhile to burn the money to make sure that we don't lose out at the end of the day in case this is the next big thing, sort of a deal. And it feels to me like there's kind of like a view like that on the federal government and like the policy level as well. It's like maybe this is the next big thing. It's what our tech industry is telling us is the next big thing. And you know, it's such a massive industry. We have benefited a lot from this industry. So we should go along with it, especially if China

is also competing and we can't risk China being the one to like win on AI if AI happens to be the big deal that everyone is suggesting that it is, right? Yeah, absolutely. It just seems like, it seems like there's so much of, there's so much fear of, of missing out, of, of, but that, that's not a good way to think about how, about the world and how we shape the world in our infrastructure. Instead of thinking about what do we actually need,

it's, well, maybe someone else will make a lot of money on it. And that just, that just highlights how the sort of misalignment of incentives, I think, we're seeing. Yeah, how absolutely broken it is, right? And I do want to talk about your vision for like how things could be different. But before we get to that, I'm wondering, you know, you've talked a lot earlier about the impacts of AI itself, right? The impacts that we're seeing from this rollout, you know, what effects it is actually having on people. And of course, you mentioned the kind of data center build out. Obviously, we're hearing more and more stories about what these data centers are meaning for communities. But as you have the federal government, getting so behind

this project being pushed by the tech industry, what impacts does that have on, you know, on workers, on regular people, on the public that is not being taken into account when basically their government is supporting everything that this industry wants? So at a high level, you know, what we've been talking about is shifting all these resources, whether it's financial, whether it's the physical, like, concrete and silicon and everything else that goes into building data center and the chips, and all of that being spent on this instead of alternatives. And all of the sort of state capacity to, like, craft policy and regulation being directed towards facilitating this. On a more local and direct level, we're seeing what is also, I think,

on the same level of the unprecedented scale of the AI build-out is the resistance to data centers. I can't recall seeing anything like this where it's people across the political spectrum, across the country, you know, just data centers, you know, we're seeing all sorts of campaigns to fight against data centers everywhere, rural, urban, suburban, all across the United States. people are very concerned, I think, about number one, that this feels, like I was saying at the beginning, this is a world-making project, and it feels like it's being imposed from above, because it is. Right. They're not, no one's, no one was asking for this. This wasn't like some kind of democratically decided plan. It's people with a lot of power and wealth said, we want to do this and I'm going to force it on you. And the reason we're going to do it is because it's going to take your job. And maybe the future will be, there'll be a supercomputer that can do things for you in some way that is, again, very vague. So, like, that's what's on offer.

And so I think that's instilling a lot of fear in people and it's instilling a lot of anger in people. But then you have to look at the data centers themselves, which, you know, I know you have done a great job of covering where there's all the fossil fuel generation that they're, you know, both. on the grid and then we're seeing lots of off-grid what's called behind the meter generation of gas plants they're just building power plants specifically for the data centers famously Elon Musk's colossus plants near Memphis are just spewing pollution uh in the area and so that's that's increasing greenhouse gas emissions you know for the climate um increasing global warming and making climate crisis worse but then also the localized effects health effects of of um of pollution are really staggering and really bad, whether that's asthma and heart and heart and

long and potential future brain damage from that, right? And then there's the land use issues where, you know, there's a data center that they're trying to build that's near me where they're going to clear cut it a huge forest to build that. The noise pollution, which I think is another under, underrated cost of this, that also has health effects. It's not just like an annoying noise, right? that causes health effects people that live nearby. And the water usage of data centers, which I think has been controversial to what extent that is an issue, I think people like to compare it to like an aggregate,

but water concerns are very particular to the particular places they're in. If you build a data center in a desert, there's not a lot of water there. Well, then if they're using a ton of water for the data, Center, that's going to cause some local issues probably. It's costing a lot of costs to people, and it's not really clear what the benefits are. And that's not even to mention the issues with like Chaplett psychosis and the attacks on education, our information ecosystem.

You see people now, I think one of the pernicious effects of AI is that people look at real videos. I can say, this is AI. And it basically destroys, it can. kind of destroy the social fabric where you're not sure what's real or what's not. Students are not learning and they're just delivering, they're having chat GPT write their essays. You know, there's so many costs from environmental to social to political. Oh, and that's not even to mention the potential authoritarian aspects of AI, which I think is a

really important part of the story and why it's enticing to people with a lot of wealth and power, because whether that's military applications or surveillance applications, it's very clear this is a tool that can be used that is really ideal for increasing power to concentrate power at the top to a select few. There's a lot of costs in a lot of different areas and not a lot of clear benefits. So it's understandable why there's no much resistance to me. Yeah, I think so too. It's no surprise to me that people have turned against this so extremely and really so quickly, right? I feel like the opposition to data centers and to AI more broadly has arisen really quickly, you know, over a relatively short span of time as people started to feel the effects

of these infrastructures and of what the tech industry is doing. And, you know, I'm sure that's paired to some degree with just how a lot of public opinion has shifted on the tech industry and the tech billionaires and things in recent years, right? And even when Elon Musk's promises, you know, a universal high income and abundance for everybody, I don't think people are really buying into that, you know, that promise or that idea that that's really our future, right? Right. How much do you think, do you feel like people are still buying, you know, almost promises to the extent they used to or are people seeing through it more now? I think people are seeing through it, you know, like, I think he definitely has like a small,

like, very committed group of people who are still around him and are still falling for it. And unfortunately, there's still a lot of media, I would say, that give him too long of a leash to like, you know, kind of bullshit openly and not get kind of pushed on it. But I do feel like a lot of the public is very much like against this guy now, especially like, I think the real shift for a lot of people was first the Twitter acquisition and that kind of like, you know, piss some people off, especially like liberals and people on the left and whatnot. But then also seeing him like get behind Trump in the way that he did. Like I think that that also soured a lot, even more people, you know. But yeah, I don't know. It's, it's been interesting to see. And, you know, you know,

talked about a lot of the costs there. I think you laid it out really well. And, you know, given that this is a climate report or, you know, a lot of your focus is on climate, I feel like that's another big cost to this as well, right, is just seeing the degree to which climate policy, climate targets have really been thrown out the window in order to facilitate this industry, this build out of data centers, you know, the fossil fuels powering them. And I wonder, you know, for you, as someone who has been working on this for so long, what you make of how quickly climate policy has kind of like fallen off the map and and were you shocked at just how quickly this reversal has been not just in the u.s but you know in in many other parts of uh the west at least

as well yeah it it has been quite shocking because it felt like there was something like an elite consensus happening around you know maybe starting with the paris agreement and a lot of um climate pledges and you know whether that's from governments or from private actors that we were talking about with the corporations a lot of resources going to energy transition a lot of attention pay to that a lot of that has kind of just seemingly dropped away in the last few years and i think there's a lot of reason for that but i think a i is is a big driver of it because it's just so enticing seemingly that there's so much money at stake and so much potential to be made at least in theory but probably a lot of people are getting rich right now already yeah that those things can

just be jettisoned because this is the thing of the future at least what they say or what they think it calls in the question how much some of the people make those pledges really believe or understand climate change because well if you take this seriously then you wouldn't be doing this when there's the sort of pot of gold of AI aGI it's easy to like you know go through mental hoops or mental gymnastics to justify these things and again like i was saying before that just highlights why we need the public sector why we need regulation to actually ensure these things happen and not depend on on private corporations to just do the right thing because the incentives are set up so that they don't do

do that. Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, like, our system is like working against us in very clear ways, you know, as you outlined earlier, but, you know, as so many of the discussions on the show, show us very clearly. Now, your report is not just looking at the way that the federal government has been supporting the AI industry and what the effect of that has been, but also how that power could be used in a very different way, right? Which I think is very important for us to understand, because if we always just keep locked into the framework that we're given from, you know, whether it's the leader of these major companies or political leaders that are invested in the status quo, then it can be hard to imagine something different, right?

Hard to recognize that this power can be wielded differently. You know, and I feel like even the pandemic was a big wake-up call for many people on that, that, you know, the government can act fast, the government can do things in people's interests if they're really pushed to do so, right, as kind of a global health emergency did force them to do. So when you are looking at the way that the U.S. federal government has been supporting the AI industry and this kind of project, how do you see that those levers could be used in a different way, in a more positive way, in a way that addresses the kind of climate crisis and the difficulties that a lot of people are facing in their lives today? Yeah, I think it's really important, like we were talking about, that there's so much resistance to AI and data centers that we also need to be think about what the alternative to this is. instead of just saying, you know, we need to stop the bad thing, which again, it's important. What the AI bill out shows, what the AI First agenda shows is that we can use,

contrary to just like decades of propaganda, basically saying the government is bad, we have to shrink the government. That's a really concerted effort to benefit corporations and the wealthy, right, which we are seeing with AI, but they're very clearly using the government. So the whole thing is just a con at every level because they want to use the government to their ends. Some of what they're doing, at least the tools they're using for AI and say I build out are not necessarily bad,

taking government stakes and companies. That could be a very useful tool for pro-social, pro-ecological ends. Like if we want to nationalize energy infrastructure and nationalize the energy grid, take stakes in companies to direct investment towards where we want to renewable energy, to public transit, et cetera. We think it's really important to highlight that the project of world making should not be in the hands of the wealthy few and that it should be in the hands of the working class of the public.

And the government is the main vehicle to do that. So, you know, we have some recommendations like public investment, democratically planning the grid, like instead of just letting big tech and AI companies just using the grid to facilitate their ends, like using tools to like the government to think about

what should our energy grid look like? What should our energy system look like to benefit the planet and benefit people rather than AI companies? Building a grid that is designed around social priorities. Centering well-paying jobs, something like a green jobs guarantee.

People talked a lot about a few years ago. I think we should need to be talking about that again, because even if we set aside the sort of science fiction promises that, yeah, it's going to take everyone's job, it is taking people's jobs right now, at least some people. I think it's a really important example to show that there's a lot of precarity

in our society that we need to use the government to prevent and ameliorate. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done. If we're thinking about an adjutant transition, and we're thinking about repairing the biosphere and building something like a green and just society, there's a lot of work that corporations are not going to want to pay for it or pay well or provide jobs with dignity.

And that's something we can use the government to do. And then AI, I think there's very clearly, some uses or examples of AI that should be banned, right? When it comes to technologies and technological advancement like this, we need public options and public control, public regulations. So it's not just anthropic and XAI and Open AI, just doing kind of whatever they want. And I don't think that necessarily taking public ownership in those companies is even the best idea because I think we need from the ground up public alternatives that are

fundamentally directed towards you know social and ecological well-being and who knows what that could look like we need public technology and computing infrastructure like that and i think that could really sort of prevent and mitigate a lot of the harms we're seeing you can imagine what inside of an AI First Agenda, we had like a people in Planet First Agenda. And so think about that from like the highest level where like, okay, how are we approaching the planning of our economy, the planning of our electricity grid, the planning of our design of our cities and our land use that's actually benefiting well-being of ecosystems, well-being of people first and foremost and not Sam Altman or Elon Musk or wherever else, right?

So that's the way we're trying to think about it. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, right? And just to pick up on a few pieces, like when you're talking about the jobs aspect of it, right, so many of these data centers promise a lot of jobs, but it's actually just construction jobs. And then there's not very much involved in actually running it, right? You know, the community is not actually getting, you know, a lot of long-term employment out of these infrastructures that are very not just capital intensive, but resource-intensive, as you've been describing as well. And, you know, you mentioned the kind of democratic planning piece of this as well. And I feel like when you talk about public technologies, Obviously, that's a way for us to get a lot more into or a lot more input on kind of the development of technologies, what technologies are being put to use for the public rather than just whatever the tech industry is offering to us. But it's also why I'm quite supportive of these efforts for moratoriums on data centers, right? It feels like that is an effort, you know, however small or, you know, maybe it's not as kind of comprehensive as we would like, but at least to start to force some regulations, some expectations, some expectations. to start putting some rules in place around these data centers. So it's not just the tech companies deciding for themselves what they want to do and kind of pushing the governments to do it. But, you know, because the public is pushing on whether it's their local governments or their state governments to get involved here,

them having to put rules in place that, you know, at least reflect some of these public demands to a certain degree in, you know, what a data center, if it does get built locally, could actually look like how it could operate, what resources it could use and those sorts of things, right? So much of this AI buildout has been very undemocratic and even anti-democratic. I think we can think about moratoria as an exertion of democracy against that. This is happening, like we've been talking about, this is happening so fast and to such a scale, we have to slow it down and we have to figure alternatives to figure out what's going on and how we can take that sort of power for alternatives. for democratic control.

I completely agree. And as we start to wrap up our conversation, I'm wondering about the path forward, right? You know, obviously there are a lot of forces arrayed against us from the tech industry and their lobby and, you know, everything that you've been talking about on that front. But even, you know, as you've been saying,

governments that are not always acting in our interests as well, right, and are supporting what these tech, you know, companies want. And so I wonder for you, what you see as, you know, the path toward moving toward a framework like the one that you're laying out. And what kind of hints or, you know, kind of movements in that direction you're seeing right now that can help us along, you know, in that fight or in the achievement of that? The future is kind of up for grabs right now.

And visions of the future, there's not really, doesn't feel like there's a lot on offer. Like I was saying earlier, it feels like the AI future is very vague and it's also doesn't sound good really. Even in their most their most lofty promises, doesn't really sound good to me. I think it doesn't sound good to a lot of people. So I think there's a lot of space,

and that has to be contested for like what could an alternate future look like? That's where people's needs are met, where people are not, people's cost of living is not going through the roof, where corporations aren't allowed to pollute with impunity, where we have renewable energy, and public transit and libraries and schools

and all these sorts of things that I think people want and people need. What we're seeing with this data center resistance is a very interesting and potent sort of political moment of potential of where people are fighting against these sort of undemocratic oligarchic forces and maybe they're not always you know they're not always like someone who's coming that from like a traditional left politics perspective. But that's a, that's a place where you can say, hey, this data center that is being imposed on you, well, here's who's doing that and here's why. And here's like the negative effects.

And like, here's what maybe what some alternatives could be. And maybe that's, you know, maybe the groups organizing a data center resistance could organize for something more beneficial in their community. Right. So to me, that's like a place of political potential. These the state of resistance and we're seeing a lot of candidates running on that. I think I don't want to like sugarcoat it. I think it's going to be a big challenge because as you talk about as we've been talking about this conversation like the inequality in our and our society is just so

enormous right now from Yala Musk briefly being the world's first trillionaire to you know, increase in cost of living and to the working. class and the way that the Trump administration has just been so brazenly corrupt and authoritarian. So it's a big challenge, but I do think that with the way that they've been pushing this so hard, I think it's a potential, there's a lot of potential for political openings here. I think it also shows that contrary to maybe some, what some people are saying right now or what we're seeing from the Trump administration's actions, that people do care a lot about the environment and climate change.

And that, you know, I think that's one of the things people are citing the most from what I've seen with why they're resisting data centers is concerns about the environment. By doing this, they're sort of drawing attention to it. And I think that that's a lot of space for us to collectively imagine alternatives. Yeah, I completely agree, right? I see a lot of hope in the movements against data centers and how much that has grown so quickly, you know, how many projects have been stopped or delayed. because of it. And really, to me, it just feels like the beginning, right? And I'm interested to see how it's going to affect the midterm elections, you know, these conversations around data centers and AI, because we've already seen it affect some elections in certain states already, right?

And so I do think, you know, it can often seem that these forces, as you were saying, are arrayed against us are so powerful that we can't do anything against it. But if we feel that way, we're just never going to try it, right? And I feel like one of the examples of these data center fights and pushbacks and what have you is that they have made, I think, surprising progress, you know, against an industry that is so powerful and that it would have been very easy to say early on that, oh, you know, these people are never going to make a difference. It's just some people in a community fighting against meta or Amazon or what have you. But actually, they have achieved quite a lot in a short period of time. And I think that could only grow, especially if, you know,

there's some effort to kind of bring that together into something bigger. So I think there's opportunity. I think there's opportunity there. Yeah, definitely. Are you seeing in Canada, is there a lot of similar things happening there? Absolutely. And we're like behind on where the United States is. There's not as many data centers up here. The projects were being proposed later than the ones in the United States. And so we also had the benefit of then learning from what's been happening in the U.S. And so when people say up here, like, you know, what difference are, some community activists going to make to these major data center projects, you can look and say, well, look at what they did in the U.S., right? You know, look at how many projects have been stopped

or delayed down there. And already here, we're seeing discussions of moratoriums. I think the first community passed a moratorium just recently. And it's only growing, right? And it's not just in the U.S. in Canada, but so many other places. So, yeah, I feel hope from that. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. I think, I think, There's a lot of hope if you can, if you keep your eyes open for it around this. And we need hope, right? Or else we're not going to get anywhere. We just feel it's all, you know, it's all over already and we can't do anything to change it. Matt, it's been really great to talk to you and have you on the show to dig into the report

and learn more about, you know, some of the work that you guys at the Climate and Community Institute are doing. Thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Matt Hogan is research and editorial manager at the Climate and Community Institute. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Husson. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pledge of your own.

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