Return with me now to the thrilling days of yesteryear. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon had paid a few hundred million dollars for the naming rights to the new hockey rink in Seattle. But instead of calling it Amazon Arena, he instead decided to commemorate his recent signature on a pledge to go carbon neutral. The name Climate Pledge Arena, if not as mellifluous as Wrigley Field or Candlestick Park, was intended, he said in an Instagram post, to be
a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action.
Oh, and it would also be
the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world, generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL.
Look, even then this seemed mostly PR. Amazon first committed to the Climate Pledge itself—net zero by 2040—the day before a giant 2019 walkout organized by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The arena seemed kind of gimmicky from the start. As Ken Belson reported at the time,
Watermelons are served as vegan sashimi, and their rinds are pickled and used in salads. Carrot tops are turned into gremolata, a condiment.
Still, credit Bezos with recognizing the spirit of the moment. Greta Thunberg and her numerous compatriots had scared the oligarchs and financiers of the world into at least rhetorical action. (He could have named it Greta Garden). As he said at the time,
“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.”
But that fright has faded over time, even as the effects of the climate crisis have become ever more legible. And in the eternal battle between fear and greed, the latter has taken on more prominence in the last couple of years. In fact, it would make sense to rename the hockey rink, perhaps AI Avarice Arena.
That’s because Amazon—and, as we shall see, the rest of the once aspirationally green tech industry—are adding 19th century smoking chimneys to their facilities in order to churn out more Compute, the 21st century equivalent of wool or steel. It’s hard to keep track of the ever-mutating list of grand new plans, often named things like “Prometheus” (or, in the weird case of one Ohio behemoth, “Socrates the Younger”), though here’s a brand new attempt to do so from the folks at Climate Power.
On at least one list of the most polluting proposed data centers, Amazon’s planned facility in Pecos TX comes in at the top; indeed, by some calculations it would be the single largest source of climate pollution in the U.S., with 35 giant natural gas turbines burning through vast quantities of fracked gas. On that same list, if you look carefully, Amazon’s planned “energy campus” in Pennsylvania would come in fourth on the list. Anyway, far from heading for net zero, Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions were up 16 percent last year.
Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, was designated to go to New York and take the company’s lumps during Climate Week; she told a gathering organized by the news site Semafor that the company needed to “do better.” Not on lessening its environmental impact, but on “communicating its environmental impact.”
“There is a lot of debate, backlash against data centers in this country right now, and one of the things that we’re doing is taking a look at what have we done well and where have we fallen down and what do we need to do better. And so, we’re revising a number of our practices. We’re calling for a lot more transparency and accountability because that’s what people in these communities deserve. We’re saying, ‘hold us accountable for our practices.”
I read this to mean: ‘it’s getting harder to build data centers, so we’re going to try and up the ante for local communities with more payouts.’ (Word came today of one Pennsylvania data center that will offer $10,000 to every family in town if they’ll just change the zoning code and let them build).
But of course even if they figure out how to buy off the communities where they want to build their factories, it won’t affect by an iota the quantity of greenhouse gases they plan on pouring into the air—or the fact that this vitiates all their proud climate pledges.
Amazon is not alone, of course. Meta, for instance, had joined RE100, a renewable energy campaign all the way back in 2016, when it was still known as Facebook. It left this summer because…it wanted to use gas, not renewables, to power its data centers. As ESG News reported
After several in-depth conversations between Meta and Climate Group, Meta has withdrawn from the RE100 initiative, as it is no longer able to meet the technical criteria due to investments made in new gas power,” a Climate Group spokesperson told the website.
The withdrawal comes as Meta expands its global data center footprint. The company has entered arrangements that support new natural gas generation to supply growing electricity demand.
In Louisiana, utilities are expected to bring 10 new gas plants online to support Meta’s Hyperion data center.
Google reported an 18 percent increase in emissions in 2025. If you want to talk about an example of fairly comprehensive corporate failure, consider this. As Heather Clancy reports
Google’s cumulative emissions have risen more than 80 percent since 2019, the baseline year for the company’s “intentionally aspirational” pledge to cut its operational emissions and certain supply chain emissions in half by 2030.
Planning to cut your emissions in half and instead raising them by eighty percent led the company’s Chief Sustainability Officer to change the title of her office to tell investors that they were “navigat[ing]the tension between hyper-growth and environmental stewardship.” In this case, “navigating” seems to involve accelerating full speed ahead into the iceberg that you identified a decade ago.
And of course there’s Elon Musk, whose Colossus data centers in the Tennessee/Mississippi corridor set the early standard for environmental irresponsibility, pouring pollution into poor black neighborhoods and triggering a wave of lawsuits. Dave Roberts and I were on a panel early in Climate Week with LaTricea Adams of Young, Gifted and Green and Abre’ Conner, director of Environmental and Climate Justice at the NAACP, and I would not bet against their ability to bedevil the richest man in the history of the world.
In fact, that pushback is now beginning, and the oligarchs behind these hyperscalers are clearly an important target. Not the only target. As Amy Westervelt notes, “We gotta start referring to data centers by both their mother and father's last names, Spain style. The Microsoft-Chevron data center, the Meta-ExxonMobil data center.” And of course we should keep beating on the dirty truth that much of the data center capacity is directly employed in raising the planet’s temperature—as Emily Atkin pointed out last month, companies like Amazon are marketing their AI services to the oil and gas companies to help them find more crude, and this may ultimately do even more damage than their emissions.
Still, the easiest way for organizers to operate may be simply to connect the much-despised oligarchs with the increasingly-despised data centers and in turn with every climate disaster that now unfolds. This is starting to happen. I got to join a demonstration outside Amazon hq in Manhattan last week, and a day later the folks from Climate Defiance managed to shut down a program with the company’s sustainability guru “in less time than their warehouse worker’s pee break.” It’s definitely worth watching the action. As organizers explained
A company that co-founded something called "The Climate Pledge" is now building the single largest source of climate pollution in the country, on purpose, in 2026. Lol. No really, it's utterly fucked.
But don't worry guys, because we have a pledge too. And one that we won't break . . .
We solemnly pledge to keep disrupting all the BS "sustainability" directors doing Simone Biles-level backflips to make emissions sound like a hipster yoga retreat while the planet burns. We pledge to keep confronting all the cowardly politicians who take corrupt death-enabling money while calling it economic development. And we pledge to keep coming for ANYONE who thinks merely uttering the word "pledge" is a substitute for actually keeping one.
Remember, as I said above, that for a jerk like Bezos the equation is always going to be greed versus fear. If he had a mild moment of social responsibility a decade ago, greed has ruled him in recent years (his one useful action this decade was trading in his wife for a younger model, thus freeing McKenzie Scott to become one of the most remarkably effective philanthropists in American history). But fear—of damage to reputation, of investigation by new majorities in Congress, maybe even someday of consumer boycotts of his ever-shabbier and more self-serving empire—might inspire change. (And if you want another reason to dislike them, read this account of waves of drones dropping packages across a test area in suburban Texas. “We hear them zoom, zoom, zoom, back and forth from morning until past dinnertime,” one resident explained).
If you think this is confined to America, think again. Ketan Joshi provides an excellent report from down under, where they threaten the country’s efforts to truly rein in emissions. Meanwhile, from Denmark, I had an email today from Søren Hermansen, the hero of the pioneering windpower buildout on Samsø Island, which became a model copied around the world.
I am struggling with Microsoft here in Denmark. They want to establish 2-3 datacenters in one municipality and several more all over Denmark
The two I am involved in are among the largest in Denmark covering 60-70 hectares of building and 110 hectares of land used for diesel/ gas turbine back up with a depot of 25.000 tonnes fuel oil for emergencies.
Microsoft is acting like colonial criminals and there is no way we can find the head of the dragon. Every time we find a CEO it is always a lower ranking person who can not answer anything but has to go back and ask someone higher in the system…
The already proposed datacenters in Denmark will more than double the total Danish electricity consumption. In other words we will return to the fossil fuel area 30-40 years ago and carbon emmissions will sky rocket.
It is all dire. But it can be fought—we are winning plenty of battles.
Earlier this summer, for instance, Microsoft backed away from its commitment to build a giant gas-fired data center in West Virginia. It never said why, but the folks at Stand.Earth speculate that “the groundswell of community resistance and threat to its “climate leader” public image played a bigger role than they’d like to admit.” As Monica Nickelsburg had reported,
An analysis by Michael Thomas, CEO of the renewable energy research firm Cleanview, estimates the project could increase Microsoft’s data center emissions by 40%.
AI is proving to be plenty unpopular for its own reasons. Microsoft’s Bill Gates warned on Meet the Press yesterday that it could cause “a billion deaths” if “something goes wrong.”
But of course on the climate front something is already going wrong. The closest thing we have to a number comes from a 2021 study, which found that for “every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 that we add beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, we will kill one person.” The Amazon Pecos Ranch project is projected to generate 33 million tons of carbon equivalent annually. You don’t need to ask ChatGPT, you just need a calculator. That’s about 7,442 lives right there.
Ridicule is useful too, of course. I’m grateful to Brian Kahn for an alternate list of names for Bezos’ arena. I think my favorite is The Plunderdome, though The Arena of Public Relations isn’t bad either.
In other energy and climate news:
+I’ve told you about the podcast discussion that Dr. Ayana Johnson and I had with Tom Mattzie, and his attempts to get the clean energy industry into fighting shape so it could throw a political elbow or two. Kainoa Lowman digs deep into the same subject, in an interesting essay that came out this morning
“We needed to instill fear,” Peter Davidson, CEO of the investment firm Aligned Climate Capital and a founding organizer of Invest in Tomorrow, told me of the group’s philosophy. The industry has historically focused on winning hearts and minds rather than playing political hardball. Now, Davidson wants politicians to understand that “if they cross the industry—just like crypto, just like the NRA—there would be consequences.”…
But for clean energy to become a genuine political force, Invest in Tomorrow will need some backup. So far, the major clean energy trade associations have not stepped up. Davidson told me that before founding Invest in Tomorrow, he approached two of those groups—the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Council on Renewable Energy—about backing an effort to defeat Roy. Both declined, he said. Tim Pawlenty, the former moderate Republican governor of Minnesota hired as SEIA’s president in May, has explicitly distanced himself from Invest in Tomorrow, telling Politico that “we’re in the business of making friends, not making enemies.”
+Fascinating course beginning next month, online from the University of British Columbia.
Recent climate extremes have underscored the urgency of building better community communication programs and taking community-wide action to climate-proof homes and critical infrastructure. This program provides new skills and career opportunities to address the rapidly growing need for civic engagement in climate action in communities that are increasingly vulnerable to climate change extremes.
Get a sense from watching the Cool ‘Hood Champs video; the teachers assure me that their methods work south of the border as well.
+Hmmm. According to some fine reporting from Benjy Sachs, the “grassroots” group trying to weaken New York City’s vital Local Law 97, which retrofits buildings across the city for energy conservation, isn’t quite so grassroots
But Co-ops and Condos United has deeper ties to the real estate industry than its grassroots branding suggests. The group is a rebranding of Homeowners for a Stronger New York, a prominent critic of Local Law 97. Until its renaming last fall, Homeowners for a Stronger New York received all its funding (over $750,000) from a lobbying group run by the Real Estate Board of New York, or REBNY, which represents some of the city’s largest developers.
Making this law work will be one of Mayor Mamdani’s chief climate tests!
Speaking of New York officials, the vice-chair of the city’s Sierra Club chapter, Wayne Arden, has an account of Governor Kathy Hochul’s fecklessness on most things energy and climate. Here’s his suggestion
How can Governor Hochul begin to restore trust with the environmental community? She should advance the Cap-and-Invest Program without delay. As a global center of finance, New York City and thus New York State have a leading role to play. If New York State links its program to those of California, Quebec, and Washington, it will create a de facto price for carbon in North America.
New York City emissions comprise about 40% of the state total, and 69% are produced by buildings. Local Law 97, New York City’s cornerstone law for addressing climate change, incentivizes building owners to reduce use of fossil fuels by increasing efficiency and electrification. Cap-and-Invest will lower the carbon intensity of the electrical grid, supporting the emission reduction aims of Local Law 97.
+For Americans, one big effect of El Niño may turn out to be beach erosion. The weekend’s nor’easter seems to have done a number on beaches in the Carolinas, the Jersey Shore, and Cape Cod (it also uncovered a shipwreck on Nantucket dating to 1884). And in California, the iconic strands of the Golden State are disappearing. As Jill Cowan writes
In Long Beach, residents were forced to flee as the Pacific battered their homes this month. Up the coast, a gaping sinkhole prompted evacuations in Malibu outside of the actor Nicolas Cage’s mansion.
In Orange County, the relentless waves cut off a key rail line and left a section of a popular beach parking lot crumbled like a smashed pack of Oreos. Multimillion-dollar houses washed into the sea.
Now a slow-moving Kelvin Wave is approaching the West Coast, which could send sea levels a foot higher for months on end. Nick Visser explains:
The Kelvin wave phenomenon is created when trade winds that usually blow from South America towards Asia die down or reverse in El Niño years, setting off a massive, slow-moving slosh of water.
Kelvin waves are not like crashing waves at the beach. They are planetary in scale, spanning thousands of miles. And when a Kelvin wave kicks off, it brings with it an untold amount of warm water that slowly moves from the western Pacific, along the equator, towards South, Central and North America…
“It’s a wave unlike the ones you’re used to at the beach. They don’t crash, you can’t really seem them come by,” said Mike Jacox, a research oceanographer at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “This winter, we’re supposed to have some really high tides around Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you also have more storms, then you have storm surge. It’s just like you’re raising the floor on all that stuff that happens.”
+From Sara Kolmes, Steven Kolmes and Jacquelyn Harootunian-Cutts, a fascinating dissection of the environmental sections of Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI
In describing the obligation to engage in moral development, as economic development is made easier by technology, he again reiterates that “true progress is not what increases the wellbeing of some by degrading ecosystems, shifting cost onto the most disadvantaged communities, or compromising the living conditions of those who will follow us,” and continues to reference environmental protection when he describes what we must consider as we look to build a good economic future [159]. To care for the vulnerable means caring for the common home, and the reverse is also true. Pope Leo XIV reminds us that we cannot turn away from the implications of our engagement with technologies that create devastating effects for vulnerable populations. He also makes explicit that environmental protection is key to intergenerational justice: We owe an environment that supports life for those whom we share a world with, and to those who come after us.
The American Pope is drawing large crowds in France this week, and seems increasingly the counterweight to Donald Trump in the western world.
+In the pages of the Financial Times, Camilla Hodgson, Ryohtaroh Satoh and Kana Inagaki offer a sad account of the U.S. managing to fall behind China again, this time in the production of sodium-ion batteries—even though America actually has most of the world’s easily usable sodium.
“The West has missed the boat” on being first to sodium-ion, said Max Reid, head of battery costs at the consultancy CRU Group. Scaling up the supply chain would require “$100mn worth of investment per plant plus, and we’re just seeing nothing of that outside China,” he said.European and US battery start-ups had been pinning their ambitions on the chance to leapfrog their Chinese rivals using sodium-ion batteries, since they can be made from abundant materials including seawater. Lithium-based batteries rely on metals such as graphite and cobalt, whose production is dominated by China.
But Chinese companies, including CATL and auto group BYD, have been supported by tax breaks while several battery start-ups in Europe and the US have folded. Natron Energy, based in California and which counted commodity trader Mercuria among its key backers, collapsed last year soon after announcing plans to build a gigafactory. That followed the closure of Stanford University spinout Bedrock Materials, co-founded by a former Tesla engineer.Companies including GM and Tiamat Energy in France have invested in sodium-ion batteries and Moll Batterien is building a German factory which it said would mark the first industrial production of sodium-ion cells and batteries in Europe, scheduled to begin next year. But they are dwarfed by the scale of production in China. The capacity of operating and planned sodium-ion gigafactories in China has risen to more than 400 gigawatt hours, compared with just 11 in the rest of the world, according to CRU data.
+Solar in Nevada is…heating up. Clara Hudson has the numbers
Despite President Trump’s disdain for renewable energy, the solar industry is growing quickly—particularly in regions he won in 2024. Those states accounted for more than 70% of all solar capacity installed in the first half of the year and represented eight of the top 10 states for new installations, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
In Nevada, projects are even moving forward on federal lands. Eight such projects are progressing through the Interior Department’s pipeline, according to its Bureau of Land Management. The swing state, which voted for Trump in 2024 and is led by a GOP governor, is one of the top producers and consumers of solar power—it gets about one-third of its energy from the sun’s rays.
In Nevada, two of the highest-profile developments that are advancing are the Mosey Solar Project and the Purple Sage Energy Center, both of which are poised to be built around the Pahrump Valley.
Mosey, a 500-megawatt solar farm accompanied by battery storage, is projected to cost $1.7 billion and cover about 3,565 acres of public land. Construction could begin as soon as 2029. Purple Sage is a slightly smaller solar-power and battery-storage project.
Until recently, both had been in limbo. All solar and wind energy projects on federal lands and waters have to be personally approved by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s office, following an order from Trump to scrutinize renewable projects. A federal judge, however, sided with renewable companies after they challenged the department’s policy in court.
Meanwhile Emily Pontecorvo has some numbers of her own, these from a new report on how much solar we could add simply by replacing old panels with new more efficient ones.
Modern panels can produce as much as 70% more energy than new ones sold 20 years ago, according to Wood Mackenzie. A report published Monday estimates that “repowering” existing solar farms, or replacing old panels with new ones, could unlock about 9.6 gigawatts of solar power by 2030, 29 gigawatts by 2035, and 67 gigawatts by 2040. (For comparison, the U.S. added 27.2 gigawatts of utility-scale solar last year.) If every project up for repowering between now and 2040 installed batteries, as well, that would add up to 13 additional gigawatts of storage to the grid by 2030, and nearly 92 gigawatts by 2040. The U.S. has just over 50 gigawatts of storage online today.
+Obviously the Trump regime’s hatred of higher education is a novel force in America. But a consortium of academics just published interesting research on the ways that industry—especially our friends at Big Oil—have been warping university priorities for decades
We argue that today's repression of universities is an escalation of a decades-long campaign of corporate capture. The campaign has moved from shaping research in favor of industrial interests to dismantling the governance structures that protect independent scholarship. That campaign made climate and energy research a primary target, because effective energy-transition policy depends on independent university research.
+I’ve been telling you about electric boats for years, but now we’re starting to see more solar-powered boats, echoing the fleet that has crossed the Amazon for years. Sarah Shemkus has an account of a new Massachusetts start up
The TruSolar20, all straight lines and right angles, was not the sleekest vessel on the Charles River when I visited at the end of August. Once I climbed aboard with inventor James Worden and we pulled away from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sailing pavilion, it quickly became clear that the boat’s shape isn’t its only distinction.
There was no exhaust pricking our lungs as we sped up, and the only noises were the breeze and the strains of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” soundtrack, a favorite of Worden’s, coming from the onboard speakers. Most notable, perhaps, was the canopy over our heads, composed of six 425-watt solar panels that provided all the power the 20-foot-long boat needed to cruise along at about five miles per hour, even on a mostly cloudy day.
In sunnier weather, the boat reaches eight miles per hour on sun power alone and can run indefinitely at that rate. If it taps into the power stored in its battery, it can get close to 14 miles per hour. After sunset, a full battery keeps the vessel moving at a slower speed all night.