To use narrative, to tell stories about a subject like water seems useful. It’s also a challenge, given how the language of water policy and water politics can seem so obscure. I learned this when I first began to do research on water issues in the late 1970s and then joined the Southern California Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) in 1982.

I decided to do this post in a different way, partly so I could draw on some personal unpublished writing about my experiences with the MWD. The use of narrative and personal history may offer an understanding of what’s the same and what has changed in the world of water, and why water politics continues to be so crucial for social and environmental change.

So here goes…

In 1980, Dorothy Green, a middle-class housewife who had been transformed into a self-taught and fierce water activist, approached me about a water-related position. Dorothy was aware of my writing and political work about water issues and knew I lived in Santa Monica and could therefore apply for a position as a MWD board member, representing the City of Santa Monica.

It was an intriguing idea. Becoming a board member of the second largest water district in the country would provide an insider’s perspective on how the MWD operated. The timing worked well. I had been writing with my colleague and co-author Peter Wiley about those issues for a book (Empires in the Sun) about to be published and we had also initiated a weekly column about resource and environmental issues.

The idea was also appealing since a major statewide water battle was looming regarding the construction of a facility, the Peripheral Canal, to bring more Northern California water to the large corporate farms in the western end of the San Joaquin Valley and into urban Southern California.

To get to know the MWD was a way to understand the sources and exercise of power in Southern California. Over the years, it had played a leading role in a water industry consisting of public water agencies, federal entities such as the Bureau of Reclamation, real estate developers, engineering and construction interests, financial players, water lawyers, and other industries that relied on a continuing supply of water to overcome any institutional, environmental, or geographic constraints. The MWD itself controlled a huge budget and made crucial decisions about where and how to import water into the southern California region. It was itself a mini-version of the water industry, with a board then largely consisting of people with ties to many of those private interests.

Becoming a MWD board member offered an opportunity to explore how to re-envision a water-dependent region and its politics. MWD had long operated as a type of de facto land use manager for the larger southern California region through how it allocated the water sources it controlled. By the 1980s, however, the water industry felt it could no longer assure continuing expansion and growth through greater amounts of imported water.

I decided to apply for the MWD board position. A divided Santa Monica City Council voted in my favor, due in part to the support of one of the conservative Council members who considered herself an environmentalist and had clashed with the MWD and with the City’s previous MWD representative for his lack of accountability.

My seven years on the MWD board during the 1980s were an instructive, fascinating, and at times bizarre experience. It was then a 51-member board where I was almost always outvoted 50-1. At the age of 36 when I was appointed, I was the youngest member of a board that consisted of several septuagenarians and octogenarians and a nurse on duty during board meetings.

I quickly became a visible opponent of the Peripheral Canal even as the MWD succeeded in getting every elected official, business executive, and the full might of the water agencies and water industry interests in the region to support the pro-Peripheral Canal campaign. The contrast was striking. Bill Boyarsky, the then Los Angeles Times city editor who covered the MWD, later characterized my role as “this leftie guy with no respect for his ‘distinguished fat head’ old colleagues.”

Campaign rhetoric during the Peripheral Canal campaign was feverish. MWD leaders and their allies asserted that without the additional water Southern California would experience drastic reductions in available supply and unforetold economic consequences. In one debate I had with another board member, he lit after me as a traitor to the region and declared that residents would need to drink water out of their toilet bowl if my position prevailed. By being visible about my opposition to the water industry plans through my writing, through talks, and through challenges I made at Board meetings, I was considered an unwanted water industry intruder. I had become a “water rebel,” as one local news article characterized my role.

Not all the board members were conservative water industry types. Several of the board members representing the City of Los Angeles – appointees of then mayor Tom Bradley – considered themselves politically progressive. Yet they tended to go along with the water agency’s consensus about the need for more imported water. “I can’t understand your position,” one of the more liberal L.A. Directors said to me at one point. “Woody Guthrie wrote songs praising the construction of dams,” he remarked wistfully. “But Woody Guthrie,” I replied, “would have identified with the water rebels.”

The fight over the Peripheral Canal, like some other water battles in California and the West, eventually produced a complicated mix of proponents and opponents and laid bare regional tensions. Northern Californians had long resented what they considered a Southern California water grab. Southern Californians countered that Northern Californians had elitist sentiments regarding their uncouth neighbors to the South and furthermore had their own imported water systems with problematic environmental consequences. Northern California had a sizable environmental contingent opposed to the Canal. Southern California’s environmental opponents of the Peripheral Canal were then much smaller in number and could have fit into Dorothy Green’s living room where she hosted periodic campaign gatherings.

Yet our small band of Southern California environmentalists and other Peripheral Canal opponents were able to convince a sizeable number of Southern Californians to oppose the Canal, upwards of 40% of those who voted. The anti-Peripheral Canal forces ultimately prevailed statewide by a nearly 3-2 margin.

It became a pivotal moment at the MWD and within the water industry. Agendas started to change thanks in part to the Peripheral Canal defeat, though ever so slightly at first. Even at MWD, the appointment of several new directors, including Tim Brick, representing the City of Pasadena, shifted some of the Board agenda and politics. Tim, a long-time colleague and friend, led the anti-Peripheral Canal campaign in Southern California and eventually became Chair of the MWD board.

Subsequent board and staff appointments further changed the culture of the MWD. It included Judy Abdo who subsequently represented Santa Monica, and Mark Gold and Paula Daniels, representing the City of Los Angeles, among others.

Mark’s appointment on two different occasions is especially noteworthy. He had headed the Heal the Bay organization that had been started by Dorothy Green and had held several other key water-related posts. He is today considered a major player in the world of water politics.

California and the Western states have continued to grapple with various water problems. These include extended droughts, groundwater contamination, and changing federal policies. Climate change has imposed and substantially extended concerns about water availability. Instead of its near exclusive reliance on imported water, the water agencies and other policymakers have begun to consider ways to manage water differently, although the water industry’s historical urge to build big dams and import waters long distances never went away. Bitter disputes continue to rage between and within states, and even within the MWD board. Yet it is a far cry from my earlier, lonely position on the MWD board.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as agendas began to change, our now expanding Southern California water rebel contingent worked with sustainable agriculture and farm labor advocates to call for a new urban and agricultural alliance based on a new water ethic of use and a politics of care for the sources of water. That vision remains compelling today.

The more I became engaged in water issues, I saw the need – and the difficulties – of building a movement rather than just a cadre of experts, albeit environmentally-oriented experts. Water has often been framed as a technical, not a social issue. I argued then that water had a community rather than commodity value. That’s so true today.

In the years since I left the water board in 1987, many more people have become engaged around water issues. The evocative struggle at Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017 brought many of the participants, including AOC, into progressive politics. The Standing Rock participants, led by indigenous activists and tribal members, identified their role as “water protectors” and put forth the compelling slogan “Water is Life.”

When I connected with action researchers in China, I also saw water as a powerful issue directly connected to the consequences of the development scenarios that China had pursued. In 2015, I met with the head of the water utility union in Thessaloniki, Greece, who had led the fight against privatizing the utility, and the head of an Athens group called “Save Greek Water.” Both made clear that privatization agendas in Greece and the EU were part of an agenda of social restructuring that extended inequality and undermined urban and rural communities and environments. It reinforced for me why I had understood that water was so crucial for building movements to re-envision water as central to a progressive agenda.

Today, the use of water and who controls it has become a major issue in the conflicts around Data Centers and the AI companies’ lack of accountability. And in California and the West and other parts of the U.S. and globally water continues to connect to the questions of who has power and how that power is used.

Yet the good news is that it’s not so unique to be a water rebel these days.

LINKS

Robert Gottlieb, A Life of its Own: The Politics and Power of Water, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988

Kelly Candaele, Beneath the Paving Stones - a River. Documentary, 2015.

Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb. Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982

Nineteen years earlier, in 2001, Occupy Wall Street events contrasted the wealthiest 1% and the 99% of the rest of us as illustrative of glaring income inequalities. French economist Thomas Piketty followed in 2013 with his sweeping historical take on the role of capitalism in furthering income inequalities through his surprise bestseller, Capital in the 21^st Century.

Since then, there has been much to despair about the direction of climate action and the continuing astronomic rise of global inequalities.

Climate denialism, for one, has made its comeback and has led to the push for a fossil fuel retrenchment. Heat waves, floods, and other climate impacts are intensifying each year. Record temperatures are recorded and then broken again the next year.

The picture is also bleak with respect to global inequalities. The 2007-2008 Great Recession, the 2020-2021 Covid epidemic, and now the AI boom of the 2020s have made these divides even wider. The rise of the Tech billionaires (and a trillionaire) and the restrictive policies and demonization of immigrants, often the most vulnerable of those with the lowest incomes, has further magnified global inequalities. Even China, while substantially reducing poverty levels, has experienced a widened gap between the wealthiest and the poorest.

Yet… The worst-case long-term climate scenarios may have shifted a bit downward, due in part to the rapid and largely unexpected increase in solar and wind and their dramatic fall in price compared to coal and other fossil fuels. And while global inequalities continue to increase, there has been a reconsideration and reckoning regarding affordability and income disparities that has brought new political energy to the tasks at hand.

Can there be an affirmative case that the future does not have to be as bleak as recent events have suggested while not trying to minimize their severity? A recent report by the Global Justice Project and the World Inequality Lab seeks to make that case. The report was pulled together by a team of 45 researchers, including Thomas Piketty, regarding what they characterized as “desirable future scenarios.”

Two key goals are highlighted: socioeconomic equality and planetary habitability. The goals are ambitious. The report describes how full economic equality between and within countries can be achieved, along with “fair access to education, healthcare and effective participation in all aspects of social economic, cultural and political life.” Income levels by 2100 would be compressed and would increase across all countries to a level equivalent to today’s richest countries. Per capita monthly gross national income would reach 5,000 Euros per month everywhere by the end of the 21^st century, according to the GJP calculations.

With respect to climate, the goal is equally ambitious. The report argues that global temperature increase can be limited to 1.8c by the year 2100, through a “fast decarbonization” process. To achieve these climate and equality numbers, massive system changes would obviously be needed.

To make such changes, the GJP links the ideas of sufficiency and reducing inequalities both between countries and within countries at the center of climate projections and income and well-being analysis.

By arguing for sufficiency and situating it in the context of greater equality, the GJP counters notions of “abundance” and “green growth,” both proxies for a notion of a status quo+ green capitalism and a “slow decarbonization.” Goods to be produced, in a sufficiency scenario, would be needed “to sustain daily life, such as housing, food, community and individual health, childcare, eldercare, and clean water” and services, such as parks, libraries, utilities, the arts, education, internet, mail, and other information services [even AI] would be considered “essential public goods,” as I argued in my book, Care-Centered Politics.

These are changes, the GJP report asserts, that are difficult to sustain “without a compelling vision of why they are worthwhile.. and the sufficiency narrative aims to provide precisely such a vision.” Rather than framing fast decarbonization and global income equality as a sacrifice in the service of continued material accumulation, the GJP reframes it as an opportunity to build a more equitable and sustainable way of life. That could mean working fewer hours, reorienting consumption toward services, eating in a more sustainable and healthy manner, sharing prosperity globally, and living within a stable climate. The contrast is between “increased human well-being compared to the trajectory of endless work and material growth.”

Is the Sufficiency narrative and fast decarbonization and reducing and eliminating global inequalities truly feasible? Major economic and political disruptions like the current US/Israeli war with Iran suggest one such dramatic shift with respect to the rise of renewables. Although major disruptions could move in a negative direction as well, such as the disaster capitalism routes that Naomi Klein has shown.

The major contribution of the Global Justice Report and its Sufficiency, Fast Decarbonization, and Reducing Global Inequalities platform is less the route than the idea that change can happen and is plausible and that the numbers reinforce that plausibility. It’s more Gramsci than Lenin, a cultural shift and a discourse battle that needs to align with a political transformation.

That’s the hope. And to make hope possible is truly radical, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, rather than to allow making despair even more convincing.

LINKS

The Global Justice Project. World Inequality Lab. The Global Justice Report. 2026, https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/global-justice-report/

Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel. “We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way.” Guardian. June 10, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/10/economists-maths-growth-doomed-strategy-un-agencies-political-leaders

It was a chaotic time in the country. Thousands of people had been in the streets for several days protesting the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the country’s unpopular President, Carlos Pérez. Martial law had been declared, and the military took to the streets to stop the protests. This sequence of events would come to be known as the “Caracazo” (or the big one in Caracas), resulting in as many as 3000 protestors killed, and eventually toppling Pérez and leading to the ascendance of Hugo Chávez.

Petrini’s epiphany was recognizing the contrast between his scheduled Caracas gathering to socialize “with the well-to-do,” as he put it, and a hungry population that had taken to the streets. Instead of the haute cuisine that would be provided, Petrini felt a more appropriate menu offering would be the low cost, national dish of meat and beans, or “pobillion.”

Petrini’s efforts to identify a new “slow food” movement had its roots in a left wing critique of the food system. It drew upon the Gambero Rosso (the Red Prawn or Red Shrimp) publication insert of the left-wing Italian newspaper Il Manifesto that first appeared in late 1986. Petrini hoped to base his new movement on environmental, pro-labor, and sustainability approaches while also celebrating the idea of fresh and local (or good!) food, approaches he characterized as “gastronomical politics.” The new movement’s slogan of “Clean, Good, and Fair” resonated with various food movements in the EU and the US, as well as in many parts of the developing world where the parallel concept of food sovereignty represented a call to action against a food economy and culture that focused on “fast” food and a type of globalized, homogenized food.

Twenty years after Carlo Petrini’s epiphany, I had the occasion to go to the Slow Food movement’s educational center, the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG), in Pollenzo, just a few kilometers from Slow Food’s headquarters in Bra, Italy, and about 50 kilometers southeast of Torino (Turin), itself a legendary region for working class and left-wing activism. I was asked to give a talk and meet with the UNISG students, several from developing countries, about the emerging food justice movement in the U.S. and how it corresponded to the global food sovereignty politics associated with such groups as Via Campesino. The relationship between food and climate politics was key to those discussions. That same year, in 2009, the food sovereignty groups, including Via Campesino, issued a manifesto at a Climate Conference in Bali, identifying the links between food and climate issues based on the notion of sovereignty.

Those links between food, climate, labor, indigenous rights, and environment were obvious and crucial to the UNISG students I met, and it also became an important part of slow food politics and its various international gatherings. One such gathering, in 2017, took place in Chengdu in China at a time when food politics in that country was experiencing multiple transitions, ranging from the Rural Reconstruction Movement to the country’s increasing integration into global economies and an urban-oriented global food culture.

The Chengdu Slow Food Conference attracted 400 participants from countries around the world. For some of its participants, including some in the U.S. delegation, it included a pre-conference tour in the outskirts of Beijing of the Sharing the Harvest farm where I had also been visiting after giving a talk hosted by Sharing the Harvest farm’s founder, Shi Yan.

Sharing the Harvest was at the forefront of China’s rural reconstruction movement whose core principles included the promotion of “agro-ecology, sustainability, and rural regeneration,” as described by one of the movement’s founders, Wen Tiejun. Sharing the Harvest farm was also one of the first examples in China of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and by the time the Chengdu gathering took place, there were more than 1000 participants in a separate gathering of China’s CSA farmers and advocates.

The visit to Sharing the Harvest and the Chengdu conference was an important and revealing encounter for the Slow Food participants who could see themselves as part of a global as well as local politics, and where food system issues played such a critical role. It also helped shape my own work, contributing to the search for a new political language that I would later describe in my book on care politics.

I never directly participated in the slow food political world even as I encountered many of its participants. Yet I recognized the importance of Carlo Petrini’s epiphany, whether for the slow food groups; the continuing debates in China about food, rural reconstruction, and what some in China described as the need for an “ecologicial civilization;” or for the importance of linking food to climate as part of a care-centered politics.

When Carlo Petrini died on May 22, he was recognized in many of the obituaries about him as a visionary who also sought to develop a politics of everyday life. “Those who sow utopia reap reality” was one of the phrases he loved to say. He also recognized early on that there was a danger that slow food could acquire or be seen as elitist, as “representing no more than a haute bourgeois amusement,” as he wrote.

It was that tension he grappled with that was also reflected in descriptions of his role as well. Ben Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic put it this way: “Mr. Petrini had been a communist, and there was an anticapitalist strain in all this. But the solution he proposed was not seizing fast-food companies and turning them over to the workers. Instead, he argued for cultivating a network of small local food businesses by directing more profits to the people behind them — conscious capitalism with a side of hedonism.”

But Petrini was not into conscious capitalism. He spoke for the producers, for those who worked in the food system, and for changing the food system itself, and not just for the consumers and the act of consumption. It was not hedonism for the well-to-do he was after, but system change.

“Etes-vous des consommateurs ou bien des participants,” (Are you consumers or participants?) was one of the graffiti slogans in the walls of Paris during the May, 1968 events. It’s a statement that Petrini had also concurred.

LINKS

Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Nation: Why our Food Should be Good, Clean and Fair. New York: Rizzzoli, 2007

Fabio Parasecoli. “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds: Food, Globaliation, and the Italian Left.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Winter 2003

Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi. Food Justice. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2010

Slow Food International Congress in Chengdu, China (blog): https://www.slowfood.com/blog-and-news/slow-food-international-congress-2017/ “Slow Food International Congress, 2017.” June 29, 2017

Wen Tiejun. Ten Crises: The Political Economy of China’s Development (1949-2020). Springer Nature. Open Source Book available at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50066

Pete Wells. “For Carlo Petrini, the Point of ‘Slow Food’ Wasn’t the Food. It Was Us.” New York Times, May 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/dining/carlo-petrini-slow-food.html

Yet the availability of Colorado River has always been contested in the United States among the seven states and their interest groups and water agencies who claim a portion of its flow. These include the Upper Basin states of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of California, Nevada, and Arizona. Dividing the waters has been the heart of western water politics for more than a century, particularly when allocations assigned to the seven states that date back to a 1922 Compact are greater than the river’s actual flow.

This system can no longer hold. The water is just not available to accommodate all its users. Something will have to give. It could be reductions or challenges for new users, such as rapidly expanding Data Centers. It could be cutbacks by the system’s largest user, agriculture, including for example alfalfa growers and their export-driven business who alone consume more than half of agriculture’s Colorado River supply. Or it could be the urban and suburban populations in places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and the urban expanse of Southern California who will need to figure out how one-time cutbacks and voluntary conservation measures due to falling supply and increased drought will need to become permanent and possibly mandatory measures.

The problem is historical: the allocations have long overestimated the actual flow of the Colorado River and failed to account for other users, such as tribal water rights. Nor did it account for the changing needs for water, whether for the invented city of Las Vegas, the expansion of agriculture as export-driven, or, more catastrophically today, climate-driven weather change, including the long droughts that now characterize this and other water systems throughout the world.

There have been a few modest adjustments, such as the Imperial Valley’s Deficit Reduction Program with Imperial Valley farmers compensated for not irrigating their fields for 45 to 60 days during the summer. Yet about half of the eligible program acres were cut for 2026 because of a lack of funding, even as the program was designed to be eliminated by the end of the year.

The most immediate issue involves the reduced allocations that will need to occur for all seven of the Basin States, who will then in turn have to address how that will impact the system’s users in each of their regions. Some reductions have already occurred, particularly among the Lower Basin states, but they’re far from sufficient to meet the rapid declines in rainfall and storage and the fear that such declines will only get worse in the near and longer term.

Water availability is just one of the indicators of how these climate-driven crises change everything. When I was on the MWD board in the 1980s, even modest conservation approaches were dismissed as minimal and, in some cases, counterproductive, since the water system was geared for expansion. Fixed costs were high and the variable income, such as through water usage, needed to support the fixed costs that would go up when new water transfer and storage facilities were built. At one point, critics of the system, including myself, would mockingly argue that the water industry needed to pray for drought, since when it rained less water was being used and paid for!

The challenges for the water system at that time led to some ludicrous ideas, Trumpian in their detachment from what in fact was in store for the water industry and their managers and the water system they had created. Let’s float icebergs down from Alaska, advocated some officials, like Walter Hickel, the former Alaska Governor and Nixon’s Secretary of Interior. Or create a massive water transfer system from the northern reaches of British Columbia, on to a 500 mile-wide reservoir at the U.S./Canada border in Montana, and then to conveyance systems to and from the Great Lakes; a proposal backed by large engineering firms who wanted the water industry to Think Big or even Bigger.

None of these ideas went far, and slowly, perhaps too slowly, some water agencies and the Basin States decision-makers they connected with, began to realize that a very different type of water system and a different type of water ethic needed to emerge. When you conserve, you create more; when you reduce allocations, you need to focus on how to manage what you have, rather than assume more plentiful water will always be available.

It’s the reality that alfalfa exporters, data center operators, and the major urban areas will have to address. Unless, in fact, we no longer even have available the water that we all need.

LINKS

Ian James. “A dire ‘math problem’ on the Colorado River and wholly inadequate responses.” Los Angeles Times. May 14, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2026-05-14/boiling-point-colorado-river-math-problem

Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons. Thirst for Growth: Water Agencies as Hidden Government in California. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989

Brian Richter et al. “New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea.” Communications Earth and Environment. March 28, 2024 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01291-0

Ian James. “Hay grown for cattle consumes nearly half the water drawn from Colorado River, study finds.” Los Angeles Times. March 28, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-03-28/alfalfa-hay-beef-water-colorado-river

Mike Rankin. “Some Optimism for a Better Hay Year.” Hay and Forage Grower. April 21, 2026. https://hayandforage.com/article-5672-Some-optimism-for-a-better-Western-hay-year.html

Ambia Staley. “AI data centers in the American West need 7 billion gallons of water a year. The region is running dry.” Quartz. May 15, 2026. https://qz.com/data-center-water-use-drought-american-west-051326

NEXT 10. “The Intersection of Data Center Development, Water Availability, and Environmental Justice in California,” May 2026. https://www.next10.org/sites/default/files/2026-05/Data-Centers-Water-Use-Report.pdf

The U.S/Israel war with Iran, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Trump-Xi China-US summit have all contributed to an emerging narrative of a global shift in power. This includes political shifts (China rising, the U.S. in decline), and in relation to global energy trends (a rapid shift towards green energy versus the long but eroding dominance of fossil fuels).

Climate advocates and writers, such as Bill McKibben and David Wallace-Wells, have argued that China is on the rise since it has become the world’s major source of solar and wind and other green technologies, and has emerged as a type of electro-state.

The numbers back up this analysis. While much of China’s green energy goes to export and can be seen as an extension of its soft power and global economic strategies, domestic numbers also indicate a major shift. This is as much an industrial and development policy as a political strategy: China builds things – solar arrays and wind turbines, electric cars, batteries, and more of the green energy infrastructure – as a state-led program. And on a massive scale.

This provides a striking contrast with the U.S. approach, especially with the major reversals in the past eighteen months in green energy politics and in advancing fossil fuel interests by the Trump Administration. Favoring coal to the point of making chaotic and illogical financial decisions, undoing nearly completed green energy projects, and pushing solar and wind developers to switch to fossil fuels are just the most visible components of Trumpian fossil fuel favoritism, hostility to climate action, and an adventuresome and expansionist oil and fossil fuel-centered foreign policy.

Xi’s needling Trump at their summit about the Thucydides Trap (referencing rising and declining powers) is nowhere more apparent than their contrasting approaches to energy. As Guardian writer Jonathan Watts put it: “The global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electro-state in the east.”

There’s good reason, from a climate perspective, to celebrate this global shift. Yet China’s green strategies also have a darker side as some of China’s developmental choices can be seen as more problematic. A case in point is China’s hydropower strategy: huge dam projects, the transformation of free-flowing and iconic rivers into a continuous source of energy development, and the use of the powers of the State to change whole regions and their social, cultural, and ecological dimensions. This includes the more than two-decade struggles around plans to build massive hydroelectric facilities at the Tiger Leaping Gorge Jinsha River site in Yunan and adjacent provinces and related hydropower projects along the upper Yangzte.

The push for massive development projects, including huge dam sites and hydropower facilities has characterized China’s water and energy approaches for several decades. The Three Gorge Dam in Central China’s Hubei Province, a project conceived as early as the 1920s, officially launched in 1994 and developed in different stages through the early 2000s and into the 2010s is still today the world’s largest dam site.

Controversial at the outset prior to construction and to this day, Three Gorge Dam displaced as many as 1.4 million people prior to completion and signified the push in this period for the migration to the cities as central to the country’s economic development. Also conceived for flood control and shipping purposes, Three Gorge Dam also had a hydropower component as China sought to link its then “all of the above” energy approach (fossil fuels, especially coal, nuclear, hydro, and an emerging solar and wind development strategy) to rapid economic growth, its urban and industrial development, and its entry on the global stage.

Less visible yet also critical to China’s various development goals in the late 1990s and early 2000s were the proposed projects along the Upper Yangtze, including the Tiger Leaping Gorge project. The Tiger Leaping Gorge is a stunning place. It is a World Heritage site and the Jinsha River that flows through it represents the upper end of the Yangtze. The area to be impacted by the multiple planned dams and hydro facilities is also the home of multiple indigenous groups, ecosystems, small scale agriculture, languages spoken, and social and cultural identities.

Smaller than the Three Gorge Dam, the facilities that were planned were nevertheless still going to displace 100,000 villagers and remove 13,333 hectares of productive farmland. Most importantly, as opposition to the project began to emerge, was the possibility that long-standing cultural and social ties would be eroded. The Tiger Leaping Gorge site was itself not just a treasure for any who could view it, but it was at the center of the community and ecological linkages among diverse groups.

When the project was first proposed, it caught the attention of Xiao Liangzhong, a young anthropologist, writer, and editor based in Beijing who had grown up along the banks of the Jinsha River in Chezhu Village. A member of the Bai ethnic group, he went to grade school with others from various ethnic groups in the region where he learned to appreciate them and their identities, all of whom were also influenced by the places where they lived.

Liangzhong’s work focused on the region extending from Yunnan to Tibet and Sichuan and the different minority groups and farming villages and communities throughout those areas. His family – grandmother, parents, several siblings – still resided in Chezhu. When Liangzhong became involved in the fight to save Tiger Leaping Gorge it extended beyond protection of the natural environment but to a critique of the developmentalism and displacement strategies at the heart of the project and its erosion of rural societies and indigenous cultures.

““Under the influence of developmentalism,” Liangzhong would write, “it is often assumed that anything—including your emotions, your land—can be compensated with money. However, the people living along the Jinsha River think otherwise. They say: ‘Even if you pave this river valley with gold, it cannot replace this free-flowing great river, nor can it restore our homeland!’”

Liangzhong became an incredibly effective advocate to save Tiger Leaping Gorge. He was able to enlist sympathetic journalists, NGO activists, and even some government officials to work with the people who would otherwise be displaced. As Simon Ng and I wrote in our profile of Liangzhong for our Global Cities book, “he maintained a commitment to a China that could value rather than undermine cultural and ecological diversity and multiplicity.”

And he was successful in his outreach. Although still committed to its developmentalism goals, including hydropower, China’s leadership at the time, including then Premier Wen Jiabao became increasingly sensitive to environmental and rural concerns, and ultimately decided to suspend some of the projects, including most notably the Tiger Leaping Gorge project.

Xiao Liangzhong didn’t live to see that outcome. Exhausted and driven, Liangzhong collapsed and died of cardiac arrest at the age of 32. One thousand villagers attended his memorial and a plaque was created for Liangzhong, whom they called “Son of the Jinsha River.”

Xiao Liangzhong (1972–2005).

When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he recalibrated China’s role around developmentalism, industrial power, political control,… and a recognition of the importance of a green strategy on the domestic and world stage. Hydropower was still central to that vision and some of the big projects became even bigger. The fifteenth of the 5 Year Plans, rolled out in 2025, included the possibility of a revival of the Jinsha River projects, including the Tiger Leaping Gorge hydro facility.

What to make of China, then? Can it become an Electro-state with the capacity to address the vision of Xiao Liangzhong? It’s a question not just for China, but how governments as well as social movements make change happen in an era of climate crises and climate change and all its social and ecological justice dimensions.

LINKS

Jonathan Watts, “The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly.” May 17, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/17/america-china-energy-oil-renewables

Harold Thibaut. “The Relentless Push to Build Dams in Tiger Leaping Gorge:’If We Lose our Land, We Lose Everything.’” Le Monde. July 7, 2025. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2025/07/07/the-relentless-rush-to-build-dams-in-china-s-tiger-leaping-gorge-if-we-lose-our-land-we-lose-everything_6743094_114.html

Lauri Myllyvirta and Belinda Schäpe, “China’s 15th Five-Year Plan — Implications for climate and energy transition,” March 6, 2026. CREA (Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air). https://energyandcleanair.org/chinas-15th-five-year-plan-implications-for-climate-and-energy-transition/

Tom Philips, “Joy as China shelves plans to dam ‘angry river’,” Guardian. December 2, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/02/joy-as-china-shelves-plans-to-dam-angry-river

Arezki Amiri, “Already Home to a Dam That Slows Earth’s Rotation, China Is Now Building an Even Larger $165 Billion Power Giant” Daily Galaxy. May 12, 2026. https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/05/china-tibet-dam-165-billion-hydropower-project/

Fan Xiao. “Four Major Hazards of the Jinsha River Tiger Leaping Gorge Hydropower Project.” English translation by Probe International, first published on WeChat on October 22, 2024 [and since deleted] https://journal.probeinternational.org/2025/01/22/four-major-hazards-of-the-jinsha-river-tiger-leaping-gorge-hydropower-project/

Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng. Global Cities: Urban Environments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 2017

Why that’s the case is laid out in two new books that fundamentally challenge how we calculate such issues as wages and income or assets and value. Their critique also made me recall that the way we think about price and value has been influenced not only by what is priced and valued but also by what is considered “priceless”.

Remember those “priceless” ads? It’s been almost 30 years since they were introduced in 1997 by Mastercard, the financial services and credit card company seeking to better reposition its brand. Those first ads appeared at the height of the neo-liberal, market-defining era of global capitalism..

The priceless ad campaign was a big success for Mastercard. It established for the company “a long-lasting, multi-dimensional marketing platform that reflects our ongoing company evolution and the changing world around us.” This evolution went from celebrating “priceless moments,” to “curating priceless moments,” and “bringing Priceless to more people than previously possible.”

What constituted priceless for Mastercard? On its website, it suggested it could be found wandering inside Frida Kahlo’s museum (cost to do it = $232) or experiencing a hands-on roasting of cacao in Thailand and then “indulging in a gut-healthy lunch” (cost to do it = $214). Priceless, it turned out, did have a price.

But some things in the world like Nature or eco-systems cannot be priced, or at least not easily or successfully. And some work that sustains us like care work is not paid, or if it is, it’s at some of the lowest wages. Those items that are unpriced or that represent unwaged work will not be showing up in the next GDP report or jobs report or in many other assessments of what the market determines has “value.”

These omissions are not just contemporary issues. The GDP, as a measure of the economy, has long been criticized for its failure to account for certain kinds of work, or for the environment and Nature and the non-human world more broadly. And the employment or jobs numbers have long excluded work that is not paid.

Those arguments are elaborated in those two recently published books: Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, and Nancy Folbre’s Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First.

The “free gift” argument, according to Battistoni, “reveals the gap between how things are valued in the market and how they might be valued otherwise.” This includes both humans and non-humans, Nature and eco-systems, and other dimensions of daily life and life on our planet.

The GDP’s failure to include Nature and Environment as goods produced that have value has double significance since it does include calculations about the loss and degradation of natural environments and non-human life as an input by the ways that those losses and degraded environments are treated. Air quality is not an input but air quality treatment such as carbon filtration systems are part of GDP. Species that are dying or forests decimated due to climate change are not counted as negative inputs but clearing the forests of the dying trees gets included.

Moreover, the market system and capitalist investment is, as Battistoni argues, “an unattractive site for value accumulation.” It’s not easy to set a price on Nature and eco-systems not because they’re priceless, but due to the way that the market and “value accumulation” (profit making) are structured. They are those free gifts taken by capitalism, situated outside the market, but subject to the impacts from the market system.

The same is true for what both Battistoni and Folbre identify as “social reproduction work,” including different forms of care work and work that is not paid. “Reproductive labor,” Battistoni says in an article for Jacobin, “tends to be labor-intensive, difficult to mechanize, and hard to make more efficient, which makes it an unattractive site for value accumulation. Capital invests where profitability is likely; where it is not, responsibility for social reproduction is displaced on to workers and their networks. This provides a more material explanation of why reproductive labor remains external to markets while still being indispensable to capitalism, and it helps bring questions of social reproduction into closer conversation with ecological concerns.”

Folbre agrees. At the heart of social reproduction is care work. The care economy, Folbre argues, relies on “a commonwealth of natural resources, ecosystem services, human knowledge we have inherited from the past, social institutions that enable effective cooperation, and the care we provide for ourselves and future generations.” Care work can be seen as the production, development and maintenance of human capabilities. And in this context, care provision is a public good.

Yet this public good is either unpaid or paid minimum or subpar wages and is not valued in other ways. It is not “priceless” in the Mastercard view. By utilizing data from the American Time Use Survey, Folbre documents how half of all work is unpaid v work, an astounding number when people first hear it. Yet that number (50% of all work being unpaid) is also underestimated since it doesn’t account for caregivers on call.

At the same time, national income accounts have ignored the additions of unpaid work to economic well-being. This is parallel to their failure to subtract/account for unpaid losses such as pollution, depletion of natural resources, and disruption of ecological processes. And even the way GDP is calculated, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 25% of the GDP is unpaid work.

For Folbre, we need to put people first in our economies. The value of care work is not market determined. It’s not measured in dollar terms but through well being and can include indicators such as mental health, reduced violence, and other alternative measures of well-being. By linking those different aspects of well-being, for humans and non-humans, Nature and Society alike, care can also be a political unifier. For both Folbre and Battistoni, these are not abstract arguments, but the basis for political action.

As Folbre puts it abut care provision and Battistoni identifies transforming the free gift paradigm, it is a matter of recognizing value and how value can be democratically assigned and for us to recognize, whether for care or for the free gifts their public benefit.

Battistoni puts it this way: “Struggles about reproduction, then, are never only about reproduction; they are about how societies chose to organize labor and allocate resources more broadly; about what kinds of work we think are valuable and important, regardless of whether they are productive for capital. To see human reproduction as continuous with both other forms of human labor and more-than-human forms of life, in turn, requires thinking more expansively about how ways of living, both human and non-human, may be organized together and make a shared world on our only planet.”

And it’s how we can value what is so valuable.

LINKS

Alyssa Battistoni. “How to Understand Nature from a Marxist Perspective,” Feb. 7, 2026. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/02/nature-capitalism-marxism-ecology-freedom

Alyssa Battistoni. Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025

Nancy Folbre. Making Care Work: Why our Economy Should Put People First. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2026

Beatrice Cornacchia, “Priceless: A celebration of 25 years.” January 16, 2023. https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/2023/priceless-a-celebration-of-25-years/

Yet while solar is making its ascent, carbon emissions and severe climate impacts have continued their own downward spiral that climate scientists have long warned about. The climate urgency is there, an unforgiving component of the various poly-crises we face. And climate scientists warn: the struggle for a change in climate politics and the possibility of a solar economy might well be coming too late.

The US/Israel War on Iran War makes visible the choices we face. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, argues that the Iran War has already created the “largest energy security threat in history” with “permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.” “The vase is broken, the damage is done, and it would be very difficult to put the pieces back together” Birol warned about the blockade’s impact in an interview with The Guardian on April 24^th, suggesting that countries will need to increasingly turn to non-fossil fuel alternatives, such as solar and wind, if just for energy security reasons.

What’s striking about the blockade and the Iran War’s impact is that it is unfolding through the actions of Donald Trump, fossil fuel’s greatest champion and solar and wind’s biggest enemy. But Trump should not have been surprised.

It’s not just the Iran War. Solar and wind have been rising for decades while its price has been falling, particularly since the Paris Agreement in 2015. The share of solar among all energy supplies has continued to climb. It reached parity globally with coal in 2025 and claimed the position of global energy leader by bypassing all fossil fuels sooner than anyone would have predicted. Energy analysts have pointed out that 2025 already witnessed the growth of solar outpacing all other fuels combined for that year.

The sharp price decline of solar is just part of the story. In the period following the Paris UN Climate meeting, several of the fossil fuel companies sought to spin a role that they were moving towards becoming green energy companies, based on their very minor purchases of alternative energy sources, This occurred particularly in the period between 2015 and 2019 when the climate movement was then at its peak.

While this was portrayed as a p.r. greenwashing stunt (which it largely was) it also became clear that solar, for the fossil fuel companies, was not profitable enough within the logic of capitalism, as energy analyst Brett Christophers pointed out in his book, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.

Return on investment paled in comparison to the fossil fuel profitability juggernaut. To be competitive, solar appeared to need public investment to be competitive in market terms; investment which Donald Trump has gone to great lengths to eliminate. Despite those efforts, solar prices continue to fall even as Trump slashes all subsidies, pulls permits, and tries to force solar installers to shift to fossil fuels.

China has also been a factor in the rise of solar. Since Paris, China had seemed the outlier. While it ramped up its solar and wind development, far outpacing the U.S., the EU bloc, and every other country in capturing nearly all dimensions of the green energy market, fossil fuel champions argued that China was destined for overcapacity, and they were sure events like the Iran War would prove the point.

But just the opposite has happened. IEA’s Fatih Birol is not the only energy analyst who sees solar’s rise as part of China’s own ascendance in a coming solar world. China is becoming the first electro-state, Bill McKibben has written. And like other solar enthusiasts, McKibben, in his latest book, celebrated that the growth of solar arrays, wind turbines, heat pumps, battery technology, EVs and E-bikes represent “probably the most potentially liberatory technology loose in our world, the single thing most likely to subvert the cartoonish inequality and eat away at the grotesque privilege that dominates our world.”

Can the solar economy revolution then be far behind? Will it allow us to imagine a new trajectory, a different, more hopeful, socially and environmentally just future? Can we win the race against climate threats and disaster?

To create the solar economy, ramping up solar development is only one, even if consequential step, as energy analyst Nat Bullard argues. Bullard identifies it as the easier step, due to solar’s dramatic price shift. The hard part is developing the infrastructure needed for transmission and to make the availability of solar ubiquitous: locally, nationally, and globally. At the same time, a solar economy needs to decarbonize and remake fossil-fuel dependent institutions, materials, and policies that influence and structure daily life needs.

How utilities respond is crucial. Most utilities are investor-owned and have a long history of catering to fossil fuel development. They need instead to act as public entities and as promoters of solar infrastructure and enhance rather than seek to limit community scale, off the grid as well as on the grid, development. Similarly, transportation and food systems need to be reconceived and restructured as solar rather than fossil-fuel based. The leap in gas prices for cars and diesel-fueled trucks as well as the cost and availability of chemical fertilizer are Iran War examples of what needs to change.

Such changes would constitute a shift in what has been called the foundation economy. At the same time, a reorientation and enhancement of the care economy also need to happen, from child care and senior care, to education and health care, to more broadly the infrastructure of daily life; a need that became so visible during the Covid epidemic as well as in the aftermath of climate events like fires and flooding.

These are both seen as community-scale and national changes. They also have to be translated into global action; action that the UN COP process pledged to make happen, but which has been continually sabotaged by fossil fuel interests and their petro-state allies.

Another pipe dream? Another glimmer of hope about global scale change is set to occur this week even in the midst of, or perhaps even made clearer by the energy security crisis of the Iran War. The governments of Colombia and The Netherlands are co-hosting the Climate Coalition of the Willing that will be meeting April 29 and April 30 in Santa Marte Colombia. 54 countries are invited, including several oil producing countries like Brazil and Mexico who are nevertheless potentially more aligned with the goals of the gathering. Such goals include the development of an initiative to transition away from fossil fuels as well as the shift towards a solar economy. As Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia Environment Minister put it about the gathering: “We need to make economic decisions away from extractivism into what we call the economics of life.”

“Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible,” asserted those who filled the streets of Paris in May 1968. Now more than ever that needs to be said and acted upon. Let it continue to emerge, even during the worst of times.

LINKS

David Walker-Wells, “The Only Good News from Iran.” New York Times, April 22, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/opinion/iran-energy-climate.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dFA.FAV8.lwki6mI9wNaM&smid=url-share

Fiona Harvey. ‘The damage is done’: global oil crisis has changed fossil fuel industry forever, IEA chief says.” The Guardian. April 24, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/24/global-oil-crisis-changed-fossil-fuel-industry-for-ever-iea-chief-fatih-birol

Bill McKibben. Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2025

Brett Christophers. The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. London and New York: Verso Books, 2024

Plain English with Derek Thompson. “The Whole World is Fighting About Energy,” An Interview with Nat Bullard. April 14, 2026.

International Energy Agency. IEA Fact Sheet on the Strait of Hormuz. https://www.iea.org/about/oil-security-and-emergency-response/strait-of-hormuz

Fiona Harvey and Jonathan Watts, “Colombia convenes climate ‘coalition of the willing’ to break global fossil fuel deadlock.” Guardian. April 17, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/17/colombia-convenes-climate-coalition-of-the-willing-to-break-global-fossil-fuel-deadlock

Gates and Microsoft had long been at the center of the carbon removal fraternity of entrepreneurs, speculators, and investors. This included Microsoft’s $100 million pledge in 2021 to support Gates’ major carbon removal initiative, Breakthrough Energy.

That same year, Microsoft decided to partner with Open AI as an investor. It subsequently, with Bill Gates cheering the company on, jumped into the AI sweepstakes by financing and building its own Data Centers.

It was also in 2021 that Microsoft’s sustainability agenda expanded to include a net zero carbon footprint goal to be achieved as early as 2030.

Gates, always ready to proclaim his own environmental and climate roles, saw the Microsoft net zero goal and his own carbon dioxide removal (CDR) initiative as helping lead the way towards a green capitalism future, marked by plentiful carbon credits.

But then came the 2024 election and Donald Trump 2.0. Climate denier, AI champion, and fossil fuel advocate, Trump pushed the tech bros and would be climate champions like Gates and Microsoft, to reconsider their earlier commitments.

This sequence has presumably created a conundrum for poor Bill Gates. While he’s of course so very, very rich ($107 billion, according to Forbes’ April 2026 estimate) and always ready to seek the spotlight, he now must reconcile his and Microsoft’s earlier climate and sustainable pledges and advocacy, given the paths now taken.

Can this conundrum be resolved? Were they ever real in the first place?

Carbon Removal

Start with the decisions about carbon removal and related geoengineering approaches. They first make their appearance in 1992 in a National Academy of Science report in the wake of the growing fears about the speed at which climate change impacts were happening. The idea of geoengineering solutions then received a major boost with the 2015 Paris UN COP Conference and the pledge to limit climate impacts to no more than an increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. Some argued that, given fossil fuel dominance in the global economy, such a pledge could only be met with strategies like carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or solar radiation management (SRM). And it also meant a status quo or status quo plus as the focus turned to geoengineering’s unproven and potentially dangerous approaches to carbon removal.

These approaches themselves became a form of “overshoot;” that is, since alternative solutions like solar and other system changes were assumed not likely to reverse or even halt climate emissions from reaching the 1.5 centigrade threshold, better then to advance CDR or SRM or related technologies. They, in turn, could eventually, when such approaches presumably became feasible and operational, tackle climate change, even as emissions continued to increase and create an even warmer planet. The fossil-fuel dependent economy could remain intact, without the disruptive changes that a solar and alternative energy and stranded fossil fuel assets scenario would require.

As overshoot became increasingly put forth as the only plausible solution, in jumped Bill Gates. In 2015, he founded his new enterprise, Breakthrough Energy, whose stated goal was to fund and champion “net zero technologies” like CDR.

For Gates, geoengineering, and particularly CDR, hit all the right buttons. It presumed big (eventual) emissions reductions. It offered industrial-scale technology solutions. It was more politically feasible since you didn’t have to mess with the fossil economy. And it was a Big Climate Change Idea that reinforced the overshoot hypothesis: don’t rely on alternative strategies like solar (too expensive, too limited in scale, so it was wrongly assumed).

Yet by postponing any climate reductions into the future when CDR could be deployed, it risked what Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have called “double overshoot.” Simply put, the more you postpone emissions reductions, the greater increase of carbon dioxide emissions continue to occur. That, in turn, creates a second, additional overshoot scenario. As Malm and Carton put it, “Overshoot imposes on us the obligation of removal, and, at the same extent, it seems to rob us of the ability to fulfill it.” And that’s already what had been happening, even before AI exploded on the scene.

AI: an Energy Sink

The double overshoot scenario has now been further compounded by the very rapid rise of AI and its voracious appetite for energy. This has been the case particularly for those hyperscalers who race to build bigger Data Centers, with greater needs for more energy, more water to cool them, and more infrastructure to make the energy available.

The amount of energy required for these new AI Data Centers is of a magnitude that fundamentally alters the climate change picture. This is due to both the amount of energy required and the sources of energy utilized.

Despite the claims of tech companies like Microsoft, the new build-out of Data Centers is significantly reliant on fossil fuel sources, such as natural gas. As an article in Grist put it, “Much of the data center build-out is poised to be powered by natural gas — and the climate consequences that come with it.” The Grist article cited numbers from the energy analysis firm Global Energy Monitor that projects totaling more than 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power in development worldwide — a roughly 31 percent jump in just the last year. And that more than a third of the new U.S. capacity will power data centers.

Beyond the question of what source of energy is utilized, the overall amount of energy required for existing and future AI Data Centers is staggering, with the numbers multiplying annually. According to the International Energy Agency, the global electricity demand of AI data centers grew by 17% in 2025, while electricity consumption from AI-focused data centers grew even faster, upwards of 50% in 2025. Future projected growth for AI-related electricity demand is now projected by IEA to double from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030.

These numbers seem to change almost monthly, as new, even bigger Data Center projects are announced. Increases, however, are compounded by the increased resistance of local communities and the first stirrings of regulatory action. Nevertheless, given the Data Center expansion race, AI has dramatically changed the picture about energy demand and with it, net zero and sustainability goals and projections.

Trumpian Factors: Unleash Fossil Fuels, Undermine Solar and Wind

In many ways, uncertainty also prevails, as efforts led by the Trump 2.0 administration attempt to keep in place the double overshoot scenario by undermining opportunities for a solar economy and rescuing any fossil fuel sources like coal. From literally his first day in office, Donald Trump began issuing Executive Orders and other actions declaring a National Emergency to rebolster the role of fossil fuels and undermine solar, wind, and even some of the geoengineering initiatives. While coal and nuclear were particular favorites, oil and gas remained the centerpiece. The rush to expand fossil fuel dominance even extended beyond US borders to include foreign adventures like interventions in Venezuela and Iran.

Trump also positioned himself as an AI champion and sought to deflect growing opposition by summoning the tech executives to a summit where the AI-related companies pledged to voluntarily “cover the cost of all power delivery infrastructure upgrades,” as the White Houe proclaimed. Nothing was said about the profligate energy use.

Thus, the Gates conundrum took shape. As the New York Times reported, Microsoft and Gates’ decision to pull back from CDR, as one example, where they had “almost single-handedly established the market for carbon dioxide removal technologies,” disoriented this nascent, future-oriented industry which had yet to become something more than a speculative venture.

At the same time, Microsoft and Gates’s AI actions favoring huge jumps in energy use, including fossil fuels, meant that these green capitalism champions had lost their cred. As one climate change campaigner said, in disappointment, “Microsoft makes great claims about its climate credentials… [but] the gap between what Microsoft says, and what Microsoft does, seems to grow wider by the day.” And that extends to Bill Gates as well, who also has his hands full answering about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. The bubble is popping.

The answer to Bill Gates’ conundrum is clear: there is no reconciliation. In fact, there might have never been.

LINKS

David Gelles and Theodore Schleifer, March 12, 2025. “Climate Group Funded by Bill Gates Slashes Staff in Major Retreat.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/climate/bill-gates-breakthrough-energy-cuts.html

David Gelles, “Carbon Removal Industry Reels as Microsoft Retreats,” April 16, 2026, New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/climate/microsoft-carbon-removal.html?emc=edit_clim_20260416&nl=climate-forward&segment_id=218334

Lucas Joppa, “Further, faster, together: Microsoft donates $100 million to Breakthrough Energy Catalyst to accelerate and scale climate tech,” September 19, 2021, Microsoft Official Blog, https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/09/19/further-faster-together-microsoft-donates-100-million-to-breakthrough-energy-catalyst-to-accelerate-and-scale-climate-tech/#:~:text=Microsoft%20is%20donating%20$100%20million%20to%20Breakthrough

J.P. Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck, and Andreas Malm, editors. Has it Come to This: The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2021

Naveena Sadasivam & Jake Bittle, Grist. Feb. 10, 2026. https://grist.org/energy/data-centers-natural-gas-methane-behind-the-meter/ .

International Energy Agency, “Key Questions on Energy and AI,” https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/3575ae9f-50bc-4cbb-9ca9-4b9b7f063e91/KeyQuestionsonEnergyandAI.pdf

Stand.earth. April 13, 2026, https://stand.earth/press-releases/160-data-center-carbon-footprint-increase-research-finds-microsoft-big-oil-forge-7b-partnership-as-several-ai-infrastructure-projects-push-hyperscaler-off-credible-path/

Wim Carton and Andreas Malm. The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late. Verso Books, New York and London, October 2025

Around the same time that the ICE head was sharing his vision, Amazon was in the process of transforming its leading role in the world of moving goods and warehouse development to position itself as a major player in the world of AI infrastructure and Data Centers. When it opened seven data centers on 1,200 acres outside New Carlisle, Indiana, in October 2025 as part of an arrangement with the rapidly expanding AI company Anthropic, it was fulfilling Todd Lyons’ dream, only in reverse. “You provide a data center and power, we’ll deploy a dedicated, secure, and fully managed AI infrastructure for you.” Amazon Web Services web site proclaimed, announcing its own journey from warehouse and logistics power broker to a player in the AI world. And when the New Carlisle data centers opened on October 29, AWS CEO Matt Garman took it a step further in an interview on CNBC. Gorman proudly asserted that Amazon was actively expanding new capacity so that it didn’t know “if we’ll be done, ever!”

Warehouses for Amazon packages aren’t entirely disappearing, of course. The goods movement system and its dedicated warehouses are still major economic players and remain central to globalization and its global traffic of goods. Yet it is a system also facing strong headwinds, from the 2020-2021 pandemic, to Donald Trump’s chaotic rollout of tariffs in 2025, and to the U.S./Israel war against Iran in 2026. It is also a system that has faced determined opposition regarding its community and environmental impacts, with community groups calling warehouse locations “diesel death zones” for the diesel trucks coming in and out as well as idling at locations near homes and schools as they wait to deliver or pick up the goods from the warehouses.

These challenges to the goods movement system have led both ICE and AI companies to take advantage in their quest for places to operate. Warehouse real estate is up for grabs. Already in the wake of the pandemic, logistics and warehouse operators, including Amazon, began to experience a reversal of their earlier expansion, that led them to either sublease or delay new warehouse operations. That, in turn, amplified concerns about an overstretched system. By way of example, industrial vacancy rates in the Inland Empire region of Southern California, a main hub of goods movement activity, increased from 1% in 2021 to 6.3% in 2024. As a result, Amazon and other warehouse operators began as early as 2022 to enter development partnerships with data center providers or sell properties originally slated for warehouses to companies looking to build massive data center campuses, as one 2022 article described this shift.

The conversion of warehouses to ICE detentions centers took off especially with the second Trump Administration in 2025 and 2026 eagerly seeking to convert or develop warehouse properties into detention centers. ICE plans included spending $38.3 billion to increase detention capacity to 92,000 beds, with large-scale detention centers capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, in addition to 16 smaller regional processing centers. And ICE was prepared to pay top dollar, often paying 11%‑13% above market rates and up to 30% above comparable deals for its warehouse to detention center strategy.

Flush with its cash, ICE immediately moved to acquire or convert warehouses, turning them effectively into prisons without even minimal amenities and where many detainees could be detained indefinitely, often unable to receive adequate medical treatment. By March 2026, 11 such warehouses/detention centers had been purchased in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, at a cost to the federal government of more than $1 billion.

Warehouse-converted detention centers became especially scandalous due to the health conditions. 13 people died in detention in the first three months of 2026. In one case, an untreated detainee was placed in intensive care where he stayed, “unable to move or speak but shackled to his hospital bed” until he died, as one New York Times article reported.

By late March 2026, more warehouse conversions to ICE detention centers were ready to move forward until the Minnesota resistance and other protests upended those expectations. With the firing of Kristi Noem and the pullback from Minnesota, the new head of Homeland Security, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, placed a temporary reboot on the ICE detention strategies, including its warehouse conversion plans, to reduce the negative attention that the Trump immigration removal policy was receiving.

Yet other warehouse conversions are still happening, as warehouse to data center purchases or conversions continue unabated. Amazon’s New Carlisle, Indiana’s plans, for example, include building 30 or more data centers. “With hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence,” as one opposition outlet characterized just one of those mega-centers.

The plans for New Carlisle also assume that 2.2 gigawatts of electricity will be consumed — enough to power a million homes -- as well as millions of gallons of water to prevent the process from overheating. The complex will ultimately be so large that it can be viewed completely only from high in the sky. It is part of what Amazon calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. On the drawing board, Project Rainier will further expand to include facilities in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Project Rainier is Amazon’s entry into a race to facilitate or build data centers so large they would have been considered absurd just a few years ago. Other AI-related companies are moving just as quickly to expand their Data Center footprints, including through warehouse purchases and conversions.

Yet like the Warehouse to ICE Detention Center plans, warehouse conversions for Data Centers, as well as for other massive Data Center land acquisitions and conversions, are also experiencing intense community and environmental opposition. Several proposed Data Center projects have been either postponed or abandoned, and ICE warehouse plans are temporarily on hold, indicating that conversion strategies might well become problematic.

The impact of these opposition forces is testimony to the value of resistance. It also underlines the need to develop alternative approaches to immigrant detentions and AI megaprojects. And not a moment too soon, since the ICE thugs and the Tech Bros want themselves to ultimately move at warp speed. They can be stopped!

LINKS

Jerod MacDonald-Evoy. “ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: ‘Prime, but with human beings’” Arizona Mirror, April 8, 2025. https://azmirror.com/2025/04/08/ice-director-envisions-amazon-like-mass-deportation-system-prime-but-with-human-beings/

Amazon Web Services website. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ai-factories/

Dan Rabb, “Industrial Sites Start Flipping to Data Centers Amid Fears of Logistics Slowdown,” Skybox News, July 22, 2022. https://www.skyboxdatacenters.com/news/industrial-sites-start-flipping-to-data-centers-amid-fears-of-logistics-slowdown

Jazmine Ulloa, Allison McCann and Emiliano Rodriguez Mega, New York Times. “More Die in ICE Custody as Critics Charge Neglect,” March 30, 2026

Rebecca Santana and Heather Hollingsworth, Los Angeles Times, “DHS pauses new immigrant warehouse purchases amid review of Noem-era contracts,” April 1, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-04-01/dhs-pauses-new-immigrant-warehouse-purchases-amid-review-of-noem-era-contracts

Erica Bryant. “A Blueprint for Resistance: How Residents and Local Governments Are Shutting Down ICE Detention in Warehouses,” March 2, 2026. VERA. https://www.vera.org/news/a-blueprint-for-resistance-how-residents-and-local-governments-are-shutting-down-ice-detention-in-warehouses

Seven years later, Dean became one of the founders of a new nature-oriented book publishing enterprise, Island Press. One of the Press’s first books, Wellspring: A Story from the Deep Country, published in 1979, was Dean’s own chronicle of living in wild nature while creating a homestead, and, as it turned out, the initial headquarters of this experimental effort at publishing rather obscure books that the larger trade publishers wouldn’t consider.

I became aware of Island Press during the 1980s for its unusual outreach and marketing to an expanding environmental research community. In this pre-tech era, it had the best mailing list for those interested in receiving its catalogue with titles that attracted academics, professionals, and activists alike. They also took risks. After several publishing houses took a pass, I approached Island Press in 1987 to see if they were interested in expanding a study by several UCLA Urban Planning graduate students into a book about solid waste and a case study of a pivotal early environmental justice battle. They agreed to the proposal and it became the book War on Waste, co-authored by Louis Blumberg (one of the graduate students) and myself.

Island Press, I realized by then, had become an invaluable source of new areas for environmental research, while also maintaining its core focus on books on bio-diversity, resource issues, and natural environments. Among its staff, Barbara Dean especially stood out for her desire to explore new areas that linked research to policy and, also, to activism. Covelo was her home and her connection to Round Valley remained the center of her life. Yet she was also the consummate book publisher and editor and her passion for the collective work needed to bring a book to life was as central to her as her love of wild nature.

In a 2003 article for Grist based on a diary she kept about her life in Covelo and her work at Island Press, she wrote: “I am struck by how many different pairs of hands a manuscript passes through on its way to becoming a book. Words and images go from author to editor to transmittal editor to production editor to copy editor to designer to typesetter to proofreader to printer to indexer — and at each of these stages, this unique manuscript (these words, these images) are the sole focus of attention and care from a particular skilled person for a critical period of time. The manuscript is passed from hand to hand, and the end product is the culmination of the individual effort of many people, all of whom are personally and professionally invested in the quality of the final book. Even with the increasing influence of technology on the production process, bookmaking still has many of the characteristics of a fine craft.”

In 1989, shortly after War on Waste was published, I began to correspond with Barbara about a new project. I identified it as a revisionist history of the U.S. environmental movement that centered on its urban and industrial roots. This was a different type of analysis and interpretation of environmental history that also sought to place environmental justice as part of the history of environmentalism story.

This was also a different type of focus for Barbara – and for Island Press. Yet she encouraged me to pursue it and loved the passion that I brought to the project. For Barbara, part of the editor’s role was to not just encourage but to share in the passion for ideas and for books and for authors who wanted and needed encouragement without losing the critical eye of what worked and what didn’t work, and to offer the feedback and insights to make a publication cohere. I felt bonded – a special author-editor relationship – and it served as motivation to bring the book to life. Together with Barbara, we came up with the title Forcing the Spring, a gardening metaphor about bringing what was planted to bloom before its anticipated time.

Several years later, in 2001, I was approached by an editor from UC Press, to do an afterword for a book they were about to publish by the travel writer, Ted Simon, entitled The River Stops Here: Saving Round Valley, A Pivotal Chapter in California’s Water Wars. Though I hadn’t seen Barbara Dean for several years, I remembered how much she loved Round Valley and how Island Press was born and flourished in its early years in Covelo. I didn’t know that much about the Round Valley struggles, so I approached my sister, Ruth Langridge, who had been doing research about the water fights in the area and who, like Barbara Dean, had become connected to the area, though she didn’t live there. Ruth and I together wrote the afterword, “Does the Water Story Ever End?” to The River Stops Here, and it also allowed me another way to feel connected to Round Valley and to Barbara Dean.

I’m not writing a new book right now, but I still love writing. Producing these substack posts allows me to continue to recreate the passion for writing itself, a passion that was nurtured and extended in my author-editor relationship to Barbara Dean. Barbara no longer lives in Round Valley, but I think of her each time we drive up north towards redwood country and pass the exit sign on the 101 to Covelo and the turn-off to Round Valley.

Island Press has also gone through changes and has just this year become part of Princeton University Press. I hope they flourish. Books and the craft of writing and publishing still matter. Among other reasons, it’s so important to affirm that, as AI seeks to make inroads into what is euphemistically called “machine writing.”

This post is for you, Barbara Dean, and for editors and authors who maintain the passion that you had and inspired. And for Covelo and for Round Valley and the challenges it faces in an era of climate change and capital’s encroachment on wild nature as a form of “free gifts” for capitalism to take, as Alyssa Battistoni, the author, critical theorist, and passionate writer, describes it.

In one last irony for me, Forcing the Spring, is one of the books that the AI company Anthropic swallowed up without permission as a source of data for its voracious AI needs. The book is included in a class action lawsuit that Anthropic has decided to settle. I see it as Barbara Dean’s revenge, a small compensation for an important need.

LINKS

Barbara Dean, Wellspring: A Story from the Deep Country. Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1979

Barbara Dean—Grist -- https://grist.org/article/dean-islandpress/. Oct. 20, 2003, “25 Years on the Climate Beat”

Ted Simon, The River Stops Here: Saving Round Valley, A Pivotal Chapter in California’s Water Wars. Afterword by Robert Gottlieb and Ruth Langridge, Berkeley: UC Press, 2001

Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Princeton University Press, 2025

Climate and Affordability

Take the issue of affordability. Scientists agree that climate change is warming the planet, not just in the future, but right now. Throughout the world, there has been an unprecedented increase in heat waves, wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events. The last three years are the hottest on record, and the planet is now warming at an accelerating rate, repeatedly exceeding the 1.5°F limit to protect humanity set in the Paris Climate agreement.

A warming planet is having economy-wide impacts. A recent study concluded that the increase in temperatures is reducing annual incomes in the US, up to 12% in some communities. Such an impact is comparable in magnitude to the “estimated impact of proposed revisions to trade, monetary, and immigration policies,” according to a study published in PNAS. Inadequate action to address increasing heat by all levels of government is making America less affordable – and it wastes taxpayers’ dollars, increases medical bills, reduces workers’ output and harms kids in school..

Extreme Heat is also dangerous. According to the National Weather Service, heat causes more deaths every year than all other extreme weather events combined. It increases the cost of health care for everyone else by driving up the cost of Medicare and Medicaid and other health insurance programs. According to the Federation of American Scientists, “Extreme heat is driving up utilization [for health care) as more Americans seek medical care for heat-related illnesses. Extreme heat events are estimated to be annually responsible for nearly 235,000 emergency department visits and more than 56,000 hospital admissions, adding approximately $1 billion to national healthcare costs. The Congressional Budget Office found that “for every 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries, extreme temperatures cause an additional 156 emergency department visits and $388,000 in spending per day on average,” and “for every 10 additional days of extreme heat above 90°F, annual Medicaid transfer payments increase by nearly 1%, equivalent to an $11.78 increase per capita,” according to a study published by the International Journal of Public Health.

Chronic extreme heat exposure to children reduces learning and their well-being. Again, according to the Federation of American Scientists, “Studies show that for each 1°F rise in average annual temperature in school districts without air conditioning or proper heat protections, there is a 1% drop in learning. The Environmental Protection Agency found that these learning losses could translate into nearly $7 billion in annual future income losses if warming trends continue. Extreme Heat threatens school districts and childcare facilities by forcing them to choose between staying open in unsafe heat or closing and disrupting learning and care.”

Grocery prices are going up. Abnormally elevated temperatures directly cause higher food prices, primarily by reducing annual yields for farms by as much as 40%. This leads to shortages and higher costs for consumers. Extreme heat increases production costs, puts stress on livestock, disrupts supply chains for fruits and vegetables and negatively impacts agricultural workers. Research indicates that by 2035, projected warming could drive food price inflation up by 1.4 to 1.8 percentage points purely due to temperature changes.

Extreme heat is driving up the cost of housing as well by increased energy use for cooling – for air conditioning for those fortunate to have it and for fans for those who don’t. Recently, the Trump administration gutted the Low Income Heat Energy Assistance Program that funded grants to states for installing dual heat/cooling pumps and other energy efficiency improvements. Higher electricity bills can be particularly challenging for low-income individuals, schools, and small businesses operating on thin margins. Moreover, extreme heat threatens the reliability of the energy infrastructure for everyone as increasing demands for cooling are also now compounded by increasing demand by data centers for AI.

All these impacts have made extreme heat a key component to today’s “Affordability Crisis!” Driven by accelerating climate change, extreme heat threatens public health while increasing the cost of living - impacts that disproportionately affect those least able to afford efforts to counteract these threats.

And those are indeed climate impacts happening right now, not just in the future. By taking action to address the extreme heat we are witnessing, it can save lives, save money, and make life a bit more affordable.

LINKS

Andrea Thompson, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2025-wasnt-the-hottest-year-on-record-earth-is-still-barreling-to-the/

“Cost of Climate Change: Financial Impacts on California and U.S. Households.” UC Berkeley, Center for Law, Energy and Environment, September, 2025. Costs of Climate Change - UC Berkeley Law

Derel Lemoine. “Climate Change has already made the United States poorer.” PNAS, December 16, 2025Maximilian Katz, et al. “Climate Extremes, food price spikes, and their wider societal risks.” Environmental Research Letters. March 2026

Yusun Kim et al. “Extreme Temperatures, Hospital Utilization and Public Health Insurance Spending.” International Journal of Public Health. Feb. 11, 2025. SSPH+ | Extreme Temperatures, Hospital Utilization and Public Health Insurance Spending

National Weather Service, Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics,

Federation of American Scientists, Impacts of Extreme Heat on Agriculture.

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2025R1/Measures/Overview/SB54

Although the use of the TRI (and prior to that the 1966 Freedom of Information Act), has had multiple exemptions and barriers for use, they have nevertheless provided an important tool for groups mobilizing against community and workplace hazards, or, in the case of the FOIA, of information being withheld by federal agencies.

Today, a new Right to Know initiative is critically needed to address the gaps in information by the huge AI companies about their operations and the impacts and hazards they’re responsible for. This includes the massive energy and water use of their data center operations; the impacts from climate change they’re intensifying; the labor impacts and job losses that are already occurring; their use as instruments of mass surveillance; and the violence AI can cause, whether through individual use of a chatbot or the miliary applications whose targets include civilian populations. Information is also lacking regarding the political manipulations the AI companies and their owners engage in to prevent any accountability.

This has led to a type of information battleground involving community groups, parent organizations, and, unfortunately, far too few policymakers in Congress and state and local bodies, seeking to contest AI secrecy.

One of the constituencies challenging this lack of transparency are indigenous groups fighting AI Data Center projects and proposals on native land, and who criticize the AI culture that runs counter to Native approaches to care for the earth. As an article on Native News Online put it, “Developers frequently arrive with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that make nontransparency part of the process. These practices normalize rezoning land and signing contracts without clear answers about water use, electricity consumption, noise and light pollution, electromagnetic fields (EMFs), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) levels, and other environmental risks. Such secret deals stand in direct opposition to the egalitarian decision-making traditions common among tribal nations—governance philosophies designed to protect the well-being of the next seven generations.”

What further makes the AI lack of transparency approach so concerning is that the AI/Tech billionaires, their companies, and the ecosystems they are creating are designed precisely to disrupt existing systems and everyday life, whether labor markets, military warfare, public life and privacy needs, or social and personal relationships. AI systems do require enormous resources that have regional and global impacts, including climate, affordability and income disparities. They have caused major job losses, both existing and anticipated, whether from claims around efficiency or productivity gains, or, more likely, when AI is utilized for downsizing and restructuring and a performance squeeze on existing work relationships.

Lack of information is strategic: the AI world utilizes a type of perverse magical thinking often disguised by obscure concepts and approaches that are at once arrogant and demeaning rather than communicative. It’s not only “trust us,” but you better trust us because the future of the earth is in our hands. It’s a type of “imperial” or “colonialist” mindset: enjoy the games you, the user, can play and leave the consequences to us.

Even where AI applications identify benefits, the lack of transparency can undermine the understanding of where and how such benefits can be developed and utilized. This has become particularly true around the question of scale, the development of the large language models presumed to usher in the era of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. Even more than its other applications, there is a fantastical quality around what AGI represents.

“Feel the AGI,” became the mantra of one of AGI’s leading proponents, Ilya Sutskever, who enjoyed evoking a cultish “Star Wars” sensibility. In a wonderful passage in Karen Hao’s excellent account of AI and AGI development through the trajectory of OpenAI, she recounts Sutskever delivering his AGI message to the company’s technical leadership and several of its primary scientists at a fire pit behind the Tenaya Lodge at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, just two miles from Yosemite. Sutskever stood in the fire pit, holding a wooden effigy. Imagine that this effigy, he told the Open AI assemblage, “represented a good, aligned AGI that OpenAI had built, only to discover that it was actually lying and deceitful.” Open AI’s duty, Sutskever then went on, was “to destroy it.” Sutskever [then] “doused the effigy in lighter fluid and lit it on fire.” Like many other examples of the behavior of the AI Tech barons, this promotion of AGI feels like a scene from an over-the-top science fiction movie.

The problem of lack of secrecy and transparency only intensifies the sense of omnipotence that pervades the AI culture. A leading critic of this culture of omnipotence and the impacts they represent, University of Washington linguistics Professor Emily Bender, who directs the University’s Computational Linguistic Laboratory, argues, regarding the AI compute process, that the “less they share about their training data, the more they can claim that their systems are magic.”

That allows the AI companies to be marketed as “universal problem-solvers.” “Instead of capabilities, we should talk about functionalities,” Bender says. Using an example of an AI system trained directly on medical data which might otherwise seem useful, she argues that relying on language models for such tasks might not be effective.” “If there’s enough narrative data in the language model, it might come up with something relevant, but that’s not what it’s purpose-built for,” Bender says, warning that these systems are “not doing the same probabilistic thinking that doctors do when diagnosing patients.” Such systems could also perpetuate medical racism due to biases in their training data. Instead, Bender advocates for “curated and evaluated datasets” specifically designed for each task. This can only work if there’s sufficient transparency,” she concludes.

It’s revealing that the AI companies and their billionaire owners are so resistant to sharing information about their systems and how they’re put together. Despite the magical thinking and dreams of omnipotence, the bottom line, ultimately, is just the bottom line for them. It represents an apotheosis of capitalism in an era of racism, climate change, anti-immigrant sentiments, and science fiction politics.

“Feel the AGI?” But does it have any clothes? It would be good to find out.

LINKS

Clifford Rechtschaffen “The Public Right to Know.” March 1, 2003. The Center for Progressive Reform. https://progressivereform.org/publications/perspright/

Christophe Lécuyer. “When Silicon Valley Feared Bhopal,” Pacific Historical Review. Fall 2024. https://online.ucpress.edu/phr/article-abstract/93/4/573/203407/When-Silicon-Valley-Feared-Bhopal?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Dr. Nichole Keway Biber. NATIVE NEWS ONLINE, “Data Centers and AI Are a Betrayal of Indigenous Lifeways,”, March 9, 2026, https://nativenewsonline.net/opinion/data-centers-and-ai-are-a-betrayal-of-indigenous-lifeways/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March%2011%2C%202026&utm_source=Native+News+Online&utm_campaign=ce553e68b3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_03_11_12_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-ce553e68b3-1407301883

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. New York: Penguin Press, 2025

Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Section in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Abi Olvera. “Why nobody can see inside AI’s black box.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 27, 2025. https://thebulletin.org/2025/01/why-nobody-can-see-inside-ais-black-box/

These were two different visions of what the future had in store.

Around the time that Gorz was writing those words, I had become a new member of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD). I was representing the City of Santa Monica on the then 51-member board whose participants came from cities and county agencies and water districts spread throughout Southern California, stretching from the Tehachapi mountains to the Mexican border. This huge water wholesaler continued to focus on expansion of a water system through ever larger Big Water Projects coming from greater distances, with enormous amounts of energy needed to transport its imported water, and with annexation policies that stretched the boundaries of its service area well beyond urban and suburban boundaries.

Why not focus on managing the water differently, I argued, using strategies that provide greater efficiency and establish an ethic of use and practice of sufficiency. My approach didn’t go far at the time, as I was often outvoted 50 to 1 on votes involving the MWD’s expansive water system projects. If efficiency and conservation were to kick in, not enough money from water sales would be available to pay for its overbuilt and expanding system. “Pray for Drought,” I ironically characterized this system.

In subsequent years, the MWD began to move towards greater efficiencies. A different culture or ethic of use began to take hold as a means to increase supplies. We’re not there yet, but the change is still notable. It provides an example of a baby step in how to imagine different futures.

I thought about this history as I began to pull together a post on energy and climate to further elaborate the argument from my previous substack about more versus less.

More and more energy, particularly more fossil fuels, has its champions. Beyond the fossil fuel industry and those who finance it, we have Donald Trump, the exemplar fossil fuel champion, and the AI companies who have been sucking up greater amounts of energy, including fossil fuels, for their massive Data Centers.

The numbers are revealing. According to the recently released International Energy Agency report, Electricity 2026: Analysis and Forecast to 2030, the 2026-2030 growth rates for electricity will be “robust.” In 2024 and 2025, as AI Data Centers, both existing and projected future ones, began their ascent, and climate factors such as intense heat days pushed demand upwards, projections of future electricity use have been estimated to jump even further. According to the IEA, more than 420 TWh [Terawatt hours] could be added over the next five years, with Data Centers constituting about 50% of that growth in demand. To put those numbers in perspective, Data Center electricity growth would be the equivalent of 210 trillion more watts used per hour, or the amount that could meet the energy needs of upwards of 210 billion homes. That’s a whole lot of energy that’s needed if those Data Centers are in fact going to be built, not yet a certainty given the upswelling of opposition, including in MAGA country, and numerous analyses that foresee a future bust rather than a hyped-up boom.

If the Data Centers do get built, where would that energy come from? For Donald Trump and his energy-related agencies and officials, the answer is simple: fossil fuels and maybe a hoped-for dash of nuclear energy. “Unleashing American Energy,” as Trump’s first energy-related Executive Order put it on January 20, 2025, meant even more of a fossil fuel future – more drilling, more pumping, more oil and gas, more energy (and water) for Data Centers and AI, and, though obviously not stated, more carbon emissions, and a quicker countdown to climate catastrophes.

For the fossil fuel industry, that means lengthening as long as possible the continuing efforts to extract, drill, and facilitate a fossil economy. It has also meant that those companies now feel more comfortable to revert to their earlier climate denial arguments. And that in turn helps disguise their fear of stranded assets, the most dreaded outcome for fossil capital. A future of stranded assets, that is the reduction and elimination of existing (and future) fossil fuel resources and fossil fuel infrastructure (e.g. pipelines, power plants) that are no longer used before the end of their anticipated economic lifetime, also means less rather than more for the Exxon-Mobil’s of the world, and less becoming more for everyone else and for the planet.

The Trumpian-fossil fuel bromance further reflects a fear of an alternative energy scenario. This includes a solar economy that has the potential to contribute to André Gorz’s argument about no longer focusing on what exists, “but in imagining, anticipating, and initiating fundamental transformation.” It also revives for me that wonderful May 1968 slogan, “All Power to the Imagination.”

Which brings me to Balcony Solar. This quite minimal source of energy provides nevertheless a seguy to the “Power to the Imagination” idea of political possibilities that already lie in existing transformations.

How so? They are easy to install, relatively inexpensive, and are easily subsidized for those least able to afford them. They can also reduce costs, and serve modest household needs, like powering computers and cell phones or small refrigerators. In an era of power outages (that can be related to Data Center stress on grids), they can counter huge jumps in prices contributing to an affordability crisis, and challenge utilities who may wish to, or be forced to revive costly energy plants that had been or are currently being slated for shut down.

Then why aren’t they on every available balcony, whether urban or rural, multi-family units, ADMs, or larger single-family homes? They are relatively compact plug-in systems that can be coupled with an inverter and/or battery storage and can be placed on balcony railings, walls, or stands. They are indeed a modest source of energy and can generate anywhere from 300 to 800 watts. They do not replace the need for more rooftop solar or other types of solar or wind generated energy, but they anticipate and make visible what a solar economy can look like and become. In combination of a stranded assets future for fossil fuels, the solar economy, or what feminist economist Kate Raworth calls “doughnut economics,” underlines how less can become more.

How to get there in a climate endangered, fossil-fueled, hypergrowth and “more should be more” world? Time is clearly a factor, as those dangers increase by the decade, by the day, by the hour. While Balcony Solar does not answer the question of time, it is nevertheless tangible, ready to happen, could be ubiquitous, and provides a pathway for a new imagination about a new type of future. In the less versus more arguments about energy, climate, and affordability, it also provides one of those baby steps to show us how less can begin its long march to become more.

LINKS

André Gorz. Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work, London: Pluto Press, 1983.

Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons. Thirst for Growth: Water Agencies as Hidden Government in California. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1991

Bob’s Climate and Migration Substack. “When More Should be Less and Less Can be More. https://bobgottlieb.substack.com/p/when-more-should-be-less-and-less).

International Energy Agency, “Electricity 2026: Analysis and Forecast to 2030.’ https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/f0aa3b77-5379-4c86-9869-1ff5786bc3b6/Electricity_2026.pdf

White House Executive Order, January 20, 2025. “Unleashing American Energy.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy/

Claire Brown. “States Weigh Bills to Allow You to Make Your Own Electricity”, New York Times, February 11, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/climate/plug-in-solar-power-bills.html

Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a Twenty-First Economist. London: Chelsea Green Press, 2017

Is technology the savior in a deeply unequal capitalist world? That’s the implication of the concept of abundance and the critique of scarcity that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson laid out in their best-selling book last year. The book was written at a moment when abundance had become a buzzword and just before Donald Trump turned it into abundance for him and his cronies and enablers, and screw those who have little or nothing.

When I read the Klein/Thompson book, it reminded me of the debates about how we – young activists in SDS in the late 1960s – elevated the concept of “post-scarcity” in a turbulent period.

We used the term post-scarcity in imagining the possibilities of change and transformation, based on technological advances and a new framework of consumption based on social needs. I would revisit and rework those ideas years later when I began to explore the concept of care politics and a care economy and its focus on redistribution, interdependence, mutual aid, solidarity, and a culture of care. In my 2022 book, Care-Centered Politics, I argued that care politics had the capacity to challenge the dominant anti-care culture that became embedded during the 500+ years of capitalism and colonialism.

Yet just a few years after the book was published, the idea of care politics seemed to become completely off-base in the Trumpian era of abundance for him and less for you. We have entered an era of crony capitalism at its crudest, most racist, most misogynist form, and where the quest for ever increasing profits and wealth dominates. As Andreas Malm and Wim Carton put it in their new book, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, “capital knows no limits [and] asks no questions about the misery it creates.” Late era capitalism just doesn’t care. This is especially true in relation to an ever-deepening inequality, where denial turns into aggression: against the climate and for fossil fuels; against the poor and those who are unequal amidst the desire for greater accumulation; and against those forced to or needing to migrate amidst efforts to demonize those who do so.

This is an ideology of capital unbound. It’s where technology today, in the form of AI, has created a new class of tech trillionaires (not just billionaires), extended the breadth and depth of inequality, and turned abundance into a place of exclusivity.

The quest for more, the idea of accumulation, is obviously not new to late capitalism. Nor is inequality. The contemporary neo-liberal era that took form in the mid to late 1970s, took off even further during the Reagan years of the 1980s. It thrived during the Clinton era of small-bore government and a globalized order during the 1990s. It assumed no other world was possible in the first decades of the 21^st century and that income and wealth divide then escalated dramatically during the pandemic years of 2020-2021.

All of these periods derive from a varied and malevolent history of accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Today, the form it is taking is not just due to Trumpism. It’s being carried out by the unholy Seven Tech Baronies (the Magnificent Seven according to its AI boosters), and all the trillionaires and cryptonaires who are fostering a new type of system of abundance and scarcity, a “Technofeudalism” of baronies and serfs, according to some. This is a capitalism where more wants more, and more, and more, a hypergrowth ideology, an abundance in extremis.

Yet there has also been a long history of pushback, a demand that more should be less, and less can be more. In the U.S., these include the populist, anarchist and socialist movements during the Gilded Age of the 1890s and early 20^th century. It produced a radicalizing labor movement in the 1930s that forced modest yet still significant redistributive changes. It witnessed the student, civil rights, black power, environmental, and women’s movements that transformed the politics and culture of 1960s and early 1970s. And it experienced the Occupy Wall Street cry for a changing order after the 2008 Great Recession on behalf of the 99%.

Today, some new, incipient yet important forms of pushback are taking shape. The call for a tax on billionaires has been linked to redistributive demands for free and/or affordable care services, whether for childcare, transit, or health care. The rapid, intense push for energy and water sucking data centers by the tech barons has created new types of local opposition that has secured some temporary, improbable victories against enormous odds. And amidst the most overt form of anti-care, anti-immigrant politics has seen new, sometimes spontaneous forms of a care politics based on mutual aid, care provisioning, and interdependence, a politics that truly deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps the clearest example of the need for more pushback, yet in an area that is also subject to denial and obfuscation, is around energy and climate politics. It is here that the demand that more should be less and less can be more needs to more fully emerge. And it is a topic I’d like to explore in a follow up substack post.

LINKS

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, New York: Avid Reader Press, 2025

Towards a Theory of Social Change: The Port Authority Statement, David Gilbert, Robert Gottlieb, and Gerry Tenney, 1967, reprinted at https://www.sds-1960s.org/PortAuthorityStatement.pdf

Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet. Robert Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022

The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, London and New York, Verso Books, 2025

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis, Portland, OR: Melville House, 2024

Then a year later, in the summer of 2025, a fire knocked out an electrical substation right in the heart of Data Center Alley in Loudoun County, VA. The outage caused data centers served by that station to use backup power for several days in late June and early July, according to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, another indicator of stresses on the grid and its customers.

The utility serving that region, Dominion Energy, has been heavily invested in the expansion of AI-related Data Centers, including the massive hyperscalers that have made Dominion’s service area in northern Viriginia the trend setter in Data Center development. At the same time, it has also become a utility prone to an increased risk of power outages as well as large rate increases and climate-related impacts due to this AI-induced grid fragility.

Dominion, like much of the utility industry, recognizes that its capacity to meet the increased demand on the grid, primarily due to the new and Proposed Data Centers, is at an inflection point. Without new energy sources, Data Center-induced power outages and grid failures will no longer be seen as rare ‘Acts of God,’ but instead will come to be recognized as “foreseeable operational events,” as industry analysts characterize such a future.

In response, the utilities and the AI Data Center investors now seek to:

· Build new power plants, such as a proposed Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center, a 1.47-billion-dollar natural-gas plant designed in part to support data-center development in Virginia.

· Plan for rate increases to meet the huge power needs and additional costs of serving the power-hungry Data Centers, and that will primarily impact utility rate payers.

· Ignore, deflect, or dismiss pollution impacts from new or retired power plants and energy sources, including for the most vulnerable communities.

· Develop and wage public relations campaigns that suggest an AI future is inevitable, and that new energy plants and Data Center developments serve the public interest rather than serve as a potential source of profit, whether for investor-owned utilities or for Data Center developers.

Dominion’s situation is revealing regarding each of those points. Its proposed Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center (CERC) is located at a site where there had been an aging coal-fired plant, two of whose boilers had shut down in 2019, with the remaining units shut down in 2023. Since then, the site has remained idle.

Yet just the current Data Centers in Loudoun and Prince William counties served by Dominion alone draw 30–60 MW of power each, orders of magnitude higher than the industrial facilities the region’s substations had been designed for. With these types of demands for power only going to increase astronomically, Dominion has moved forward its CERC plan to develop a natural gas and low distate fuel sourced plant on that same abandoned site, along with several diesel generators.

At the same time, still fearful of the potential for continuing outages due in part to their own plans to add more stress on the system, the AI Data Center owners and investors have begun to explore their own strategies to enable them to stay open a lengthier stretch of time, even perhaps as much as six months, during an extended outage. These strategies include the Data Centers relying on their own backup generators rather than depending on the utility’s system.

Such strategies would enable the AI facilities to essentially decouple themselves from the load which they have already stressed and which they will do so even more into the future. In addition, the likelihood of climate impacts such as the heat wave in the summer of 2025 or the cold bomb cycles like the one that just occurred in January 2026, will extend disruptions to the system, including an overextended load and increased outages. However, with their decoupling strategies in place, the Data Centers would have their power, even while residents and local businesses go dark.

This potential scenario has led to increased opposition to such plans. In the case of Dominion’s proposed new natural gas plant, state regulators, sympathetic to the plans of the utility and to the AI Data Center developers, quickly moved to approve the plans for the CERC natural gas power plant.

Then, unexpectedly for them, at a December 2025 meeting to move those plans forward, the regulators, the utility, and the AI developers were startled to discover an intense outpouring of opposition that has caused a temporary delay on the plans moving forward. This included challenges to CERC on four grounds: environmental justice (yet another source of pollution impacts for an already vulnerable community), the cost of the gas plant compared to alternatives (such as less expensive solar), the burden of proof on reliability (including the problem of Data Center decoupling), and the legal mechanism for cost recovery (including the impact on rate payers already suffering from the rising cost of electricity).

They shouldn’t have been surprised. As I discussed in an earlier substack (https://bobgottlieb.substack.com/p/ai-data-center-opposition), and others have also written, opposition to projects like CERC and the massive Data Center developments have led to new opposition movements that were unexpected. There are already today nearly 200 activist groups nationwide, with the largest clusters in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions, including notably Virginia, according to Data Center Watch.

As these groups have begun to organize, the AI industry has struck back. Public relations campaigns have increasingly become a tool utilized by both the largest AI companies like Meta and the coalitions that the AI industry has created, such as the Virginia Data Center Coalition and its p.r. arm, “Virginia Connects.”

Yet the problems are not going to disappear. Despite the soft images and rosy claims of the pr campaigns, there are already and will continue to be a huge jump in AI-related energy (and water) demands on the grid. Nationally, regulators increasingly expect continuing impacts, with estimates of peak demand nearly tripling from 85 GW to 218 GW by 2031, as one regulator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas estimated, with nearly 78 GW of that coming from data centers alone. Without proactive redesign, as one AI-industry organization argued, the next Virginia-style disturbance could trigger not a near-miss, but a multi-state blackout.

These AI Data Center energy-related developments also have crucial climate change implications: continuing reliance and expansion of fossil fuel sources, like the CERC facilities; load stresses and resilience strategies due to AI Data Center expansion that impact entire electricity infrastructure systems; and public relations campaigns that deflect climate goals and ultimately strengthen climate deniers.

The opposition to these energy-related AI Data Center developments, while limited in resources to contest the power-hungry AI behemoths and their various enablers, have nevertheless become an important counterforce that can strengthen the broader environmental and climate justice arguments and movements. These battles are only going to intensify.

LINKS

Eli Tan, New York Times, “Meta Aims to Get People to Embrace Data Centers.” Feb. 3, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/technology/meta-data-center-ads.html.

Virginia Connects. https://www.virginiaconnects.com/

Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition. https://www.pecva.org/region/regional-state-national-region/general-assembly/virginia-data-center-reform-coalition/

Patrick Larsen. “Regulators to consider appeal against Dominion Energy natural gas plant,” VPM News. December 18, 2025, https://www.vpm.org/news/2025-12-18/scc-chesterfield-energy-reliability-center-appeal-dominion-selc-holmes

Whitney Pitkin, “The AI Energy Crisis: Data Centers Strain Chesapeake’s Power and Water,” The Bay Journal, October 5, 2025. https://thebaynet.com/the-ai-energy-crisis-data-centers-strain-chesapeakes-power-and-water/

Global Data Center Hub. “When 1.5 Gigawatts Vanished: What the Virginia Near-Blackout Revealed About the Future of AI Infrastructure,” Nov. 5, 2025,

Maeve Allsup, “AEP, Dominion argue there’s no such thing as ‘isolated’ colocation for data centers.” Latitude Media, March 31, 2025. https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/aep-dominion-argue-theres-no-such-thing-as-isolated-colocation-for-data-centers/#:~:text=The%20group%20of%20power%20providers,connected%20to%20the%20wider%20system.

Paul Cobler and Camila Maia. Texas Tribune. “Texas’ power grid weathered another winter storm. Is it ready for the future?.” January 29, 2026. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/01/29/texas-winter-storm-uri-anniversary-power-grid-ercot/

Nevin has a new paper where he argues that AI has the ability to—and I’m quoting from the paper—”fundamentally reconfigure commercial influence by collapsing the distinction between information, advice, and marketing. Compared with earlier forms of digital marketing, its novelty lies in its interactional form, its relational framing, and its temporal depth, which allows repeated interactions to shape expectations and practices over time.” It’s a wonderful quote, and it becomes—these are my words—an even greater extension of the commodification of daily life.

So by way of background, let’s start. Nevin, you can tell me about what led you to do this research, given your other interests or related interests in things like food systems and community health.

Nevin Cohen:

Thanks, Bob. Thanks for inviting me to chat with you. I think this topic is really timely, and I came to it from two different perspectives. One, I’ve always been interested in the power of technology to enable activism, so people can use technology to understand complex systems and collect data and analyze it and map it. That can be a really powerful tool. But at the same time, I’ve been interested in how digital technologies have been used to increase consumption and to shape our consumption in ways that are either bad for the environment or unhealthy for people.

Over the last several years at the Urban Food Policy Institute, we’ve been researching predatory marketing of unhealthy food. That’s just one example of how corporations have targeted individuals and communities and categories of individuals, because those categories are vulnerable to products that might be less expensive at first cost but ultimately harmful to them over time. We’ve done research on how young adults in New York City have been disproportionately exposed to fast food advertising and junk food advertising, both in traditional formats like billboards and signs, but also in social media.

So AI—my quote was very long, but it’s basically that AI is an exceptionally powerful tool to do marketing. We are just beginning to talk about the ways in which AI can really be pervasive as a tool to market both healthy products and unhealthy products. But we’re at an inflection point in the history of AI. It’s the beginning of the technology, but it’s at a point where AI stocks are highly valued. AI companies are propping up the stock market. They’ve invested in huge amounts of infrastructure—energy production, chip factories, data centers. Very soon now, these companies are going to have to prove that this is all worthwhile economically, and they’re going to have to find new revenue streams beyond the $20 a month fee that I pay for ChatGPT or Claude. I think advertising and marketing is an obvious way that they can generate a lot of revenue very quickly and over time.

Robert Gottlieb:

Very timely also, because ChatGPT is talking about introducing a kind of advertising avenue as part of their product.

Nevin Cohen:

Yeah, they announced on Friday.

Robert Gottlieb:

How significant do you think that is?

Nevin Cohen:

I think it’s the first step to a much deeper level of marketing and advertising that we’ll see over time. What ChatGPT announced on Friday was that they’re going to place the AI version of banner ads. These are—when you search for something on Google, you’ll often be fed advertisements at the top of the screen. Maybe the first five search results will be sponsored and it’ll say that they’re sponsored. That’s a way that the internet has really been able to do ultra-targeted marketing to individuals based on the words that they’re searching for and the websites that they’re visiting.

ChatGPT announced that at the end of the conversation—that might be about, people might ask ChatGPT to help them plan an exercise regimen for the marathon in six months, and they’ll get an extensive plan for running—and then at the bottom, it might say, “By the way, Nike running shoes are on sale at Amazon.” That’s a somewhat insidious but recognizable advertisement. I think that’ll have an influence and they’ll be able to show that these targeted ads, based on the conversation you’ve had, are really effective at driving sales. But I think AI has the potential to market to us in much more insidious and undetectable ways that I think are really important.

Robert Gottlieb:

Yeah, I mean, there is actually a long history in terms of different forms of media that have used both direct and more hidden forms of marketing to influence people’s behavior. What’s also interesting about those histories is that this became really essential for a way for those industries to not only support themselves, but see themselves as having a main goal of making profits and delivering audiences to the people who are paying for it through advertising or other forms of marketing. But this seems even more insidious.

Nevin Cohen:

Yes. Actually, TV in the old days relied on market segmentation. There was a demographic that watched I Love Lucy and a demographic that watched the baseball game. They might overlap, but they were distinct enough for marketing companies to serve different ads on different shows. The other difference, though, is that the ads were a break from the content. With AI, the market differentiation can be microscopic. In other words, the chatbots can really understand Nevin and his desires and wants and serve me up very, very targeted, ultra-targeted ads that I wouldn’t be able to be exposed to on a TV show.

Second, this isn’t necessarily a break from content. It’s actually potentially content being produced with commercial sponsorship behind it. So it’s not like I Love Lucy is sponsored by a tobacco company and I see tobacco ads in between segments of the show. With AI, there’s the potential for the conversation to evolve with the commercial marketing creating it. There’s product placement in TV shows and movies and YouTube videos. That’s insidious because people don’t often recognize that a bottle of Coca-Cola on the table in their movie is actually an advertisement to them and is triggering something in their mind about the product.

But when a product is mentioned in a conversation in which people are trusting the chatbot to be conversing with them as individuals, it’s a qualitatively different kind of experience of the product.

Robert Gottlieb:

How are the companies, the AI companies, going to develop that type of trust for the people who are using it? Is it because they’re providing other kinds of needs for people, and so people say, “Oh, well, ChatGPT is the way to go if I want to learn anything or do anything”?

Nevin Cohen:

Yeah. I think it’s important for people to distinguish between the back-end portion of AI—the large language models that are digesting as much information that humans have produced as possible and then using computational algorithms to really figure out how to turn that into conversation—and then there’s the front end of AI that the commercial platforms like ChatGPT and Anthropic and Google’s Gemini use to personalize the information that they are generating and share it with people in a way that encourages people to maintain their use of AI, increase their use of AI, continue the conversation.

I think people who have used AI recognize the sycophantic conversational chatbot that encourages them that they’re doing something right or they’re on the right track and asks helpful questions to keep you using the chatbot. That mode of building trust, convincing people that the conversation is equivalent to a human conversation and over time is equivalent to a human relationship in that the chatbot remembers things from previous conversations and then tailors its output to your interests and deficiencies and potentially insecurities—that’s a powerful method that platforms are using to keep people engaged. For most users, it’s not really clear that this is happening or how it’s happening. I think most users now are just engaging in conversations and finding them useful and putting trust in the output that the chatbots are producing.

Robert Gottlieb:

What’s interesting at the same time as this explosion of both AI use and the infrastructure for AI is the distrust that’s emerged and opposition, particularly around the infrastructure issues, the development of these massive data centers and the impact on communities as well as on the environment. So you have these two things happening simultaneously. Where do you think that’s going to go in terms of this trust or lack of trust issue?

Nevin Cohen:

I think that we’re also at a very important point in which people are just beginning to recognize the huge financial and environmental impacts of AI as a technology. On the other hand, we’ve seen this before. At the very beginning of the internet, people were both optimistic about its ability to bring the world together and to provide enormous benefits to people, and others were—myself included—concerned about the rise of e-commerce and the impact on commercial spaces in cities and business, local businesses, and the environment because of the transportation of goods around the country.

My concern is that the AI platforms will prove to be so enticing and useful in people’s day-to-day lives that we will continue to integrate them into our lives rather than putting up the guardrails I think are necessary to prevent the negative consequences of AI use.

Robert Gottlieb:

Talk a little about the guardrails, where you think and how that could be developed, because there is the beginnings of discussion out there of, “Oh, we have to do something,” particularly some of the more egregious ways in which AI has influenced behavior has become a public issue in ways that has very quickly turned into “What can we do to control AI?”

But also above and beyond that, I’ll go back to your very initial point that AI could be a tool to develop things that are of social benefit. I think of the way some of the public health community has become interested in AI as a tool to deal with tobacco issues, to reduce tobacco use, to interact with people on how they can move towards reducing or eliminating tobacco use as an example. So how do you reconcile this sort of scenario on the one hand, where there is the insidious nature of AI and its commercial applications, with AI as a socially beneficial tool?

Nevin Cohen:

Sure. I’m not a Luddite. I use AI myself almost every day now. There are examples of very positive uses of AI as a means to counsel people, to give people feedback when they don’t have access to a human counselor or even therapist. There are ways in which AI can guide people to healthier behaviors and practices. You can learn how to do things that are beneficial through AI.

I think that the healthcare industry is going through a revolution with AI, because AI as a tool can, for example, reduce the bureaucratic tasks that doctors have to do—taking notes during their treatments with patients and filling out forms—freeing up time to actually engage with their patients more directly. AI is an interesting diagnostic tool. Radiologists are using it now to quickly read X-rays and other diagnostic tests. Ordinary people, consumers, are using AI in ways to learn more about elements they’re facing and to have conversations with their doctors that are more useful.

All that said, there are these negative impacts as well, and I think policymakers need to be aware of the potential negative impacts and balance what is currently a very pro-AI policy position with reasonable guardrails.

In thinking about what’s needed for policy to make sure that the worst implications of AI, particularly around advertising and marketing and consumer behavior, aren’t realized, we need to really understand the different ways in which AI can influence behavior and consumption. I mentioned banner ads that are like the banner ads that we were fed through search engines and other sites like social media sites. That’s what ChatGPT is rolling out now.

But we also talked about product placement within conversations. So AI chatbots can produce conversational output that might recommend a particular restaurant to go to when you’re traveling to Paris or a particularly good running shoe to use if you’re getting ready for the Boston Marathon. Those product recommendations would likely either not be as clearly recognized by the user because they’re part of a longer conversation. Some early tests have shown that even when people are told that there’s a corporate sponsorship behind the output of an AI-generated conversation, they don’t see it as that. They see it as simply helpful recommendations.

But the third, I think more pernicious, use of AI is normalizing behaviors that are unhealthy and that are unhealthy because they specifically involve the consumption of unhealthy products. I, as a test the other day, asked ChatGPT for suggestions for what to do with my colleagues at work after work on a Thursday, and it suggested going to happy hour. It specifically said “with or without alcohol,” which was an interesting qualification. But AI conversations can normalize different kinds of everyday practices that inherently involve the consumption of products. It can suggest driving somewhere rather than taking transit. It might suggest eating a certain type of food at a holiday. I think these forms of potentially sponsored output need to be guarded against because those are probably the least obvious to people as corporate sponsorship and potentially the hardest to regulate.

And one last way—or actually two last ways—in which AI can lead to unhealthy consumption: Agentic AI is becoming available and easy to use. That’s a form of AI in which you tell a chatbot to remember to buy your spouse an anniversary present every year on a certain date, and it goes and does that without you having to do anything because you’ve already given it a credit card number and permission to do so. You might ask a chatbot to order you something healthy for lunch, and agentic AI will be able to do that. It’ll find a local takeout, order you lunch and have it delivered and let you know that it’s being delivered. The qualification that you wanted a healthy lunch might trigger a commercial relationship with a number of different lunch establishments and order you a specific product from a specific place. It would be completely opaque to the user that this was a sponsored decision on the part of the chatbot.

So that’s how it happens, and it can happen. But I think it’s possible for regulators to figure out some policies that would prevent that from happening.

Robert Gottlieb:

Well, let me take it a step further, though. Isn’t part of the problem—and this was true with the early development of the Internet itself—that the public needs that could become part of the process of the use of the technology are really influenced by the private goals of making profit, developing a certain kind of relationship with the person as a consumer rather than as a member of the public?

There was a debate within OpenAI back around 2015 when it was making a decision about its next step. It had all the rhetoric that we also saw with the internet that it would be a nonprofit, it would be designed for the public good. The decision of the then leadership and continuing leadership of Sam Altman was to turn it into a profit-making enterprise. Isn’t that the central problem of addressing AI? You can develop regulations, but there’s always the danger of regulations being changed to be either weakened or subverted, and the regulators becoming a kept industry, part of the influence of people who have the resources, companies that have the resources to do that kind of manipulation. Should we have a publicly run AI system?

Nevin Cohen:

I think the profit motive is the key problem here and the need for these companies to turn a profit and show investors that they are generating enough revenue to profit. I’m not sure that a nonprofit status is sufficient. It’s probably better than a for-profit status, but I’ve worked for nonprofits that have had commercial relationships, and I think that could be really problematic over time. It might give the illusion of fairness and in fact be as beholden to corporate supporters as a for-profit.

I think there are examples of web browsers like Firefox that are open access and not commercialized, and I think that would be positive, but it wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the for-profit companies unless we simply ban them, which is really unlikely. So I think policy is still necessary to restrict how commercial relationships are either disclosed or whether they can be used at all in the output of a chatbot.

We’ve successfully banned most tobacco advertising in the US. We haven’t done as well with advertising of unhealthy food for children during hours that children watch TV and other social media that they watch. In the US, it’s been a voluntary effort that’s been unsuccessful by the food industry to limit advertising of junk food to children. Other countries have gone further. The UK is now, I believe, in the process of banning advertising of unhealthy food to children.

But I think at a minimum, disclosure requirements are necessary so that people using these platforms understand whether there are commercial relationships behind the output that’s being generated. But as I mentioned earlier, there have been experiments that show that even when disclosure exists, people have a hard time discerning that it’s actually an advertisement that they’re being fed. We need to have a discussion about whether certain types of commercial relationships need to be prohibited. Maybe products that are inherently harmful to children should be banned from being marketed through AI chatbots.

Robert Gottlieb:

The changes around tobacco marketing came about because of a long-standing and ultimately quite robust social movement that targeted tobacco use and the role of the tobacco companies in terms of whether it’s for young people or more generally around public health. So you do have an emerging—at least concern that hasn’t crystallized into a social movement per se—around how AI is being used. But you also have a very quickly developing social movement or a set of social movements around how AI is itself becoming a system and an infrastructure. It’s been actually successful in a limited way in stopping certain projects that have harmful consequences in terms of particularly energy, water, and then also the economic fallout from AI.

How would you bring those two sets of concerns and potential social movements together? Because isn’t that what is needed to say, “Look, we have to fundamentally rethink what AI is about and how it should be used”?

Nevin Cohen:

Absolutely. I think there’s generalized anxiety about AI as a technology and localized battles around electricity prices going up because of high consumption of electricity by data centers and examples of AI being used to generate harmful content or to do other things that are clearly harmful. The movement hasn’t coalesced, I don’t think, to both put those pieces together—that this is, in fact, a disruptive technology, like the Internet, like electricity in previous centuries—and that we need to pay attention to those interconnected impacts.

I think the organizing around responding to the potentially negative impacts of AI needs to recognize that it’s also probably not going away and that we need to think through an effective way of regulating this technology as it is integrated into different processes. Because right now, a lot of the rhetoric around both the promise and the negative aspects of AI tend to be bifurcated and not, I think, as nuanced as they need to be in order to figure out a route forward in terms of policies toward the technology.

Robert Gottlieb:

Okay. So on that note, unless you have one last thing you want to let people know about.

Nevin Cohen:

Well, as an academic, I think we need to actually start measuring these impacts. A lot of what I’ve talked about is likely to happen and may happen in different ways. But as researchers, I think we need to really pay attention to documenting how people are using AI and what the specific impacts that we can measure are, so that we can understand what their potential long-term impact might be and really develop effective policies to prevent those most harmful impacts.

Robert Gottlieb:

And as researchers connected to social movements, we need to think of the ways in which social movements can not just influence, but direct where this industry is going to go.

Nevin Cohen:

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Gottlieb:

Thank you.

Nevin Cohen:

Thanks. Take care.

As fast as the AI boom grows, dependent on the rapid expansion of Data Center development, local opposition to these plans has grown almost as quickly. This opposition is as ubiquitous as the plans themselves to build Data Centers wherever and as quickly as possible.

Data Centers, including the massive hyperscale Centers, are being proposed to be built in red states, blue states, rural communities, suburban communities, low-income communities of color, at the urban edge, and even, at a more minute scale in dense urban areas. They are most heavily located in places like Virginia and Texas and California, but they are also emerging in Germany, Canada, and England, as well as African, Latin American, and Asian countries. The U.S, proposed developments are far outpacing any other country. And, if some tech bros like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg follow through on their most elaborate and hubristic plans, they could be built in space. Perhaps this would serve as a prelude to Musk’s long-standing dream to relocate the select few to live extraterrestrially. And this is all happening at warp speed.

The local opposition to Data Center development entered the scene far more quickly than anticipated. Almost all opposition has been local. Most state and federal policymakers have been major supporters of the Data Center/AI boom. Regulatory efforts are minimal; tax incentives are ample, both short and long term. The job and economic benefits are touted, even though most of them are speculative or transient, as is much of the AI boom. Even community efforts to have transparency and to make public the information about AI and Data Center impacts, such as water and energy use, have been vigorously opposed by the AI companies with the support of the Trump Administration as well as Democratic Governors like Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro at the state level.

How to make AI marketable and then profitable has been the guiding principle of the developers. There is not much that’s open right now. Well-funded PR initiatives by the tech companies and their investment and developer allies seek to smooth the way to minimize any local concerns and to assert that such information is proprietary. Trust us, they say, as has been said many times before.

The Charge of Nimbyism

At the heart of the PR campaign to overcome such local opposition is the well-worn charge of nimbyism, conflating other local opposition around such issues as low-income housing as equivalent Nimby-like efforts to stop AI’s proclaimed socially and economically necessary development. But is the local opposition to AI Data Centers in fact a form of Nimbyism?

The actual term “nimbyism” was first widely used around the conflicts over environmental and community impacts of waste disposal in the 1970s in places like Love Canal in New York or the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County in California. Local opposition to major development projects like highway construction date back even further to the 1950s and 1960s when the Interstate Highway system was being built, including in urban centers that led to neighborhood displacements. Robert Caro’s best-selling 1974 book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses’s grand plan to reconfigure the New York metropolitan region through highway construction was the most prominent account of these locally grounded struggles.

As the term nimbyism evolved, it came to be used as a pejorative description about local opposition to development. Such opposition was characterized as a type of local parochial response to the general good that major development projects were assumed to represent. Some of the more successful local opposition in the highway battles of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, fought the location of the highway routes (thus, the claim of nimbyism), even though much of that opposition also focused critically on how the highway system and auto-centered transportation undermined transit systems and walkable neighborhoods.

However, it was the struggles around waste and hazard issues during the 1970s and 1980s that became the centerpiece of the corporate and developer arguments that nimbyism was anti-social and anti-progress. Groups that fought landfills, waste incinerators, toxic emissions from chemical plants and other facilities challenged the charge of parochialism. As opposed to the accusation of parochial nimbyism, they coined terms like “Not in Anybody’s Yard,” or “Plug up the Toilet.” Moreover, these local struggles, given the predominance of the location of the waste and hazardous facilities in low-income communities of color, helped develop the notions of environmental racism and environmental justice as another way to challenge the charge of “nimbyism.”

Locating hazardous and toxic facilities in low-income communities of color had become in fact the preferred strategy of the developers, made explicit when faced with the potential for community opposition. Among environmental justice advocates, a 1984 report by the consulting firm of Cerell and Associates, which explicitly identified a location strategy for waste facilities to build their facilities in vulnerable low-income communities, made explicit the environmental racism charge that the waste and toxics companies were looking to find locations where opposition could be limited due to the lack of resources to fight back.

The Nimbyism charge found stronger footing when it came to opposition to affordable housing projects and homeless support services, sometimes led by wealthier residents who wanted to keep low-income people and the houseless out of their communities. It was also used as a proxy for a charge of anti-modernism and anti-technology, an approach that has become foundational to the AI companies approach to weaken or minimize opposition to Data Center development. These are just a bunch of Luddites, nimby proponents who are against progress and technology, argue the AI proponents and their enablers.

Yet the opposition to the AI Data Centers, like the highway location critics and anti-toxics and environmental racism opposition before them, while criticizing the location of such facilities, also have core arguments about the local and national as well as the global impacts of AI and Data Center developments. Those criticisms are about process issues –AI companies hiding the information about impacts, back door deals to enable such developments, seeking to locate in vulnerable areas where opposition is assumed to be weakest, etc. They are about energy and water use impacts – enormous energy use that impacts utility pricing, the need to build new energy facilities that could be both polluting and contributing to climate impacts, reviving problematic technologies such as shuttered nuclear power plants, and water use that negatively affects water quality and community water availability. And they are about, especially with the hyperscalers, about enormous land use impacts that reconfigure vast areas into new versions of sacrifice zones on behalf of profit-seeking trillionaires and their mega-corporations.

Yet, interestingly, the limited resources available to local opposition forces have nevertheless stopped or postponed multiple projects. It has led to the frantic search for new sites and new deals by the AI companies. And it has contributed to the speculation that the Data Center battles might be the warning that we are in the midst of a bubble that will pop sooner rather than later. Perhaps that’s why the Musks and the Zuckerbergs have been outfitting their space suits.

LINKS

Data Center Watch, “$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition” and “Q-2 2025 Update: 125% Surge in Data Center Opposition,” https://www.datacenterwatch.org/q22025

Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974

Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb, War on Waste: Can America Win its Battle with Garbage? Washington DC: Island Press, 1989

Adam Mahoney, “After a White Town Rejected a Data Center, Developers Targeted a Black Area,” Capital B, January 6, 2026, https://capitalbnews.org/data-center-south-carolina-black-community/

Ryan Kmetz, “Environmental Justice and Data Center Location Patterns in the United States” June 25, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/environmental-justice-data-center-location-patterns-united-ryan-kmetz-aukue/

And thanks to my friend Andrea Hricko for sharing some of her research on data centers.

In September 2002, a dramatically reduced flow of water in the Klamath River along with other factors such as pesticide runoff led to the largest fish kill of salmon ever recorded. Water had been held back at Iron Gate Dam, near the Oregon border. This was due in part to then Vice President Dick Cheney’s manipulation of Interior Department decision-makers to increase the political support of Oregon farmers who wanted to secure the diverted waters.

The consequences were immediate. Dead and dying salmon began to line the banks of the river, as many as 35,000 deaths in those first weeks after Iron Gate Dam limited its release. For members of the Yurok Nation, it was “a mass destruction of our salmon resource” and an “unprecedented biological catastrophe.” And for Amy Bowers Cordalis, who in later years became the Yurok Nation’s chief counsel, the fish kill represented, as she described it in her recently published book, The Water Remembers, “a form of ecocide against my people.”

The fish kill episode on the Klamath took place in the context of fierce struggles over tribal water and fishing rights throughout the Pacific Northwest. Moreover, the fish wars of the 1960s and 1970s were like the struggles throughout the U.S. and Canada over forest and desert lands and other resource conflicts where indigenous groups and Tribal Nations were pitted against energy and lumber companies, local and regional governments, and economic players such as oil and mining companies, as well as the agriculture and commercial fishing groups.

These battles included litigation that had, at first appearance, dramatic consequences. The “fish wars” in the Puget Sound region of the state of Washington, for example, led to a major court ruling, the Boldt Decision (United States v. Washington, 1974), a federal ruling guaranteeing Washington tribes the right to fish in their historic places and gave them the right to co-manage, along with the state government, the life and well-being of the salmon and other fish in the region. In this same period, Amy Bower’s Uncle Ray, who had been arrested nineteen times for fishing on the Klamath, became the plaintiff in another crucial court case, Mattz vs. Arnett. This litigation, also successful, focused on the Yurok Nation’s tribal sovereignty, including the fishing rights on the Klamath River. For Amy Bowers and for the Yurok, it was a family, tribal, and social and ecological justice court victory.

Dam Removal

Despite these victories, court rulings were disregarded and the struggles didn’t end. For the Yurok and their other tribal partners, such as the Hoopa, the key focus was the four dams along the Klamath that had been built between 1918 and 1962 to serve lumber, energy, and agricultural interests. The operation of the dams had major responsibility for the fish kills, the poor water quality and sediment flows, and the undermining of a way of life for the Yurok and their tribal partners.

“Never take more than you need” and “never take more animals, creatures, or plants that we need to survive,” was the advice Amy Bowers heard from her Grandmother Geneva. Geneva would tell the Yurok story about how the Creator, in the form of a holy man, reminded people to live in balance with the natural world by leaving footprints on the beach at the mouth of the Klamath below Rek-woi. Those footprints, continued Geneva in the Yurok narrative, would remain if that balance was maintained. The footprints, however, for Geneva and her granddaughter, had disappeared in the 1970s with the fish kills and the failure to implement her family’s U.S. Supreme Court case.

The heart of the struggle over the next five decades was whether the four dams on the Klamath could be torn down. According to Beth Rose Middleton Manning, a professor of Native American studies at UC Davis, tribes had rarely been consulted throughout the history of U.S. dam construction. As Middleton argued, “in almost every location where there’s a dam, there’s a history of displacement, disruption and putting in that infrastructure without the consent of the communities and nations whose homeland that is.”

The Yurok and their tribal allies, however, persisted. They expanded their dam removal coalition to include fishing groups, environmentalists, researchers and academics, and those public officials who came to appreciate the indigenous knowledge, wisdom, and the tribal sovereignty of the Yurok. The Yurok worked with the farmers, who had been their bitter opponents and with whom they had been engaged in an active war for several decades, to develop a common understanding of how their concept of balance could also include modest and sufficient water flows for farming needs. And they eventually worked out an agreement with PacifiCorp, the owner of the dams then controlled by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway which had acquired the company in 2006. Buffet’s group recognized that maintaining the dams would be a lot more costly than dismantling them, so they signed off too, if they could be protected from liability during the dam removal process.

An Extraordinary Moment

After agreements were signed and then renegotiated, each of the four dams were taken down in sequence, with the Iron Gate Dam the last to be removed on schedule in 2024, with the very last sediment taken out on October 2^nd and 3^rd. It was an extraordinary moment. Fifty-two years after Iron Gate Dam had triggered the largest fish kill in U.S. history, the removal of the last bits of that same dam and the three others that had preceded it proved to be the largest dam removal process the U.S. and the world has experienced.

The Yurok recognized and celebrated the moment and its historical significance, as did the salmon. A group of teenagers, who had trained for the event for months, descended by kayak from the Iron Gate Dam removal site, past the three other sites where the dams had been removed, to Rek-woi, where hundreds celebrated with them on their month-long journey. The salmon were also making the journey and, undoubtedly, the footprints, virtual or otherwise, began to reappear. Various recordings showed how impressive the teens, from several of the tribes involved, had managed the feat.

Push Back and Challenges

It didn’t take long for the Trump Administration to try to undermine what had been accomplished. Following up on Elon Musk’s slash and burn DOGE process, the U.S. Department of the Interior took back in October, 2025 $2.1 million in federal grants for restoration work that would have funded seven projects along the Klamath River, including for wildfire prevention, habitat restoration, and surveys of Chinook salmon. The work associated with the grants, originally provided through the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, was already in progress and needed to be halted and invoices for the partial work already completed needed to be paid.

The challenges have only increased. The coalitions pulled together to make the dam removal and river renewal happen remain fragile. Much of the population that lived along the pathway of the dam removal are MAGA supporters, even as many of them came to support the dam removal. Before the victories and the celebrations, seven young Yurok, including Amy Bower’s sister, had committed suicide when the realities seemed bleakest. Climate change in the future could impact river flows. Wildfires at the river’s edge may get larger than the July 2021 Bootleg fire that burned more than 413,000 acres. Those who scorn free-flowing rivers are still in power, though potentially they could on the way out in the next few years. Hope survives.

And the salmon still swim and the tribes still celebrate and revere the fish and the renewal of the river. Balance, as the Yurok say, is local and global. The struggles will continue. And the footprints will seek to reappear.

LINKS

Amy Bowers Cordalis. The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. Little Brown & Co.: New York, 2025

Q&A with Amy Bowers Cordalis. Underscore Native News. November 3, 2025, https://www.underscore.news/culture/q-a-amy-bowers-cordalis-on-her-debut-memoir-the-water-remembers/

Michael Belchik, Dave Hillemeier, and Ronnie M. Pierce, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program. “The Klamath River Fish Kill of 2002; Analysis of Contributing Factors” February 2004. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/bay_delta/california_waterfix/exhibits/docs/PCFFA&IGFR/part2/pcffa_155.pdf

Oregon Water Science Center. “The Klamath River: Year 1 Post-Dam Removal,” July 30, 2025. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/klamath-river-year-1-post-dam-removal#:~:text=With%20the%20dams%20gone%2C%20the%20Klamath%20River,vegetation%20can%20grow.%20Springtime%20flows%20are%20higher.

Klamath Dam Removal and Kayaker event “First Descent” documentary -- https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/13/first-descent-klamath-documentary/

Jacques Leslie, “Salmon’s Comeback Pits Nature Against Trump Administration.” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-11-05/klamath-river-salmon-trump-endangered-species-act

Robert MacFarlane, New York Times. “Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement.” May 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/river-clean-water-act-klamath.html