Good News Everyone! The Planet Has Been Saved
Now we are all doomed because of the AI data centers, according to the CCP
During the Democratic Party debate on 20 February 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that “if we don’t act incredibly boldly within the next six, seven years, there will be irreparable damage done — not to just to Nevada, not just to Vermont or Massachusetts, but to the entire world.”
Stopping this “existential threat” required a $30 trillion dollar ‘Green New Deal’, a total economic reorganization that Sanders promised would create 20 million “good-paying” jobs. “This is a moral issue”, he stressed, because moral hectoring is the true essence of socialist economics, while ‘science’ is entirely fungible.
Six years later, the climate doomsday has not arrived and Democrats are no longer running on climate fear. In a New York Times op ed last week, climate doomsayer Matthew T. Huber noted “a striking shift from a few years ago, when many Democratic politicians thought the promise of a Green New Deal would build a coalition based on green jobs and fighting inequality.”
Huber is the author of the 2022 book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, in which he argues that “affordability” is linked to decarbonization of the economy and Democrats should talk about it more. Four years later, he says that “it might be better to say nothing at all” about climate change because it “has become yet another issue fueling polarization.” Put more accurately: voters hate it.
“The candidates’ first task must be to regain credibility with working people by tackling their more immediate, material concerns”, Huber writes. But where did Democratic candidates lose their credibility on this issue? Was it Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, telling us 20 years ago that we had just ten years to reverse climate change before we reached the “tipping point”, beyond which we were all doomed?
Or perhaps it was the economic devastation of Green New Deal policy. “When I think of climate change, I think about jobs”, Joe Biden tweeted in 2020. “Good-paying, union jobs that put Americans to work, make our air cleaner, and rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure.” Instead of reducing inflation, Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” doubled the federal deficit and raised inflation by pumping $370 billion into the economy.
That is how it goes with ‘Net Zero’ policies and climate activism. They are latter-day socialist central planning, justified by the reputed morality of decarbonization, purportedly aimed at improving the middle class, and championed by elites who know what we need and want better than we do. The result is always economic destruction because reality does not conform to magical formulas.
But now the justification for climate crisis has faltered because time has run out on doomsday. Since 2011, the climate change models touted by doomsayers have all come from a set of assumptions known as RCP8.5 that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now admits are “implausible”. This “means that almost every fearmongering mainstream media climate headline and story that has been written over the last 15 years is junk”, Chris Morrison writes at Daily Sceptic. “A long and painful process of rehabilitation now seems likely.”
Tens of thousands of research papers have been, and are still being, published under this “improbable” rubric. False assumptions “are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital”, Roger Pielke, Jr. notes. “The abandonment of the high-end legacy scenarios … will need to propagate through this entire infrastructure.”
So what are politicians like Bernie Sanders supposed to do, now? The answer is obvious: they have recycled their climate doomerism as AI data center doomerism. Sanders recently hosted a panel with Chinese AI officials to play up the “existential threat” of AI and slow down American development. Former Facebook executive Dustin Moskovitz has organized billions of dollars of spending on AI doomerism through his organization, Coefficient Giving.
To date, the group has paid out $611 million to politicians, with 99.8 percent of the money going to Democrats. Coefficient Giving is a new facade built on the same old ‘Effective Altruism’ movement that already tried to save the world from us lesser mortals. It serves to launder the AI priorities of Anthropic, the same progressive company that recently tried to gain control over the Department of War’s use of AI on behalf of the Democratic Party to the advantage of America’s enemies.
Among their tactics is a 50-state approach aimed at creating a regulatory patchwork so onerous that only the largest companies can afford to build AI data centers. This is exactly the same approach that climate doomerism has used against carbon infrastructure across the country. The main beneficiary of this approach is of course China, which is allowed to continue building as much carbon-intensive infrastructure and as many AI data centers as the CCP desires.
The AI doomers push the odd conservative figure like Amy Kremer, formerly of the Tea Party, out front as a fig leaf of bipartisanship. This is a distraction from the complete and perfect transference of the arguments for Net Zero to AI data centers, which follows the changing flow of money from the old issue to the new one.
Money entirely explains why climate change doomerism became a sacred cow on the left. The Liberal Patriot website regularly called out progressive policy prescriptions — open borders, transgender sex denialism, etc. — but was forced to shut down this year specifically because they dared to debunk the “totalizing claims to scientific consensus and authority made by the climate movement”.
This “epistemological commitment” to climate doom in the progressive political “ecosystem” meant that criticism was received “as a threat rather than an asset”, Kyle Saunders, a former contributor, explains. While the Liberal Patriot coverage was “technically correct”, it was nevertheless deemed “harmful and pernicious” because it “undermines the case for the climate movement.”
The moral cause (read: money) was more important than any amount of data from actual science. It still is more important than actual data. Concerns about AI water use are wildly overstated, as the people making these overstatements have admitted. Media coverage of AI water use is almost all biased and inaccurate. We have seen this before with climate.
No industry has ever been built without trade-offs, whereas the ‘Green New Deal’ has been falsely presented as trade-off free. In reality, wind turbines wear out and the steel cannot be recycled, while wilderness teeming with wildlife is destroyed for solar farms. Creating ‘carbon free’ energy is impossible, and China is the only beneficiary when we pretend otherwise.
It was all presented to us as an unimpeachable moral cause. Now, stopping data centers is the unimpeachable moral cause. This fallacy of the morally righteous cause always manifests as funding, which locks out criticism. It explains the Democratic Party’s commitment to transgender surgeries for children, crime and punishment, and more.
We cannot be surprised that it now empowers AI doomerism. Nothing has changed except the target of the moral crusade and the direction of the money flow towards it.
The Chinese Communist Party wanted the American energy industry to struggle, so Democrats have made it struggle. Now the CCP wants American AI to struggle, so progressive Democrats will make American AI struggle, and then cash the checks from Anthropic to run for Congress. When you see Bernie Sanders complaining about the influence of money on American politics, it is a confession disguised as an accusation.