On Thursday, the White House put forward its new pledge under the Paris Agreement: By 2035, the United States will reduce its emissions by between 61 and 66 percent, compared to 2005 levels. “American industry will keep inventing and keep investing. State, local, and tribal governments will keep stepping up,” Biden bragged in a prerecorded statement. “And together, we will turn this existential threat into a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform our nation for generations to come.”
Biden, of course, will have no say over how or if that goal will be met, and the pledge doesn’t legally obligate the U.S. to actually work toward it. The Paris Agreement only requires that countries periodically submit new goals known as “nationally determined contributions,” and the announcement this week marked America’s formal submission of that new benchmark. Trump and his allies, meanwhile, have promised to once again pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement once he takes office next month, dismantle rules that help reduce emissions, and purge the federal workforce of virtually anyone whose job title includes the word “climate.”
The more meaningful development is that the administration is reportedly working on an executive order to roll out the red carpet for power-hungry data centers. Sources familiar with the plan recently told The Washington Post that the order could open up federal lands for building AI data centers “that consume at least one gigawatt of electricity,” roughly as much as a city of one million residents. The order may relax environmental restrictions and allow companies to build power plants “fueled by natural gas at the same sites, with wind or solar power expected to eventually take the place of natural gas.”
The rush to subsidize AI has been inspired in large part by the pitch—made mostly by tech companies—that the U.S. faces some grave national security threat if it doesn’t give these tech companies everything they want, now. “China, fixated on seizing the lead by 2030, is building faster—harnessing government-controlled data and increasing its production of chips and energy,” OpenAI warned in a white paper presented to administration officials this fall. “Energy above all is critical to the U.S. maintaining its lead.”
Conveniently for tech magnates, that crisis narrative has overshadowed questions about what all this new AI will do, whether it’s necessary, and what the market for it actually is. The rush to build new AI infrastructure and power it risks bringing a fleet of unnecessary new fossil-fueled power plants online, which could then lock in higher emissions for decades to come. This last-ditch AI frenzy could also hand the Trump administration even more tools by which to further enrich the companies and executives—including Open AI’s Sam Altman, Meta, and Amazon—that are cozying up to him.
The last week has showcased the broader dynamics that have characterized the Biden administration’s approach to the climate crisis: a modestly impressive decarbonization agenda described in heroic terms, routinely sabotaged by the administration’s paranoid and deeply rooted commitment to keeping the U.S. atop an unequal global order. The awkward attempt to meld these two goals has backfired, politically, failing to align new political constituencies behind the project of reducing emissions. Republicans are just as opposed to anything called climate policy as they were four years ago—however much money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into their districts. Sweeping rhetoric about U.S. climate leadership is still mostly just that: rhetoric. And while those climate talking points will leave the White House when Biden does, the next Trump administration will inherit a stronger practical set of tools for attacking an ever-expanding list of U.S. enemies, tailor-made for them by the Biden administration: a cruel, bloated sanctions regime; expanded tariffs on China; a far-right Israeli government given a blank check for atrocities and violent territorial expansion; and now, a template for relaxing environmental regulations to please tech companies.
Whether Democrats have adopted these classically Republican positions to win over swing voters or because they share the GOP’s values doesn’t really matter. The Biden White House’s longest-lasting legacy won’t be that he subsidized automakers to build some more electric vehicles or announced an unenforceable climate goal. It will be making the world a more dangerous place and handing Trump and his corporate allies the tools to continue that process.
