Along with delegates from all over the world, I’ll be heading to the United Nations COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém. Like many others, I’m unsure what to expect.
This year, the summit faces perhaps the greatest headwinds of any in recent history. In the United States, the Trump administration has slashed climate science, cancelled renewable projects, expanded fossil fuel extraction and left the Paris Agreement (again). Trump’s efforts to hamstring climate action have made for extreme geopolitical turbulence, overshadowing the world’s main forum for coordinating climate action – even as the problem worsens.
Climate talks are never easy. Every nation wants input and many interests clash. Petrostates and big fossil fuel exporters want to keep extraction going, while Pacific states despairingly watch the seas rise. But in the absence of a global government to direct climate policy, these imperfect talks remain the best option for coordinating commitment to meaningful action.
Here’s what to keep an eye on this year.
A smaller-than-usual COP?
A persistent criticism of the annual climate summits is that they have become too big and unwieldy – more a trade show and playground for fossil fuel lobbyists than an effective forum for multilateral diplomacy and action on climate change. One solution is to deliberately make these talks smaller.
The Belém conference may end up having a smaller number of delegates, though not by design so much as logistical headaches.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva backed the decision to invite the world to the Amazon to display how vital the massive rainforest is as a carbon sink. But Belém’s remote location on the northeast coast, limited infrastructure and shortage of hotels have seen prices soar, putting the conference out of reach for smaller nations, including some of the most vulnerable. These constraints could undermine the inclusive “Mutirão” (collective effort on climate change) sought by organisers.
Many delegates will sleep on ships at the Belem climate talks. Pictured is Curupira, a figure from Brazilian folklore and the COP30 mascot. Gabriel Della Giustina/COP30, CC BY-NC-ND
Show me the money
Climate finance is a perennial issue at COP meetings. These funding pledges by rich countries are intended to help poorer countries reduce emissions, adapt to climate change or recover from climate disasters. Poorer countries have long called for more funding, given rich countries have done vastly more damage to the climate.
At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year, a new climate finance goal was set for US$300 billion (~A$460 billion) to be raised annually by developed countries by 2035, with the goal of reaching $US1.3 trillion (~A$2 trillion) in funding from both government and private sources over the same period.
To deliver the second goal, negotiators laid out a “Baku to Belém” roadmap. The details are due to be finalised at COP30. But with the US walking away from climate action and the European Union wavering, many eyes will be on China and whether it will step into the climate leadership vacuum left by developed countries. The EU has only just reached agreement on a 2040 emissions reduction target and an “indicative” cut for 2035.
Climate finance will be the priority for many countries, as worsening disasters such as Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica and Typhoon Kalmaegi in the Philippines once again demonstrate the enormous human and financial cost of climate change.
The latest UN assessment indicates the need for this funding is outpacing flows by 12–14 times. In Belém, poorer countries will be hoping to land agreement on greater finance and support for adaptation. Work on a global set of indicators to track progress on adaptation – including finance – will be key.
Brazilian organisers hope to rally countries around another flagship funding initiative set to launch at COP30. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility would compensate countries for preserving tropical forests, with 20% of funds directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities who protect tropical forest on their lands. If it gets up, this fund could offer a breakthrough in tackling deforestation by flipping the economics in favour of conservation and protecting a huge store of carbon.
2035 climate pledges
Belém was supposed to be a celebration of ambitious new emissions pledges which would keep alive the Paris Agreement goal of holding warming to 1.5°C. Nations were originally due to submit their 2035 pledges (formally known as Nationally Determined Contributions) by February, with an extension given to September after 95 per cent of countries missed the deadline.
When pledges finally arrived in September, they were broadly underwhelming. Only half the world’s emissions were covered by a 2035 pledge, meaning the remaining emissions gap could be very significant. Australia is pledging cuts of 62–70% from 2005 emissions levels.
That’s not to say there’s no progress. A new UN report suggests countries are bending the curve downward on emissions but at a far slower pace than is needed.
How negotiators handle this emissions gap will be a litmus test for whether countries are taking their Paris Agreement obligations seriously.
Rise of the courts
Even as some countries back away from climate action, courts are increasingly stepping into the breach. This year, the International Court of Justice issued a rousing Advisory Opinion on states’ climate obligations under international law, including that national targets have to make an adequate contribution to meeting the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal. The court warned failing to take “appropriate action” to safeguard the climate system from fossil fuel emissions – including from projects carried out by private corporations – may be “an internationally wrongful act”. That is, they could attract international liability.
It will be interesting to see how this ruling affects negotiating positions at COP30 over the fossil fuel phase-out. At COP28 in 2023, nations promised to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. If countries fail to progress the phase-out, accountability could instead be delivered via the courts. A new judgement in France found the net zero targets of oil and gas majors amount to greenwashing, while lawsuits aimed at making big carbon polluters liable for climate damage caused by their emissions are in the pipeline.
An Australia/Pacific COP?
A big question to be resolved is whether Australia’s long-running bid to host next year’s COP in Adelaide will get up. The bid to jointly host COP31 with Pacific nations has strong international support, but the rival bidder, Turkey, has not withdrawn.
If consensus is not reached at COP30, the host city would default back to Bonn in Germany, where the UN climate secretariat is based.
Outcome unknown
As climate change worsens, these sprawling, intense meetings may not seem like a solution. But despite headwinds and backsliding, they are essential. The world has made progress on climate change since 2015, due in large part to the Paris Agreement. What’s needed now on its tenth anniversary is a reinfusion of vigour to get the job done.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Australians love rooftop solar power. About 4 million homes have solar panels on their roofs, and we generate more solar energy per person than any other country.
But affordability pressures on home owners are holding them back from installing rooftop solar on millions of homes. Without this, Australia could struggle to meet its goal of generating more than 80% of electricity from renewables by 2030.
We propose a bold new “use it or lend it” solar program, under which the owners of detached and semi-detached homes would have the option of allowing the government to install and operate solar panels on their rooftops.
This could be an effective alternative to traditional energy rebates to accelerate the energy transition. And the electricity generated from these systems could be allocated to low-income households and renters, who are currently unable to access solar power.
Many homeowners would like to install solar but housing affordability issues mean they don’t have resources. Chris Gordon/Getty
Boosting solar
Slightly more than half of owner-occupied houses in Australia have solar panels.
Our new research looked at the factors that influenced household solar panel uptake in the Sydney metropolitan area from 2013 to 2024.
We found that as the cost of panels and batteries dropped over time and electricity prices soared, more homeowners decided to install solar. In contrast, the feed-in tariffs – the payment from electricity retailers for surplus electricity you put back into the grid – seem to have little impact on solar adoption.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that high house prices relative to household incomes resulted in reduced solar adoption, showing housing affordability is a barrier for solar uptake. Despite the long-term savings offered by solar, home owners battling housing affordability simply didn’t have as much disposable income to spend on solar panels.
At present, a typical 6.6 kilowatt system costs about $8,500, but the owner only pays about $6,200 because of the Commonwealth Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme rebate. These rebates are being phased out by 2030.
Untapped potential
Australia has a legislated greenhouse emissions target of 43% below 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Last month, it announced a more ambitious interim target of 62–70% below 2005 levels by 2035.
To overcome the shortfall on solar adoption, bold policies are needed to make rooftop solar accessible to all households, not just those who can already afford it.
What has been proposed so far? The Climate Council advocates for the mandatory inclusion of solar on new and substantially renovated houses, as well as suitable new apartment buildings. The Grattan Institute says state and territory governments should provide certainty with a long-term date for the end of gas.
But these approaches take time. We propose a third and complementary “use it or lend it” option. Under this scheme, owners of detached and semi-detached houses that have not installed solar could “lend” their rooftop space to the government for publicly owned solar panels.
Our research proposes that owners who have not installed solar could permit the federal government to install and operate solar panels on their rooftops. delectus/Getty
How ‘use it or lend it’ would work
Owners who chose this option would retain full ownership of their property while receiving compensation, such as annual lease payments, for allowing public use of their rooftop space.
This arrangement would give property owners the clear, risk-free benefit of financial compensation without the cost of installation or responsibility for maintenance of the panels themselves. We expect the program would appeal to low-income homeowners who cannot afford solar panels, as well as rental property owners who may be reluctant or unable to invest in solar.
For the government, the electricity from these systems could be allocated to low-income households and renters, two groups that face the greatest barriers to direct solar participation. This could be done through virtual energy networks, a digital platform that allows solar households to sell excess electricity to non-solar households. The “use it or lend it” policy could be an effective tool to address equity concerns in solar uptake.
Property owners could choose to buy back the rooftop solar panel system installed by the government at any time. If existing owners initially opt out but later wish to opt back in, or if new property owners decide to participate, the purchase price would be determined based on the “cost neutrality” principle, meaning the government does not profit.
To ensure feasibility and fairness, the program would have to include safeguards covering roof integrity and owner indemnity against potential damage or injury. It would need fair access principles for the installation, service and removal of the solar panels and batteries.
Each property’s solar suitability would be assessed by accredited professionals, considering technical viability as well as the property owner’s priorities, for example planned subdivisions or renovations.
With only five years until the current solar rebates are phased out, now is the time to consider how to boost solar installation without them.
With careful design and drafting, a landowner lending their roof space to the government does not disadvantage them. Owners, renters, the government and the climate would all benefit from solar panels on unused roofs.
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Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Amsterdam, Netherlands – Greenpeace demands world leaders agree on a global response plan at COP30 as a new major UN report warned the global temperature is projected to rise to 2.3-2.5°C above pre-industrial era global temperatures, putting the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5°C at risk in the short-term.
The UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2025 warned the world is heading towards “a serious escalation of climate risks and damages” due to a lack of ambition and action, and reports the multi-decadal average of global temperature rise will exceed 1.5°C, at least temporarily, requiring faster and bigger cuts in emissions to minimise the overshoot.
Jasper Inventor, Deputy Programme Director, Greenpeace International said: “How many warnings do we need? The time is now, but our leaders are asleep at the wheel, on a collision course to more devastating storms like Hurricane Melissa, human suffering, economic damages and climate injustice.”
“Warnings of a 1.5°C overshoot must be a rallying call for action and yet 2035 climate action plans have failed to bridge the ambition gap. We’re still only inching forward on cutting our emissions despite the demands of people and communities around the world.”
“We have the renewable energy solutions and we are making progress, but emissions are still rising, the transition away from fossil fuels is too slow, and national climate action plans are barely moving the needle. It’s time for G20 countries, above all developed countries, to grab the wheel and really lead the transition, starting at COP30, where a global response plan to accelerate action must be agreed.”
The Emissions Gap Report 2025 predicted global temperatures to reach 2.3-2.5°C by the end of the century, down from 2.6-2.8°C last year. Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement 10 years ago, temperature predictions have fallen from 3-3.5°C, but faster action is required.
Similar to the UNFCCC’s NDC synthesis report, the UNEP also warned new 2035 climate action plans will have insufficient impact in reducing emissions, especially due to the intended US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and called on G20 nations to display climate leadership.
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The government has signed vast deals with gas-loving, Trump-donating AI giants.
When U.S. President Donald Trump landed for what he called the “exquisite honour” of an unprecedented second state visit to the UK this September, he brought along a retinue of his favourite Silicon Valley tech bosses for dinner with King Charles.
Among the guests seated in the gold-flecked banquet hall of Windsor Castle: Jensen Huang, CEO of the artificial intelligence (AI) chip-manufacturer Nvidia, which has recently skyrocketed into the position of the world’s largest public company, and Sam Altman, founder and CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Recently, these two tech CEOs seem to have earned a direct line to President Trump and, unsurprisingly, the bedrock of that influence appears to be money – earlier this year, Nvidia and Altman both donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration ceremony.
When they landed in London, they quickly applied their skills of political influence to Labour.
Altman and Huang’s visit to the UK accompanied the signing of Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s £150 billion “U.S.-UK Technology Prosperity Deal”, an agreement which includes £31 billion in investments from American tech companies to construct fleets of gargantuan “hyperscaler” AI-ready data centres across Britain.
Stargate UK, a massive AI infrastructure project from OpenAI, Nvidia, and UK AI startup Nscale, is only one of several huge new initiatives introduced via the deal.
On the first day of the big visit, Nvidia threw a press conference to celebrate its pledge to invest a further £2 billion in UK AI.
“This is a historic day,” Starmer rhapsodised about the Nvidia investment while standing next to Huang, lit by the glow of a towering Nvidia logo.
Huang handed Starmer a framed golden Nvidia supercomputer as a gift, embossed with an inscription which Huang asked the prime minister to share.
“This is the UK’s age of AI,” Starmer read out to rising cheers in the audience. “A new industrial revolution begins!”
One glaring omission from Starmer and Huang’s “revolution”? Any mention of how the UK will power an explosion of water and energy-voracious AI data centres – the vast warehouses of supercomputers needed to run the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini – without completely upending the UK’s net zero commitments.
Instead, on the same day, Huang declared Nvidia’s plans to power its UK AI with fossil fuels.
“Sustainable power like nuclear and wind and of course all of that solar is all going to contribute, but I’m also hoping that gas turbines can also contribute,” he told The Times.
Starmer has claimed that home-grown clean energy is “in the DNA” of his government, yet Labour has so far said little about Nvidia’s plans for fossil fuel-powered AI in Britain – or how it intends to hit its net zero targets while charging headlong into this big tech bonanza.
Too Much, Too Quickly
Labour has already been widely accused of growing too close to U.S. big tech companies.
In recent months, the government has signed wide-ranging deals with seven Trump-supporting U.S. tech giants – Nvidia, OpenAI, Instagram and Facebook creator Meta, software company Microsoft, online retail behemoth Amazon, search engine pioneer Google, and enigmatic “spy tech” company Palantir.
Together, these tech firms have donated a combined $7.5 million (£5.6 million) to President Trump, a figure that doesn’t count the unspecified amounts Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Palantir reportedly gave for the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom.
The Trump administration has pursued an anti-immigrant, anti-democratic, pro-fossil fuel agenda, which has included an eight-fold increase in weapons expenditure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carrying out deadly immigration raids across the country, and over $1 trillion (£760 billion) in defence spending, largely for weapons, shipbuilding, and military aircraft.
Trump has so far sent National Guard troops into five U.S. cities and cut nearly $60 billion (£45 billion) in aid funding worldwide.
Labour has already struck deals that would see Trump’s big tech allies train the UK workforce in AI, collaborate with the British military, house the UK’s classified information, and “modernise” the NHS. These deals have prompted widespread concerns about their lack of transparency and the threats they pose to UK data security.
Now, further concern is growing that Labour is encouraging American AI companies to run roughshod over the UK’s renewable energy transition.
“Starmer’s investment deals with U.S. big tech threaten to give them priority access to Britain’s resources – be they energy, water, or personal data – rather than using these resources to meet public need. They will drive a coach and horses through our climate commitments,” Nick Dearden, director of campaign group Global Justice Now, told DeSmog.
That threat revolves around the government’s efforts to aggressively woo U.S. big tech to ramp up multi-billion pound AI data centre investments at its designated AI “Growth Zones”.
To date, several big tech firms have heeded the call. In the past few months, Microsoft has invested £22 billion, Google’s parent company Alphabet has pledged £5 billion, and Amazon – the biggest owner of data centres in the world – has promised £8 billion for UK AI development.
Oliver Hayes, head of policy at campaign organisation Global Action Plan, agrees with Dearden’s concerns. “By striking deals with U.S. tech companies that are gung-ho about gas-fired data centres, ministers are opening yet more doors for lobbyists, exposing bill-payers to greater pain, and jeopardising UK climate targets,” he told DeSmog.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all already watered down or wholly abandoned their sustainability pledges in the last year due to the surging energy demands of their AI businesses.
OpenAI hasn’t even created one. This summer, the firm hired as its energy chief a former Trump-administration natural gas evangelist who promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“One way of looking at AI is that its main use is as a vehicle to give the fossil fuel industry one last reason to expand,” wrote American environmentalist Bill McKibben in response to the hire.
Meanwhile, many of the people running these tech giants have veered into outright climate science denial.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates made headlines last week for making what he called a “strategic pivot” on climate change, claiming that it “will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future”.
His words contradict the position of hundreds of leading climate scientists across the world, who when surveyed by The Guardian said they expect that the earth will warm by at least 2.5C by the end of the century, which the UN’s climate agency has reported would lead to “catastrophic climate breakdown”.
Trump’s Tech Bros vs. Climate Change
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is not the only American tech boss with a proclivity for powering data centres with natural gas. Nearly all of the companies partnering with Labour have already embraced it.
Fossil gas as an AI energy “solution” is an import from Trump’s U.S. – the world’s top producer of liquefied natural gas. In July, Trump lauded the idea of powering data centres using fossil fuels while flanked by oil and gas executives.
A growing cadre of U.S. tech giants – including OpenAI, Oracle, Meta, xAI, and Microsoft – are installing gas turbine generators at their data centre sites in the U.S. and Ireland to provide energy to their supercomputer complexes. Amazon previously applied to build one, though eventually withdrew its plans. At the end of October, Google joined the list, announcing its investment in a gas plant with carbon capture for its data centres in the U.S. Midwest.
And many big tech companies are not shy about claiming that these projects are just the beginning.
Microsoft’s vice president for energy, Google’s chief investment officer, OpenAI’s Altman, Amazon’s vice president for global data centres, and Nvidia’s senior director of corporate sustainability have all publicly supported the idea of their companies relying on natural gas as an energy source for AI data centres.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Credit: WSJ / YouTube
Now, several of these tech giants have set their sights on powering the UK AI boom with gas.
In a June meeting of the government’s newly formed AI Energy Council, which includes Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, Labour ministers were pressured to consider that “temporary on-site generation, including natural gas fuel cells” could be an “interim measure” to avoid delays in connecting data centres to the UK’s notoriously backlogged energy grid.
The Tony Blair Institute, a think tank with a strong influence on Starmer’s government and deep ties to Trump-supporting American billionaire tech mogulLarry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has added its voice to this chorus. The institute argued in a report published in July that dedicated gas power sources will be needed to provide reliable energy to UK data centres as a “bridging measure” to give time for the country’s renewable energy networks to develop.
Campaigners are quick to point out that powering data centres with gas would decimate the UK’s climate targets.
“Off-grid gas plants are a climate catastrophe which could lead to hundreds of millions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions from the tech sector. They would delay the phase out of fossil gas in Europe when we need to speed up the transition to renewable energy,” Jill McCardle of renewable energy campaign group Beyond Fossil Fuels told DeSmog.
This fact doesn’t seem to have deterred the big tech elite.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, and Altman have all said, in one way or another, that the AI boom will be worth its skyrocketing emissions because artificial intelligence will help to solve the climate crisis.
“I don’t want to say this because climate change is so serious and so hard of a problem,” Altman said in a 2023 interview, “but I think once we have a really powerful super intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult for a system like that.”
Schmidt has argued that pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a supercomputer as smart or smarter than a human – is the best way to solve the climate crisis, because “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway”.
Bill Gates told journalists last year that “data centres are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to global energy needs] but probably only 2 percent to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly.”
Critics say – nonsense.
“The fact is that the climate crisis is not primarily a technological problem: we have most if not all of the tech we need to fix it,” Adam Becker, science journalist and author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, told DeSmog.
“Tech oligarchs think that they can burn fossil fuels with impunity and clean it up later with a magic wand given to them by a machine god. But that isn’t going to happen. The reality is that we need to save ourselves from the machinations of these cruelly myopic billionaires.”
Starmer’s Silence
Will Labour regulate the climate-destroying impulses of these tech behemoths?
“This AI frenzy needs to be regulated or big tech will burn dirty fossil fuels to power it,” McCardle warned DeSmog.
Hayes of Global Action Plan added: “Ministers should immediately and unequivocally announce that data centres will not be permitted to connect to the gas grid. Silicon Valley has money to burn, so if they want to put enormous demands on the UK’s energy system, they should pay for new renewables to supply it.”
However, Labour ministers haven’t yet put the kibosh on gas-powered AI.
During the president’s state visit in September, Starmer and Trump – whose administration has reversed American climate policy so dramatically that some experts are now calling the U.S. a “petrostate” – held a press conference for the Technology Prosperity Deal.
With the camera rolling, Trump addressed Nvidia’s gas-embracing CEO directly.
“AI is taking over the world. You’re taking over the world, Jensen [Huang]. I don’t know what you’re doing here. All I can say is we both hope you’re right.”
Through the whole exchange, Starmer sat with folded hands next to the American president, chuckling.
Labour’s Tech Courtships: A Primer
Microsoft
Microsoft, which has donated $750,000 (£560,000) to Trump and recently rolled back its “moonshot” sustainabilitygoals amid a surge in its AI emissions, already operates several data centres in the UK and currently has plans to build a £106 million AI-ready hyperscaler data centre in Leeds.
During Trump’s state visit, and as part of the new U.S.-UK Technology Prosperity Deal, Microsoft announced its plans to invest $30 billion (£22.5 billion) to “power [the UK’s] AI future”.
Microsoft’s links with Labour go deeper than this huge infusion of Trump-affiliated cash. It has partnered with Labour on a number of projects, including joining Amazon in training millions of workers in AI skills, and signing a deal to provide Microsoft’s AI software at a discount to the UK public sector.
Though the company still pays lip service to its commitment to sustainably-powered AI, it is working with fossil fuel companies – selling its AI services to fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron – and actively embracing fossil fuel-based energy options.
As for gas-powered AI, Microsoft’s Vice President of Energy, Bob Hollis, told CNBC in March that powering more data centres with natural gas paired with carbon capture was “not off the table”.
Microsoft already operates a data centre campus powered by off-grid gas generators in Ireland, and had been slated to build a data centre next to a coal plant in the U.S. state of Wisconsin until local opposition stopped the project.
Google
Labour’s deal-making with Google, which gave $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration and quietly deleted all sustainability targets from its website in September, has been extensive.
Labour has granted Google a £400 million defence contract to use its cloud services for “classified information sharing”, has signed a partnership with the firm to help the government – including the NHS and local councils – to “modernise”, alongside an agreement for the company to help “upskill” British workers with AI.
Google’s parent company Alphabet – which opened a £735 million data centre in Hertfordshire with Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year – announced a £5 billion investment in UK-based AI research and infrastructure in September to coincide with Trump’s visit.
Google – whose carbon emissions soared by nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024 – claims it has signed a deal with Shell to supply “95 percent carbon-free energy” for its UK investments. However, this claim is called into question by the company’s planned hyperscaler data centre in Essex, which will belch out 570,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
The company has also begun advocating for the use of fossil fuels to meet data centre energy demands.
In August, Google’s Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat praised a speech by the U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in which he pushed to expand the use of fossil fuels for powering data centers. Porat called Burgum’s comments “fantastic” – “[b]ecause I think it is very clear that to realise the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it.”
A Google policy brief has also detailed the company’s intention to pursue “accelerating innovation and investment in affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture”.
Meta
Meta, which donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration fund, is currently building “Hyperion”, three massive gas-powered data centres in Louisiana larger than the size of Manhattan. The firm is also pursuing a “titan cluster” of data centres in Ohio dubbed “Prometheus”, powered by its own gas plant.
It is also currently working on a $1 million (£750,000) initiative with Labour to provide “government-owned” AI tools for “high-security use cases like language translation for national security” and “speeding up the approvals process for house building”.
At the end of January, former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who was Meta’s president of global affairs at the time, hosted a dinner with former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair where tech entrepreneurs met with government investment ministers.
It is unknown whether Meta currently has plans to invest in UK data centres.
Palantir
Palantir, a mysterious spy tech company that builds databases of personal information, is run by a Trump-supporting climate science denier. However, that hasn’t stopped Labour from working with the firm.
In September, the government announced a £1.5 billion “strategic partnership” to “boost military AI and innovation”, in which Palantir will collaborate with the UK military to “develop AI-powered capabilities already tested in Ukraine to speed up decision making, military planning and targeting.”
The partnership comes on top of Palantir’s ongoing five-year £330 million NHS contract, awarded in 2023 by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, to create a data platform for personal health information that has spurred fears over the privacy of patient medical records.
The company’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, is a long-time Trump donor, having given at least $1.75 million (£1.31 million) to Trump campaigns from 2016 to 2020.
OpenAI is not hiding its intention to embrace off-grid gas as the energy source for its data centre construction frenzy in the UK, or its cosy relationship with Trump.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, is closely aligned with both Trump and several climate deniers, having donated $1 million (£750,000) to the president’s inauguration.
Nevertheless, in July, Labour deepened its relationship with the creator of ChatGPT – signing a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI to “turbocharge” UK AI.
The government is already using ChatGPT in “Humphrey”, a Whitehall tool designed to “speed up the civil service by taking away admin burdens”, as well as “Consult”, an AI tool which “speeds up the policy making process by automatically sorting public responses to consultations.”
OpenAI has already started powering data centres with gas. Its U.S. Stargate Project site in Texas, slated to become one of the largest data centre sites in the world, is installing off-grid gas turbines to power its operations.
The firm has chosen not to disclose the carbon footprint of ChatGPT-5, its most advanced AI model to date, despite the fact that researchers told The Guardian it uses “significantly more energy than GPT-4o”. The company, which is rapidly expanding across the globe, does not have publicly announced climate or sustainability targets.
These choices are reflected in the views of Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”
Altman has also said that he thinks AI will solve climate change, despite the technology’s ever-expanding demand for power.
Altman’s history with climate deniers goes back to the beginning of his career when Thiel served as his mentor. The OpenAI CEO also previously donated $32,000 (£23,000) to climate denier Michael Shellenberger’s failed 2022 campaign for Governor of California.
Shellenberger has made extensive claims denying the severity of climate change, including that “humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’”, “the Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’”, and “climate change is not making natural disasters worse”.
Shellenberger is well known for his nuclear energy advocacy, which aligns with Altman’s own long-held positions.
In a 2015 blog on Altman’s personal website, he argued,:“The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy.”
Nvidia
Nvidia’s ties to Labour go well beyond its role in the freshly-announced Stargate UK data centre project.
The supercomputer chip company, which donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump in January, has pledged to invest £2 billion to develop the UK AI sector and to deploy 120,000 advanced computer chips across the UK.
Earlier in the summer, the government also announced that it would collaborate with Nvidia on training the UK workforce via a “nationwide AI talent development pipeline”. An agreement was also forged for Nvidia to provide AI resource tools to UK universities.
Amazon
In June, Amazon, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and is the biggest owner of data centres in the world, pledged to invest £40 billion in the UK over three years, which includes a £8 billion investment in UK data centres.
It is also part of a Labour government initiative to provide. AI training to UK workers.
The UK government’s reliance on Amazon goes well beyond its Labour-era deals – it has won £1.7 billion in UK government contracts since 2016.
Though Amazon announced a plan in 2019 to eliminate or offset all company carbon emissions by 2040, its emissions spiked by about 40 percent by 2023, around the time that it stopped reporting its electricity usage.
It has also recently come under fire for obscuring the full extent of its data centre water consumption.
The company has since expressed interest in running its data centres on gas. Amazon Web Services (AWS) applied for planning permission in 2024 to build a gas-powered data centre in Oregon, but eventually withdrew the plans.
At an energy summit this April, Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centres, announced to a room of oil and gas executives that “to have the energy we need for the grid [to power data centres], it’s going to take an ‘all of the above’ approach for a period of time.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, dreams of a world powered by ever-expanding energy consumption, including AI data centres powered by solar in space.
“Everybody on this planet is going to want to be a first-world citizen using first-world amounts of energy, and the people who are first-world citizens today using first-world amounts of energy. We’re going to want to use even more energy,” he told the audience at a private event at the exclusive Yale Club of New York City in 2019.
To achieve this grand energy expansion, Bezos envisions a solar system populated by a “trillion” people living on space stations.
“[We] don’t want to face a civilisation of stasis… if we just stay on this planet – that’s the long-term issue. You have to capture more of the sun’s output,” he said.
Science journalist Adam Becker called Bezos’s space station utopia “a distraction from solutions to the climate crisis here and now”.
He added: “It’s sad to see one of the wealthiest people in the world waste his power and influence on something so pointless instead of actually helping with the biggest problem that humanity has ever faced.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
The six protesters outside Southwark crown court. From left: Andrew Dames, Clara O’Callaghan, Cosmo Cattell, Jane Touil, Michael Dunk and Adelheid Russenberger. Photograph: Just Stop Oil
Lawyers call for clarity over law as six are found guilty while being stopped from using defence used by fellow activists
Six environmental protesters were convicted after they were denied the ability to put a “reasonable excuse” defence or climate facts before the jury, despite these being afforded to other activists acquitted for taking part in the same demonstration.
After an eight-day trial at Southwark crown court in London, the six Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists were found guilty of public nuisance, which carries a maximum 10-year sentence, for climbing gantries on the M25 in 2022 to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects. They will be sentenced next month.
The way their case was handled contrasts starkly with that of three other JSO activists who took part in the same demonstration on London’s orbital motorway.
They were found not guilty of public nuisance after the judge at Guildford crown court allowed them to argue a defence of reasonable excuse and prosecutors permitted them to include 12 climate facts in the agreed facts – undisputed by both prosecutors and defence lawyers – presented to the jury. The verdicts in the two cases were less than three weeks apart.
