The price of eggs has more than doubled in the past eight years, which isn’t great, but at least you can eat eggs. The price of US government subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry has also more than doubled in that time, which is far, far less great. Welfare for an industry that makes billions of dollars in profits and pollutes the climate is worse than useless. It’s self-destructive.
The federal government gives oil, gas and coal producers at least $34.8 billion in subsidies each year, according to a new study by the research and advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International. In 2017, OCI estimated these gifts at $14.7 billion annually. This doubling in federal largesse has taken place under both Democratic and Republican political administrations, highlighting the difficulty of stopping its growth, much less reversing it.
In fact, some of the most recent extensions of federal aid have made it possible for these subsidies to explode in the future, threatening to reach trillions of dollars. When the world needs exponential growth in clean-energy investments to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global heating, the US government will be bankrolling fossil-fuel expansion and stoking the emergency.
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.Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat said his “comments were fantastic.”
This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.
At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Washington, D.C., Google’s president cheered on Trump’s interior secretary after he slammed Silicon Valley’s support of the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and pushed to expand the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels to power data centers, according to a previously unreported recording.
Following the speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees that “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic… [B]ecause I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”
Porat was speaking on a panel about how AI is “rewriting America’s future,” alongside Big Tech leaders including venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. During the panel, Porat also discussed a Google white paper advocating for U.S. investments in natural gas and nuclear to power the industry’s energy-hungry data centers.
Google and other major tech companies as recently as a few years ago led the corporate world in acknowledging the seriousness of the climate emergency and proposing concrete actions to limit Silicon Valley’s carbon emissions. Porat’s company has for years positioned itself as a climate leader in the tech industry. Among its many promises? An ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.
Yet Porat’s comments at the Hill & Valley Forum, and her subsequent praise in July for the Trump administration’s “energy abundance” agenda — which supports oil, gas, and coal while severely penalizing renewables such as wind and solar — signal that, at a time when climate action is under serious threat from Republicans, the country’s largest tech companies are wavering in their support for the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest-carbon energy sources.
That’s reflected in Google’s carbon emissions, which soared nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to a company environmental report. An independent study from the NewClimate Institute, a German nonprofit, warned in August of a “crisis” for the tech giant’s ability to meet its climate targets, stating that “data centre expansion and higher artificial intelligence (AI) usage have rapidly increased Google’s electricity demand and absolute [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Google didn’t respond to a media request about Porat’s comments.
“Climate Extremist Agenda”
Founded in 2021, the Hill & Valley Forum is an organization that brings together prominent tech executives and venture capitalists with federal policymakers. This year’s event, which took place in late April, featured the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Carp and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, alongside politicians including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The opening remarks were delivered by Burgum, a former North Dakota governor with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. As interior secretary, Burgum oversees management and conservation of federal land. Previous reporting showed that in 2024, months prior to being nominated by Trump for the position, Burgum hosted a private dinner for oil, gas, and coal executives.
Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported “the climate extremist agenda,” which he defined as the idea that “a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.” Burgum added: “I’ve always been a little offended by that.”
Echoing common climate-denier talking points about the inability of climate models to predict future temperature rise, Burgum questioned “how a group could take a spreadsheet and extrapolate [climate] data for 90 years, 80 years, now 75 years and say ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’”
He then positioned coal as an energy source that can power Big Tech’s data centers. “Any coal plant running in America today is incredibly clean,” he claimed without evidence.
Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.
“That’s the Trump plan, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said.
Google Leader On Burgum’s Vision for AI: “Fantastic”
Porat, the Google president, expressed no qualms with Burgum’s speech when she was asked about it on a panel later that day, instead stating that his “comments were fantastic.” Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.
Five years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that “we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change.” He outlined a plan to power its data centers by doing “things like pairing wind and solar power sources together, and increasing our use of battery storage.”
But at the Hill & Valley Forum, Porat outlined an energy agenda much more favorable to fossil fuels. During the panel, she touted a recent Google white paper that didn’t once mention wind or solar, even though they generally remain the cheapest form of power generation worldwide. The document instead called for federal investment in “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture (among other sources).”
Others at the conference voiced direct skepticism of renewable energy, including David Friedberg, co-host of the popular pro-Trump tech podcast All-In. “To scale up energy, it’s not about solar, it’s not about wind, those might have been nice from a narrative perspective, but scalable energy production requires these next-gen systems and we have to unlock that,” he claimed during a panel about reindustrializing America.
In reality, last year, nearly 93 percent of new power additions worldwide came from renewable sources.
Trump’s AI Action Plan
When the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan in Washington, D.C., in late July, the event was presented in the form of a live podcast hosted by Friedberg and his other All-In co-hosts, as well as the founders of Hill & Valley.
“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the plan reads. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”
The plan claims that it will ensure free speech in AI systems by eliminating “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” It further constricts federal spending to developers of the type of AI models, such as ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok, “who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”
Some climate groups were quick to condemn the proposal. “This U.S. AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors,” KD Chavez, executive director of the national advocacy group Climate Justice Alliance, said in a statement.
But if Google has any concerns about the anti-climate AI policies being pursued by the White House, the company isn’t showing it. At a mid-July AI event in Pennsylvania, Porat heaped more praise on the Trump administration.
“Mr. President, thank you for your leadership and for your clear and urgent direction that our nation invest in AI infrastructure, technology and the energy to unlock its benefits so that America can continue to lead,” she said.
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. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
The U.S. Department of Energy shared an image of coal with the message, “She is the moment,” on social media on July 31, 2025. (Image: U.S. Department of Energy/X)
“The Trump administration wants us all choking, sick, misinformed, and working ourselves to death so that a few from the luxury class can be ever more wealthy,” said one science communicator.
The U.S. Department of Energy came under fire from scientists and other climate action advocates on Thursday for a social media post celebrating coal, as President Donald Trump works to boost the fossil fuel, despite its devastating impacts on public health and the planet.
On X—the platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who left the Trump administration earlier this year—the department shared an image of coal with the message, “She’s an icon. She’s a legend. And she is the moment.”
The audio of television host Wendy Williams saying that, while speaking about rapper Lil’ Kim, often has been repurposed by social media users. However, the DOE’s use of the phrase to glamorize coal sparked swift and intense backlash.
“POV: It’s 1885 and you work for the Department of Energy,” wrote Jonas Nahm, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served on the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden.
Democratic members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources replied: “She is inefficient. She is dirtier air. She is higher energy bills.”
Multiple X users pointed to coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, a condition that occurs when coal dust is inhaled—including California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office, which wrote, “She’s black lung.”
The national Democratic Party account said, “In April, Trump cut a program that gave free black lung screenings to coal miners.”
After U.S. District Judge Irene Berger—appointed by former President Barack Obama in West Virginia—issued a preliminary injunction against firings at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, nearly 200 workers who screen coal miners for black lung were reinstated.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has taken various steps to attack the climate and benefit the fossil fuel industry, such as picking fracking CEO Chris Wright to lead DOE, signing coal-friendly executive orders in April and issuing proclamations that provide what the White House called “regulatory relief” for a range of facilities, including coal plants, earlier this month.
“Hard to fathom this coming from the DOE if there were any sane, reasonable, rational, or thoughtful government in control,” Graham Lau, an astrobiologist and science communicator, said of the department’s pro-coal X post. “The Trump administration wants us all choking, sick, misinformed, and working ourselves to death so that a few from the luxury class can be ever more wealthy. Coal is not the moment. Coal is not going to meet U.S. energy needs. Coal is not the way forward.”
Climate and clean energy investor Ramez Naam wrote, “She is the past,” and shared the graph below, which features data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration about coal consumption since 1960.
Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at Canada’s University of Ottawa studying contentious climate debates, quipped, “Just the U.S. Department of Energy shilling for one of the most destructive industries known to humanity cool cool cool.”
In the early 1900s, coal mining in the United States often killed more than 2,000 workers per year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. Over the past decade, it has killed roughly 10 people annually.
It’s not just coal miners who are at risk. Research published in the journal Science two years ago found that “from 1999-2020, approximately 460,000 deaths in the Medicare population were attributable to coal electricity-generating emissions.”
Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence, said Thursday: “The fact that they’re coding coal as female is right in line with the fact that Trump is a rapist. They take everything they want, they think the planet is like a woman they can just exploit, and fuck whomever they hurt in the process.”
Several women have accused the president of sexual assault, including journalist E. Jean Carroll, who said he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s. Although Trump has denied the allegations, in 2023, a New York City jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images
The UK’s broken justice system is locking young activists like me away – and we’ll all suffer the consequences
My name’s Ella. I am a fairly average 22-year-old from Birmingham, central England. I have friends, a supportive family, and hopes and dreams for after graduation. I’m also facing up to ten years in prison.
On 5 August last year, I was arrested along with three others on a side street in Gatley, near Manchester, just after 4am. We had been planning to enter Manchester Airport’s airfield – provided it was safe to do so – to block the taxiway by glueing our hands to the tarmac.
We didn’t get near the airport, but I have been held in HMP Styal, a women’s prison just outside Manchester, ever since. I was charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and spent six months in prison awaiting trial. I was found guilty in February and will have served three months by the time I am sentenced at the end of this month.
So what drives a young person like me to take nonviolent action as drastic as this? You may have realised that I am a member of Just Stop Oil. At the time of my arrest, I was carrying boltcutters, glue, a hi-vis jacket, and a banner reading ‘sign the treaty’ in all caps.
It was the summer of 2024, the hottest year ever recorded. We were trying to send a message to the British government: it must sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and make an immediate plan to transition away from oil, gas and coal to prevent further global heating, climate breakdown, and eventual societal collapse.
We wanted to go to an airport – a symbol of the carbon economy – to make clear that the UK’s ‘business as usual’ approach is sending humanity over a cliff edge into destruction, displacement, and massive loss of life.
Our protest may have seemed drastic, but as I tried to explain to the judge and the jury, it was proportionate to the scale of the crisis we are facing. We all stand to lose everything.
Until my arrest, I was a final-year environmental science student at the University of Leeds. As I told the court, the science is clear: burning and extracting fossil fuels is heating the planet and leading to mass crop failure, with food insecurity and starvation for large parts of the world and drastic price hikes on staples for the rest of us. Crop failure on this scale will kill millions and displace many more. A billion people could be on the move within 25 years. The impacts will be felt everywhere, by everyone.
I spoke about my university lecturers, who are prominent climate scientists and are fearful for their children’s lives. They feel they aren’t being listened to, that the government is implementing policies contrary to science. I said that the knowledge I had gained from studying gave me a responsibility to act.
Court trials like mine are remarkably technical – you must submit a legal defence if you want the judge to allow jurors to consider your motivation, or the context of your actions. I did not have a lawyer and, like my co-defendants, put forward a defence of ‘self-defence’ and ‘necessity’.
I argued that I acted not only to protect the lives of the millions already living on the frontline of climate breakdown, but in defence of myself and young people globally. I told the court how I am afraid for my own future, the future of my brother, my friends, my cousins, and all young people everywhere.
The judge dismissed this, saying the climate crisis does not pose an ‘immediate threat to life’. He told jurors to ignore the context around our actions and focus only on whether we had planned to commit a ‘crime’, saying that anything they’d heard about climate change during the hearing was irrelevant as it was a political or philosophical belief.
But the climate crisis is not a belief, it is science, and science doesn’t care about legal defences, judges’ rulings or prison sentences. It will continue to worsen and take more lives until governments work together to stop burning fossil fuels.
Conservative ministers loudly championed free speech – right up until they outlawed it. Now, we’re all at risk
Over the past six months in prison, this truth has become clearer and clearer. Climate breakdown is no longer something I read about in textbooks, study in lectures, or write about in exams. I’m seeing it through the bars of my cell window.
On New Year’s Day, a state of emergency was declared as Greater Manchester was hit by heavy rains. Over a thousand people were evacuated from flooded homes – HMP Styal’s prison officers among them – their possessions ruined, and huge disruption caused.
The rising waters cut off the roads leading to the prison, causing a staffing crisis that compromised our safety, with no one allowed to leave their wings or houses. The prison’s library and workplaces were flooded, ruining books and leaving some prisoners with no work or activities even after the regime returned to normal.
Such extreme weather is being seen everywhere. On the penultimate day of my hearing, 14 people were killed in floods in the US state of Kentucky, including a seven-year-old girl and her mother, who were washed away in their car. I used my closing speech to tell jurors about this, about how upset it made me. How many people will die before we open our eyes?
The judge ruled it irrelevant.
Having been barred from considering almost everything we’d said, the jury had little choice but to find us guilty. I am grateful to all twelve of them, though, for listening to what we had to say for three weeks and making the only decision they could within the constraints given.
Despite the guilty verdict, being in prison and my impending sentencing, I am at peace. I should have had my whole life ahead of me, and my future now hangs in the balance, but I know that I acted in line with my conscience and moral convictions and, above all, nonviolently: without violence and actively against violence.
Being on trial at a crown court in my early twenties was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. But what choice did I have? At university, I studied the truth, and now I have to act on it.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside coal and energy workers during an executive order signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet,” said one environmental lawyer.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed multiple executive orders that aim to boost the coal industry, a move that critics denounced as “reckless” and “breathlessly stupid” even before the orders were officially unveiled.
Among the orders signed Tuesday, Trump directed U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to acknowledge the end of a moratorium that had halted new coal leasing on public lands and to prioritize coal leasing and related activities, and also directed U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to determine whether coal used in steel production can be considered a “critical material.” According to Reuters, permitting this classification would pave the way for the administration to use emergency powers to boost production.
Trump also paused environmental regulation imposed under former President Joe Biden that applied to certain coal-burning power plants thereby purportedly “safeguarding the nation’s energy grid and security, and saving coal plants from closure.”
Additionally, one order directed the “Energy Department to develop a process for using emergency powers to prevent unprofitable coal plants from shutting down in order to avert power outages,” according to The New York Times, a move that may face court challenges.
Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at the green group Earthjustice, said Tuesday: “Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet. President Trump’s efforts to rescue failing coal plants and open our lands to destructive mining is another in a series of actions that sacrifices American lives for fossil fuel industry profit. Instead of investing in pollution, we should be leading the way on clean energy.”
“The only way to prop up coal is to deny reality, and the reality is that people no longer rely on coal because it’s expensive, unreliable, and devastating to public health,” said Julie McNamara, an associate policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement on Tuesday.
“Instead of supporting the economy-boosting clean energy transition that maintains widespread public support across the country, President Trump is relentlessly attempting to tear it down.”
Trump has vowed to support what he calls “beautiful, clean coal,” though the industry has been in decline for years. Coal-fired electricity generation has dropped from 38.5% of the country’s generation mix in 2014 to 14.7% in 2024, according to a 2025 factbook from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Coal is also the dirtiest fossil fuel.
The executive order builds on previous moves by the Trump administration. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an effort to rollback a host of EPA regulations, including some that will impact coal producers.
On the first day of his second term, Trump declared a “national energy emergency” intended to help deliver on his campaign pledge to “drill, baby, drill.” That emergency defined energy to include oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal, flowing water, and critical minerals—but it omitted solar and wind.
Reporting earlier Tuesday indicated that Trump would sign an order invoking presidential emergency authority to force coal-fired power plants to stay open.
In a statement released in response to that reporting, Tyson Slocum, energy program director at the watchdog Public Citizen, said: “Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands.”
“Coal kills. In the last two decades, nearly half a million Americans have died from exposure to coal pollution,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the environmental organization the Sierra Club in a statement on earlier on Tuesday, also in response to reports that executive orders were forthcoming.
In another move that generated swift criticism, Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate state policies that are aimed at confronting the climate crisis and to take action to stop enforcement of those laws.
According to The Washington Post, it is unclear what authority would the agency would rely on. The order specifically calls out state climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont.
“President Trump’s executive order weaponizes the Justice Department against states that dare to make polluters pay for climate damage,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Make Polluters Pay—a campaign to build public support for climate litigation—in a statement on Wednesday.
“This is the fossil fuel industry’s desperation on full display—they’re so afraid of facing evidence of their deception in court that they’ve convinced the president to launch a federal assault on state sovereignty. We are watching corporate capture of government unfold in real time,” DiPaola added.
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