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A conversation with Danielle Arigoni, author of the new book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation
When we talk about climate solutions, we often hear the word resilience. It’s the catch-all term for all the things we’re doing to prepare for the impacts of climate change — things like building seawalls and hardening homes and switching to renewable energy sources. But planning for the future is a tricky thing, and, argues Danielle Arigoni, author of the new bookClimate Resilience for an Aging Nation (Island Press), there’s one section of American society that is left out of resilience as we think of it today: older adults.
Arigoni spent much of her career working as an urban planner for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but it was only once she started working at the AARP that she came to see how aging populations were often left out of urban design considerations. Now the managing director for policy and solutions at National Housing Trust, Arigoni spends her time working on climate-friendly affordable housing solutions.
Resilience, she writes in her book, is not just a matter of hardening physical infrastructure to keep the natural world out, but should incorporate the social connections that shape our days. As the country’s population ages, designing climate solutions that take older adults into account will be crucial not only for saving the lives of older adults, but for creating a more just future for everyone.
I spoke with Arigoni about her research, and what a more aging-friendly form of resiliency looks like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does climate change affect older populations in particular?
I mean, in a lot of ways. Certainly in disasters, we see that for a whole bunch of reasons, whether it’s mobility, or frailty, or cognitive decline, older adults are not able to respond in the same ways that younger people do. I think that’s partly a failure of emergency management to anticipate those conditions.
But even outside of disasters, we see that older adults oftentimes are living from a precarious financial standpoint. Fifteen percent of older adults live at or below the poverty line, which means they just do not have any available funds to decamp for a few days to safer ground or to weatherize their home or to stockpile resources.
And all of those things compile to a set of circumstances where older adults are either living in homes that they can’t afford to heat and cool in response to changing conditions, or they’re living in places where their homes are deteriorating because of climate impacts and they’re unable to fix them, which then sets off a kind of snowball effect of health problems as well. Something like 80% of all people over 65 have two or more chronic conditions, and when that gets layered on top of extreme heat and wildfire smoke and indoor mold and all of these other things, that multiplies the effects.
Does heat affect older adults in a different way from the larger population?
Heat is the deadliest extreme weather phenomenon in our country, and 80% of the casualties are older adults. And that is for a lot of reasons. To begin, older adults can’t process heat in the way that young bodies can; our ability to sweat changes as we age. So that’s part of it.
But heat also complicates and sits on top of underlying medical conditions and prescriptions. So there might be symptoms of heat illness that get masked because they resemble the effects of things like heart disease, or COPD, or respiratory challenges, or the effect of the medication, so it goes untreated.
And then when you layer on top of that the number of older adults who live alone, who may not even have someone to recognize that they’re starting to be disoriented and lose their balance, or that they are sitting in a house that’s 80 degrees when it really needs to be set at 72 because that person is too afraid of what their utility bills are going to cost that month.
All those factors compile and really just accelerate the risk for older adults in extreme heat. Extreme heat also isolates people further; they can’t go and knock on a neighbor’s door to ask for help if it’s 110 degrees out.
In your book you pointed out that there’s a link between where older adults live and climate risk.
Yeah, something like 50% of the older adults in the country live in about nine states. And those nine states are, for the most part, the states where climate risks are the greatest. So it’s places like California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, the last of which just saw six straight weeks of 100 degree temperatures this summer. And yet Phoenix is one of the fastest growing areas for older adults. So you have to, at some point, stop and kind of scratch your head and wonder how we can better inform people so that they aren’t moving into areas where they are taking on greater risk.
Phoenix, to its credit, has already said they’re stopping new development because they’re running out of water. That was a recognition of the intersection between resources and habitability and development patterns. I don’t think we’ve necessarily done that, for the most part, in many communities. I think that’s a decision no local official wants to make. They don’t want to say they’re anti-growth.
There’s an interesting political conundrum here. Some of these places, like Florida and Texas and Louisiana, are places with legislatures that aren’t, shall we say, very climate-forward. And these older adults you’re concerned about might not care much for it either. So how do you navigate that?
It has to be education, right? There’s something in the lived experience of seeing that hurricane season is becoming longer and more frequent. That is testing even the presumptions of people who’ve been in Florida for a long time thinking they can live through it. When you’re experiencing more and more disasters to the point that it’s truly interfering with your well-being or maybe your financial viability —, like if all of your money is tied up in your home and your home is now in a floodplain, for example —, it prompts some very real and very timely conversations about what to do. So it’s just a matter of time before the real cost of being in some of these places becomes hard to ignore.
There’s a section in your book titled “Climate Planning and Disaster Resilience Tools Generally Fail The Age-Friendly Test.” What does resilience look like today, and how is it falling short for the elderly?
I think one arm of resiliency is the energy efficiency and carbon reduction set of activities, which is where we’re striving to reduce our carbon emissions. And we’re going to put in place a whole bunch of policies and programs to drive down the cost of that initiative. Another pillar is in hazard mitigation planning. FEMA unlocks a lot of hazard mitigation dollars for states and communities that have completed a plan before disaster strikes.
So those are kind of two disparate pillars: One is climate mitigation, and the other is risk mitigation. Neither of those think about age in a concerted way right now. In the requirements that FEMA just updated for state hazard mitigation plans that had been in place for like nine years, there’s one mention of considering demographic change when you’re writing your plan, but they don’t say you should project who your population is and what their needs are.
I think it’s a real missed opportunity, because those mitigation plans set the course for all the FEMA funds that follow. Oftentimes they become a vessel which other public resources are poured into as well. If you’re not identifying the needs of older adults right at the outset, you’re really missing that nuance in terms of what risk mitigation looks like for them.
Similarly, on the climate mitigation side, there’s a whole set of activities around, for example, making New York state a great place to age, but they don’t tie into the climate plan that New York state has put in place. Wouldn’t it make sense if we focus those investments in bringing utility costs down, in incorporating renewable energy and making energy efficiency investments, in those same places where we know older adults are already paying too much for their housing and are unable to afford to keep their utilities running or upgrade their homes? That would reduce their risk too.
I’m curious about the shortfalls of the solutions that we do build. I think a lot about how in places that are hurricane-prone, for example, you see a lot of houses on stilts. And I’m wondering if there’s just a simple mobility problem here.
I think that there’s sometimes a failure to acknowledge mobility challenges, certainly with elevating homes, but also just in terms of accessing transportation options, and relocation or evacuation options. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t accessible elevated homes, I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t seen any with my own two eyes. But I don’t necessarily know that that’s a really thoughtful solution. Even when we think about cooling centers that are being established for heat waves, it’s great that those exist, but I’m not sure that planners are always thinking about how people are getting to them. Those kinds of breakdowns that are part of the problem.
The harder conversation, frankly, is how do we relocate people out of harm’s way when elevating maybe is not going to be a very sustainable solution? Relocating is such a thorny topic, I think particularly so for older adults who may have lived their entire lives in one location. The notion of moving and being displaced because of climate change is a very, very difficult kind of identity crisis. It’s a pretty philosophical challenge, in addition to all the logistical challenges of moving your home, your community, and your livelihood.
What does climate resilience geared towards older populations look like? It sounds like you’re advocating for essentially an overhaul of a lot of things, because there are all these interconnected systems.
Yeah, it’s not a simple solution. When I think about what a climate-resilient community looks like, it certainly includes all the hard infrastructure that you would want — sea walls or levees, the sort of infrastructure that we think could mitigate risk. But it would also include a lot more thoughtfulness about how we’re designing our communities to live in every day. So thinking about different ways of designing housing, for example: how do we create communities where there’s more housing choice, so people can live in smaller units that will consume less energy and encourage more organic interaction than you see in suburbs? Hopefully they’ll be fueled by renewable energy as well so you’re eliminating that utility cost burden that is really problematic for low-income older adults.
There’s also making sure we have a robust transportation system so that you have not just a public transit system that works and gets people where they need to go every day of the year, but is also designed in ways that allow people to still use it when it’s hot. That means shade and seating, maybe even cooling factors at bus stops. Because otherwise, this transit system will not serve people if it is too hot outside. So you really have to think holistically about all of the elements that it takes to make a more climate resilient place.
I would also say communication and social connectedness is a huge part of it too. A good number of older adults do not have in-home internet or smartphones, so they don’t access the internet on a daily basis. So if you’re relying upon these systems to notify people or to get them to sign up for things that are going to reduce their risks, then you’re probably missing a whole bunch of people. So how do you cultivate a multi-pronged approach where you’re using all the levers you have available to you, including people like home health aides, or service organizations like Meals on Wheels, to get information to people in ways that they can access and utilize it?
Your point about home health aides reminds me that you drew a connection between climate and COVID-19 in your book. What lessons can we learn from the pandemic that can be applied to climate change?
Tragically, what we learned is that older adults are viewed as expendable. I think we somehow accepted the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of people who die from COVID-19 were older adults. It didn’t cause the kind of outrage that I think it should have. And I think some of that same thing is happening here with climate-fueled disasters.
COVID taught us the importance of getting information and support to people in their homes. I think there’s this presumption that when we plan for nursing homes we’ve checked the box, we’ve covered older adults’ needs. But that’s only true for a very small number of older adults — the vast majority live in their homes, often alone, particularly older women. And so how do you get services and information to folks in their home in ways that understand and appreciate their mobility challenges?
It’s interesting that so much of what you’re talking about is communication. I feel like when people hear the word resilience, they think of these big plans to transform the built environment.
I think communication is a huge part of why we’re here. And by that I mean the inability of these different siloed technical fields to communicate with one another. Emergency management and hazard mitigation people use a very different language than aging advocates do, who use a very different language than sustainability advocates do. They speak different languages, and they report in different structures, and they’re funded by different agencies. And never the twain shall meet. There are not a lot of opportunities where those things come together like they should.
My hope is that by communicating more effectively with aging advocates in terms that they understand, using programs that they are responsible for administering, they then see climate change as part of their mission. It needs to be the same way when talking to emergency managers about hazard mitigation plans: We can begin to unpack the unique needs of older adults that might be falling through the cracks in terms of their existing planning efforts. We really need to create this middle ground of understanding.
Do you have a favorite solution? Or maybe a favorite place that has implemented these solutions well?
The one that comes to mind — and I’m a little biased because I went to school there — is Portland, Oregon.
During COVID, they developed a framework to get supplies into the homes of an array of people in the city, to ensure they had what they needed, whether it’s food or diapers or adult incontinence supplies. These are things that were really important to get to people. Then they layered that with really effective community-based organizations that could reach committees that were hard to reach. So they had a Latino group reaching Spanish speakers, they had an Asian American group reaching Asian immigrants, and so on.
After the pandemic, Portland was able to use their relationships with those groups during two summers in which terrible heat waves hit the region. They quickly deployed those same organizations to get portable heat pumps into people’s homes, and they prioritized low-income older adults. They were able to do that because they’d already cultivated that tradition of serving people in that community through trusted organizations. And I can’t help but think that it saved lives.
What do you think the federal government should be doing differently around climate resiliency and aging? Are there particular policies you’d like to see that target aging populations?
I think it needs to happen at all levels, from the local to the regional and state levels. And that can be accelerated by work at the federal level. So for example they could require that hazard mitigation plans, and applications for HUD programs, or BRIC, which is a FEMA program, have to include an analysis of demographic change, and what that means for people over 65.
That’s a step forward, because then you’ve got state planners and local leaders thinking about what their aging population needs, because the share of older adults is only going to grow, it’s not going to diminish.
Similarly, the Older Americans Act is going to be reauthorized soon, and that funds all kinds of agency work that supports home and community-based services so that people can age in place. There’s a real need there to acknowledge the fact that climate change is going to interfere with some people’s ability to do that. And that might mean that they need more utility assistance, because now they have to run the air conditioner longer or put the heater on more frequently. Or it might mean that they need different kinds of supports, like making sure these folks can evacuate during a flood.
Is there something you found in your research that people seem to constantly get wrong?
There’s a general impression that older adults are living their best lives, they’ve got their retirement savings and are going on cruises and playing golf. But it’s just not the case for so many older adults. Something like half of all people who are unhoused right now are single people over 50. There’s a whole set of upstream financial challenges many older adults face, including paying way too much of their income for housing because rents have skyrocketed and they often have fixed incomes. Not to mention all the other expenses that go along with getting older, such as prescriptions. So climate Is a risk magnifier financially as well.
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Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting untold billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story's publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and the rest only have so much political capital to spend.
When Donald Trump first became a serious Presidential candidate in 2015, many big tech leaders sounded the alarm. When the U.S. threatened to exit the Paris Agreement for the first time, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta) took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal urging Trump to stay in. He didn’t — and Elon Musk, in particular, was incensed.
But by the time specific climate legislation — namely the Inflation Reduction Act — was up for debate in 2022, these companies had largely clammed up. When Trump exited Paris once more, the response was markedly muted.
Now that the IRA’s tax credits face clear and present threats, this same story is playing out again. As the Senate makes its changes to the House’s proposed budget bill, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are keeping quiet, at least publicly, about their lobbying efforts. Most did not respond to my request for an interview or a statement clarifying their position, except to say they had “nothing to share on this topic,” as Microsoft did.
That’s not to say they have no opinion about the fate of clean energy tax credits. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all voluntarily set ambitious net-zero emissions targets that they’re struggling to meet, largely due to booming data center electricity demand. They’re some of the biggest buyers of solar and wind energy, and are investing heavily in nuclear and geothermal. (On Wednesday morning, Pennsylvania’s Talen Energy announced an expanded power purchase agreement with Amazon, for nearly 2 gigawatts of power through 2042.) All of these energy sources are a whole lot more accessible with tax credits than without.
There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy. Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.
The answer may come down to priorities. “It’s hard to overstate how much this race for AI has just completely changed the business models and the way that these big tech companies are thinking about investment,” Jeff Navin, co-founder of the climate-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me. “While they’re obviously going to be impacted by the price of energy, I think they’re even more interested and concerned about how quickly they can get energy built so that they can build these data centers.”
The tech industry has shown much more reluctance to stand up to Trump, period, this time around. As the president has moved from a political outsider to the central figure in the Republican party, hyperscalers have increasingly curried his favor as they advocate against actions that could pose an existential risk to their business — think tighter regulations on the tech sector or AI, or tariffs on key supplies made in Asia.
As Navin put it to me, “When you have a president who has very strong opinions on wind turbines and randomly throws companies’ names in tweets in the middle of the night, do you really want to stick your neck out and take on something that the president views as unpopular if you’ve got other business in front of him that could be more impactful for your bottom line?”
It is undeniably true that the AI-driven data center boom is pushing these companies to look for new sources of clean power. Last week Meta signed a major nuclear deal with Constellation Energy. Microsoft is also partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island, while Google and Amazon have both announced investments in companies developing small modular reactors. Meta, Google, and Microsoft are also investing in next-generation geothermal energy startups.
But while the companies are eager to tout these partnerships, Navin suspects most of their energy lobbying is now being directed towards efforts such as permitting reform and building out transmission infrastructure. Publicly available lobbying records confirm that these are indeed focus areas, as they’re critical to bringing data centers online quickly, regardless of how they’re powered and whether that power is subsidized. “They’re not going to stop construction on an energy project that has access to electricity just because that electricity is marginally more expensive,” Navin told me. “There’s just too much at stake.”
Tech companies have lobbied on numerous budget, tax, sustainability, and clean energy issues thus far this year. Amazon’s lobbying report is the only one to specifically call out efforts on “renewable energy tax credits,” while Meta cites “renewable energy policy” and Microsoft name-drops the IRA. But there’s no hard and fast standard for how companies describe the issues they’re lobbying on or what they’re looking to achieve. And perhaps most importantly, the reports don’t disclose how much money they allot to each issue, which would illuminate their priorities.
Lobbying can also happen indirectly, via industry groups such as the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Data Center Coalition. Both have been vocal advocates for preserving the tax credits. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed a lobbying push by the latter — which counts Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google among its most prominent members — that involved meetings with about 30 Republican senators and a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
DCC didn’t respond to my request for an interview. But CEBA CEO Rich Powell told me, “If we take away these incentives right now, just as we’re getting the rust off the gears and getting back into growth mode for the electricity economy, we’re really concerned about price spikes.”
The leader of another industry group, Advanced Energy United, shared Powell’s concern that passing the bill would mean higher electricity prices. Taking away clean energy incentives would ”fundamentally undercut the financing structure for — let’s be frank — the vast majority of projects in the interconnection queue today,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director of AEU, told me.
Being part of an industry association is by no means a guarantee of political alignment on every issue. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are also members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — by far the largest lobbying group in the U.S. — which has a long history of opposing climate action and the IRA itself. Apple even left the Chamber in 2009 due to its climate policy stances.
But Powell and Godfrey implied that the tech giants' views are — or at least ought to be — in alignment with theirs. “Many of our members are lobbying independently. Many of them are lobbying alongside us. And then many of them are supporting CEBA to go and lobby on this,” Powell told me, though he wouldn’t reveal what actions any specific hyperscalers were taking.
Godfrey said that AEU’s positions are “certainly reflective of what large energy consumers, notably tech companies, have been working to pursue across a variety of technologies and with applicability to a couple of different types of credits.”
And yet hyperscalers may have already spent a good deal of their political capital fighting for a niche provision in the House’s version of the budget bill, which bans state-level AI regulation for a decade. That would make the AI boom infinitely easier for tech companies, who don’t want to deal with a patchwork of varying regulations, or really most regulations at all.
On top of everything else, big tech in particular is dealing with government-led anti-trust lawsuits, both at home and abroad. Google recently lost two major cases to the Department of Justice, related to its search and advertising business. A final decision is pending regarding the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, regarding the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Not to be outdone, Amazon will also be fighting an antitrust case brought by the FTC next year.
As these companies work to convince the public, politicians, and the courts that they’re not monopolistic rule-breakers, and that AI is a benevolent technology that the U.S. must develop before China, they certainly seem to be relinquishing the clean energy mantle they once sought to carry, at least rhetorically. We’ll know more once all these data centers come online. But if the present is any indication, speed, not green electrons, is the North Star.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Amazon’s power purchase agreement with Talen Energy.