Chatbot, Are We Cooked?
It’s too damn hot, and Big Tech is turning up the heat.
On Tuesday, as New Yorkers headed to the polls for the primaries—hours before Zohran Mamdani’s joyous triumph over Andrew Cuomo would be apparent—it was 100°F, the outdoor public pools were closed to the public, and my neighbors were barefoot in the spray of a fire hydrant. “Opening fire hydrants without spray caps is illegal, wasteful, and dangerous,” read the 12:34 pm email I received from the city. Also wasteful and dangerous was failing to open the city’s public pools in time for a record-breaking heat dome.
A climate-resilient city would offer, as Johanna Bozuwa has persuasively written, abundant opportunities for “low-carbon leisure” like public pools, which can double as life-saving means of cooling off during extreme heat events. On Tuesday the pools were closed but the polls were open, air conditioning wafting out of the open doors. The mailman passed by, a wet towel around his neck, blue shirt drenched with sweat.
The sweltering heat had barely abated by the time the news broke that the young and unabashedly progressive Mamdani had defeated the billionaire-backed disgraced former governor to clinch the Democratic mayoral nomination. (Revolving Door Project doesn’t make political endorsements, but after the fact, it’s safe to say this election has rattled the calcified Democratic establishment in important ways.)
This newsletter is not about the election, but about the heat dome that loomed over it, swamping much of the country. Still, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the all-too-rare feeling of political joy. While I was worrying and writing about the extreme heat, my phone was silently filling up with messages in the canvassing group chats, where volunteers were organizing pollsite visibility shifts and offering water to anyone who needed it. Perhaps this is a contradiction worth holding onto: how much can still be accomplished within the harsh parameters of our unequal, fast-warming world.
The Coldest Summer of the Rest of Your Life
Over the last forty-eight hours, more than 100 million Americans—a third of the country—have experienced dangerous temperatures across the eastern half of the United States. In Washington D.C., the capital approached record heat as Senate Republicans worked to accelerate the planet’s warming by dismantling the nation’s multibillion dollar investments in clean energy.
Extreme heat is one of the most deadly routine consequences of climate change, deadlier than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. But experts say that people chronically underestimate its dangers. News stories often default to images of people sunbathing and frolicking in fountains and on beaches to “beat the heat,” but on Monday and Tuesday afternoon, when temperatures reached their peaks, more people were at work and school, some without air conditioning.
Agriculture, construction, delivery, landscaping, and oil and gas workers suffer the highest rates of heat-related illness. During the Biden administration the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed a rule requiring employers to offer water and rest breaks under extreme temperatures, which fossil fuel trade groups opposed. Now the Trump administration is considering sabotaging this rule. David Keeling, Trump’s pick to lead OSHA, previously worked for companies that opposed federal worker protections, including UPS and Amazon, whose workers frequently face heat-related illness.
Power outages during heat waves exacerbate the risk of life-threatening consequences for those left without power. Over the last few days, sporadic outages were reported in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and elsewhere. As the heat wave approached last week, I was struck by how little coverage I was seeing on the risk of blackouts in major cities; most of the relevant stories warning of that possibility were from 2023 and 2024. After PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, issued a “Maximum Generation Alert” for Tuesday June 24, Wired elevated its excellent story from 2023 on how a grid collapse would make extreme heat far more deadly. But in general, it seemed that if any major blackout were to hit during this heat dome, it would catch people by surprise.
I’d argue that this is a serious political failure. It’s other kinds of failures, too (including a media failure). But in a country where climate change is so politicized that the political party which holds the White House, both chambers of Congress, and a majority on the Supreme Court is working energetically to ensure that we don’t address it, it’s essential that the opposition party connect the dots for the public between the climate disasters we’re suffering, the policies that could remedy them, and the politicians and powerful corporate interests who are sabotaging those policies at every turn. A functional opposition would loudly draw attention to the governing regime advancing policy to line the pockets of their fossil fuel benefactors while leaving the rest of us to fry like an egg.
“Weather is already political, because weather today is increasingly shaped by political choices,” I wrote two years ago for this newsletter. Since then, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 421 to 431 parts per million. We are rocketing far beyond the “safe” limit of 350 ppm.
Last year, climate disasters cost the United States nearly one trillion dollars, or about 3 percent of the country’s GDP. “This mainly comes from skyrocketing home insurance premiums, which have doubled since 2017, as well as expensive weather disasters, like the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton ($113 billion) and the Los Angeles fires ($65 billion),” Ryan Cooper wrote for The American Prospect. Climate change is so costly that “the economic cost of policy to fix climate change is actually negative.” But DOGE thinks that firing firefighters ahead of fire season is a better way to save money. We’re moving backwards, fast, and at an incalculable cost.
We’re Paying Big Tech’s Energy Bills
Electricity bills are rising steeply for people around the country. There are many factors behind this increase, including the volatile price of gas and the skyrocketing quantities of gas being exported abroad. Another lesser known source of these price hikes is the rapid buildout of data centers for artificial intelligence.
Utility customers are paying for some of the costs associated with altering grid infrastructure to serve tech companies’ voracious–and rapidly growing–demand, a recent report from Wood MacKenzie found. In March, a paper from the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative explored how “the public is paying the energy bills of some of the largest companies in the world,” including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. And in April, a report from Good Jobs First revealed that states across the country are endangering their budgets by offering massive tax exemption programs to tech companies, with at least ten states already losing more than $100 million per year in revenue.
Local communities around the country are increasingly vocalizing their opposition to these massive data centers. Some states, like Minnesota and Indiana, are looking to tighten guardrails to ensure that residential customers don’t foot the bill for data centers’ needs. Other states continue to offer incentives and loopholes to Big Tech, including West Virginia, where a new law offers data center operators “fast-tracked permitting, special tax treatment, and access to fossil-fuel-powered microgrids.”
AI is rapidly cementing itself as a “disaster multiplier.” The consequences of its unchecked expansion range from exacerbating water shortages and increasing pollution to emboldening the surveillance state and spreading misinformation. And the text of the GOP budget bill currently includes a ten year ban on states regulating AI, emboldening Big Tech’s harmful excesses. If you read one thing about AI, a good option is the latest report from AI Now Institute, which reckons with “the ways in which today’s AI isn’t just being used by us, it’s being used on us.”
The authors point out that it isn’t widely understood yet that the AI industry is “fundamentally incentivized to hurt the interests of working people and families.” High profile stories on the risks of AI often focus on the existential risks, rather than its material impacts. But AI intersects with people’s lived experiences in many ways which need to be made more visible, and connected to a bigger story—a story about power. In coming months, we’ll be diving deeper into how AI is being wielded against the public interest, whether that’s DOGE eliminating public servants from government and replacing them with chatbots, or data centers increasing planet-warming pollution and straining the grid in an era of dangerous heat.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Attacks on Federal Climate Data Will Accelerate a Financial Crisis
Mapping the Home Insurance Crisis: A Closer Look at North Carolina
Why Is a Former Obama Official Attacking the Left on Climate?
Trump Cracks Down on Undocumented People as Corporate Harms Continue Unabated
Revolving Door Project Launches Corporate Crime Enforcement Capacity Tracker
Don't Let Polls Poison Your Brain
I lived through four years of excessive energy bills after leaving Florida where bills were normally $700 monthly for a family of four (from nuclear power) and moving to SC for job relocation. Our bills for a 1600 sq. ft. home built in the 50’s with original construction was $400 a month. Believing this was reasonable not realizing my bills were literally paying for two nuclear plants who were not viable near the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion project. Customers like us were left paying billions for a non-existent power plants. This is what happens when Republicans remove regulations aka consumer protections. Since then Dominion has taken over and continues to increase our rates annually. Our bills have now risen from $160 per month to over $205. Anyone who states free power is a scam needs to be ignored and never be allowed to enter office anywhere.