Tech giant Amazon, which has for years portrayed itself as a global corporate climate leader, sponsored an AI energy summit featuring prominent climate deniers, DeSmog can reveal.
 
The C3 Energy Summit on “American Leadership in Energy Innovation,” which took place in Washington, D.C., this week, featured sponsors and speakers from across the world of oil and gas, including a keynote from Chris Wright, President Trump’s energy secretary and vice-chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, who has previously stated that “There is no climate crisis.”
 
The summit featured Jarrod Agen, executive director of Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, who in 2010 stated, “Science is best left to the experts, and currently there is lively debate on the impact of humanity’s impact on global warming and climate change.”

He more recently stated that renewables “haven’t proven that they can get off the ground,” when in fact they are the fastest-growing energy source worldwide. At the event, Agen said that the Trump administration wants to “optimize” and “grow” the coal sector, according to audio obtained by DeSmog.

The Amazon sponsorship comes despite the fact that the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, pledged $10 billion to fight climate change in 2020 – setting up the Bezos Earth Fund, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to address climate change to date. Bezos even renamed a sports stadium in Washington state the Climate Pledge Arena at the time.

But Amazon is now the biggest owner of water and energy-guzzling data centers in the world, and like other tech companies, it has shifted away from supporting clean energy towards touting nuclear and natural gas as electricity sources for the infrastructure needed to power AI. 

The company, which donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, didn’t respond to detailed questions from DeSmog.

Charles Koch and Harold Hamm

The summit featured a wide variety of speakers who sang the praises and promise of fossil fuel-powered AI data centers. This is a position lauded by Trump and a hallmark of his National Energy Dominance Council agenda, which is tasked with expanding markets for America’s “amazing natural assets,” including “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products,” and “coal.”

A coterie of organizations linked to climate deniers joined Amazon in its event sponsorship. Co-sponsors included Stand Together, a political organization and charitable group founded by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, who for decades has helped fund and promote efforts to question the science of climate change.

Another sponsor was the Hamm Energy Institute, which was created by oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a close Trump ally who’s previously stated that “Climate change isn’t our biggest problem.” The institute put out a recent paper saying, “natural gas has emerged as the most reliable baseload” to provide energy to power AI, despite industry data showing that renewables are the quickest and most economic electricity source to install.
 
Speakers at the summit expressed strong support for the weakening of permitting laws, including environmental protection, which slow down energy and AI development.
 
In his opening speech, Wright advocated for a “bipartisan permitting reform bill” to speed up U.S. energy infrastructure and data center build out, audio obtained by DeSmog revealed. He called the National Environmental Policy Act, the foundational law that mandates environmental impact assessments in federal projects, a “massive problem,” and tacked on a plea for “common sense around the Endangered Species Act.”
 
Agen meanwhile claimed that the White House discusses permitting reform “every day” and is “doing what we can do from the executive level” to shorten a “two-year permitting process … to weeks.”

Industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute and the American Gas Association are also pushing permitting reform. Meanwhile, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity says that such legislation can hasten “new pipelines, export terminals and delivery systems” along with expanding “LNG and crude oil exports.”

Climate Pledge?

Since the AI boom began, Amazon has been mired in controversy for obscuring the full extent of its data center water use, and failing to meet its climate emissions goals due to the skyrocketing energy demands of its AI business. It’s also raised eyebrows by selling AI tools for oil and gas exploration, and hinting at embracing off-grid natural gas power for its data centers.
 
At the end of November, 1,000 Amazon employees wrote an open letter to the company accusing it of “casting aside its climate goals to build AI.”

Only a few weeks after receiving the letter, Amazon sponsored the C3 Summit, hosted by the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions (C3), a think tank that supports fossil fuel expansion and has praised Wright for being “clear-eyed about the importance of fossil fuels for the long haul.”
 
C3 has also weighed in on the impact of the AI boom. “AI isn’t destroying the planet,” the organisation posted on Instagram, just a few days before the Amazon summit. “It’s not AI vs. the planet. Its innovation vs. red tape.”

A Gas Chorus

Wright and Agen were only two of a grab bag of summit speakers from across the energy industry who celebrated natural gas as an AI energy solution. “It’s a very very important role,” Kyle Danish, partner at law practice Van Ness Feldman, said in a conference session on “Energy for AI.” The practice was a summit co-sponsor that has boasted of being “one of nation’s most well-renowned natural gas & oil practices.” 

Mike Howard, CEO of summit co-sponsor Howard Energy Partners, a company that builds and operates natural gas pipelines, informed a session on “Energy Poverty Solutions” that his company wants to “double in size in the next five years … through increase in natural gas usage because … of data centers.”

Five years ago, when announcing the Bezos Earth Fund, the Amazon CEO stated that “Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.”

Earlier this year the fund halted funding to the Science Based Targets Initiative, a key global climate certification organization for companies. 

Amazon insists it’s still committed to fighting climate change. It announced in August that it reached a goal of powering its global operations with 100 percent renewable energy seven years ahead of schedule.

Yet, the company does not appear to have ruled out relying on powering AI with gas in the future. At an energy summit this April, Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, told a room of oil and gas and tech executives that “to have the energy we need for the grid [to power data centers], it’s going to take an ‘all of the above’ approach for a period of time.”

But having only a temporary boost in fossil fuels is not necessarily a goal shared by speakers at the C3 Energy Summit, who want oil and gas to dominate long into the future. “We need a permanent regime,” said Mike Catanzaro, CEO of the Republican lobbying group CGCN, in reference to deregulating natural gas pipelines, among other sectors. “We’re talking about these long-lived assets.”