“I want to give you just a few points to keep in mind when this topic comes up so you understand,” Heartland Institute President James Taylor told state lawmakers and others who had gathered in Indianapolis for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) 52nd annual meeting last summer, “the climate crisis simply does not exist.”

Attacking the conclusions of climate science is hardly new for the Heartland Institute, which in 2012 ran a brief but notorious billboard campaign that depicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski with the caption “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

But Taylor’s speech at an ALEC side event came with a new AI-era twist on an old message: Bring back coal.

After several years of attacking big tech over the industry’s perceived politics, Heartland is now urging those same companies to burn coal and other fossil fuels to power the enormous data centers used to train and run so-called “artificial intelligence” systems and for cryptocurrency mining. During its July 2025 presentation, Heartland sought to convince listeners that coal can — and should — make a major comeback, documents reviewed by DeSmog show.

To a significant degree, big tech companies have so far kept the notoriously-polluting fossil fuel at arm’s length as they’ve moved to build new power plants to generate electricity for data centers. Nonetheless, the datacenter–linked surge in power demand and whipsawing government policies are spurring a minor comeback for coal — including a proposed 1.25 gigawatt energy center in Alaska that, if built, would be the first new coal plant opened in the U.S. since 2013.

Much of America’s pro-coal push is playing out at the federal level, with, for example, the Trump administration’s Department of Energy repeatedly intervening to force utilities to keep aging coal plants operating beyond their planned retirements — despite rising concerns over the costs. “Keeping the plants open has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which will be paid by ratepayers,” The New York Times reported.

Heartland’s presentation offers a window into how climate deniers have been pushing a similar pro-fossil fuel agenda at the state level.

“There is no global warming justification to shut down conventional power,” Heartland’s final slide reads. “We need MORE conventional energy and LESS wind and solar – not the other way around!”

A Playbook for the States

Over 1,600 people attended ALEC’s 2025 annual meeting, themed “States Rising,” including “elected officials, policy experts, and industry voices.”

For over 50 years, ALEC has offered corporate lobbyists a conduit to state lawmakers. “ALEC’s 2,000 legislator members pay a nominal fee for membership, but the organization’s real funding comes from corporate lobbyists and conservative mega-funders who want to see their agendas enacted in the states,” the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward wrote in its April 2025 report, A People’s Guide to ALEC’s Plan for the States. “The result is an organization that is remarkably effective at laundering the priorities of its donors into legislation. According to one analysis, between 2010 and 2018, legislators introduced 2,900 bills based on ALEC’s model legislation, and more than 600 became law.”

Since its July 2025 meeting, ALEC has adopted one model policy taking aim at financial incentives for “premature closures” of coal and natural gas power plants and another that would “streamline approval of energy facilities” (defined to include “oil refineries, natural gas plants, equipment and associated facilities” as well as renewable energy facilities).

ALEC has a long history of embracing coal and other fossil fuels — and 2025 proved to be no exception. “This past legislative session, at least 15 ‘grid reliability’ and ‘grid stability’ bills based on ALEC model policies were introduced in statehouses across the country,” a November 2025 analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy found. That count includes bills “legislating preferences for fossil fuels” that became law in Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio.

At the ALEC convention, the Heartland Institute took credit for a Louisiana law that Taylor described as directing state energy regulators to de-prioritize emissions concerns.

“Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry just signed into law a bill that does that,” Taylor said during a Q&A. “We at the Heartland Institute were working with him in that regard. We’d be happy to work in any other states to make that happen.” That Louisiana law also defined “green” energy to specifically include natural gas and nuclear power — but at the ALEC side event, Heartland talked up the emissions terms, which would also benefit coal.

ALEC has separately claimed credit for shaping that legislation, writing in July that Louisiana’s law “incorporates elements” of one of the organization’s 2024 model policies.

A Climate Clash

Roughly a decade ago, climate denial drove a public wedge between the Heartland Institute and ALEC. “Heartland’s strident policies on climate change may have strained a relationship with one of its most powerful remaining allies: the American Legislative Exchange Council, an influential organization that unites private interests and conservative politicians to craft legislative proposals,” PBS reported in 2018, listing companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and eBay that left ALEC in 2014 over what Google’s CEO at the time called “just literally lying” about climate change.

Signs of that strain may remain, with Heartland relegated to a “side event” during ALEC’s 2025 convention.

DeSmog reached out to Heartland and ALEC, asking if Taylor’s presentation may have influenced ALEC’s model policies.

“Any time Heartland gets an audience with policymakers, we have an impact,” Taylor said in an emailed response. “Policymakers within ALEC, throughout America, and around the world have requested copies and additional information in relation to the climate and energy presentation we delivered at ALEC. Then those policymakers have put that information to work.”

ALEC did not respond to questions from DeSmog.

Both Heartland and ALEC have a long history of fossil fuel ties, Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, told DeSmog. For instance, both have received funding in the past from ExxonMobil, Koch family foundations, and the American Petroleum Institute — and, the Center for Media and Democracy noted in 2016, from the coal industry, including the coal mining giant Alpha Natural Resources (now Alpha Metallurgical Resources, following a 2015 bankruptcy).

For Heartland, Graves said, the data center boom could offer a chance to push tech companies away from their green commitments. “They are trying to squeeze the tech companies to basically go back on whatever climate agreements or support for greener investments or greener energy they’ve made,” she said.

ALEC has also opposed “environmental, social and governance” investing, which surged in 2020 but has slowed in today’s political headwinds. “In fact, they’ve been at the forefront of efforts to basically block socially responsible investing, directed toward alternative energies,” Graves said.

Now, both coal and big tech are represented inside ALEC’s leadership.

ALEC is led, in part, by its “Private Enterprise Advisory Council,” made up of representatives from 21 companies, organizations, and trade associations.

“They’re the ones who are really footing the bill. They’re the companies that are the mainstays of ALEC,” Graves told DeSmog. “The politicians cycle through. But the ones that stay are that board.”

That council includes both Koch Companies Public Sector (a lobbying arm of the sprawling Koch business empire, including the coal marketer Koch Carbon) and the Information Technology Industry Council. The Information Technology Industry Council represents major technology companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI.

The Information Technology Industry Council did not respond to a request for comment from DeSmog.

‘A Brittle, Outmoded Technology’

On July 16, as Heartland took the podium, the impacts of a warming climate were on display: Texas was reeling from catastrophic flooding that killed 27 young campers and counselors along with dozens of others, wildfires had already burned over a million acres across 12 states that year, and the eastern half of the U.S. roasted under a massive heatwave.

Heartland kicked its presentation off with familiar climate denial talking points. It started with the false claim that “temperatures are unusually cool, not hot,” which it illustrated with figures from a 1998 study. A slide headlined “global warming is saving lives,” follows, then a prediction that “CO2 can cause no further warming” (sourced to “testimony in U.S. Congress” by two long-retired academics with histories of taking funding from coal companies).

For decades, the Heartland Institute has repeatedly pushed many of those same (widely rejected) claims and predictions about the climate. During that time, climate change has continued — and accelerated.

Even Heartland’s push for coal isn’t entirely new. Back in 2018, the group launched a pro-coal campaign, E&E News reported at the time. “We’re going into six different states where the Sierra Club is trying to close coal plants, and we’re going in and saying we need those coal plants,” Heartland’s then-CEO said.

Back then, the coal industry was in decline, slumping amid competition from a flood of cheap fracked gas and renewables’ rapid gains in cost and efficiency.

However, at the ALEC side event last year, Heartland faulted wind and solar energy for driving up costs and electrical utilities for “eliminating baseload coal power.”

“Electricity demand is growing, and will continue to grow, especially with the boom in computing data centers and server farms for technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing,” Heartland wrote.

Taylor presented figures suggesting solar and wind are wildly expensive compared to fossil fuels, illustrated on a slide called “Why Would We Want ‘All of the Above?’” (using a set of estimates covering one state, Texas, drawn from a 2022 paper).  

The energy industry, however, has been changing rapidly, even just in the past few years.

Attempts to compare costs between different types of energy tend to spur heated debate among energy experts — but what is clear is that coal is no longer the undisputed king of the power grid when it comes to cost.

“Today, renewable energy is the most affordable source of power in most parts of the world,” according to the United Nations. “Over 90 per cent of new renewable projects are now cheaper than fossil fuels alternatives.”

Environmental advocates and power grid experts say the idea that coal is uniquely reliable or well-suited to data center demand is also outdated.

“There is a high-profile effort to keep coal plants that are set to retire online and run them at unprecedented levels, ostensibly for reasons of reliability,” analysts at RMI, which supports a “zero-carbon future,” wrote last summer. “But the truth is, coal-fired power plants, far from being a reliable backbone for this new era of electricity demand, are a brittle, outmoded technology that threatens to undermine the very grid resilience they’re being proposed to protect.”

The state-level push for coal has been massively bolstered by the Trump administration’s aggressive pro-coal stance and willingness to ditch environmental standards — including federal limits governing toxic coal wastewater, coal ash, and dangerous air pollutants like sulfur dioxide. In February, for example, DeSmog reported that the Trump administration tossed out Colorado’s haze standards, “repurposing measures initially intended to safeguard public health and prevent pollution to reboot the dirtiest, deadliest fossil fuel.”

At least 15 coal power plants pushed back planned retirements since the Trump administration took power, DeSmog reported in December — and that number has since risen. 

Electrical utilities themselves have begun pushing back — warning that keeping coal afloat carries rising costs.

Maintaining a major coal-fired unit at the F.B. Culley plant in Indiana “will require substantial investment to support an inefficient and increasingly unreliable asset,” CenterPoint Energy wrote in a Feb. 17, 2026 letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Despite those costs, America’s lurch towards coal has begun to drive global impacts. In 2025, coal demand fell in India and plateaued in China — but it surged in the U.S. “In the United States, gas-to-coal switching and strong growth in electricity demand supported a 10% rise in coal use, reversing the trend of recent declines,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) Global Energy Review 2026 reported.

Overall, the world consumed about 30 million more tons of coal in 2025 than it did in 2024, a rise of 0.4 percent, the IEA found. At the same time, it added, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions grew at a nearly identical rate, hitting a new record high.

That fossil comeback remains fragile, with the IEA predicting coal demand will drop again before the decade is out.

Heartland itself drove home the importance of climate concerns for coal and other fossil fuels during its presentation last summer.

“Essentially, we need to take action to make sure that we are not shutting down, we’re not taking away coal power, natural gas power,” Heartland’s Taylor told attendees as he concluded his remarks. “And the best way to do that is to make sure that we fight back on the truth of climate science.”