The data center bubble is filled with methane and the Senate is going nuclear

PRESENTED BY LE CHATGPT

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is holding its confirmation hearing for Scott Kupor to be director of the Office of Personnel Management and Eric Ueland to be deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, both in the White House. Ueland is a long-time Republican operative who served in the first Trump term. Kupor is a managing partner at the techno-fascist venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which recently hired Daniel Penny because he murdered a homeless man on the New York City subway in a vigilante attack. In a recent blog post, Kupor said, approvingly, that “AI is beginning to eat the world,” thanks in no small part to his investment efforts.

To put it another way, we’re seeing the transition from human-dependent corporate neoliberalism to computation-driven corporate neofascism.

As a recent report from Americans for Financial Reform reveals: “Private equity has spent nearly $200 billion to finance data center deals, with the vast majority of this spending hidden from public view.”

There's an insane projected increase in electricity and water demand coming from a “tsunami of advanced data centers.” Data centers are already putting intense pressure on electric grids and water supplies:

“The global AI demand in 2027 is projected to require 4.2 and 6.6. billion cubic meters of water withdrawal, surpassing the annual water use of 4–6 countries the size of Denmark, or about half of the United Kingdom’s total annual withdrawals.”

Evan Halper and Jake Spring reported that last month’s CERAWeek energy conference was full of Silicon Valley representatives, eager for a continuation of the fracking boom. “We need to be building near term for that longer-term opportunity, so it’s not missed,” said Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer of Google. On stage with her, NextEra¹ CEO John Ketchum “stressed that gas will be a crucial part of the energy mix for years to come”:

Wearing a “Make Energy Great Again” bracelet, BlackRock CEO Larry “Rat” Fink touted he is advising Trump to embrace fracking-powered AI:

And there's also rapidly growing pressure on raw materials, land use, and construction as the fracked-gas and computational infrastructure is built out.

These investors and corporate entities—the titans of private equity, the banks, the fossil-fuel companies, the tech giants propping up the US stock market—will lose trillions if the bubble collapses.

So they desperately need environmental rules, construction standards, and other regulations to be rapidly erased. They need to kill off the ability of the American people to constrain capital when fundamental services like water and electricity are made unaffordable. And they need to destroy any rational skepticism of techno-babble prophets.

In other words, they need Trump and Musk to destroy constitutional democracy and the public welfare state on behalf of the polluter-driven “abundance agenda.”

This is one of the core reasons that corporate America seems blasé about Trump even as he blows up the human economy. Their leadership believes in a future economy that is no longer built on human well-being, but one in which, as Scott Kupor said, AI eats the world.

Today, the carbon-techno-fascists are blowing up the U.S. Senate.

The Senate has unambiguous rules against passing the lawless Trump agenda of giant billionaire tax cuts and the evisceration of public welfare through a filibuster-proof reconciliation package, whose contents have just been released. More than 30 million Americans will lose their Medicaid as $4 trillion in corporate tax cuts are made permanent. So Senate Republicans are planning to use the nuclear option today on Senate rules, with Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Budget Chair Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) leading the way into madness.

Under Senate procedure, any budget reconciliation package needs to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office and reviewed by the Senate Parliamentarian—but doing either would show the Trump coup plan to violate Senate rules. So Senate Republicans are skipping those steps, with the only check remaining a floor vote on the rules violation. The nuclear option is triggered when the chair overturns the rules, Democrats appeal, and then the rules are abandoned by a majority vote.

Doing so will give the Trumpists a filibuster-proof vehicle to pass any legislation they desire, starting with making the Trump tax cuts permanent. But anything else would be on the table. This will be the end of all rules-based order in the Senate. No more budgeting. No more fiscal probity of any kind.

The first vote on this nuclear-grade insanity is expected today.

At 6:30 pm, National City Christian Church in Thomas Circle hosts a Sensitive Locations, Sacred Spaces prayer vigil to prepare for Friday’s 10 am Mennonite Church v. DHS hearing. The lawsuit, brought by dozens of faith groups against the Trump regime, challenges Trump’s recission of protections from immigrations enforcement in churches, synagogues, mosques, and other sacred spaces and sensitive locations. The hearing takes place at Courtroom 24A at the Prettyman Courthouse and will be also open on a toll-free line.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 9:30 AM: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
  Scott Kupor to be Director, Office of Personnel Management, and Eric Ueland to be Deputy Director for Management, Office of Management and Budget

Climate Action Today:

• 6:30 PM: National City Christian Church
  Sensitive Locations, Sacred Spaces Prayer Vigil

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

1  Sharp-eyed readers of Hill Heat will remember that yesterday’s newsletter featured the confirmation hearing for Katharine MacGregor to be Deputy Secretary of the Interior and James Danly to be Deputy Secretary of Energy, both of whom worked for NextEra, and that a newsletter last week featured NextEra as one of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) top donors.