The Week in Climate Hearings: The Great Dismantling

As Hill Heat has previously noted, data centers don’t need a livable environment nearly as much as humans do. But they do require massive amounts of energy, water, and capital. Fulfilling the Silicon Valley vision of a fully automated economy thus requires a wholesale restructuring of federal policy, including the sunsetting of environmentalism. To that end, one in four professional lobbyists in Washington, D.C. now work for the AI industry, while environmental advocacy and policy institutions are dismantled or subverted.

In the latest blow to environmental journalism, Environmental and Energy News, the Hill environmental news publication founded in 1998, is being dissolved six years after its acquisition by Politico. Some of the E&E News energy reporters will remain, in support of new newsletters on federal and state-level AI-energy policy.

Several hearings this week directly touch upon the transition to our anti-environmental techno-deployment economy.

On Tuesday, the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee holds a hearing on accelerating the deployment of nuclear energy by reducing regulations on nuclear fuels and nuclear plants, a strong goal of the data-center industry. Nuclear industry lobbyists and nuclear engineer Kathryn Huff are planned witnesses at the hearing, which also will touch on efforts to restore some independence for nuclear regulators after a year of Trumpian takeover.

On Wednesday morning, the House Science Committee meets with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to review the Department of Energy’s FY2027 plans for its science portfolio, which involve killing all renewable energy and climate research and investing heavily in AI, nuclear, and fossil-fuel energy. House appropriators have marked up a DOE science budget that diverges from the administration proposal, rejecting the proposed elimination of the Offie of Electricity, climate research, and ARPA-E, but offering even more funds for AI and fossil-fuel programs.

On Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee is holding a hearing on the swollen AI industry with the sycophantic title “AI and the American Dream: Promoting Innovation, Affordability, and American Dominance.” The announced witnesses are AI industry lobbyist and former Republican staffer Mike Flynn, Hudson Institute and former Trump national security staffer David Feith, and American Enterprise right-wing AI optimist Will Rinehart.

People around the world are fighting back, from Minnesota to Scotland. On Tuesday evening at 8 pm, the Data Center Working Group presents its fourth in a five-part training series on organizing to stop data centers, with a session on how to research the money trail.

Meanwhile, we are confronting the crisis of fossil-fueled climate destabilization, even as we turn off the warning signs.

Climate economist Danny Cullenward has resigned from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, an industry-aligned initiative established in 1990 as a third-party effort to provide a neutral accounting of climate pollution. Although the effort has always accommodated industry perspectives, back-deal moves in the past year to redefine the climate impacts of the timber industry led Cullenward to file a formal protest in February before today’s resignation. As Cullen relates, “under the industry rule, recycled paper would be counted as a climate harm while cutting down an old-growth forest to produce virgin paper would be counted as a climate benefit.”

In addition to the aforementioned Department of Energy hearing, Wednesday morning has a passel of climate-disaster hearings, all at 10 am.

• Whether any senator is willing to mention climate pollution, Wednesday’s 10 am Senate oversight hearing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture with Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins will be driven by the climate crisis, whether the topic is forestry, wildfires, fertilizer costs, or the collapse of the Great Plains wheat crop.

• The House Agriculture Committee is inviting agricultural perspectives on the future of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the Trump-negotiated successor to NAFTA. Mexico is facing extraordinary heat and drought while its subsistence farmers are threatened by the dumping of subsidized U.S. corn production.

• The rapid desertification of the West is the focus of a Senate Energy and Natural Resources hearing, with the dry euphemism of “oversight of the Colorado River Basin, including its current hydrologic conditions and ongoing negotiations regarding post-2026 operations.” Interior official Andrea Travnicek, Bureau of Reclamation official David Palumbo, American Rivers executive director Tom Kiernan, and local officials and lobbyists from Utah, Wyoming, and California will testify about the fossil-fueled Colorado River “system crash” and failure of the negotiations of how to allocate the disappearing water supply. The hearing follows a 9:30 am markup of 33 forest, wildfire, mining, public lands, national parks, hydropower, water infrastructure, Holocaust education, and other energy and natural resource bills at 9:30 am. The bills either dance around the edges of the Western climate crisis or exacerbate it—most notably S. 140, the “Wildfire Prevention Act,” which would “prevent” wildfires by clear-cutting forests.

• House appropriators are completing the markup of the $100 billion Fiscal Year 2027 Homeland Security bill, which includes $34 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, most of which is the $28.4 billion allocated for the Disaster Relief Fund. FY26 Disaster Relief Fund expenditures were $26.4 billion.

• The House Financial Services housing subcommittee holds a hearing on local needs in disaster recovery, specifically the Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, which is funded by Congress on an ad-hoc basis in response to major climate disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. Witnesses include state officials from Texas and North Carolina.

• The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee reviews the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget with director Brian Nesvik, who opposes fish and wildlife. The proposed budget would gut the agency, including the elimination of the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, National Wildlife Refuge Fund, Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, Multinational Species Conservation Fund, and State and Tribal Wildlife Grants.

• House Natural Resources is marking up four bills, including an urban bird habitat bill and legislation to open the city of Carlsbad to fracking (H.R. 7882).

The trillion-dollar U.S. military budget is moving inexorably forward on both the foreign (Department of War) and domestic (Department of Homeland Security) front. The U.S. House should vote on the $70 billion ICE-CBP no-restrictions funding bill this week. On Tuesday, House appropriators will mark up the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies bill and then move on to the $100 billion Fiscal Year 2027 Homeland Security bill, completing that markup on Wednesday. On Thursday, House appropriators are conducting a classified markup of FY27 Defense bill.

Other climate hearings of interest this week include a Tuesday 10 am Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing on technological advances in the transportation industry and a field hearing in Hot Springs, Arkansas on Friday morning on the Great American Outdoors Act and Hot Springs National Park.