The Week in Climate Hearings: Cooking the Climate for Compute

On Tuesday, September 15th, Axios hosts a morning of fast interviews on the electric grid with Reps. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) and Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.), U.S. Energy Information Administration chief Tristan Abbey, and Duke Energy CEO Harry Sideris. Then the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition is launching its Thriving Economy Project, with an online press conference with members of Congress at 9 am and an in-person briefing with report authors at 4 pm.

On Thursday, September 17th, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are at Politics & Prose with their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

Speaking of which…

The primary existential threat AI poses to humanity is not Roko’s Basilisk or Skynet or other fantasies of the transhumanism and effective altruism cults seeking to create a silicon god. The extinction-level catastrophe AI promises is nothing more exciting than cooking the climate for compute.

As sociopathic tech billionaire Eric Schmidt raved in his Congressional testimony on April 9, 2025:

The Trump regime—including Donald Trump personally—has made cooking the climate for compute a central mission, paid for by everyone else. The fossil-fueled hyperscaler industry has feasted on the One Big Brutal Bill’s tax breaks, Brian Faler reports:

As revealed by Eric Katz and Mara Hoplamazian, DOGE is still running the show. Last week, the Bureau of Land Management gave its state directors three days to list public lands that could be turned over to Big Tech to build AI hyperscalers.¹

And this week, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward to illegally kill carbon pollution rules for power plants, in the latest boon for fracking-powered slop boxes.

This is the last week both houses of Congress are in session until the general election.

This week, the House of Representatives is considering a packet of data-center-industry bills under suspension (requiring a two-thirds majority to pass), led by H.R. 9340, the so-called Ratepayer Protection Act, which encourages states “to voluntarily consider adopting cost protections against the energy costs of data centers.” The bill’s co-sponsors are mostly Republicans, but a handful of industry-aligned Democrats, led by former Climate Crisis chair Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), are promoting it as a “bipartisan” step to “protecting consumers” from “soul-crushing” electric bills. However, Food and Water Watch has dubbed the legislation the Ratepayer Deception Act, as its recommended policies—even if states choose to implement them—would shield utility shareholders from unexpected costs, but not necessarily protect ratepayers.

The other hyperscaler-friendly bills being moved for a floor vote under suspension are H.R. 6633, the High-Capacity Grid Act, H.R. 9332, the Load Forecasting Enhancement Act, and H.R. 9339, the Affordable Innovation for the Grid Act.

More positive bills moving under suspension are a trio of “critical minerals” bills (H.R. 9615, the BRACE Act, to support recycling lithium-ion batteries, H.R. 9616, the EMRTAI Authorization Act, for fast-tracking mining of Superfund sites, and H.R. 9617, the CHARM Act, to push the EPA to develop a “national strategy for recovering critical minerals from discarded materials”), the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (H.R. 2140), and the Water Resources Development Act of 2026 (H.R. 9497).²  

Monday, September 14

At 4 pm, the House Rules Committee sets up the week’s majority-rule floor votes, including two resolutions to overturn California’s ship pollution rules, H.J. Res. 210 and H.J. Res. 213.

Tuesday, September 15

At 10 am, the House Energy and Commerce Committee energy subcommittee holds a hearing on the Trump regime’s plan to deal with spent nuclear fuel, which is to rename nuclear waste dumps as “nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses.” The Republican governors of Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Idaho, and West Virginia have signed deals with the Department of Energy “to explore the opportunity to become a host state for an Innovation Campus.”

Meanwhile, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee holds a hearing on emerging research and technologies for climate and other natural disaster prediction, preparation, and response. Republicans plan to extol the ability of AI tools to better predict disasters while enforcing silence on how the pollution they generate is causing the disasters.

Wednesday, September 16

At 10 am, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s National Parks Subcommittee receives receives testimony on two dozen pieces of legislation, including:

• S.4103/H.R.2709, the “Save Our Sequoias” Act, to use the threat of fossil-fueled wildfires to sequoias to justify clear-cutting of old-growth California sequoia forests, even in national parks. The bipartisan legislation is co-sponsored by Democratic senators Alex Padilla (Calif.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Angus King (Maine), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), John Hickenlooper (Colo.), and Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), but is is broadly condemned by environmental groups.

• S.1568, the “Liberating Incandescent Technology” Act, to reverse energy-efficiency standards for lightbulbs

• S.5338, the “Energy Efficiency Reform” Act of 2026, to amend the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to prohibit the Secretary of Energy from prescribing any new or amended energy conservation standards for a product that is “not technologically feasible and economically justified”

• S.4787, the “Free to Exit Administrative Tribunals” (FEAT) Act, to bypass the Department of Interior Office of Hearings and Appeals and send disputes to a fast-tracked federal court system

• S.4116, the “Geo POWER” Act and S.456, the “STEAM” Act, to expedite geothermal projects

Meanwhile the House Natural Resources Committee’s Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee receives testimony on bills to fast-track Florida wetlands dredging, reduce crocodile protections, study artificial manatee habitats, control golden mussels, increase Yosemite water payments by San Francisco, and other water rights. Witnesses include California and New Mexico tribal representatives on the water rights legislation; the director of the Yorba Linda Water District on the Yosemite bill; NextEra Energy’s Mike Sole on new habitats for manatees relying on power plant waste heat; and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s John Truitt and the Conservancy of Southwest Florida’s Amber Crooks on fast-tracking wetlands dredging (for and against, respectively).

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee marks up a bevy of bills, including ones supporting aquaculture and Alaska fishery bycatch reduction.

In the afternoon, the House Natural Resources federal lands subcommittee receives
testimony on Mountain Pine Beetle coordination and National Parks bills. Colorado State Forester Matthew McCombs is testifying for the “Mountain Pine Beetle Coordination Act” (H.R. 9999), introduced by Reps. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.). The bill would authorize the Chief of the Forest Service to enter into cooperative agreements with states and tribes to “address mountain pine beetle infestations and reduce associated wildfire risk,” including by increased logging. This would federalize Colorado’s active state-level efforts to ignore scientists, “further whip up fire hysteria among elected officials, media, and the public to expand taxpayer funding for more logging than Colorado has seen since the gold rush,” and engage in “ecologically harmful logging which has no effect on large waves of beetles,” according to the Eco-Integrity Alliance.

1  Not coincidentally, Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum—the chair of the White House National Energy Dominance Council—spent 2025 meeting with the CEOs of Amazon, Bechtel, NextEra, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Baker Hughes, Devon Energy, Williams Companies, Sempra, and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell.

2  Bills being considered under suspension on Monday include a swath of public lands, water rights, and water and wildlife bills, including H.R. 7889, the Advancing Water Research and Collaboration Act of 2025, which would authorize federal research into AI-industry water demand, and the controversial H.R. 4931, the National Park System Long-Term Lease Investment Act, which would remove competitive bidding requirements for long-term leases within the national parks (but got out of committee by unanimous consent).