Climate denialism, neoliberalism, fossil fuels, extractivism, AI, and carbon trading

Featuring Milton Friedman, Koch Industries, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Eric Schmidt, and Wildlife Works’ Jeremy Freund.

PHOTO Credit: Thermal image from “We Saw What AI Data Centers Don’t Want You to See,” by PBS Terra and Floodlight News.

I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to talk about an article published in The Times last week.

Really? I didn’t have you down as a Times reader.

Generally speaking, I’m not. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of Rupert Murdoch and his climate denialism. Or of billionaire-owned newspapers in general. Which is not to say that everything in The Times is rubbish, of course.

Why do you want to talk about this particular The Times article?

Well, Jeremy Freund, Chief Climate Officer at Wildlife Works, referred to it in a post on LinkedIn. He writes that the article “refreshingly captures a dichotomy that has been building for years and I’m thrilled to see it finally get some exposure”.

Let’s start with what The Times article says. We can come back to Freund later on.

The Times article starts with this sentence: “Milton Friedman called it ‘the suicidal impulse of the business community’.”

We’re diving straight into the neoliberal deep end then.

Oh yes. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given that the author of The Times article is Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute.

Remind me. What is the Cato Institute?

It’s a neoliberal think tank based in Washington DC. It was founded in 1974 by Charles Koch, Murray Rothbard, and Edward Crane.

The Cato Institute’s position on the climate crisis, is that “Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”

1975?

The Cato Institute doesn’t give any source for this date. Obviously, human activity, largely through burning fossil fuels, has influenced the climate since long before 1975. A 2016 paper in Nature found that greenhouse gases began warming the world’s oceans in the 1830s.

The Cato Institute is only out by 145 years.

Cato Institute’s “Global Warming” statement hasn’t changed since at least January 2013 — the first time it was saved on the Internet Archive.

I don’t hold out any hope at all that they’ll correct it now just because of some peer reviewed scientific paper in Nature from 10 years ago.

Anything else about the Cato Institute’s position on “Global Warming”?

I’m afraid so. According to the Cato Institute, “global warming” is a “very complicated and difficult issue”.

The Cato Institute is reading straight from the tobacco disinformation playbook, then.

Yes. In the 1950s, the tobacco industry launched a public relations campaign to cast doubt on the science that provided mounting evidence of the health dangers of smoking.

In 1969, an internal memo from tobacco firm Brown & Williamson stated that,

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy . . . if we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health.

The fossil fuel industry has used the same strategy — even employing the same PR agents that the tobacco industry used.

It gets worse, believe it or not. Despite the urgent need for immediate action to address the climate crisis, the Cato Institute argues that “there is ample time” to develop the technologies needed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The reality, of course, is that we need to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

I don’t suppose there’s any mention of fossil fuels in the Cato Institute’s “Global Warming” statement, is there?

No, of course not. And here’s why: Between 1986 and 2015, the Cato Institute received more than US$17 million from various Koch Foundations.

The Cato Institute was originally incorporated under the name “The Charles Koch Foundation, Inc.” and was funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch (who died in 2019). Koch Industries, the Koch family business, is a huge conglomerate that generates its profits largely from fossil fuels, but is also involved in chemicals, cattle, pulp and paper, and synthetics.

Koch Industries is one of the biggest climate villains on the planet — not only because of its greenhouse gas emissions but because of the millions that the Koch brothers have poured into organisations promoting climate denial. The Cato Institute is just one of these organisations.

The Koch brothers also assembled a network of more than 600 libertarian wealthy donors, which US historian Nancy MacLean described in 2025 as “the largest private political network in the world”.

This network has become a powerful delivery vehicle for its libertarian and increasingly authoritarian agenda. We’ve seen its fingerprints in the Brexit campaign, in billionaire support for fascist parties in Europe, in the growing collaboration of far-right parties and neoliberal think tanks, and in the ascent of the Trump administration itself.

Nice guys, the Koch brothers.

I suppose so, if you’re keen on fascism and the destruction of the planet’s living ecosystem.

Let’s go back to Ryan Bourne, the Cato Institute economist, and writer of The Times piece. Any more on him?

Before he moved to the Cato Institute, he was head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK.

The IEA was formed by Anthony Fisher, a former banker, World War II pilot, and chicken farmer. He read the 20-page edited version of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” that was published in Readers’ Digest magazine in April 1945.

Fisher didn’t like the post-war Labour government’s economic policies. Apparently, he took a particular dislike to the Egg Marketing Board.

Fisher visited Hayek at the London School of Economics. He told Hayek he believed his arguments and asked him what he should do. Hayek advised him not to go into politics, but to set up a think tank.

First Fisher needed money. He brought factory chicken farming from the US to Britain and expanded his operations to more than 1 million birds. He made enough money to set up his think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The IEA has been extraordinarily influential. Its 2025 accounts reveal that it appeared on British media more than 4,000 times, or an average of almost 11 times a day, in the previous 12 months. (That’s down from 14 times a day in 2023.)

In 2019, LBC radio presenter James O’Brien described IEA as a “hard-right lobby group for vested interests of big business, fossil fuels, tobacco, junk food”. When the IEA complained to the UK media regulator Ofcom about O’Brien’s comments, Ofcom cleared LBC of any wrongdoing,

Anything else we need to know about Fisher, before we get back to The Times article?

In 1981, Fisher founded the Atlas Network. It promotes limited government, free enterprise, personal liberty, and personal responsibility. It promotes neoliberalism, in other words.

Nearly 500 think tanks worldwide are Atlas Network partners.

In 2024, writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot outlined the Atlas Network’s links to right wing politicians including Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei, and Donald Trump. Project 2025 was written by the Heritage Foundation, a member of the Atlas Network.

Also in 2024, Anne-Sophie Simpère investigated the Atlas Network’s links with — and funding from — ExxonMobil, and its role in playing down the climate crisis.

Needless to say, the Cato Institute is also a member of the Atlas Network.

So, we know who wrote the article. What did Bourne actually write?

Bourne, as you’ll remember, opens his Times article by referring to Milton Friedman.

In 1989, Friedman won the National Association for Business Economics’ Adam Smith Award. He gave a lecture titled, “The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community”.

Friedman argues that “corporations, and especially large corporations, seeking to pursue through political means what they regard as their own interests, do not do a good job of evaluating their interest. The policies they pursue and promote are very often adverse to their own interests.”

In his lecture, Friedman argues against tariffs and protectionism, against banking regulation, for the privatisation of education, and against regulation of Big Tech.

“When it comes to politics and philanthropy, businessmen often fund causes that work not just against their company’s interests,” Bourne writes, “but against free enterprise itself.”

Bourne apparently doesn’t consider the fact that he’s working for a think tank funded by massively polluting businesses. Neither does he consider what Friedman might have thought about corporations funding right wing free market think tanks, like the Cato Institute.

In his Times article, Bourne gives the example of Big Tech and the current resistance against AI data centres. According to Bourne, for two decades Big Tech has “helped bankroll a climate activist ecosystem persuading Westerners that fossil-fuel energy, industrial expansion and economic growth were pushing the planet towards catastrophe”.

Wait, are you seriously trying to tell me that resistance to AI data centres is a result of Big Tech’s funding for climate organisations?

That’s Bourne’s argument, not mine. Incidentally, Bourne doesn’t mention that the Cato Institute has received funding from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Brian Merchant, who writes the excellent Blood in the Machine Substack met some of the protesters against data centres when he attended at a recent city council meeting in Monterey Park, California.

He describes them as “a remarkably diverse group” of people concerned about higher electricity costs, noise, and air pollution. In return they see temporary jobs and a technology that would profit others, quite probably at their direct expense. Some of them raise concerns about AI involvement in surveillance and the US war-machine. At least one raises concerns about “techno-fascism”.

“In that context,” Merchant writes, “it seems condescending to imply that affluent environmentalists are running this movement.”

Does Bourne provide any evidence to back up his argument about Big Tech’s funding driving the opposition to AI data centres?

No. But he mentions a “recent Wall Street Journal column by Barton Swaim” about former Google CEO Eric Schmidt being booed after comments about AI that he made during a graduation speech at the University of Arizona.

Swaim’s article is titled, “The Panic Industry’s New Target.” It’s almost certainly where Bourne got the idea from for his Times article.

Swaim claims that many of the people opposing construction of data centres are attached to “501(c)(3) organizations” (charities and foundations) who “got their talking points from national nonprofits supported by some of the same moneyed outfits the Schmidt and Gates foundations spent the last two decades bankrolling.”

This claim is not held up by reporting by Blood in the Machine, or Inside Climate News, or More Perfect Union, or Wired to name just a few of the publications writing about the impacts of AI.

Do we need to know who Swaim is?

He’s a conservative opinion writer at the Wall Street Journal. Which, incidentally is owned by Dow Jones, a division of Murdoch’s News Corp. He writes of “climate alarmism” and “climate-change ideology”. He argues that it “should have been obvious” that climate science is “in no way settled”.

Hmmm. Another climate denier at a Murdoch newspaper. So what does he have to say about Schmidt being booed?

Swaim writes that, after being booed,

Schmidt then continued with his prepared remarks: “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.” He went on to urge graduates not to let fear rob them of personal agency — a fine, saccharine message.

Except that Schmidt was probably being booed because many of the graduates have not been able to find jobs. Many are blaming AI.

Instead of considering the impact of AI on graduate jobs, Swaim asks “Where does Mr. Schmidt thing young people got the idea that ‘the climate is breaking’?”

A sensible answer to this question would be from climate scientists, NASA, the IPCC, or even from reading newspapers not owned by Murdoch.

Swaim’s answer is that the fear comes in part from the “scores of climate-panic groups” that the Schmidt Family Foundation’s 11th Hour Project has funded over the past two decades.

“One detail particularly amuses,” Swaim writes, “When 11th Hour first appeared, in 2006, it funded screenings of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ a documentary designed to terrorize viewers with 90 minutes of bleak prophecies, now happily exploded.”

That’s not true. Gore got most things right, and exaggerated a few.

And to state the obvious, the climate crisis has not gone away.

Both Bourne and Swaim end their articles by trying to tell us that AI is good for us. We need data centres, they say, to watch Netflix and football, make online payments, and buy airline tickets.

A recent report by the International Energy Agency looks at energy and AI. It finds that energy consumption for AI queries (such as simple text queries) has “declined massively” in recent years with improved software and hardware. However, new energy-intensive AI applications such as video generation, reasoning, and agentic tasks are increasingly being used. The International Energy Agency reports that, “These kinds of tasks can consume hundred or thousands of times more energy per query than simple text generation.”

Do Swaim or Bourne mention any of the problems with AI data centres?

Swaim mentions the vast increase in the numbers of data centres to meet AI’s demands. And the increase in energy needed.

Bourne mentions the water needed for cooling, but writes that “water use is localised, and cooling can often use recycled water”.

Localised water use is clearly a problem if you happen to live next to a data centre that is sucking away your drinking water. The water for cooling systems has to be clean, to prevent bacteria growth or corrosion in the cooling system. That means using mostly drinking water. And most AI data centres use evaporative cooling. Closed loop systems cost more and use more energy.

AI data centres consume water for both cooling and electricity generation.

In October 2025, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water, Pedro Arrojo Agudo, called for a moratorium on new data centres:

States and international institutions should promote a moratorium on the development of data centres and provide clear information on their water and energy consumption and the risks that they pose to climate change, the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems, the human rights of impoverished populations and the survival of vulnerable productive sectors.

And in December 2025, more than 230 organisations in the US demanded a moratorium on data centres in the US.

Bourne tells us that the effect of data centres on electricity bills depends on “whether governments allow enough reliable generation and grid capacity to be built”.

So governments should massively expand electricity production and grid capacity to meet the surging demand of AI data centres? Whether that involves coal, oil, gas, nuclear, or biofuels?

According to Bourne, yes. Of course, the Cato Institute’s position on “global warming” is that “there is ample time” to develop the technology that will miraculously stop the climate crisis. In the meantime, then, it’s drill baby drill.

Many of the new AI data centres currently being built are powered by fossil gas. Many are following the model developed at Elon Musk’s Colossus AI data centre in Memphis. Musk installed 35 “mobile” gas turbines to power the plant. As a result communities living near the plant are increasingly suffering from asthma, cancer, and respiratory diseases.

In Texas, for example, about 300 data centres are currently operational. 100 more are under construction and 100 more are planned. Texas has 80 GW of fossil gas power plants under construction. About half of these plants will provide power exclusively to data centres without connecting to the Texas electrical grid.

One of the new AI data centres, GW Ranch, will generate almost 8 GW of fossil gas electricity. That’s enough to provide electricity for more than half the homes in Texas. All of that electricity will be off the grid — entirely for that one data centre.

This may relieve pressure on the electricity grid and avoid increases in electricity bills, but it will also result in additional very large greenhouse gas emissions.

These fossil gas operations also generate fine particulate matter which are detrimental to human health. One study of the healthcare related costs for people living near to a similar data centre in Virginia could be between US$53 million and US$99 million per year.

So, why on earth is Wildlife Works’ Jeremy Freund so “thrilled” about this piece of pro-AI, pro-pollution, climate denialism in The Times?

Read Freund’s LinkedIn comment yourself — here it is in full:

Wow. That’s quite a ride. Capitalism for good, eh?

One of the problems that carbon market proponents have always had is that they need a very large, very polluting, expanding industry to buy carbon credits. That’s why carbon traders have always been close to the fossil fuel industry. And the aviation industry. The AI boom has everything the carbon traders have ever dreamed of — a huge increase in fossil fuels to power data centres, vast amounts of money, commitments to “net zero”, and a complete disregard of the impacts on either people or the environment.

Which explains why we have a carbon trader publicly admitting that he couldn’t care less about the climate crisis, or about extractivism, logging, mining, industrial agriculture, fossil fuels, water supplies, human health, or the impacts of AI — as long as the extractivists buy carbon credits.