[[link removed]]

NO, THE US DOESN’T NEED FOSSIL FUELS TO WIN ‘AN AI ARMS RACE’
 
[[link removed]]


 

Joe Fassler
September 24, 2025
DESMOG
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ These industry players and allies push a misleading narrative the
Trump administration now parrots. _

Oil and gas industry leaders and their allies are pushing for a
massive fossil fuel scale-up — with national security and AI
dominance as their rationale. , Sari Williams

 

As the U.S. braces for a surge in artificial intelligence
(AI)–related electricity demand, the natural gas industry has a
message for the public: Fossil fuels must power the future’s data
centers, the computer-filled warehouses where AI models like
ChatGPT primarily train and deploy. 

A range of oil and gas industry groups and industry-friendly
nonprofits are making the case that AI’s growing hunger for
power requires a robust fossil-energy scale-up, DeSmog has
found. This massive deployment of dirty power is a national security
necessity, they say. And Trump administration officials
have embraced this message. But experts on renewable energy
economics and deployment say this narrative is misleading. They
posit that a new era of gas-powered data centers is neither necessary
nor inevitable. 

“The idea that AI simply requires natural gas and nothing else,
that renewables cannot be used, is absolutely false,” said Safak
Yucel, a sustainable business operations expert at Georgetown
University. “That’s not true, and that’s essentially fake
news.” 

Yet on September 10, at the Gastech industry conference in Milan
[[link removed]], U.S. Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum took the stage with U.S. Energy
Secretary Chris Wright [[link removed]]. “The
real existential threat right now is not one degree of climate
change,” Burgum said
[[link removed]].
“It’s the fact that we could lose the AI arms race if we don’t
have enough power.” The only way to win that race, he said, is with
“affordable, reliable energy,” industry’s shorthand for fossil
fuels.  

Wright, a former gas industry executive, argued that the coming
ramp-up should be met primarily with gas, coal, and oil, which
he called the three fastest-growing energy sources. “All of them
are growing faster than wind and solar combined,” he said. 

Solar is the fastest growing source of electricity in the U.S. and
globally
[[link removed]],
followed by wind. Together, after a years of record-breaking growth,
these sources provided 15 percent of all electricity generated
[[link removed]] globally in
2024. And both solar and wind now generate power more cheaply
[[link removed]] than
fossil fuel plants do, even without subsidies. But that hasn’t
stopped a growing chorus of the fossil fuel industry, its
industry-funded allies, Trump administration officials, and the chief
executive himself from telling a very different story. 

The White House did not provide comment on DeSmog’s findings by
press time. 

Can Fossil Fuels or Renewables Grow Fast Enough for AI Demand? 

In March 2024, the Texas Public Policy Foundation
[[link removed]] (TPPF),
a think tank closely linked to fracking billionaire and Trump
megadonor Tim Dunn
[[link removed]],
announced a new initiative: The National Center for Energy Analytics
(NCEA). It said NCEA would “restore balance and inject more realism
into national energy policy debates.” Launched in part by a
$250,000 donation
[[link removed]] from
a family foundation linked to a prominent oil and gas exploration
firm, NCEA is today helmed by Mark P. Mills
[[link removed]]. 

With numerous industry ties and a history of downplaying the climate
crisis, Mills and NCEA almost immediately began hyping the need for
a massive surge in energy production to meet the demands of AI,
while attacking renewables as unfit for the job. 

“There aren’t many ways to meet the velocity and scale of electric
demand coming without a boom in building more natural-gas-fired power
plants,” he wrote
[[link removed]] in
City Journal, an outlet run by the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute
[[link removed]]. TPPF
helped amplify Mills’ claims, with a top official writing
in July 2024
[[link removed]] that
“AI’s insatiable appetite for energy can’t be satisfied by
renewables.” 

Mills’ preferred term for this outlook: “energy realism,” a
worldview that suggests the U.S. must forgo climate goals if the
nation is serious about AI.  

By this spring, Mills was repeating his claims in testimony
[[link removed]] before
Congress, arguing that only fossil fuels will allow America to beat
China in a quest for AI dominance. “Reality, and arithmetic, show
that the needed power won’t come from squeezing more out of existing
assets, or stopping coal plant retirements, or utility-scale wind and
solar, nor from building new nuclear plants,” he said. “All that
will help, but it won’t be enough, soon enough. Most of the new
power will come from natural gas combustion turbines and engines.
Those can and are being built rapidly.” 

The Heartland Institute
[[link removed]] is pushing a similar
message. That climate crisis–denying think tank has received
millions in funding from the Mercer family and Donors Trust dark, and
historically been funded by Big Tobacco, the Koch family
[[link removed]] and ExxonMobil
[[link removed]]. “AI
will be incompatible with anti-fossil energy activism,”
[[link removed]]
Heartland editorial director Chris Talgo claimed in a June 2024
op-ed in The Hill, citing China and other “adversarial nations”
racing for “AI supremacy.”

The narrative that only fossil fuels can
power AI’s projected  ramp-up is “100 percent wrong,” said
Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy
Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). He pointed to the fact that
renewables have jumped to nearly 40 percent of Texas’ energy
supply, up from just10 percent a decade ago. 

“Texas is also the grid that’s growing fastest in the United
States
[[link removed]],”
he said. The fact that renewables’ slice is growing fastest
at a time the whole pie is growing “is proof positive to me that
it’s possible essentially anywhere,” Wamsted said. 

Huge numbers of renewable projects are waiting to come online. 95
percent of the projects requesting permission to join the larger
energy grid are renewable, said Caitlin Marquis, managing director at
Advanced Energy United, a trade association representing the
renewables industry. By contrast, additional growth from natural
gas could be hamstrung by massive bottlenecks in supply chain and
highly skilled labor related to the large turbines needed to
power data centers. The three producers that make up 90 percent of
that market have already sold out all their inventory through 2030
[[link removed]], according
to Wamsted.

“They can’t just go expand,” he said. 

Spurred partly by the AI boom, Texas companies proposed
building more than 100 natural gas plants
[[link removed]] in
the coming years, and the state created a $7.2 billion fund
[[link removed]] to
grease the wheel. But so far only two have been approved for about
$300 million in loans
[[link removed]],
Canary Media reports. Meanwhile developers have canceledseven
others, invoking rising costs
[[link removed]] and long
turbine wait times
[[link removed]]. 

In response to DeSmog’s questions, NCEA spokesperson Aaron Mays
wrote that Mark Mills has “frequently challenged the assumptions
used to propose energy policies of all kinds, including those anchored
in climate-centric objectives.” Mays also said that “whether
renewables can meet AI’s energy needs is an active debate in both
the business and academic worlds,” while largely pointing to the
work of NCEA’s own scholars to suggest renewable energy is more
expensive and slower growing than fossil fuels.  

The “often poor accuracy, or incompleteness, of energy facts in
media and policy discussions is the issue that animated the creation
of the NCEA,” Mays wrote. 

How Reliable Is Renewable Energy? 

This year, the Consumer Energy Alliance
[[link removed]], another
industry-funded nonprofit advocacy group, launched a campaign
attacking renewables’ reliability and credibility. In a wide range
of blog posts, op-eds, and media appearances, CEA staff argue that
scaling up energy availability for data centers is of paramount
importance— and that only fossil fuels are stable enough to fit the
bill. 

“America cannot win the AI race without abundant, affordable,
reliable energy. Full stop,” CEA president David Holt wrote
[[link removed]] in
a RealClearEnergy op-ed in May. “National security depend on
getting this right.” 

In a July op-ed
[[link removed]] for
the same outlet, he specifically blamed the phase-out of fossil
fuel plants for a supposed U.S. energy shortfall, arguing that
renewables are simply too undependable to provide data center
electricity: “We’re shutting down power plants that work 24/7 and
replacing them with sources that work when the weather
cooperates.” 

Georgetown’s Yucel said that narrative is highly misleading.
Co-located solar and wind energy tend to complement one another
well. Sunlight is available during the day and
wind tends to pick up at night — generating more than
enough electricity to provide steady power in
many U.S. regions. When solar and wind are feeding into
a regional grid, their output tends to be “relatively stable,”
regardless of time of day, he said.

Meanwhile, advanced batteries give renewables backup storage
capacity regardless of time of day —  an approach
that’s still cost-competitive with natural gas, according
to Advanced Energy United managing director Harry Godfrey. 

CEA is a project of HBW Resources, an energy-focused PR company
founded by longtime Republican lobbyist
[[link removed]] Michael
Whatley. In addition to a working on behalf of oil and gas clients,
it has advocated for the Keystone XL Pipeline and the
Canadian tar sands industry.
Some CEA member companies also focus on renewable energy, and the
group tends to advocate for an all-of-the-above energy approach. 

But despite paying lip service to keeping “every option on the
table,” Holt and his colleagues routinely contend that
renewables are a far more dubious power source. In a 2024 op-ed
titled “The Blackouts Are Coming! The Blackouts Are Coming!
[[link removed]],”
Holt warned the public not to “forget the real world realities and
cost implications of attempting to outlaw oil and natural gas now and
rely on wind and solar.” 

“Mandating politically-preferred energy forms that can’t yet, if
ever, replace abundant natural gas, oil, and nuclear will bring energy
shortages, electricity blackouts, and higher prices at home and at the
pump,.” he wrote.

Yet, during the 2021 power grid failure in Texas, renewables produced
more reliably than fossil-derived energy sources, including
gas, according to a federal study
[[link removed]]. When
Texas faced record-setting energy demand during last summer’s
most sweltering days, solar kept the lights on and air conditioners
running [[link removed]],
according to the National Renewable Energy Lab. The idea that
renewables will bring higher prices to consumers is simply false,
Yucel said. 

“I’m essentially a business school professor. So I am
unapologetically capitalist,” he said. “From the profitability
perspective, the winner is absolutely clear: renewables.”

CEA did not respond to a request for comment.

Industry Would Like a Word 

Oil and gas companies haven’t just relied on advocacy groups to
spread their message on AI. Increasingly, they’ve
started making the case themselves. 

In recent months, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has made “energy
realism” arguments
[[link removed]] in
media appearance for outlets like CNBC
[[link removed]] and Fox News.
“U.S. policy has often prioritized climate idealism over energy
pragmatism,” he wrote in a recent Fox News op-ed
[[link removed]].
“Wind, solar, and battery technologies will play a key role in our
energy future, but they are not available at the scale or
reliability needed to fuel expected AI center demand. And these
combined sources are more expensive than U.S. natural gas.”

“It’s not a given that we will win this race,” Wirth told The
New York Post this month
[[link removed]].
“We need to match up this great innovation with our great energy
resources.”

Oil and gas trade groups are promoting the same theme in a steady
drumbeat of op-eds, blog posts, and paid social media advertisements.
“Of all the available energy sources in the U.S., natural gas is
uniquely positioned to support the rapid demand growth required for
America to lead the way in AI without jeopardizing reliability or
affordability,” Karen Harbert, president of the American Gas
Association (AGA), wrote in a July op-ed for RealClearEnergy
[[link removed]],
an argument she tied to winning a race “against competitors like
China.”  The American Petroleum Institute (API)
[[link removed]] echoed these
claims in blog posts andpublic comments by its CEO Mike Sommers
[[link removed]].
 

RealClear Media, RealClearEnergy’s parent company, itself has
extensive ties to right-wing disinformation networks
[[link removed]].
In 2021, it announced
[[link removed]] an
initiative to collaborate with the State Policy Network
[[link removed]], a network of
free market think tanks, to promote op-eds from its members,
which in the past
[[link removed]] have included both
Texas Public Policy Foundation and Consumer Energy Alliance. 

Chevron, AGA, and API did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington Steps in

On July 23, at a Washington, D.C. gathering of tech leaders convened
by the nonprofit Hill and Valley Forum, President Trump performatively
signed a trio of executive orders intended to jump start America’s
artificial intelligence capacity. On stage next to him, a big blue
sign made the day’s theme unmistakable: “Winning the AI Race.” 

The overarching “AI Action Plan”
[[link removed]]released
that day vowed to reject “climate dogma and bureaucratic red
tape.” Its language suggested that government support for
renewables stands at odds with America’s growing appetite
for energy , echoing the narrative promoted for months by NCEA,
CEA, and other groups. It also referred to a need to grow only
“reliable, dispatchable energy” — industry code for fossil
fuels
[[link removed]]. 

One of the executive orders made clear that the federal government
would only help expedite projects relying on “natural gas
turbines, coal power equipment, nuclear power equipment, geothermal
power equipment, and any other dispatchable baseload energy
sources,” while excluding wind and solar. 

For its part, the tech industry played along. 

“America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is
President Trump,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, in a public
discussion at the summit. “On the first day of his
administration, he realized the importance of AI and he realized the
importance of energy. For the last, I don’t know how many years,
energy production was vilified.” 

Huang, whose company dominates production of computer chips for data
centers, seemed to equate“energy” with fossil fuels, and
“vilification” with decarbonization. Nvidia did not respond to
a request for comment by press time.  

Meanwhile, Trump has been more than willing to vilify certain energy
sources, making no bones about his antipathy for wind and solar. “We
don’t allow windmills, and we don’t want the solar panels,”
he said, during an August 26 cabinet meeting
[[link removed]]. “For firing up
your big plants, it doesn’t work. It’s very unstable.”

At a Council on Foreign Relations summit  this month, Energy
Secretary Wright said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wanted
to prioritize “plants that produce electricity 24/7, whether the
wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” saying that was necessary
“to stay ahead of China in AI.”

Wright then compared allowing China to get ahead in AI to letting
Germany build the first atomic bomb during World War II
[[link removed]]. “AI
is going to have massive national defense and national security
ramifications,” he said. If China got meaningfully ahead of us in
AI, we become the secondary nation of the planet, that’s a different
world we don’t want to go to.”

Since January, the Trump administration has blocked or delayed at
least six major wind projects
[[link removed]],
including a $6.2 billion project off Maryland’s coast that was 80
percent complete
[[link removed]].
Just this month, it moved to halt a 141-turbine project
[[link removed]] off
the coast of Massachusetts. If ramping up energy supply were a
truly critical national security concern, experts say this would be
the last thing you’d want to do. 

“There clearly is a disconnect between parts of the
administration,” Wamsted said. “Because if you need all that power
as fast as you can get it, we should finish all those offshore wind
facilities.” 

If America’s government doesn’t understand this, rest assured
that China’s does. Between January and May 2025, China installed
a record-breaking amount of solar and wind
[[link removed]] — enough
to power the entire nation of Turkey. 

===

Joe Fassler is a writer and journalist whose work on climate and
technology appears in outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times,
and Wired. His novel, The Sky Was Ours
[[link removed]],
was published by Penguin Books.

* Energy; Politics and Policy; Renewable Energy;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]