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Climate
'Good!' Declares AOC After Arizona City Council Rejects Data Center Pushed by Sinema
"She can't even be effective as a shill," said one critic of the ex-senator's lobbying.
Dec 12, 2025
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among those celebrating after the Chandler, Arizona City Council on Thursday night unanimously rejected an artificial intelligence data center project promoted by former US Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
"Good!" Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) simply said on social media Friday.
The defeat of the proposed $2.5 billion project comes as hundreds of advocacy groups and progressive leaders, including US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are urging opponents of energy-sucking AI data centers across the United States to keep pressuring local, state, and federal leaders over climate, economic, environmental, and water concerns.
In Chandler, "the nearly 43,000-square-foot data center on the corner of Price and Dobson roads would have been the 11th data center in the Price Road Corridor, an area known for employers like Intel and Wells Fargo," the Arizona Republic reported.
The newspaper noted that around 300 people attended Thursday's meeting—many holding signs protesting the project—and city spokesperson Matthew Burdick said that the government received 256 comments opposing the data center.
Although Sinema skipped the debate on Thursday, the ex-senator—who frequently thwarted Democratic priorities on Capitol Hill and ultimately ditched the party before leaving office—previously attended a planning and zoning commission meeting in Chandler to push for the project. That stunt earned her the title of "cartoon villain."
Sinema critics again took aim at her after the 7-0 vote, saying that "she can't even be effective as a shill" and "Sinema went all in to lobby for a data center in Chandler, Arizona and the council told her to get rekt."
Progressive commentator Krystal Ball declared: "Kyrsten Sinema data center L. Love to see it."
Politico noted Friday that "several other Arizona cities, including Phoenix and Tucson, have written zoning rules for data centers or placed new requirements on the facilities. Local officials in cities in Oregon, Missouri, Virginia, Arizona, and Indiana have also rejected planned data centers."
Janos Marton, chief advocacy officer at Dream.Org, said: "Another big win in Arizona, following Tucson's rejection of a data center. When communities are organized they can fight back and win. Don't accept data centers that hide their impacts behind NDAs, drive up energy prices, and bring pollution to local neighborhoods."
When Sinema lobbied for the Chandler data center in October, she cited President Donald Trump's push for such projects.
"The AI Action Plan, set out by the Trump administration, says very clearly that we must continue to proliferate AI and AI data centers throughout the country," she said at the time. "So federal preemption is coming. Chandler right now has the opportunity to determine how and when these new, innovative AI data centers will be built."
Trump on Thursday signed an executive order (EO) intended to block states from enforcing their own AI regulations.
"I understand the president has issued an EO. I think that is yet to play itself out," Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke reportedly said after the city vote. "Really, this is a land use question, not [about] policies related to data centers."
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'Defeat for Justice': Ecuador to Pay Amazon-Polluting Chevron $220 Million
"A debt is not owed to Chevron. A debt is owed to the Amazonian families still waiting for truth, justice, and full reparation."
Dec 09, 2025
A US advocacy group, American human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, and the group in Ecuador behind a historic legal battle against Chevron over its dumping of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest are condemning the Ecuadorian government's plans to pay the oil giant hundreds of millions of dollars due to an arbitration ruling.
In response to the legal fight in Ecuador that led to a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron—which bought Texaco—the fossil fuel company turned to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, suing the South American country in the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration. As part of the latter case, Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar Méndez's office announced Monday that the government would pay the US company only around $220 million, rather than the over $3 billion Chevron sought.
While Chevron said in a statement that it was "pleased with the resolution of this matter" and claimed the decision "strengthened the rule of law globally," and Salazar Méndez's office celebrated the dramatically lower figure, and the Union of Peoples Affected by Chevron-Texaco (UDAPT)—the group that began the case against oil company in 1993—pushed back against the government's framing of the reduction "as if it was a success and an economic achievement."
"The reality is it is a defeat for justice," UDAPT argued in a Tuesday statement. "For 32 years, UDAPT has documented pollution, environmental crime, and lives broken by Chevron, proving what should be obvious: Communities have not recovered, health has not been restored, clean water has not returned, and the territories that sustain life remain contaminated. A debt is not owed to Chevron. A debt is owed to the Amazonian families still waiting for truth, justice, and full reparation."
Amazon Watch deputy director Paul Paz y Miño similarly said Tuesday that "this illegitimate arbitration process is nothing more than Chevron abusing the law to escape accountability for one of the worst oil disasters in history."
"Ecuador's courts ruled correctly and based largely on Chevron's own evidence, that Chevron deliberately poisoned Indigenous and rural communities, leaving behind a mass cancer zone in the Amazon," the campaigner continued. "Adding insult to injury, the idea that Ecuador's people should now pay a US oil company that admitted to deliberate pollution is the epitome of environmental racism."
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa "must not honor this ISDS award, and the international community must stand behind the victims of Chevron's crimes and demand that the company clean up Ecuador once and for all," Paz y Miño added. "Amazon Watch stands with the affected Indigenous peoples and communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We urge President Noboa to reject this illegitimate award, disclose any negotiations with Chevron, and enforce Ecuadorian law by ensuring Chevron pays its debt to those it poisoned."
Donziger—who was detained in the United States for nearly 1,000 days after Chevron went after him in the American legal system for representing Big Oil's victims in Ecuador—was also sharply critical, saying Tuesday that "the decision by a so-called private corporate arbitration panel that claims to absolve Chevron of its massive pollution liability in Ecuador has no legitimacy and does not affect the historic $9.5 billion damages judgment won by Amazonian communities."
"That judgment still stands as the definitive public court ruling in the case," he said. "The private arbitral panel has no authority over the six public appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada, that issued unanimous decisions against Chevron and confirmed the extensive evidence that the company devastated local communities by deliberately dumping billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into rivers and streams used by thousands of people for drinking, bathing, and fishing."
"I also strongly condemn President Daniel Noboa for his plans to betray his own people by agreeing to send $220 million from the public treasury to Chevron, a company that owes Ecuador billions under multiple court orders for poisoning vulnerable Indigenous peoples with toxic oil waste," Donziger added. "Noboa would effectively grant Chevron a taxpayer-funded bailout financed by the same citizens who remain victims of the company's pollution. This would be an outrageous dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office, warranting removal."
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'Attack on Independent Science': Trump EPA Removes All Mention of Human-Caused Climate Crisis From Public Webpages
Climate scientist Daniel Swain called it "a deliberate effort to misinform."
Dec 09, 2025
The Trump administration has removed all references to human-caused climate change from Environmental Protection Agency webpages, as well as large amounts of data showing the dramatic warming of the climate over recent decades and the resulting risks.
According to a Tuesday report from the Washington Post, one page on the "Causes of Climate Change" stated as recently as October that "it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land," a statement that reflects the overwhelming consensus in peer-reviewed literature on climate.
That statement is now nowhere to be found, with those that remain only mentioning "natural" causes of planetary warming like volcanic activity and variations in solar activity.
"The new, near-exclusive emphasis on natural causes of climate change on the EPA's website is now completely out of sync with all available evidence demonstrating overwhelming human influence on contemporary warming trends," explained Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, who posted about the changes on social media.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which examines tens of thousands of studies from around the globe, found that virtually all warming since the dawn of the industrial era can be attributed to human carbon emissions.
This can be confirmed using the Wayback Machine's last snapshot (from Oct 8, 2025). At some point between Oct 8 & Dec 8, major changes were made to this and other EPA climate change content. Information has either been removed completely or "adjusted" to emphasize natural causes.
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— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Pages about the catastrophic results of climate change have also been scrubbed: One of them allowed users to view several climate change indicators, like the historic decline of Arctic sea ice and glaciers and the increased rates of coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. That page has been deleted entirely.
Another page, which answered frequently asked questions about climate change, now no longer includes questions like, "Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?” "How can people reduce the risks of climate change?" and "Who is most at risk from the impacts of climate change?" The page provides no indication that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon, instead only discussing natural factors.
That page links to another that has since been deleted. It once provided extensive information about the risks climate change poses to human health, "from increasing the risk of extreme heat events and heavy storms to increasing the risk of asthma attacks and changing the spread of certain diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes." Another deleted page discussed the impacts of climate change on children's health and low-income populations.
“This is, I think, one of the more dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space,” said Swain. "This website is now completely incorrect regarding the changes in climate that we’re seeing today and their causes... It’s clearly a deliberate effort to misinform.”
During his 2024 campaign for reelection, President Donald Trump and his affiliated super political action committees received more than $96 million in direct contributions from oil and gas industry donors, according to a January report from Climate Power. Since retaking office, he has moved to dramatically expand the extraction and use of planet-heating fossil fuels while eliminating investment in clean energy and electric vehicles.
Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, "Deleting and distorting this scientific information only serves to give a free pass to fossil fuel polluters who are raking in profits even as communities reel from extreme heatwaves, record-breaking floods, intensified storms, and catastrophic wildfires."
Cleetus said that the purging of climate information from EPA sites was a prelude to "the likely overturning of the endangerment finding, a legal and scientific foundation for standards to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and threatening human health."
In July, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled a proposal to rescind the 2009 finding, which determined that climate change endangers human life and serves as the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
Undermining climate science is core to that effort, which Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said at the time, "could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.”
Shortly after Zeldin announced the rule change, the Department of Energy cobbled together a “Climate Working Group” comprising five authors handpicked by Secretary Chris Wright to produce a climate report that disputes the IPCC's findings and the scientific consensus on climate change.
The report did not undergo peer review and omitted around 99% of the scientific literature the IPCC relied on for its comprehensive findings. A group of climate scientists that independently reviewed the paper found that it “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.”
Cleetus said Tuesday that “EPA is trying to bury the evidence on human-caused climate change, but it cannot change the reality of climate science or the harsh toll climate impacts are taking on people’s lives... This isn’t just about data on a website; it’s an attack on independent science and scientific integrity.”
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'Victory for Everyone Who Pays an Electricity Bill': Judge Tosses Trump Ban on New Wind Energy Projects
"Get out of the way of the expansion of renewable energy," one clean power advocate told the Trump administration.
Dec 09, 2025
Clean energy advocates have scored at least a temporary victory after a federal judge on Monday threw out President Donald Trump's executive order that banned new wind power projects in the US.
As reported by CNBC, Judge Patti Saris of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts tossed Trump's executive order in its entirety after finding it "arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law," and arguing that the federal government did not provide a reasoned explanation for enacting such a policy.
The executive order, which Trump signed in January, halted all permits and leases for both offshore and onshore wind power projects.
A group of 17 states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued the Trump administration earlier this year to overturn the executive order, which they labeled "an existential threat to the wind industry" in the US.
In a social media post, James hailed the judge's ruling and called the decision "a big victory in our fight to keep tackling the climate crisis and protect one of our best sources of clean, reliable, and affordable energy."
Nancy Pyne, senior adviser for Sierra Club, declared the ruling "a victory for everyone who pays an electricity bill, is part of the clean energy workforce, and breathes air."
"Americans need cheaper and more reliable energy that does not come at the expense of our health and futures," Pyne added. "We are glad to see this illegal order get vacated, and we will continue to advocate for more wind energy projects across the country to lower the cost of energy and create stable, union jobs in our communities."
Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at Natural Resources Defense Council, also emphasized the benefits to US consumers of allowing more wind-power projects to move forward.
"From the beginning of its time in office, the Trump administration put a halt to the wind energy projects that are needed to keep utility bills in check and the grid reliable," Kennedy said. "In the months since, this action has been a devastating blow to workers, electricity customers, and the reliability of the power grid."
Kennedy added that the Trump administration should accept the judge's verdict and "get out of the way of the expansion of renewable energy."
The Trump administration has the option to appeal the judge's order, although it did not respond to questions from the New York Times on Monday about whether it had plans to do so.
Trump's war against wind power comes at a time when rising electric bills, caused in large part by increased demand from energy-devouring artificial intelligence data centers, have become a hot-button political issue.
A recent report from researchers at The Century Foundation and financial abuse watchdog Protect Borrowers found that the average overdue balance on utility bills has surged by 32% over the last three years, going from $597 in 2022 to $789 in 2025. The report also estimated that roughly 1 out of every 20 US households has utility debt that is “so severe it was sent to collections or in arrears."
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