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fossil fuels
Why Is Big Tech Using the Energy of the Past to Power the Future?
As these companies invest billions in technology for AI, they must re-up investments in renewables to power our future and protect our communities.
Sep 06, 2025
AI is everywhere. But its powerful computing comes with a big cost to our planet, our neighborhoods, and our wallets.
AI servers are so power hungry that utilities are keeping coal-fired power plants that were slated for closure running to meet the needs of massive servers. And in the South alone, there are plans for 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years—enough to power millions of homes—just to feed AI’s energy needs.
Multibillion dollar companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta that previously committed to 100% renewable energy are going back to the Jurassic Age, using fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to meet their insatiable energy needs. Even nuclear power plants are being reactivated to meet the needs of power-hungry servers.
At a time when we need all corporations to reduce their climate footprint, carbon emissions from major tech companies in 2023 have skyrocketed to 150% of average 2020 values.
AI data centers also produce massive noise pollution and use huge amounts of water. Residents near data centers report that the sound keeps them awake at night and their taps are running dry.
Many of us live in communities that either have or will have a data center, and we’re already feeling the effects. Many of these plants further burden communities already struggling with a lack of economic investment, access to basic resources, and exposure to high levels of pollution.
To add insult to injury, amid stagnant wages and increasing costs for food, housing, utilities, and consumer goods, AI’s demand for power is also raising electric rates for customers nationwide. To meet the soaring demand for energy that AI data servers demand, utilities need to build new infrastructure, the cost of which is being passed onto all customers.
These companies have the know-how and the wealth to power AI with wind, solar, and batteries—which makes it all the more puzzling that they’re relying on fossil fuels to power the future.
A recent Carnegie Mellon study found that AI data centers could increase electric rates by 25% in Northern Virginia by 2030. And NPR recently reported that AI data centers were a key driver in electric rates increasing twice as fast as the cost of living nationwide—at a time when 1 in 6 households are struggling to pay their energy bills.
All of these impacts are only projected to grow. AI already consumes enough electricity to power 7 million American homes. By 2028, that could jump to the amount of power needed for 22% of all US households.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
AI could be powered by renewable energy that is nonpolluting and works to reduce energy costs for us all. The leading AI companies, who have made significant climate pledges, must lead the way.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all made promises to the communities they serve to tackle climate and pollution. They all have climate pledges. And they have made significant investments in renewable energy in the past.
Those investments make sense, since renewables are the most affordable form of electricity. These companies have the know-how and the wealth to power AI with wind, solar, and batteries—which makes it all the more puzzling that they’re relying on fossil fuels to power the future.
If these corporate giants are to be good neighbors, they first need to be open and honest about the scope and scale of the problem and the solutions needed.
As these companies invest billions in technology for AI, they must re-up investments in renewables to power our future and protect our communities. They must ensure that communities have a real voice in how and where AI data centers are built—and that our communities aren’t sacrificed in the name of profits.
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As Trump Pushes to Defund Infrastructure, Water Systems Serving Tens of Millions Face Flood Risk
The White House has proposed slashing funds for the nation's water systems by 90%.
Sep 02, 2025
As the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress push to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for water infrastructure, they are increasing the flood risk community waters system face across the United States—making it more likely that close to 60 million people could lose access to safe water during or after such emergencies.
The environmental justice group Food and Water Watch (FWW) on Tuesday released a report on a sometimes overlooked impact of flooding: In addition to the devastating damage that floods can do to homes, roads, and community buildings, flooding can contaminate water supplies while overwhelming water utility systems and putting treatment plants out of commission even after the water has receded.
In Washed Out, FWW warns that the flood risk to the 448 largest community water systems in the country is growing as extreme weather events become increasingly common and more severe, with more than one-third of those systems facing "significant" flood risks.
At least 10% of the land served by the systems with the highest risks lie in areas prone to flooding, according to FWW, and 59.4 million people rely on those systems for safe drinking water.
About 15% of water systems evaluated by FWW have "elevated" flood risks, with at least 20% of land in high flood risk areas, where nearly 22 million people live.
Florida, which had at least four billion-dollar flood disasters between 1980-2024 and experienced several "100-year" rainstorms last year, was identified as having the highest flooding risk for large community water systems. The state is home to 10 of the country's 15 large systems that serve areas where at least half the land is in high flood risk zones.
New Jersey and Louisiana each have two large systems at high risk, while at least half the the area served by Boston's water system is also in a flood zone, putting more than 2.5 million people at serious risk of losing water access in the event of a flood.
Other high risk areas identified by FWW include New York City, where the municipal water system serves 8.2 million people and which has more than 12% of its land in high risk flood zones; Corpus Christi, Texas, where 23% of land is at high risk of flooding; and Alameda County, California, where 42% of land is in a flood zone.
"Now more than ever, it is imperative that all members of Congress stand firmly united against any shortsighted attempt to strip support for our critical water and sewer infrastructure."
"As our analysis illuminates, scores of water systems serving highly-populated communities are at significant threat of flooding that could suddenly break safe water delivery and sanitary sewer operation—for days, weeks or even months. Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans in Congress are seeking to decimate the key federal funding that keeps these systems operating safely," said Mary Grant, water program director at FWW.
Republicans in the US House are currently seeking a 25% cut to the Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds (SRF)—the primary source of federal funding for the nation's water and wastewater systems.
An appropriations bill released last month by the House Interior Subcommittee would slash the funds from $2.8 billion to $2.1 billion, bringing them to their lowest level since 2008.
The proposal does not go as far as President Donald Trump's push to cut the programs by nearly 90% with a plan to eventually zero them out, but FWW noted last month that the proposed cuts "come at a time when the needs of our nation's water and wastewater systems are substantial and growing."
"According to the latest needs survey of the US EPA, upgrading our water and wastewater infrastructure will cost $1.3 trillion over the next two decades just to comply with existing federal law," said the group.
Slashing funds for water infrastructure, including building more climate-resilient systems, would also put the drinking water of millions of people at risk at a time when flooding and other extreme weather disasters is becoming more common due to the continued extraction of planet-heating fossil fuels.
Scientists last year said Hurricane Helene—which along with smaller storms that happened around the same time dumped 40 trillion gallons of rain on the Southeast—was made about 10% more intense and dangerous by the human-caused climate crisis. The flooding left Asheville, North Carolina without safe drinking water for more than seven weeks.
FWW on Tuesday renewed its call for the US to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources—instead of slashing regulations for oil and gas industries as Trump has—and warned that "local water providers must also improve their systems to withstand today's climate reality."
"This level of investment will require a strong federal commitment," said the group.
FWW called on Congress to pass legislation like the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (WATER) Act "to guarantee federal support for safe and clean water in every community" and reject efforts to strip crucial funding from the SRF.
"Now more than ever," said Grant, "it is imperative that all members of Congress stand firmly united against any shortsighted attempt to strip support for our critical water and sewer infrastructure."
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Hard Lessons From Katrina We’re Still Learning 20 Years Later
Hurricane Katrina not only exposed the vulnerability of communities to extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, but also systemic injustices and a deeply flawed US insurance system.
Aug 29, 2025
It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States, wreaking havoc in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. An estimated 1,833 people died in the hurricane and the flooding that ensued. The storm destroyed or damaged more than a million housing units and more than 200,000 homes, causing one of the largest relocations of people in US history.
In the months and years that followed, entrenched inequalities, questionable policy choices, and predatory practices by private insurers decided who could return home and rebuild. For instance, countless residents impacted by the hurricane learned too late that their standard homeowners’ insurance offered no protection against flood damage, leaving them to shoulder devastating repair costs themselves. In cities such as New Orleans, these dynamics further marginalized Black residents, who were more likely to live in flood-prone neighborhoods. The result was widespread and often permanent displacement, with longtime communities effectively erased from the map.
Hurricane Katrina not only exposed the vulnerability of communities to extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, but also systemic injustices and a deeply flawed US insurance system. Private insurers pour billions of dollars into the fossil fuel industry, which is the main contributor to climate change. Thus, insurers help fuel the very crisis that is driving more frequent and severe climate disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, they are passing the financial risk of the escalating impact of climate change onto policyholders and forcing them to bear the costs of the crisis the industry itself helps perpetuate.
As climate-driven storms grow more frequent and increasingly destructive, the same insurance failures, housing crises, and inequitable recovery that followed Katrina now threaten communities nationwide. Two decades later, Katrina’s hard lessons cannot be ignored. Everyone deserves to live in safety and the opportunity to stay in the place they call home. Corporate greed and government negligence cannot continue to undermine these rights.
The Hurricane
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall with winds that reached 140 miles per hour. These high-velocity winds drove a storm surge that raised sea levels 25 to 28 feet above normal along parts of the Mississippi coast, and 10 to 20 feet along the southeastern Louisiana coast. The surge breached protective levees, causing catastrophic flooding. Two days after the hurricane struck, 80% of the city of New Orleans was underwater. Other coastal towns and cities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and along the western Florida panhandle also experienced significant storm surges and destructive winds, which caused widespread flooding and damage to homes.
The Great Displacement
Approximately 1.5 million people aged 16 years and older had to leave their residences in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama because of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, where the mayor issued a mandatory evacuation order, a population of around 500,000 was reduced to a few thousand people within a week of the storm.
As water was pumped out of the flooded areas and basic services and infrastructure were restored, New Orleanians were allowed to return. But tens of thousands were not able to do so. One year after Katrina, approximately 197,000 residents had not come back to the city; many relocated to the relatively close cities of Houston and Baton Rouge, but others as far away as Alaska and Massachusetts. Still today, many of those who evacuated the city, hoping to return, remain displaced. New Orleans’s metropolitan area population remains 20% below pre-Katrina levels.
The Impact On Black Communities
The development of New Orleans has been fraught with injustices. Racial segregation, redlining, and chronic underinvestment in Black communities pushed residents and renters into areas with crumbling infrastructure, poorer-quality homes, and greater exposure to environmental hazards and contaminants.
When Katrina hit, Black residents were concentrated in the most vulnerable parts of New Orleans, located well below sea level and poorly protected by inadequate levees. Accordingly, neighborhoods with the highest percentages of Black residents saw greater housing destruction from the storm.
Did You Know?
The disparate impact of climate disasters on property and infrastructure in US minority communities is the result of nearly a century of discriminatory home lending and insurance policies.
In the 1930s, the US federal government used a rating system in its low-cost home loan program to assess lending risk. Assessors created maps ranking the perceived risk of lending in certain neighborhoods, with race often used as the determining factor in assessing a community’s risk level. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were typically rated as “hazardous” and outlined in red, warning lenders that the area was a perilous place to lend money. Known as redlining, these and other discriminatory practices led to a lack of investment in minority communities.
This lack of financial access resulted in shoddy construction and poor infrastructure that have made minority neighborhoods less resilient to climate disasters and more prone to other financial risks. For instance, insurers are more likely to increase premiums if they determine that properties are less resilient to climate damage. This new financial practice is known as bluelining, and it occurs when insurers raise their prices or pull out of areas that they perceive to be at greater environmental risk.
Reconstruction: A New Pathway to Segregation?
For Lousina’s Black residents, Katrina’s damage was compounded by discriminatory recovery policies that deepened inequalities. After the storm, the federally funded Road Home program was launched to help residents repair or rebuild damaged homes. It offered grants of up to $150,000 per homeowner, but payments were based on whichever was lower—the home’s pre-storm value or the cost to rebuild.
Because property values in Black neighborhoods were often far lower than in white neighborhoods, this meant many Black homeowners would receive only a fraction of what they needed to rebuild. In one case, a woman had rebuilding costs of over $150,000, but because the estimated value of her home pre-storm was much lower, she would’ve received an essentially useless grant of $1,400. As a result, the program was alleged to discriminate against Black homeowners, and a federal class action suit was filed on November 12, 2008, on behalf of 20,000 homeowners. The litigation settled with Louisiana agreeing to reward approximately 1,300 homeowners with $62 million in additional compensation.
The Blow to Affordable Housing
Renters fared no better. Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed 82,000 rental units in Louisiana, 20% of which were affordable to extremely low-income households. The impact on public and federally subsidized rentals was especially severe. In New Orleans, public-housing residents were displaced at a rate of nearly 90%. And reconstruction policies only exacerbated the disparities these residents faced.
Consider this.
Before the storm hit and floodwaters rose, the Housing Authority of New Orleans evacuated all residents living in its 7,379 public housing units. After the waters receded, residents were allowed to return to approximately 1,600 units. Most other units were sealed off with steel doors and barbed wire—officially due to storm damage—before being slated for demolition. Yet, the redevelopment that followed included far fewer mixed-income apartments. By 2010, five years after the hurricane, less than half of the original 7,379 units were open in any form. The dramatic decrease in public housing contributed to the permanent displacement of many of New Orleans’ longtime residents.
After Katrina, renters faced a range of economic pressures. Many landlords delayed repairs or rebuilding, especially in low-income areas, which are seen as less profitable. Some used the disaster as an opportunity to renovate and target higher-paying tenants, further shrinking the supply of affordable rentals. Within five years of the Hurricane, the stock of mid-priced housing units in New Orleans had declined by more than two-thirds, pushing the median rent from $689 in 2004 to $876 in 2009. These rising costs hit Black residents hardest, forcing many to leave and permanently altering the city’s character.
Even those who could afford to return to New Orleans and buy a new home after Katrina faced soaring prices—up 14% in the first year alone—as demand outpaced the reduced housing supply. In addition, homeowners’ insurance premiums jumped 22% in Louisiana between 2005 and 2007, adding yet another barrier to homeownership.
The Flood Exclusion Trap
Then, as now, and to the surprise of many victims of the Hurricane, standard home insurance policies in the US did not protect homeowners from floodwater damage. This means residents must buy additional flood insurance to be protected in the event of a disaster like Katrina.
New Orleans residents had among the highest participation rates in the country in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a federal government program that provides flood insurance to homeowners, renters, and businesses. However, the majority of residents in areas affected by Katrina had not purchased flood insurance. Uninsured property losses due to flooding were economically devastating, exceeding an estimated $41.1 billion (USD 100 billion in 2024 prices). In addition, the NFIP incurred some $16.1 billion in losses and a deficit exceeding $18 billion as a direct result of the flooding caused by Katrina.
Even for New Orleanians with flood insurance, coverage likely fell short. Policies typically covered about $152,000—the city’s median house price at the time. But this was rarely enough to replace the damaged household contents or to pay residents for temporary housing while their home was uninhabitable.
More and more, whether people hit by climate-driven storms get anything from their insurers depends not on the fact that their homes were damaged, but on how they were damaged.
While the standard home insurance policy does not cover water damage from a hurricane, it does cover wind damage. This gap left residents and insurers arguing about whether Katrina’s destruction to their homes was caused by its high-velocity winds or the flooding that followed, with multiple lawsuits challenging the validity of flood exclusions in insurance policies. Even before the flooding receded and residents of Louisiana and Mississippi could start to rebuild their lives, courts were inundated with litigation, with about 6,600 insurance-related lawsuits being instigated in the US District Court. Yet, Katrina’s destructive flooding was driven by a storm surge powered by the hurricane’s high winds—the very peril homeowners’ policies are supposed to cover.
On September 15, 2005, Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood filed a case against five of the largest homeowners’ insurers in the state. Attorney General Hood sought a court declaration that the flood exclusion provision in standard home insurance policies was “void and unenforceable” and in violation “of the public policy of the State of Mississippi.” However, in that case and others, courts ruled that the flood exclusions were spelled out clearly in homeowners’ insurance policies and did not violate public policy.
The exclusion of water damage from insurance coverage remains a present issue for existing homeowners. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, since 1996, 99% of US counties have been impacted by flooding, but only 4% of homeowners have flood insurance. And, more importantly, over half (56%) of American homeowners don’t know that their home insurance policy excludes flood damage. As hurricane season intensifies, many homeowners will be shocked to learn that their insurance does not cover flood loss.
Insurers’ Favorite Loophole: Wind vs. Water Damage
After Katrina, some insurers exploited the false dichotomy between wind and water damage, classifying losses as water damage to shift liability onto homeowners or the NFIP.
In 2013, a federal jury in Mississippi found that State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. defrauded the NFIP after avoiding covering a policyholder’s wind losses from Katrina by blaming the damage on storm surge, which is covered by federal flood insurance. Almost 10 years later, in August 2022, State Farm settled the case, agreeing to pay $100 million to the federal government.
State Farm was not the only insurer engaged in nefarious behavior, attributing Hurricane Katrina damage to flooding instead of wind. In oral argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2009, insurance company USAA publicly admitted that it shifted its own costs to the NFIP and thus taxpayers.
The false dichotomy between the wind and water damage resulting from a hurricane remains nebulous. The damage caused by Hurricane Ian in Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina in 2022, with its record-high wind speeds, generated $63 billion in private insurance claims. In contrast, 2018’s Hurricane Florence primarily caused water—not wind—damage in North and South Carolina, leaving uninsured flood losses estimated at nearly $20 billion and letting private insurers largely escape liability. More and more, whether people hit by climate-driven storms get anything from their insurers depends not on the fact that their homes were damaged, but on how they were damaged.
Regulators Must Act: People over Profit
Hurricane Katrina exposed widespread gaps in home insurance coverage that persist today. In the 20 years since Katrina, unmitigated climate change has fueled rising temperatures and made extreme weather events such as hurricanes both more frequent and more severe. As storms grow costlier and more destructive, insurers have raised home insurance premiums and declined to renew many policies, leaving households with fewer options for protection. This escalating cycle has produced today’s insurance crisis.
Federal and state lawmakers must respond. The federal government must reform the NFIP to improve federal flood insurance and ensure it provides affordable coverage for more hazards. At the same time, the NFIP should do more to support community-based mitigation. States, meanwhile, must use their regulatory authority over insurance markets to address skyrocketing insurance costs and growing coverage gaps resulting from mounting climate change impacts.
Regulators should adopt legislation, like New York’s Insure Our Future bill, to prohibit insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, require them to phase out support for existing projects, and force insurers to divest from fossil fuel companies.
The insurance industry cannot ignore its role in fueling the very crisis it now faces. Climate change-induced disasters are indisputably driven by fossil fuel emissions. And insurance companies facilitate climate change by investing in fossil fuel companies and underwriting fossil fuel projects. US insurance companies have investments of more than $500 billion in fossil fuel-related assets, including coal, oil, and gas. In 2022 alone, insurers worldwide collected $21 billion in premiums for underwriting fossil fuel projects—directly enabling their expansion.
Regulators should adopt legislation, like New York’s Insure Our Future bill, to prohibit insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, require them to phase out support for existing projects, and force insurers to divest from fossil fuel companies. Without bold action, insurers will continue to profit from climate destruction while leaving families and communities to bear the costs.
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