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renewable energy
Everyday People Bear the Costs of Big Tech’s Hunger for Profits
We pay it in rising energy bills, our worsening climate, our lack of access to safe water, increased noise pollution, and risks to our health and safety.
Dec 16, 2025
Bill Gates recently made headlines by suggesting that climate change is no longer a priority, but the American public begs to differ.
In this last election, climate change was a defining issue in states like Virginia and Georgia, where voters grappled with rising energy costs. And no matter how much tech billionaires try to distract us, increasing power costs and our worsening climate are directly connected to corporations like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon racing to dominate the AI landscape.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the price of energy has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation since 2020, and Big Tech’s push for more power-hungry data centers is only making it worse.
The data centers proliferating across the country drive up energy costs by powering energy-ravenous generative AI, cloud storage, digital networks, and other energy intensive programs—much of it fueled by coal and natural gas that exacerbate climate change.
We can demand that tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon uphold their commitments to use 100% renewable energy and not rely on fossil fuels and nuclear energy to power data centers.
In some cases, data centers consume enough electricity to power the equivalent of a small city. The wholesale price of electricity in areas housing data centers is up a whopping 267% from five years ago—and everyday customers are eating those costs.
Americans are also shouldering increasing costs of an extreme climate.
The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard noted that insurance prices rose 74% between 2008 and 2024—and between 2018 and 2023, nearly 2 million people had their policies canceled by insurers because of climate risks.
Meanwhile, home prices have gone up 40% in the past two decades—meaning the cost of home repair and recovery from climate disasters has also grown, all while wages remain stagnant.
Data centers aren’t just putting our wallets at risk. Power grids across the country are already strained from aging infrastructure and repeated battering during extreme weather events.
The additional pressure to feed energy-intensive data centers only heightens the risk of power blackouts in emergencies like wildfires, deep freezes, and hurricanes. And in some communities, people’s taps have literally run dry because data centers used all the local groundwater.
Worse still, Big Tech’s AI energy demand has triggered a resurgence in dirty energy with the construction of new gas-powered energy plants and delayed shutdowns of fossil fuel-powered plants. The tech industry is even pushing for a revitalization of nuclear energy, including the planned 2028 reopening of Three Mile Island—site of the worst nuclear power plant disaster in US history—to help power Microsoft’s data centers.
Everyday people bear the costs of Big Tech’s hunger for profits. We pay it in rising energy bills, our worsening climate, our lack of access to safe water, increased noise pollution, and risks to our health and safety.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of raising our bills, draining our local resources, and destabilizing our climate, Big Tech could create more energy jobs, lessen our power bills, and sustain communities.
We can demand that tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon uphold their commitments to use 100% renewable energy and not rely on fossil fuels and nuclear energy to power data centers. We can insist that data centers only go where they’re wanted by ensuring communities are given full transparency and protection in how they’re affected by power usage, water access, and noise pollution.
The current administration is ignoring its obligations to the American public by refusing to rein in Big Tech. But tech billionaires still have a responsibility to the very public they depend on for their existence.
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Economic Self-Interest Will Draw Millions To Solar Energy
A good investment never did so much good. Eventually, more and more people will realize it.
Dec 15, 2025
Many Americans who don’t believe in global warming will opt to invest in solar energy simply because it will save them lots of money.
Unfortunately, not everyone can install solar panels on their roofs. People in apartments or renting will not have that opportunity, though some might cash in through community solar organizations or plug-in solar --- portable panels that can be placed on balconies or in yards.
Even some single-family homes may have roofs aimed the wrong direction or too shaded. But for those with suitable houses, solar panels are increasingly a no-brainer.
In 2019 we installed 32 panels on our home roof at a cost of about $18,000--- about $22,000 in 2025 dollars. However a 30% federal tax credit reduced our out of pocket cost to about $12,600.
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” repeals the federal tax credit starting in January, but solar panels remain an excellent investment.
In seven years, our panels have generated more than 72,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This would have cost us more than $7,250 at the local price of ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Thus, in less than seven years our panels have saved us more than half of what we paid for them. And they should be good for 25 years, or more.
They have generated more than half of the electricity we have used in our all-electric household, including charging up the battery in our electric car, a Chevrolet Bolt EV. To indicate how much energy 72,500 kilowatt-hours represents, that would be enough to drive our electric car about 280,000 miles!
The cost of installing solar panels may come down further. The panels themselves are getting cheaper. And for various reasons, including local building regulations, installation costs in the U.S. are much higher than in some other countries. Many cities are exploring how to make local laws more receptive to solar.
Maximum benefit from solar panels will come if you pay cash for them rather than borrowing the money and paying interest on it. Assuming you have money that you might otherwise invest in a CD, bonds, or stocks, just compare what such investments would earn compared to what the solar panels would save you.
Assuming panels would cost you $20,000, investing that amount instead in a 3% CD would bring in $600 a year in taxable income, so maybe you would have $450 after taxes. In 7 years, after tax interest would come to $3150, less than half of what we have saved during that same period with our solar panels. Of course, with stocks and bonds you very likely have something left at the end of solar panels' lives.
Bond funds currently earn about the same 3% interest, and of course with stocks you never know what they will earn and also face the danger that they will suffer from a Wall Street crash.
And taking taxes into consideration, the money solar panels save you provides the equivalent of tax-free income, so a $7,250 saving over 7 years would leave as much in your pocket as $9600 in taxable income would have, assuming you are in a 25% marginal tax bracket.
Furthermore, remember that the price of electricity will undoubtedly go up. The savings from having solar panels will therefore also increase, making them an even better investment.
I don’t recommend borrowing to pay for solar panels. But if you are considering this, be sure to subtract the interest you would be paying on the loan from the benefits the panels will produce before you sign anything. It may not pencil out.
Check out your solar installer – most are reputable, but perhaps not all. The installer can tell you how well your local utility treats customers with solar panels, which can vary greatly.
And be ultra cautious about anybody offering to install solar panels for “free.” They will retain a property right in the panels until you pay them off, which could scare off buyers if you need to sell the property.
There truly is no free lunch! But solar panels can be the next best thing.
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Trump's Oil Piracy Shows Why the Push for Renewable Energy Is the Push for Peace
Conflict like the US targeting of Venezuela is probably inevitable as long as the world depends on an energy source that is available only in a few places.
Dec 11, 2025
I don’t know enough maritime law to tell you exactly why it’s wrong for America to be dropping troops onto tankers to seize them—just to say that, no matter what legalistic excuse the administration cooks up, it looks exactly like being a pirate. (It’s worth remembering that the US Navy was founded largely to take on piracy, and thanks to the Barbary corsairs, the early Americans had a lot to say about the subject. George Washington, for instance: Pirates are “enemies to mankind.”)
But I can tell you this. In the ever-shrinking mind of our current president, the reason why it’s good to seize a tanker is because it carries oil, and oil is the source of all strength, his contemporary equivalent to pieces of his eight. It’s “a large tanker, very large,” Mr. Trump explained, continuing (inevitably) to describe it as “the largest one ever seized actually.” When asked what would happen to the cargo, he said “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”
Oil is, and always has been, at the center of our concerns with Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven reserves (though much of it is in the incredibly dirty and hard-to-recover form of tarsands). At the moment it’s a major supplier to China, and it claims sovereignty over a major oil field in Guyana which has attracted big investment from Exxon and Chevron. So if you wonder why we’ve been attacking “drug boats” from Venezuela on the grounds that they’re carrying fentanyl, which Venezuela does not produce, that may give you some sense. Indeed the pressure has been so intense that the Maduro government in Caracas apparently offered to essentially turn over its oil and mineral resources to America in October negotiations; we’ve apparently decided we’d rather just take them.
This kind of coercion on behalf of the hydrocarbon industry is becoming old hat for the Trump administration. It’s used tariff policy, for instance, to force country after country to agree to buy huge quantities of American liquefied natural gas. As CNBC reported last spring regarding one deal with the EU:
“They’re going to have to buy our energy from us, because they need it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can knock off $350 billion in one week,” the president said. The European Union faces a 20% tariff rate if it does not reach a deal with Trump.
(Justin Mikulka has a pointed take on why this strategy won’t work for the LNG industry, and new data emerged this week showing just how badly it is going to penalize Americans who depend on propane for heating, since they’re now competing with so many other places for our supply of natural gas).
And of course in another sense we’ve been pirating the atmosphere for more than a century, filling up what is a common property with our emissions—America got rich burning fossil fuels, and the main result for other countries will be an ever higher temperature.
But for the moment let’s just think about the flow of oil, because it’s been behind, in large part, so much of the geopolitical tension of the last hundred years. Japan’s quest for oil played some real role in the attacks on Pearl Harbor; Germany invaded the USSR in no small part to secure the oil fields of the Caucasus. The Suez crisis hinged on the transport of oil to Europe. OPEC seized on our thirst for oil as a powerful weapon in the 1980s, and America’s determination to keep oil flowing has determined much of our global stance in the postwar years—I’ll never forget a sign I saw at an early demonstration against the war in Iraq: “How did our oil end up under their sand?”
The point here is that conflict like this is probably inevitable as long as the world depends on an energy source that is available only in a few places. Control of those places becomes too important—you end up with oligarchs, and with people who want to topple them.
So how nice to imagine a world where location doesn’t matter—where instead we depend on energy from the sun and the wind, available everywhere. In the crudest terms, it’s going to be difficult to fight a war over sunshine. No one will ever seize a tanker to get at its supply of solar energy. Which is good news for everyone except those profiting from the current paradigm—Trumpism represents its dying twitches, but obviously those twitches can do great damage, as the last 24 hours indicates.
Yes, we need sun and windpower to take a bite out of the climate crisis. But we also need it to take a bite out of the authoritarianism crisis. Our job is to make this transition happen faster; every new solar panel erodes just a little bit the logic of oil imperialism. The push for clean energy is the push for peace.
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