The Panic Industry’s New Target

A generation coached to fear climate change is now fretting over AI and data centers

By Barton Swaim. Excerpts:

"Where does Mr. Schmidt think young people got the idea that “the climate is breaking”? Where did the “fear” he laments come from? In part from the scores of climate-panic groups to which the Schmidt Family Foundation’s 11th Hour Project has granted hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 20 years. One detail particularly amuses: 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. The outfit, like scores of others founded and funded by other progressive billionaires, spends its resources opposing fossil-based energy and trumpeting the dangers of a warming world."

"Last year Bill Gates posted an essay on his website purporting to scold alarmists and express his own moderate view of the climate question, namely that it is a “very important problem” but doesn’t doom civilization. You have to wonder, then, why Mr. Gates has sent so much of his money to Arabella Advisors. Arabella, a pass-through entity now called Sunflower Services, funds a dizzying array of groups that exist to alarm the public over an imminent climate apocalypse and to portray carbon-emitting energy as an existential threat to humanity."

"nobody staffing the multibillion-dollar ganglion of climate nonprofits and activist groups plans on taking a more measured view of the coming cataclysm."

"modern data centers first appeared in the 1990s, when companies learned the benefits of fast internet connectivity and information storage."

"the people showing up at county council meetings to protest the construction of a data center . . . 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."