Amid the many political casualties of 2025 — mass
federal layoffs, shuttered agencies, and clean energy spending cuts —
the passing of one of the last decade’s defining political projects went
almost entirely unnoticed. On December 31, 2025, the Green New Deal
Network, a coalition of climate, labor, and social justice
organizations, officially died.
The coalition wasn’t intended to last forever, but its demise was
sped up by the political mood that got President Donald Trump reelected
in 2024, when the momentum that the movement had enjoyed under Joe
Biden’s administration seemingly evaporated overnight.
As Trump launched
an all-out assault on environmental regulations and climate policies,
the climate movement was left at a loss,
unsure how to push for change with the public increasingly focused on
other issues, like the cost of living, and a federal government hostile
to its cause.
“The conditions under which the Green New Deal Network was founded have fundamentally changed,” the coalition’s site said,
explaining its decision to fold. “The mission of climate, jobs, and
justice is far from over — but the structure built to win a specific
moment is no longer the right vehicle for what comes next.”
Saul Levin, who was the network’s director of campaigns and politics,
knew what was next for him personally: fighting AI data centers.
The
artificial intelligence boom has created a surge in construction of
giant facilities that process digital information, and communities
across the country are working to stop them from being built, concerned
about water usage, soaring energy bills, and Big Tech taking over.
Over a
year ago, Levin had started a Signal chat to help people opposing data
centers get organized. Now his chat has about 350 members across 40
states, and he’s busy with his new podcast, “The Hum,” capturing their stories and highlighting successes.
Many climate activists are following a similar path. Concerns about
greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, and social justice
fit organically into the growing anti-data center movement, which has
attracted a much broader, bipartisan coalition
than the Green New Deal ever did.
“The climate movement is increasingly
realizing that this is a fight that’s both an important fight and a
strategic fight,” said Evan Sutton, an anti-AI advocate who’s helping
connect people who oppose data centers.
Take the Sunrise Movement, whose members stormed Representative Nancy
Pelosi’s office in 2018 to demand a Green New Deal, catapulting the
idea into the national conversation. “We’ve definitely seen a surge of
interest in data center fights around the country,” said Aru
Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director. Local Sunrise hubs have
been mobilizing to stop data centers in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, and
Lansing, Michigan, Shiney-Ajay said.
There’s a logical reason for the climate movement to get involved:
These hyperscale data centers are poised to cause carbon emissions to
spike. A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
found that data centers could account for about one-third of the growth
in U.S. electricity demand between 2024 and 2030.
This thirst for
energy is driving the expansion of infrastructure for natural gas,
a fossil fuel. A typical AI data center demands as much electricity as
100,000 households, but some of the largest ones being built may use up
to 20 times that, according to the International Energy Agency.
The rapid expansion of data centers threatens to “undo a huge amount of
the progress that we made in terms of moving toward clean energy,”
Shiney-Ajay said. “If we don’t really seriously start to pass policy
that mitigates that, then they could be a disaster for our climate.”
Some established environmental organizations have gotten on board with suspending hyperscale data center construction. A letter
sent to Congress this month calling for a nationwide moratorium was
signed by more than 500 groups, most of them related to the environment,
climate change, or environmental justice — such as Greenpeace USA,
Third Act, GreenLatinos, and Food and Water Watch. But some of the
biggest names of the U.S. environmental movement were absent from the
list, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council,
and the Nature Conservancy.
That’s not to say they’re pro-data center, though. “The speculative
rush to build data centers is harming ratepayers, our climate, and
community health, which is why we urgently need protections from states
and the federal government,” Jeremy Fisher, the Sierra Club’s principal
advisor, said in an emailed statement. The organization advocates for
holding Big Tech to a higher standard in terms of environmental and
health impacts and argues that companies should invest in clean energy
to run their facilities instead of fossil fuels. “Data centers can and
should be powered with renewable energy that does not threaten our
environment and our health, our wallets, or our environment,” Fisher
said.
Thomas Meyer, the organizing projects director at Food and Water
Watch, which led the letter to Congress, said that powering data centers
with clean energy doesn’t solve the problem. In Washington state, for
instance, Amazon outbid the utility Puget Sound Energy
in an auction for an enormous Oregon solar farm, leaving the utility
concerned about competition for renewable resources as Amazon races to
build energy-hungry data centers. “What about the things that that solar
power would have gone to power instead?” Meyer said. “You haven’t grown
the pie. You’ve just shifted it from one place to another.”
Big green groups may also be taking cues from Democratic politicians, many of whom, like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, have been friendly to data center development.
“The unfortunate reality is that some organizations tend to follow
rather than lead, especially when it comes to mainstream positions of
Democratic Party leaders or elected officials,” Meyer said.
Meyer witnessed a similar dynamic a decade ago when working as a
field organizer on campaigns to ban fracking: a disconnect between
grassroots energy and mainstream institutions. Established environmental
groups tend to move more slowly than bottom-up movements, said Valerie
Costa, co-executive director of the Oil and Gas Action Network, a
nonprofit that supports grassroots groups working to move the U.S.
beyond fossil fuels. “One of the things that grassroots movements do
really well is shifting when there are more immediate threats, and being
able to respond quickly,” Costa said.
That was recently in play in Seattle, where the climate activist
group 350 Seattle joined the push to pass a moratorium on new large data
centers after the news broke this spring that five major facilities
could be coming to town. If all the projects were actually built, they
would require about one-third the amount of power that Seattle uses on a
typical day. The Seattle City Council passed the moratorium unanimously
earlier this month, making it the largest city in the U.S.
so far to suspend approvals. For local activists working on an issue as
amorphous and overwhelming as climate change, it was invigorating to
get involved in a mission with a concrete, local outcome.
“For us, it was a very good on-ramp for people who just want to do
something and want to turn that powerlessness into something
meaningful,” said Nivi Achanta, the founder and CEO of Soapbox Project, a
local climate action group that advocated for the moratorium. The
group’s Signal chat buzzed as the city council weighed the policy:
“People were, like, pulling out drinks and grabbing their popcorn and
actually watching these city council politics unfold in a way that’s so
much more fun than anything I’ve experienced outside of this, in the
general climate movement,” Achanta said.
In Washington state, known for its progressive climate policies, new
natural gas infrastructure driven by power-hungry AI data centers
threatens to produce an additional 13.5 million metric tons of carbon
dioxide each year, about 14 percent of the state’s current annual emissions. That could derail its attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, as required by the state’s Climate Commitment Act.
Even in a blue state, there’s an understanding that opposition to data
centers has to be bipartisan if it’s going to be successful, especially
since most data centers are being proposed in rural areas.
“We can’t just rely on the West Coast, or on the blue corridor from
Bellingham down to Vancouver, Washington, to get something done,” said
Lauren Redfield, a voluntary organizer with the Washington AI
Resistance.
As climate activists join local fights, they may find themselves
teaming up with people they don’t agree with on everything, or on much
at all. Data centers are a rare issue that unites Americans across the political spectrum,
with 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans opposed to
building data centers in their area, according to polling from Gallup.
All kinds of people — punk musicians in Utah, farmers in Oregon, beauty
salon workers in Maryland — are coming out for all kinds of reasons,
according to Levin, the host of “The Hum.” But their differences aren’t
stopping them from working together.
“Again and again, we hear from organizers who are like, ‘I don’t care
if you’re here for climate change, and I’m here because I think it’s
going to be ugly, and that person’s here because they hate AI’ — all of
us think this is a bad project,” Levin said.
In the first three months of this year, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 facilities worth nearly $130 billion.
One reason this resistance has been effective is because of its people
power — the hundreds of thousands of people who are turning out to town
halls, meeting up on porches, and otherwise showing up to fight. In an
age of loneliness and political disillusionment, it’s a sign that
something is changing.
“I’m really hopeful that this is the thing that gets communities
re-engaged in local politics,” Redfield said. “We’ve seen a lot of
apathy over the last several years, and I’m really hoping that this
civic engagement can help us build that community that can help us
stitch our society back together.”
