At a summit at Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday this week, President Donald Trump will gather Big Oil CEOs and the heads of several artificial intelligence giants in a nightmarish affair to discuss how to accelerate the use of fossil fuels to power AI. In response, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, issued the following statement:
“Trump’s radical AI agenda entails abusing emergency authorities to usurp state and local laws to accommodate Big Oil and Big Tech’s profits at the expense of everyone else. While no public interest consumer or environmental groups are invited, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute are slated to speak, along with EQT’s Toby Rice, and the CEOs of ExxonMobil (Darren Woods), Shell (Wael Sawan), Chevron (Mike Wirth), OpenAI (Sam Altman), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Microsoft (Satya Nadella) and Alphabet (Sundar Pichai) are on the guest list.
“Trump’s scheme is to abuse an array of emergency powers to force communities to host energy-gobbling AI data centers by designating such facilities and all associated energy infrastructure as national security assets, thereby crushing any state and local zoning laws and other public health and safety protections. Trump’s actions will promote dirty natural gas and coal as the fuel of choice, which will raise Americans’ energy bills while contaminating the environment. Trump’s agenda will put Big Tech in control of America’s AI policy, despite the industry’s widespread abuses. Trump’s radical AI plan is yet another example of the President siding with powerful corporations ahead of the American people.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.