Q&A: Tech Billionaires’ AI Space Empire Fantasies Are ‘An Insidious Form of Climate Denial’

 "Science journalist Adam Becker speaks with DeSmog about how Silicon Valley tech billionaires have invented new forms of greenwashing and climate denial in their quest for ever-more fantastic technology.

By Rei Takver

In the wildest dreams of tech billionaires, humans colonize the solar system on giant space stations, dodge mortality by uploading their brains into computers, and solve climate change in a single swoop of god-like AI-generated genius.

It’s a hubris that has led Big Tech companies, which until recently were seen as corporate climate leaders with ambitious clean energy goals, to run full-tilt towards oil and gas — powering the rapid expansion of their monstrously energy-hungry AI data centers with natural gas, and holding court with Trump energy officials who deny climate science while championing American fossil fuel “energy dominance.”
 
To all of this, Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, basically says – Um. No.
 
Becker’s book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, exposes how tech billionaires’ sci-fi inspired fantasies about ever-more technology making everything, endlessly, better are basically, well — terrible. These billionaires’ promises, in Becker’s careful accounting, veer from what he says is “wildly implausible” to “profoundly immoral” – and ultimately paves the way for a descent into oligarchy. 
 
They’re also, in Becker’s view, emerging as the root of a new, Silicon Valley-styled “insidious form of climate denial” – replete with its own set of what he calls greenwashing tactics.

DeSmog reporter Rei Takver spoke with Becker about what he thinks drives this new kind of climate denialism, and its consequences.
 
This interview has been condensed and edited for concision and clarity.

Rei Takver: You’ve said that writing More Everything Forever started after uncovering that evangelical Christian tech billionaire and Palantir founder Peter Thiel was funding a science magazine, Inference: International Review of Science, that was publishing not only creationism, but full-on climate science contrarianism. Why did Thiel’s climate denial take you over the edge?

Adam Becker: People take Silicon Valley’s ideas about science and technology very seriously, as though the leaders of the tech industry actually know anything about science or tech. It’s an understandable mistake to make, but it’s a mistake. When I started thinking about what I already knew about that, I realized that there was this through-line in Silicon Valley of climate denial of a kind, usually not the outright climate denial that you find in that Thiel-funded magazine, but a more insidious form of climate denial that minimizes climate change as a problem and says, “Oh, this is something that we can solve later, once we’ve built an [artificial intelligence] god, or gone to space.”
 
Rei Takver: When I see the phrase “more everything forever,” it conjures visions of endless power — more oil, more gas, more nuclear, forever. You’ve written about how many of these tech billionaires, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, love dreaming about tapping into endless sources of infinite energy — often alongside the Trump administration. Why do you think Altman, and a wide selection of other tech leaders are aligning with the Trump administration’s aggressively fossil-fuel dominant AI energy policy?
 
Adam Becker: Let me answer your question with a segue. Nuclear fusion is one of these false promises of the tech industry, right? There’s a company, Helion, saying that they’re going to get a nuclear fusion power plant online at commercially competitive rates by 2028. I’m a physicist. That’s delusional. More realistically, we’re talking 40 years, and even that is probably optimistic — 2028 is not going to happen. Guess who’s the single largest investor in Helion and chairman of the board? It is Sam Altman. In an interview in January he was asked, what’s the best way to combat climate change? And he said, oh, we need to loosen up permitting for nuclear fusion plants, something that doesn’t exist and will not exist for probably decades.

Rei Takver: I wonder if Altman knows that himself. He’s written in his personal blog that “the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy,” but also that he’s “unsure” how we’ll power the 21st century. Well, it does seem like he has some idea, since OpenAI is firing up gas turbines to run data centers already.
 
Adam Becker: I think it’s important to take a careful look at the world view here. Altman hired a Trump natural gas dude [to lead OpenAI’s global energy strategy] because he wants to build out as much AI infrastructure as possible, and he wants to get people to give him as much money as they can — before either the AI bubble pops or they succeed in building an AI god, which is not going to happen. 
 
Rei Takver: Hasn’t Altman even said he believes AGI, artificial general intelligence, a supercomputer that in theory would match or exceed the intelligence of a human being, is going to solve climate change when it’s invented?

Adam Becker: Yeah, he said back in 2023 that climate change isn’t going to be that big a deal for a super intelligent AGI, because we can just ask it for three wishes to solve global warming. That’s not a viable plan. That’s not even a concept of a plan. The thing about these insane, futuristic visions that Altman and other tech billionaires are trying to sell the rest of us on is that it allows them to justify any action that they possibly want to take. As in, sure, we can just burn as many fossil fuels as we want right now, because the AGI is going to solve it for us.

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, billionaire venture capitalist, and CEO of a space company [Relativity Space], said a little over a year ago now that“we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” so we need to just burn as much energy as possible, get into AGI now, so the AI will solve climate change for us. That’s a better climate plan.

Solar and renewables are cheaper than they’ve ever been, and more reliable than they’ve ever been, but sure, buddy, we’re not going to meet our climate goals, even if we try. Whatever. I’m sure that the solution is to have people invest in the companies in your venture capitalist portfolio, which, by the way, includes another one of these boondoggle fusion companies. 
 
Rei Takver: Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates have also been backtracking on climate issues recently. Last year, Microsoft announced publicly that its own climate targets had been a “moonshot,” and Bill Gates recently argued that AI will do more to solve climate change than worsen it.

Adam Becker: The idea that tech will save us, and is the only thing that will save us, and will solve every single problem, is something that you see over and over again in the tech industry. It is the idea that, his time, we found the thing that’s going to save the world, the World Wide Web! Oh, no. no, no. What’s going to save people is social media — look at the Arab Spring! Oh, no, no. What’s going to save the world is AI! No. What’s going to save the world is AI data centers in space!
 
Rei Takver: Speaking of data centers in space, Jeff Bezos is a huge fan, and also a huge fan of expansive space colonization that would see trillions of humans across the solar system. What is going on with this?
 
Adam Becker: Bezos said recently that he “doesn’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now” because “in the next couple of decades, there will be millions of people living in space.” No, that’s definitely not happening. You are wrong. The only reason you could actually say that with a straight face was you just don’t believe anything that anyone with expertise tells you about the world, or don’t bother to seek it out in the first place before you make statements.
 
Rei Takver: And part of the reason that Bezos says we need these space colonies is because he thinks there’s just not enough energy on Earth.
 
Adam Becker: Bezos is right about the fact that if our energy usage growth continues at the current rate, in a few hundred years we will not be able to keep growing our energy usage, because we’ll be using all the energy that the sun delivers to Earth in the form of sunlight. He’s right about that, too. The problem is, first of all, we’re not even going to get close to that. There’s all sorts of reasons why our energy usage is going to have to stop growing way before that point.  Even if it doesn’t stop before that point, the waste heat from thermodynamic limits would boil the oceans.
 
The other way Bezos goes wrong is that after he says “Earth is the best planet,” he then says, so therefore, since we have to go into space to keep growth going, we need to build giant artificial space stations, and then we can have Earth as a kind of like planetary preserve.
 
Rei Takver: Which doesn’t have any congruence with the fact that his company just sponsored a summit where a bunch of fossil fuel companies came together with Trump energy officials to fantasize about building out more carbon belching, everything in the name of building out AI infrastructure.
 
Adam Becker: Yup. We get more, everything, forever.

Rei Takver: Elon Musk is also really into space colonies — in his case, on Mars. Musk says humans need to be multi-planetary because we need a backup, and weirdly, he seems to talk more about asteroids hitting the Earth than climate change. Why do you think that is?

Adam Becker: I’m going to quote [astronomer] Lucianne Walcowicz on this. They speculate, and I think they’re probably right, that an asteroid hitting Earth is something that a billionaire can’t be culpable for, right? Billionaires are not complicit in the fact that planet-killing asteroids exist, right? That’s just a fact about the solar system. Of course, it’s also true that if one of those asteroids hit here, it would still be nicer to be on Earth than it would be on Mars. And it’s also true that Mars gets hit with more asteroids than the Earth does.
 
Musk talks about terraforming Mars … if we have the technology to terraform Mars, why not just use that technology to solve climate change here on Earth? If such technology existed, it would absolutely be easier to use it here to fix climate change, because stopping climate change and getting the climate back into a good state that is compatible with advanced human civilization is so much easier than terraforming Mars. And yet, we have not shown ourselves capable of getting climate change under control. Mars is just a terrible idea as a backup for humanity for so many reasons. Even the idea of a backup for humanity is inherently problematic. 
 
Rei Takver: Totally. In going after a “backup” planet, Musk is not just abdicating responsibility about climate change in a hypothetical future, he’s abdicating responsibility for the climate, and humanity, here and now.  
 
Adam Becker: Oh yeah, I mean, look at the un-permitted natural gas plants that Musk is using to power an xAI data center in Tennessee. These tech billionaires are using these futuristic visions of their technologies to justify continuing extractive practices and continuing to accumulate power and wealth that’s always going to be at the expense of lots of other people. And I don’t think that they’re acting in their own enlightened self interest, right? What good is your money if civilization collapses due to a climate crisis?

Rei Takver: How much would you say we should be thinking of these tech bro fantasies and these tech bros as explicitly anti-climate?

Adam Becker: That’s exactly what they are. They do not care about the climate because they don’t see it as a problem, which is a form of climate denial, right? They think, we’ll fix it in post, basically, right? That’s essentially Sam Altman’s answer about climate change is:  “Oh, yeah, we’ll get to AI and then we can fix everything else with that.” That’s not going to happen. And they just don’t think that anything else is as important as these futuristic fantasies that they have about AI in space and, you know, having more everything forever. Even the nuclear fusion stuff, where they say, “Oh yeah, this is green energy.” It’s not going to happen. And so what it is, is essentially a form of greenwashing, by using false promises of a futuristic green energy technology that is not going to arrive in time, if ever, as an excuse to temporarily use fossil fuels as transition to this technology that will never come, instead of just using the abundant, cheap green energy technology that we have now.
 
 Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever can be purchased in the U.S., UK, and Canada." DeSmog

When Cities Burn: Could the Los Angeles fires happen here?

 Excerpt: 

"In January 2025, in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, Los Angeles was overrun by a firestorm that killed 31 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, and left one of the world’s best-resourced firefighting teams overwhelmed.

This prompted an immediate, and unsettling question for many Australians: could something like this happen here?

Our new analysis brings together the latest science, climate trends and fire behaviour research to provide the answer.

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The uncomfortable truth is that many of the factors that led to the LA disaster are already present in Australia — and getting worse. Climate pollution from burning coal, oil and gas is supercharging heat, drying out landscapes, lengthening fire seasons and fuelling more extreme fire weather across fire-prone regions.

Australians have already experienced fires with the same hallmarks of the LA fires: drought- parched forests, strong winds, low humidity, explosive fire behaviour, and unstoppable fire fronts that fire agencies, no matter how well-resourced, struggle to respond to. 

In 2003, it happened in Canberra. In 2009, Black Saturday hit Victoria. Tasmania and the NSW Blue Mountains were ablaze in 2013. Then, the national megafires of 2019-20: the Black Summer bushfires; the most destructive and widespread in Australia on record.

What Australia has not yet experienced — but is increasingly at risk of — is what Los Angeles endured: a major fire hitting a major city. 

Our latest analysis explains that millions more Australians now live on the expanding outskirts of our capital cities and major regional centres, where homes adjoin highly flammable bush and grasslands. 

These at-risk communities — from the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria, Perth Hills, Adelaide Hills, the Blue Mountains, Sydney suburbs, NSW Central Coast, Hobart’s suburbs and Canberra’s western edge — are already some of the most fire-exposed urban areas in the world. 

In this report, we outline how climate change played an instrumental role in supercharging the main factors that underpinned the Californian catastrophe, and compare those conditions across Australia’s capital cities. We also explain why firefighters are increasingly facing fires they cannot stop; and what must be done to protect Australian lives, homes and communities as extreme fire weather intensifies.

We still have a choice on just how dangerous future fire conditions become. Now is the time to reduce climate pollution further and faster, to adapt our cities, and prepare our fire services and communities for a future increasingly at risk of devastating bushfires.

Download Report

Key findings

1. The shocking 2025 wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles neighbourhoods in the middle of winter were supercharged by climate pollution.

• Climate pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas shaped the dangerous and extreme weather conditions that drove these fires: record dryness; non arrival of the typical annual wet season; and hurricane-like winds gusting up to 160 kmh.
• Climate pollution has all but erased traditional fire seasons and turned them into an all-year-round threat. The January 2025 fires hit in the middle of winter, well outside of the traditional fire season from June to November.
• LA experienced climate whiplash: a rapid switch between two very wet years that resulted in extreme fire fuel loads, followed by very dry conditions ideal for fires.
• Around the world, climate pollution is driving worsening fire conditions: 43% of the 200 most damaging fires have occurred in just the past decade.

2. Many Australian cities share dangerous characteristics that made the LA fires so destructive, and many of our worst bushfires have also exhibited unstoppable fire behaviour.

• Like California, many parts of Australia have a hot and dry climate. Research shows between 2000 and 2023 the intensity and frequency of the worst fires in southern Australia and western North America rose sharply under more extreme weather conditions.
• Australia has suffered through fires with the same characteristics as LA: extremely strong winds, drought conditions, high fuel loads and unstoppable fire behaviour. During Black Saturday 2009 in Victoria, the fire danger index exceeded 200 (with 100 the upper limit of recognised fire danger rating up until 2009).
• Fire-generated thunderstorms, or pyroconvective events, were relatively rare with 60 such events recorded in Australia in the 40 years up to 2018. During Black Summer, there were at least 45 fire- generated thunderstorms.
• Our analysis shows that the outskirts of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart share characteristics that made the LA fires so destructive.

3. Just like in LA, more people than ever are living in harm’s way on the fast-growing urban fringes of Australian cities.

• In LA, hurricane-like Santa Ana winds (up to 160 km/h) created a firestorm that fed on tinder dry brush, then houses. From 1990-2020, 45% of all new homes in California were built where suburbs meet flammable terrain.
• Over the past 20 years, outer suburban populations have exploded in Australia, too: More than doubling in Melbourne and Perth, up 36% in Adelaide, 33% in Hobart and 24% in Sydney.
• More than 6.9 million Australians now live where suburbs meet the bush — the zones most exposed to deadly fires. Had the Black Summer bushfires directly impacted the edges of our cities or major regional centres – such as Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, the NSW Central Coast, the Dandenong ranges, the Adelaide Hills, the Perth Hills or Hobart – then property losses on the scale of LA could have occurred.
• Many of the LA homes that burnt were built before fire resilient building standards were introduced there in 2008. Up to 90% of Australian homes in high-risk fire zones were also built before modern bushfire standards existed — making ignition due to ember attack and house-to-house fire spread far more likely.
• Research shows that, globally, 10% of all fires result in 78% of all fatalities. Most of these occur in suburbs built where bush or grassland meets cities.

4. Climate pollution is turbo-charging Australian fire conditions, and it’s making fires more frequent, costly, intense – and less predictable.

• Since 2020 insurance premiums have increased by 78% to 138% for homes in bushfire-prone Local Government Areas within Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
• The cost of the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires to our economy was estimated at $10 billion. It is a matter of when – not if – we’ll experience another fire on this scale, or worse, as dangerous fire weather conditions driven by climate pollution make this a near certainty.
• From 1979 to 2019 fire seasons across Australia grew by an additional 27 days – a 20% increase over the 40-year period.
• Southern Australia is experiencing long-term declines in cool-season rainfall at the same time as spring and summer become hotter and drier: setting the stage for earlier, more intense and widespread fires like the 2003 Canberra fires and 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
• Fire behaviour at night is becoming more extreme and robbing firefighters of a tool they’ve used for centuries: attacking fires and backburning during milder night conditions to bring large fires under control.
• The world’s first large-scale fire-generated tornado – and the fastest rate of spread for a forest fire –  was recorded in Canberra, in January 2003.

5. Climate-fuelled fires are increasingly exceeding the limits of modern firefighting. Investment in community preparation and urgent cuts to climate pollution are both critical to saving Australian lives and communities.

• There is no way to safely or effectively fight pyroconvective events, like those experienced in Canberra 2003, Black Saturday 2009, and the Black Summer bushfires. Aircraft must be grounded, and efforts to protect properties temporarily abandoned.
• Modelling shows that 3°C of global warming would result in catastrophic fire danger zones three times bigger than experienced on Black Saturday in 2009 (810,000 km2) with temperatures as high as 48°C in Victoria, NSW, and South Australia.
• Fires on this scale are considered beyond the limits of any fire service to control. Los Angeles is one of the best-resourced firefighting jurisdictions in the world, but was still overwhelmed: extreme winds grounded aircraft, simultaneous fires limited assistance, and there was sudden loss of water pressure.
• Australia is facing more days of extreme fire weather and larger, more damaging fires under worsening fire weather caused by climate pollution. We must:
  • Cut climate pollution from coal, oil and gas more swiftly and deeply if we’re to avoid even worse.
  • Invest heavily in disaster preparation and community resilience at all levels of government so we’re as prepared as possible  for the worsening fire risks we already face.
  •  As a priority, increase emergency service and land management capacity at the urban fringe of our cities and major regional centres so growing populations are better protected for what’s to come." Climate Council

Download Report" Climate Council

 

At least 11 dead as Europe bakes in unprecedented heatwave

 Excerpt: 

"In short:

London has recorded a maximum temperature of 35 degrees Celsius on Tuesday, breaking the record for the hottest day in May on record.

Europe is sweltering through an unusually early heatwave that scientists say are becoming more frequent and occurring at abnormal times due to climate change.

At least 11 people have died in Britain and France, mostly due to drownings as people seek relief. 

Heat records have tumbled across Europe for the second straight day as an unprecedentedly early heatwave continues to bake the continent, with some fatalities reported.

In London, temperatures topped 35 degrees Celsius in the mid-afternoon, officially making Tuesday the hottest day in May since records began.

This broke the previous record, set only a day prior on Monday, when the British capital sweltered under 33.5C temperatures.

London also recorded a rare "tropical night" on Monday evening, defined as one in which the temperature does not fall below 20C." ABC News

 

 

Temperatures in London topped 35 degrees Celsius on Tuesday afternoon, local time. (AP: Kin Cheung)